Thursday, February 21, 2013

Godless Hedonism


Hedonism

She was vivacious,
bold,
audacious,
irreverent,
and in her brilliance all came alive…

She was sardonic,
and they laughed when
she cut men down to the size of boys,
like cedars hewn at the blows of a barbarian.

Her beauty was alive, extending its vines to capture any
who would pass by,
and in her languid eyes there was the tranquility of apathy.

She spoke with eloquence,
confidence,
captivating in the sincerity of her gestures,
her touch, her promises.
She was a liar, but they wanted her lies,
they loved her promises,
they were transfixed by how she spoke,
and, like her, cared little for what she spoke.

They congratulated themselves for loving her,
for evolving beyond the tedious gods of youth.

She was intoxicating,
and when her red lips
drew close,
all the people paused.
And while she kissed him
she slipped in the knife,
and laughed at the love she saw in his eyes.

And the people loved her more for it.

Monday, February 18, 2013

Christian Hedonism

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. C.S. Lewis

There are a million different kinds of saints, a million pleasures they enjoy. There is only one kind of sinner, one kind of godless pleasure! Give me the pleasure of the saint any day before the pleasure of the sinner because the former is deep and wide while the latter is neither. The saint by living according to the spirit finds an ordered universe of pleasure, a symphony of perfectly interpreted and harmonized pleasures as infinite as the starry hosts. The sinner knows only the homogenous pleasure of rebellion against the myriad pleasures of God. He knows only the pleasure of audaciously asserting his own will against God's design for all pleasure. In all the supposed variety of his rebellious pleasure seeking, there is only one experience--namely, feverishly stoking the dying embers of the latest thrill, and then finding that, once again, the embers cannot be kept alive. His only pleasure is the dalliance of his own destruction. The only thing he feels deeply is his own progressive despair. But his worldview cannot say why pleasures now are better than the loss of consciousness in death. He cannot interpret his pleasures or his pains or his dying or his nothingness. It is all without meaning. And because it is without meaning, every so called pleasure of this life stabs with the knives of nihilism.

But I am a Christian hedonist. I don't mind admitting it. I want to visit all of Guy Fieri's "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives." I like the best wine, not the cheap stuff that tastes like strained raisin juice. Give me the stuff that is like "bottled poetry" as Dom Perignon once so famously mused. God provided the fruit of the vine. He created a world of endless variety, and no doubt one reason was so that its bright and complex glory would be to our enjoyment. And I'm not ashamed to admit that I want to experience the pleasures God has provided in this life to the full.

It is strange to see Christians uncritically falling back into heresies long ago rejected. Surely this is one effect of a culture obsessed with itself and fixated on the present moment, as if all of history is a long boring prelude to the splendor of us. Christians today have become Gnostics again. I see it as a kind of reaction against the prevailing godless hedonism of the surrounding culture. If the culture is going to throw itself mindlessly into an ongoing orgy of physical pleasure, then we will show them a life of spiritual pleasure in ascetic reaction against the physical.

(Warning... sarcasm font used ahead in order to confront Gnostic tendencies in some Christians...)

While they shuffle off to Las Vegas, we hold up in our sacred Christian sub-culture with our accountability partners.

We can't go having too much money. One would presumably spend it on luxuries and there is no place in this life for luxury with so many people starving. So the spiritual thing to do is to live a life of deprivation and give away lots of money to third world countries.

We can't eat too much because that would indicate the sin of gluttony. One should have the appearance of a medieval monk so that it will be apparent to others that one has no issue mastering the body.

One can't drink alcohol, at all! Alcohol is a "spirit" that will quench the true Spirit. To drink intoxicating liquor is to manipulate the body and thus provides only a counterfeit pleasure to true spiritual pleasure.

To listen to music for one's own pleasure is sin! One must find music that overtly celebrates God rather than stimulating the hearer to feel some emotion that is purely selfish.

Sex must be done only in the context of children. We can thank Aquinas for this one. To have sex for pleasure alone, even in the context of marriage, is not an appropriately spiritual act. It would be purely physical sex for pleasure alone. And clearly that is a sin!

If one sits quietly before a brilliant sunset, or closes ones eyes to take in the symphony of nature's music at the seashore, or takes in a sumptuous seven course Italian meal; it all must be directed toward some overtly spiritualized meaning. If it is not, then clearly it is unspiritual. And if it is unspiritual, then it is pagan, vulgar and self-serving godless hedonism.

But here is the interesting question: What if we have it all in reverse? What if God, by His Spirit and the activity of His son in the world, is attempting to set right our spirits so that we can appropriately take in the endless physical pleasures He has in store for us in the resurrection, which we would do well to note is a restoration of the body and the spirit? What if heaven is the wedding feast our senses could not now remotely ingest? What if the wine is so brilliant, so intense, that in our present condition we would not understand it, could not appreciate it; like a child whose tastes are not evolved enough to appreciate a gourmet meal? Perhaps we are children who must mature into a capacity to appreciate the full physical glory of heaven.

I reject the Gnostic tendency in Christianity that would place physical pleasure below spiritual pleasure. I believe we were created as spirit-animals for a full compliment of physical and spiritual pleasures.

The world is obviously a miserable place in many respects. It is riddled with war, pain, ennui and all that "cracks and sinews and cakes the mind," in the words of Melville. It is not our home. And the prospects of man creating a utopia here are dismal at best. But there are moments; glorious moments of pristine beauty, glory, pleasure. There is art that hints at something more sublime than the tiresome cyclical rhythm of pain and happiness. There is love that suggests something higher. The pleasures of this life curiously harken back to the unfallen state and also call us onward toward our true heavenly home.

The aesthetics of nature is itself an illustration of what I'm saying here. The curious thing about places like Yosemite or Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon is that they are places that defy utility. These are virtually useless lands, except for the fact that they are rapturously beautiful. Their only use lies in their capacity to awaken our sense of wonder, of reverie. What a useless emotion if godless evolution is true! But what if this is one way that God communicates to us that we are designed to be aesthetics and not mere automatons. We are to survive, yes, but far more important is what happens in us while we survive. God gets at us through these moments of wonder.

And so in the end it seems we must reject both extremes and find a kind of Aristotelian golden mean. The first extreme is that godless hedonism that sees nothing beyond the physical world, and thus can find no dignity in the pleasures we enjoy because they are wholly fleeting, utterly random and swallowed up in a nihilistic void. But this is a life of ongoing death, a life that tantalizes with temporal pleasure and then leaves one to die having gathered an empty harvest of purposeless experiences.

In the end, I oppose the hedonistic option and the Gnostic option for the same reason; not because one is physical and the other spiritual, but because when one deharmonizes the spiritual from the physical or the physical from the spiritual, pleasure is lost!