When indulgence and inhibition are on the menu

As the time of feasting concludes, and resolutions start to crumble, Ryan Gilfeather takes some lessons on how and when to say 'no more'.

Ryan Gilfeather

Ryan Gilfeather explores social issues through the lens of philosophy, theology, and history. He is a Research Associate at the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work.

Two stuffed cheeseburgers are carried on a tray.

Peter Dawn on Unsplash.

Advent and Christmas are heroic culinary seasons. They are times of abundant feasting on foods from rich and varied traditions. However, despite the enthusiasm many of us share in this overindulgence, we are, as a society, fairly ambivalent about the pleasures of food.

Recently, Tim Hayward wrote a vigorous defence of gluttony, claiming that the Church labelling it a sin, because it defied the practice of self-denial in hope of future reward that he claims the Christian faith is predicated upon. Here, Tim represents a prominent belief in our culture, that taking pleasure in an activity cannot be wrong if it doesn’t have negative consequences on others.

However, despite the prominence of these views, diet culture is still powerful and pervasive. Many of us, perhaps guilt ridden and ashamed, will resolve in the New Year to cut out the pleasures of food in order to drop a few waist sizes.

This encouragement to say no to the pleasures of food, is an invitation to learn the habit of denying our inner yearnings, if they will lead to emptiness.

Over the years, Christians have also toyed with the question of what pleasure we are to take in food. They are certainly far more cautious than the hedonists among us would like. However, they give us a way to navigate between the Scylla of unrestrained indulgence and the Charybdis of starving ourselves entirely.

Gregory of Nyssa, a Fourth Century bishop and theologian, argued that indulging the desire for the pleasures of food can replace our pursuit of those things which are truly good in life. Here, Gregory makes a similar point to Graham Tomlin in a recent article for Seen & Unseen. Gregory gives particular insight into the psychological experience of addiction to physical pleasure. In his biography of Moses, he likens the pursuit of physical pleasures to an enslaved person making bricks. The brick maker is entirely consumed, both in mind and body, with filling the brick cast and baking it. But, as soon as the brick is finished, the cast is empty again, and the process must be repeated. We dedicate our thoughts and our actions to achieving physical pleasures, but as soon as we attain them, they disappear. It is a futile process.

Crucially, some people develop a kind of addiction to pursuing pleasure, they are stuck in the loop of dedicating their minds and bodies to achieving it again and again. They begin to experience emotional turbulence if they can’t attain pleasure, like anger, greed, or anxiety. This pattern of behaviour absorbs these people’s thoughts so much that it replaces their capacity to pursue those things in life which will truly make them flourish. Therefore, this encouragement to say no to the pleasures of food, is an invitation to learn the habit of denying our inner yearnings, if they will lead to emptiness.

The most salient and pervasive examples of this today are digital content and social media. We tend to think of addiction in clinical terms, an extreme form of behaviour associated with people whose habitual consumption of drugs, alcohol, or gambling has run their lives off of the track. However, some psychologists argue for a broader definition of addiction. One which includes the habituation to compulsively consuming social media, the news, and other forms of digital media. For many of us, our compulsion to consume these kinds of content will occupy a great deal of our time and energy, which we could otherwise spend on activities which would make us thrive. Such as nurturing our relationships with God and with others, creative endeavours, and spending time in nature.

A well-crafted meal, especially one received from a long culinary tradition, reveals the power of human creativity, which in turn shows us a glimmer of God’s creative act.

Importantly, Gregory does not suggest that we ought to starve ourselves. A key aspect of learning to say no to the pleasures of food, is learning to say yes to that which our body needs. He explains that our minds are capable of determining how much is sufficient, but our inner yearnings are not. If they are left unchecked, they will cause us to desire to never stop eating. For those of us who are privileged enough to afford it, the solution is to neither punish nor destroy our bodies, but simply to stop when we have had a sufficient amount.

Admittedly, this vision of eating does not sound like much fun. Food and wine certainly afford me great pleasure, not so much in their quantities but in their qualities; what room is there for people like me in Gregory’s vision of the kingdom of God?

In his interpretation of the Song of Songs, a book in the Hebrew Bible, Gregory discusses two kinds of pleasure. He says that there are pleasures of the body, which, as discussed, consume our minds and bodies, replace our pursuit of those things which will help us truly flourish and give us turbulent emotions. However, there are also spiritual pleasures. These are experiences which lift our minds up to God and give us a kind of spiritual ecstasy. Although Gregory does not make this connection, I suggest that food can afford us these spiritual pleasures. The occasional feast can point to the abundance of God’s generosity to us. Fine fresh fruit on a summer's day can teach us something about the goodness of God’s creation. A well-crafted meal, especially one received from a long culinary tradition, reveals the power of human creativity, which in turn shows us a glimmer of God’s creative act.

In this way, Christians have a way of thinking about the pleasures of food which walks the narrow path between the pitfalls of unhealthy overindulgence and mutilation of the body. It is cautious about a pattern of life given over to the pursuit of pleasure instead of those things which will make us thrive. However, it recognises those times in which food can lift up our minds to the divine. So, this New Year, don’t resolve to starve yourself in pursuit of a certain waistline, and certainly don’t give up on discipline altogether. Instead, focus on moderation, and the capacity to say no to unhelpful desires. Let this discipline open up space in your life to say yes to those things which will make you truly flourish.

Article

Belief

Christmas culture

Creed

Wisdom

16 December 2024

5 min read

How to have a philosophically happy Christmas

Raise a glass to the invasion of history by the author of history.

