Identifying as human has deadly implications

The incarnation and an execution impacts humanity.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

Head and shoulders image of a man with closed eyes, on his forehead is an ashen cross.

Josh Applegate on Unsplash.

Christmas makes no sense without Easter.

In Jesus of Nazareth, the Creator himself entered his creation to live among us. This is what Christians call the Incarnation. But why? What was the point of this identification with humanity? You might have expected these sorts of answers: he came to found the Christian religion, to teach us how to live and to gather a community of followers. These are true enough but look inside any church building or read any part of the New Testament, and you’ll find that another thing is the focus, something that makes Jesus different to any other founder of a religion. He came to die.

Jesus’ death is the climax of all four gospel stories. It is evident that the point of the narrative is there. The rest of the Bible’s New Testament spends more time describing the machinations that led to Jesus’ death than outlining what he taught. Does that mean it doesn’t matter what Jesus taught? Of course not: Jesus’ teachings matter tremendously to Christians. But his death matters still more.

No doubt you knew that. The first thing anyone learns about Christianity is its symbol, the cross on which Jesus was executed. One of the cruellest forms of capital punishment that has ever been legal, those executed on the cross were called ‘crucified’ – a word which still has its shuddering power even today. Crucifixion was a death reserved for the lowest of the low: common thieves, runaway slaves, rebels, and lawbreakers. Yet this particular death was the ultimate goal of Jesus’ life.

Why? What’s it all about? For Christians, Jesus’ crucifixion strikes at the very root of all that is wrong with the world. To understand it, first we have to understand what Christians believe about that.

If you fall into a pit you can’t climb out of, then lack of information is not your problem. Nor does it matter how many other people are in the pit with you: nobody down there can pull you or themselves out.

Everyone agrees the world in its current state is, to put it mildly, less than ideal. Most put it down to a lack of education, or to the stubborn foolishness of a few isolated individuals.

If you believe that people behave badly because they are ill-informed, then you might think the solution is to teach people what is right. You will put great faith in education: give people the information they need and they will change their ways.

Alternatively, if you believe ‘other’ people are the problem, you can focus your attention on opposing them, imprisoning them, or stripping them of power somehow. But Christians believe that the root of the problem is far deeper, such that these efforts only scratch the surface and will never be effective in the long run.

Christians believe that the whole of humanity has been damaged, cut off from its relationship to what matters by a primordial catastrophe that we call ‘the Fall’. Human beings are not simply ignorant, and the problem does not lie in lack of information, or education. The problem lies in our will, the part of us that chooses what is wrong even when we know full-well that it is wrong. And the problem is not just some people ‘over there’, conveniently set apart from me. Every single human being has been impacted. Including you. And me. Every one of us is part of the problem, which is why no one of us, however smart or well-informed we are, can be the solution. If you fall into a pit you can’t climb out of, then lack of information is not your problem. Nor does it matter how many other people are in the pit with you: nobody down there can pull you or themselves out. You need someone outside the pit who can reach down and grab hold of you.

That is why Christianity is more than a moral programme for self-improvement, or a set of spiritual practices comparable to those of other religions. According to Christians, the human race does not need another set of rules about how to live, or a formula to cultivate mindfulness and inner peace. We need a saviour: someone who does not share our fallen condition, but who can reach down and lift us to safety.

How far down did Jesus have to go? All the way to the bottom, which means death. Even the worst kind of death.

How did Jesus’ death save us? Christians have various theories about that. You may have heard the most common which uses law court imagery: we were guilty and sentenced capital punishment, but Jesus was punished instead so we don’t have to. Some people love this theory and live by it; others find it morally problematic and offensive. But the point is not the theory: the point is the reality to which it points. One way or another, by dying Jesus reconnected us to God and restored the broken relationship.

But it’s stranger still than that, because Jesus’ death is not the end. It was only the preliminary to something far more wonderful and transformative, a sign of a promise beyond our wildest hopes. By dying, Jesus defeated death itself and came back to life. If Christmas makes no sense without the cross, then the cross makes no sense without the resurrection. But more on that in my next article.

Explainer

Creed

Virtues

15 March 2024

6 min read

Temperance: neurotic vice or self-control for future benefit?

We’re better at bravery than temperance, just when we need that self-control more than ever.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A casually dressed man perches on railing balancing, clasping his hands and looking around.

Jed Villejo on Unsplash.

The 21st century is witnessing a crisis of temperance, self-discipline, and self-control. Lent is one way to combat this.

According to the international Leader Character framework, there are eleven “character strengths” important for human wellbeing and good leadership. These include virtues like justice, accountability, courage, and good judgment. Researchers have used this framework to perform thousands of studies on teams and groups of people around the world. These studies show that, almost without exception, temperance is the weakest virtue in every team everywhere. (Not quite every person – each team has one or two members with strong temperance, but temperance is still weakest on average for a group).

