The Modern World

St. Paisios’s critique of modern secular culture — drawn primarily from Volume 1 of the Spiritual Counsels (With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man). The Elder identified the spiritual diseases of the contemporary world with precision and compassion, diagnosing the malaise of modernity not as a political commentator but as a spiritual physician.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Pain and Love for Contemporary Man

The title of Volume 1 of the Spiritual Counsels — “With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man” — captures St. Paisios’s posture toward the modern world perfectly. He did not critique modernity from a position of superiority or contempt but from pain (at what humanity was losing) and love (for those caught in modernity’s spiritual confusion):

The very title of Volume 1, With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man, captures this posture: he addressed the modern world not with contempt but with pain at what humanity was losing and love for those caught in its confusion. (The line sometimes quoted as “I don’t hate modern people; I love them… it hurts me to see what they’re doing to themselves” is a paraphrase of this title and spirit, not a located saying.)
His critique was always pastoral, never political. He was not advocating for a return to a particular political or social order but for a return to God.

Secularism

St. Paisios identified secularism (kosmikofrsyni) as the fundamental spiritual disease of the modern age — the attempt to build human life without reference to God:

He taught that man, by sin, turns the earthly paradise into an earthly hell — that life organized apart from God collapses into the very misery it sought to escape. (The neat aphorism “modern man tried to create paradise without God and has created hell” is widely circulated under his name but is not found in any published source; it is reported here in its genuine substance.)
He traced the trajectory: the Enlightenment promised that reason would replace faith and produce a better world. Instead, the 20th century produced unprecedented violence, nihilism, and spiritual emptiness.
Secularism doesn’t necessarily mean atheism in the formal sense — it is a practical atheism: living as if God doesn’t matter, relegating faith to a private hobby while organizing public life on purely materialist principles.
The result is a vacuum: when God is removed from the center of human life, other things rush in to fill the void — money, pleasure, power, ideology — and none of them satisfy.

Technology

St. Paisios addressed technology with nuance — neither condemning it absolutely nor embracing it uncritically:

Benefits

He acknowledged that technology can serve good purposes — medicine, communication, the alleviation of physical hardship. He was not a Luddite.

Dangers

But he identified specific spiritual dangers:

Distraction: Technology fills every moment with noise and stimulation, leaving no space for silence, reflection, or prayer. St. Paisios prized silence as essential to the spiritual life: “Silence greatly helps in spiritual life. It is good for one to practice silence for about an hour a day… when a person has many distractions during the day, he should rejoice if he has ten minutes for prayer, or even two minutes to read something, so as to drive away distractions” (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 4, Family Life; cf. blogs.ancientfaith.com/asd/2015/07/13). (A popular line about modern people being “afraid of silence… the radio, the television” is in fact a saying of Pope Francis, not St. Paisios, and has been removed.)
Passivity: Television (his primary technological concern, given his era) makes people passive consumers of images rather than active participants in life.
Artificial relationships: Technology mediates human interaction in ways that diminish genuine personal contact.
Speed: The acceleration of life through technology creates restlessness and an inability to be patient, still, or present.

The Principle

His fundamental principle: technology should serve the human person and the spiritual life, not dominate them. When technology becomes an end in itself — when people organize their lives around their devices rather than around God, family, and prayer — it has become an idol.

Media

St. Paisios was particularly concerned about the effects of television (and, by extension, all screen-based media):

He held that “novels, newspapers and television have no value in developing a spiritual life,” and warned that “television dulls children’s minds” so that “they lose the ability to think on their own” — “television has done us great damage” (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 2, Spiritual Awakening; cf. orthochristian.com/32840.html).
He worried about children’s exposure to violent and immoral content, and about the cumulative effect of hours spent consuming entertainment rather than praying, reading, playing, or conversing.
He did not command everyone to destroy their televisions, but he strongly encouraged limiting consumption and being discriminating about content.

Restlessness

St. Paisios diagnosed a spiritual restlessness (anisychia) at the heart of modern life:

Modern people are always busy, always moving, always consuming — but never satisfied. The more they have, the more they want. The faster they go, the more anxious they become.
This restlessness is a spiritual symptom: the soul that is not at peace with God cannot be at peace with anything. His own remedy was the simplification of life: “If you want to get rid of anxiety, simplify your lives!” — for “most of the conveniences we have cause difficulties,” and “if man does not simplify his life, he will end up tormenting himself” (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 1, With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man; cf. orthodoxword.wordpress.com, “‘Simplify your Lives’ with Elder Paisios”). (The line attributing modern restlessness to “a void that only God can fill” echoes Pascal rather than any located saying of the Elder.)
The cure is not a change of environment but a change of heart: silence, prayer, simplicity, and communion with God.

Loss of Simplicity

St. Paisios lamented the loss of simplicity (aplotita) in modern life:

Material simplicity: people accumulate far more than they need, creating anxiety about maintenance and loss.
Relational simplicity: relationships become transactional and utilitarian rather than characterized by genuine love and trust.
Spiritual simplicity: the childlike faith of earlier generations is replaced by skepticism, analysis, and doubt.
He did not romanticize the past (rural poverty had its own miseries), but he observed that material poverty often coincided with spiritual richness, while material wealth often coincided with spiritual poverty — a theme consonant with his frequent nostalgia for the faithful simplicity of Pharasa and Konitsa and his lament that “we have abandoned God.” (The tidy antithesis “the villages of my childhood had nothing, but they had God; the cities of today have everything except God” is widely circulated but not found in any published source.)

What Modern Man Lacks

St. Paisios’s diagnosis was ultimately simple: modern man lacks God — and everything else that is missing (peace, joy, meaning, community, hope) flows from that central absence:

He attributed the great majority of the problem-laden letters and visits he received — marital, financial, and psychological alike — to people having “withdrawn from God” and become self-centered; the remedy he urged was always a return to God, who alone gives both relief and the strength to bear what remains (St. Paisios, Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 4, Family Life; cf. the Family Life excerpts at orthodoxinfo.com). The enumerated “thousand problems… they have forgotten God” wording is a paraphrase rather than a located quotation.

References

St. Paisios of Mount Athos. Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 1: With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man. Souroti: Hesychasterion of St. John the Theologian.
St. Paisios of Mount Athos. Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 2: Spiritual Awakening. Souroti: Hesychasterion of St. John the Theologian.
St. Paisios of Mount Athos. Spiritual Counsels, Vol. 4: Family Life. Souroti: Hesychasterion of St. John the Theologian.
Hieromonk Isaac. Elder Paisios of Mount Athos. Translated from the Greek.
“An Excerpt from Spiritual Awakening: Elder Paisios on Spiritual Study” (television, study). orthochristian.com/32840.html.
Andrew Stephen Damick. “St. Paisios and Salvation from Distraction” (quoting Family Life on silence). blogs.ancientfaith.com/asd/2015/07/13.
“‘Simplify your Lives’ with Elder Paisios” (from With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man). orthodoxword.wordpress.com/2010/06/12.