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

Assisted dying

Care

Creed

Death & life

19 November 2024

5 min read

“Shortening death” sidesteps the real battle

We need to do more than protest bad deaths, we need to protest death itself, it's more than biological.

Tom Dove

Tom is a physician and completing a theology doctorate.

A hand drapes over the side of an object out of shot.

Michael Schaffler on Unsplash.

What is “death”? It’s surprising the term has received little attention in the assisted dying discussion so far, because more hangs on the answer than one might expect. At a press briefing, Kim Leadbeater MP stated that the assisted dying bill she is proposing is about “shortening death, not ending life.”

But what meaning does “death” have here?

The current bill defines neither “death” nor “dying.” Granted, it implies a biological definition. The bill speaks of administering approved substances to “cause that person’s death” and of capacity and decision-making around “ending life.” These fit the understanding of death with which the medical profession operates—death is the point in time when the combined functions required for human life cease. It is a one-time event, the end of physiology, and so is recognised by a combination of physical signs.

Death, then, is a diagnosis.

So, too, “dying”—though here the waters are murkier. Setting aside sudden deaths, medical talk of dying takes us out of binary territory. Dying speaks of a process, of the “terminal phase.” Within medicine a diagnosis of dying heralds the expectation that a person’s death will occur within hours or days. And so, the focus shifts. The task of care is no longer the coordinated work of investigation, preserving life, and treating symptoms. Now attention is on bringing relief to the process of dying.

The bill seems wise to much of this. Though definitions of death and dying are absent, the bill does define terminal illness—“an inevitably progressive condition which cannot be reversed by treatment” and from which the event of death “can reasonably be expected within 6 months.” And so, it clearly distinguishes terminal illness from biological death and, implicitly, from dying.

Of course, terminal illness and biological death are related. Terminal illness is irreversible, and where terminal illness leads is death. Or, you might say, it leads to the end of life. Apart from the timescale of six months, the same may be said of ageing: ageing is irreversible, and where ageing leads is death. This is why Kim Leadbeater’s comment was puzzling to me. I suspect what she really meant was “shortening terminal illness.” If so, this is confusing because, within the framework of the bill, “shortening terminal illness” and “ending life” are identical. It seems she was getting at something else.

“It seems odd that in the name of eliminating suffering, we eliminate the sufferer.”

Stanley Hauerwas

I suspect Kim Leadbeater was echoing a conviction at home in the Christian faith. That is, try as we might to keep death at a distance and restrict it to a faraway frontier, the life of human beings involves death. I don’t simply mean the biological death we witness—the deaths of friends, relatives, or even strangers. I mean death intrudes upon the way we experience life. Death is more than simply biological.

The fear of death belongs in this category. For some, the impending loss of relationships and joys casts a shadow over life, giving birth to apprehension. Death is not simply a factual matter but something that exerts power and influence. Or take disease and illness. Built into the notion of terminal illness is the idea that the sickness borne by a human body will ultimately bring about that body’s death. That body already speaks of its death. Death is making itself felt in advance.

And so, death is more than a biological event. Even living things can bear the marks of death.

This is no novel claim. The creation account recorded in the Bible says that in the beginning, there was good. But an intruder appears. In the wake of humanity’s choice to go its own way rather than the way of its Maker, death arrives on the scene. And death is an imposter—not simply a physiological fact at the end of the road, but a destructive and alien presence in God’s good world.

Understood in this way, death is not something that God intends humans simply submit to. Death is something to protest. This is why Kim Leadbeater’s comment gets at something important: this kind of death should be protested. The marks of death should not be accommodated, because they do not belong to the goodness of what God has made.

At the heart of the Christian faith is God’s own ultimate protest against the force of death. Christians celebrate that God himself came in the man Jesus to “destroy death.” This is plainly more than biological. Jesus came to free humanity from the entirety of death’s grip. Hence why, when Jesus speaks of “eternal life” he means more than endless biological existence. He means liberation from all the havoc that death brings to bear within God’s world. To the Christian imagination, the power of death must be protested because God protested it first.

The question is how to protest death. Within the framework of the bill, shortening death or terminal illness is identical with ending life. This is the only form protesting death can take.

But the Christian faith makes a far more radical claim: God alone overcame death by dying. This is the point: Jesus was the one—the only one—who emerged resurrected victor in the contest with the power of death. In seeing his death and resurrection, an unshakeable hope emerges. Death is not the victor. And this hope stands above our present experience of death—in whatever form—and, at the same time, calls us to join the protest.

Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas once wrote: “it seems odd that in the name of eliminating suffering, we eliminate the sufferer.” I have deliberately avoided discussing suffering, not least because it would take me too far afield. Yet Hauerwas has put his finger on what I’m getting at. Protesting death—in the big sense—belongs to the Christian faith. Protesting suffering and pain, economic and racial injustice, fractured relationships and broken societies, are all part of this protest. But can eliminating those who live within the shadow of death be part of this protest? I think not. The Christian faith believes there is only one who can overcome death in this way, and that is God himself—who has already done it.