Charles Foster

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

A fish eye lens view of a person standing silhouetted, looking up to a colourful night sky with the Milky Way across it

Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

A few years ago, I had dinner with a well-known philosopher. Knowing that he is no friend of religion, and curious how he’d respond, I set about mocking the credulity of Christians and parroting the lines I’d so often heard: superstition degrades and obfuscates; let’s act and think like grown-ups, not craven children; we’re free to write our own rules, and we can write better rules than barbarous Levantine goat-herders; we’re brave enough to say that when we die we rot. And so on. The standard fare.

He looked at me over the top of his glass. ‘Have you never been taught’, he said acidly, ‘that if you destroy the premises of an argument, the argument collapses? The same is true of history.’

I’ve slowly learned that he was right.

‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’, asked John Cleese, as the leader of the People’s Front of Judea. He’s famously answered by his troops. The modern version of the question, which is just as embarrassing, is ‘What have the Christians ever done for us?’ The historian Tom Holland, not (as far as we know) himself a professed Christian, has made a good living by providing a long and meticulously documented list. I’m not going to review it here. My own personal list would include Chartres Cathedral, Paul’s tectonic notion that there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’ (and hence universal human dignity and suffrage), and Christmas.

The Christians say that Christmas is the commemoration of a historical fact: an invasion of history by the author of history; of creation by the creator.

This is too much for many to swallow. If that’s true for you, is it dishonest to celebrate Christmas?

A mathematician friend works on imaginary numbers. An imaginary number is a real number multiplied by the ‘imaginary unit’, i. i2 = -1, and so i = √-1. Think about it. It’s an impossibility. It’s absurd. Descartes talked about ‘imaginary numbers’ only to laugh at the idea. But they are enormously useful in real life. You are reading this on a phone or computer screen courtesy of imaginary numbers. Sometimes it’s worth suppressing, or at least muting, a contemptuous laugh. Tom Holland’s list, and mine, depend on theological and historical numbers that might (or might not) be imaginary. You don’t have to stop dubbing the numbers ‘imaginary’ – don’t stop having to call them ludicrous – to carry on reading your screen.

Christmas, for me, is a celebration not only of family, gluttony and intoxication, but of four facts (if the Christians are historically correct) and four principles which are generated by those facts - whether the facts are real or imaginary. The principles work, just as my computer screen does.

First: human agency is cosmically colossal. The invasion I mentioned above was invited (so preventing it from being rape) by a Palestinian Jewish girl. She could have said ‘No’, and so scuppered the whole project.

Second: Christmas drafts a completely new account of power. In the Christian story of Easter, all the powers of darkness are disarmed by one broken man dying on a piece of wood between dying criminals. It was a continuation of the story that began at Christmas: the birth, in a shitty stable, to a teenage mother accused of fornication, of a child soon to be a refugee, driven to another country to escape the murderous authorities. It’s all about the subversion of political and military power by the irresistible power of the powerless.

Third: the universe is surprising. Nobody predicted the invasion. Yes, I know the Christians say, with the confidence given by the retrospectocope, that there were hints in the Hebrew scriptures, but they weren’t seen at the time, and the most learned Jews today, even with the retrospectoscope, still don’t see them. Yes, I know that the ancient world was awash with tales of the impregnation of mortals by gods, and with virgin births (think of Dionysos, Attis, Romulus and Remus and many others). But they didn’t look remotely like this. Those tales were told to prop up conventional claims to power, not explode them. Bethlehem burst onto the blind side of history, injecting unforeseen possibility. The virgin conception smashed pre-conceptions. A new way of being had gestated. If that was possible, what wasn’t?

Fourth: The most revolutionary thing about Christmas, perhaps, is that it shows that mythos is real – part of the web and weave of reality.

After dinner at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 20 September 1931, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson walked together along Addison’s Walk, part of Magdalen’s grounds. They were discussing the resurrection of Jesus. Lewis knew all about the ubiquitous tales of dying and rising gods. The Christian resurrection stories were no different, he said. They were poetically resonant, no doubt, but essentially ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.’

‘No’, said Tolkien. ‘They are not lies,’ There was a sudden rush of wind in the still night. In Lewis’s rooms the conversation continued into the early hours. The stories were indeed myths, Tolkien contended, but true myths.

This conversation propelled Lewis finally into Christianity.

The Christmas story suggests that Tolkien was right (and those notoriously mystical quantum physicists – some of the most adept handlers of imaginary numbers, by the way - are right): there is no robust boundary between history and legend, between physics and metaphysics, between matter and spirit. This, in fact, is our working assumption, whether we’re explicitly religious or not. However icy our reductionism, we think that we matter, that there is more than matter, and that whatever that ‘more’ is, it is heavier and more enduring than matter, and matters more than matter. We love our children far more than reciprocal altruism or kin selection suggests we should. However sturdy our atheism we dab our eyes at the St Matthew Passion and put flowers on our parents’ graves.

It is reassuring to have a festival which enjoins us to lift our glasses and toast the way we live when we’re being the kind of people we urge our children, our friends and our politicians to be. It commands us to admit mystery to the dining table, and to celebrate being as mysterious as we know we are.

Christmas, authentically celebrated, is part of the foundation on which rest Chartres cathedral, freedom, suffrage, dignity and many things we innocently and dangerously take for granted. Like it or not, that foundation, as the austere philosopher observed, is the premise of the argument for the civilization that until recently succoured us before we replaced it with – well, with what?