The modern world is not only intemperate: it actively encourages the opposite: immediate gratification of desires. Every day we are bombarded with online ads, posters, and TV commercials that tell us to ‘Indulge yourself’; ‘treat yourself’, ‘look after yourself’, along with images of sensually pleasing people and objects. It is a rare advert that appeals to your calm rationality and long-term thinking. The advertising industry knows that it can make much more money from people who lack self-control. If it targets your basic animal impulses, then you are more likely to buy things you don’t need and wouldn’t have thought of without ad’s enticing promise.

Temperance is the power to choose what you won’t regret choosing later on.

Worse still, there are elements of Western thought that praise intemperance as a virtue and pathologize restraint as a psychological disorder. Elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, popularised in the media, suggest that you do damage to your mental health if you suppress your desires or try to hide them. It is far healthier to give free rein – to sexual desire first of all, but to all desires in the end. Temperance is no longer a virtue to be admired, but a neurotic vice that fills your subconscious with envy, bitterness, and psychological problems.

What is temperance anyway and why is it a problem if we lack it?

Temperance is self-control. It is acquired by self-discipline. Its purpose is to organise and order your many desires, giving priority to the ones that matter most to you. Let’s say you want to lose weight, and you also want to eat that doughnut you can see in the shop window. Or you want to save money to buy a house, but you also want that new and larger TV screen. Those are competing desires. Temperance is the power to choose what you won’t regret choosing later on. It doesn’t tell you what you ought to choose: it simply gives you control over your desires so you rule over them instead of them ruling you.

What does lack of temperance look like? Whenever you keep doing something you wish you didn’t keep doing, you are being intemperate. I don’t mean one-time actions that you later regret. I mean things you know you’ll regret even before you do them, yet you still do them. Things like: smoking (for most people), eating too much, browsing Instagram or TikTok instead of working, failing to show up for gym class. It can also mean any kind of procrastination: avoiding doing a task you know you have to do but don’t want to do ‘now’. In sum, it reveals a disorganisation in your priorities and goals, so a lesser priority subverts a higher priority because it’s more immediately available and enjoyable.

We need temperance if we’re going to be happy with where our lives are going

The problem with lacking temperance is that it undermines your own goals for your life and makes your future self a helpless victim of your present self. It leads to a downward spiral of the heart of intemperance is that some desire, some pleasure, some indulgence, has gained so much power over our life that we no longer have control over it. It is in the driving seat, not us. Intemperance is also a cause of self-hatred and low self-esteem. One of the best ways to feel better about yourself is to set long term goals and stick to them. It makes you feel like you’re heading somewhere good.

By contrast, the heart of temperance is to subordinate everything we think, feel, and enjoy to our will, our clear-headed decisions about the kind of person we want to be in the long-term. We need temperance if we’re going to be happy with where our lives are going. Temperance is even needed for worldly success. Warren Buffett once said, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble.”

Why is temperance so lacking in our own time? I can think of at least two reasons.

First, we are one of the wealthiest societies ever to exist. Wealth may have benefits, but it also enables us to get what we want, when we want it. Wealthy people are less used to having their desires unsatisfied than poor people. Unfulfilled longing is a less common occurrence for the rich, so there is little natural opportunity to exercise the muscle of self-denial.

Secondly, we are one of the least religious societies ever to have existed. In contrast to secularism, religion has always had practical tools to cultivate temperance. All major world religions have ritual practices of fasting and feasting designed to exercise and strengthen self-discipline. Every year Muslims endure the gruelling discipline of Ramadan. Orthodox Christians restrict themselves to a vegan diet during the forty days of lent, and many other Christians give up some indulgence. Both rich and poor share alike in this voluntary self-denial. Now that these practices are eroding away, they are being replaced not by other self-discipline practices, but by the worship of I-want-it-here-and-now. This is shown most poignantly in the 2000 movie Chocolat, which explicitly puts up sensual indulgence in competition to traditional religion and abstinence – and indulgence wins.

But the decline of religion has done more than this: it has also undermined the sense of transcendent purpose in many people’s lives – which was what motivated them to look beyond their physical desires. Without hope and without a larger sense of meaning to life, people have less reason to sacrifice short-term pleasures for the sake of longer-term goals.

Nor are sensual desires the only way we can be intemperate. An outburst of rage on social media is a sign of intemperance.

I don’t mean that short-term pleasures are always bad, or that sensual desire is evil in itself. The whole point of temperance is that it involves the right amount, and not too much, of something good. That is what makes it so tricky. If eating a doughnut was like stealing or violence, we would have a stronger voice telling us not to do it. But because it’s not bad in itself, we find it harder to resist. We need temperance to say no to something good when we’ve already taken enough of it, so we don’t take too much.

Nor are sensual desires the only way we can be intemperate. An outburst of rage on social media is a sign of intemperance. A father who spends too long in the office and not enough time with his children is being intemperate. He is sacrificing the long-term goal of healthy family relationships for the short-term goal of career success. We lack the self-control to express our anger in the right place at the right time.

Temperance is needed for so many of the other virtues to function. If you’re not temperate, then you will be late for meetings, fail to deliver work on time, or makes too many commitments that you can’t keep. You’ll be a liability to your friends and colleagues.

Temperance doesn’t tell you what you should aim for in life. But no matter what you aim for, you won’t get it without temperance. So, what are you giving up for lent?