Explainer
Addiction
Creed
Eating
5 min read

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 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
Attention
Creed
Education
Psychology
6 min read

We miss so much when we only see what we are looking for

Explaining why we don't see the unseen - with the help of a gorilla.
A blurred image of a blindfolded man.
Manuel Bonadeo on Unsplash.

In a thriving Pentecostal Church on an English city street, a room full of worshippers are singing, clapping, dancing and throwing their hands in the air. The preacher cries “Come, Holy Spirit!” and there are cries of “Amen!” and “Yes Lord!” One person has tears on their cheeks.  

A few doors down, a few dozen Anglicans also gather. Heads bent over their liturgy books, there is a hum of responses and an air of reverence. “Give us the joy of your saving help: and sustain us with your life-giving Spirit.” The altar candles flicker as the community settles itself into pews. The Holy Spirit is no less present to these worshippers, although they respond in a completely different way.  

Both churches share one creed, in which they commit to their belief in God as the source of all things, seen and unseen. Whilst Pentecostal theologies tend to focus on the observable and unpredictable signs of the Spirit at work, many Anglicans would describe the Spirit in terms of an inner experience, perhaps one that is cognitive rather than physical. But either way, Christians share one belief – that God is present in the world, and we call that the Holy Spirit.  

However, there are also hundreds of people who walk past both of these churches, week by week, who would never dream of setting foot inside. Many of them will think that anyone who believes in God is deluded or deceived. Such rationalist thinkers often have a strongly monist view of the world, in which everything, even mysterious things such as human consciousness and perception of non-physical entities, must have a physical or biological basis. As Ebenezer Scrooge says to the apparent ghost of Marley in Charles Dickens’ book, A Christmas Carol, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” 

It is almost impossible to convince someone who hasn’t had a first first-hand experience of God that anything like the Holy Spirit exists. Many nay-sayers, I suspect, quietly (or maybe not so quietly) believe that their unbelief is because they are more rational and maybe even more intelligent than those who get excited by such things. But there is another possible explanation for why some people apparently cannot, or will not, see the unseen.  

The British education system is heavily orientated towards STEM. Even when more creative subjects such as literature find their way into the syllabus, they are often studied in a rather dry and analytical way. Notwithstanding the efforts of the occasional maverick teacher, I recall much time spent learning how to identify the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, and little (if any) time learning to articulate how his sonnets made me feel. Such a system turns out good scientists, but it may be that in doing so it trains our young people out of being able to perceive a whole raft of things which are arguably just as important to human flourishing.  

The world around us contains significantly more sensory input than our minds can process, so we simply don’t pay attention to most of it. 

A “selective attention test” can quickly prove this point. I did one recently with a room full of psychology undergraduates, almost all of whom had identified as monists. “Since you guys are the brightest and the best,” I simpered “let’s do a little intelligence test. Apparently only five per cent of the general population get the answer right to this puzzle, but in this room, I expect the success rate will be a little higher…”  

Having primed them by flattering their egos, I proceeded to show them a video called “The Monkey Business Illusion”, designed in 2009 by scientists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. During the short film, a group of people pass basket balls to each other, and viewers are asked to count how many times the players wearing white shirts pass the ball. It seems simple enough, and when the film ended, I asked the students how many counted the right number of passes. Almost every hand in the room went up. No surprises there.  

Then I asked the more important question – who saw the gorilla? There was a smattering of laughter, and this time only about half of the hands went up. Meanwhile, the other half of my students were looking around at their peers, utterly confused… 

But it was true. In “The Monkey Business Illusion”, a person in a 6ft gorilla costume walks right across the middle of the scene, weaving through the players in the game. However, because most viewers are intently focussed on watching the players in white, they simply don’t perceive it. You can try this for yourself - the video I’m talking about can be found easily on YouTube, and if you follow the search term “selective attention test” there are many others like it.  

The material point is that the world around us contains significantly more sensory input than our minds can process, so we simply don’t pay attention to most of it. If you pause for a moment right now, you might notice that there is the hum of a heater in your room, or the noise of traffic outside, or the smell of an air freshener, or that a piece of your clothing that is too tight – things you were simply not aware of until I pointed them out. It’s common that we don’t perceive things until something else makes us think that they are important. If someone tells you that your house might have structural damage, you will suddenly start to notice every creak that comes from your walls and ceilings, even though those creaks have probably been happening for years.  

As social beings, we can be easily conditioned into paying attention to certain things and ignoring others. If I tell a group of students that intelligent people are highly attentive to the players in white shirts, I increase the likelihood that they simply will not notice a gorilla.  

There is good research to show that children, even in our modern and secular society, are inherently spiritual – most young kids believe in God, or gods, fairies and the existence of many things unseen. But this is not celebrated in our STEM focussed education system, wherein young minds are highly conditioned to let go of such “irrational” beliefs and trust in the full explanatory power of science. It is so effective that, by the time they get to my classroom at university, I’ve got little hope of persuading any of my monists that there was a 6ft gorilla without showing the video again and letting them see it for themselves.  

But there are always some people who are willing to challenge the idea that Marley was just an undigested bit of beef. There are always some people who attend churches of one type or another, or practice other forms of spirituality and religion. Some pray, some meditate, and many take part in rituals. This trains them in what anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann calls “micro-processes of attending”, leaving them more ready to perceive spiritual things instead of screening them out of their conscious awareness. How they respond might depend on preferred tradition – dancing, liturgy, or a little bit of both. But all agree that there is something going on that is unseen and important.  

Many STEM educated, highly rational and fully committed monists no doubt think that those who attend churches are deluded and deceived into perceiving unseen things are simply just not there. These nay-sayers have been taught, implicitly and explicitly, that it is more intelligent to believe in the all-explanatory power of science. But perhaps it is they who have been deluded and deceived? As the Monkey Business Illusion demonstrates, if you flatter someone’s intelligence enough, it becomes entirely possible to hide a 6ft gorilla in plain sight.  

Watch the Monkey Business Illusion

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