Pleasure

Why are some foods enjoyable? Or certain movies? Or the completing of a particular project? Why does a sunset bring pleasure? A relationship? An enemy’s being foiled? Is the “pleasure” in each case the same pleasure? Or is the pleasure specific to the object/event? And why in each of these examples can pleasure sometimes be absent? It is difficult to pin down the elusive character of pleasure.

Some have held that pleasure comes from freely engaging in an act (e.g., hiking, working). But sometimes pleasure surprises you. Others have seen pleasure as more a matter of the will, when one attains a desired object (e.g., a team’s winning the Superbowl). But what of a sunset? Still others believe pleasure to derive from moving from potentially to actually knowing something (e.g., meeting your daughter after a prolonged absence). Pleasure is all this and more. It is the natural accompaniment of one’s well-being and has usually been understood as central to any understanding of human motivation and values.

Webster defines pleasure as “the gratification of the senses or of the mind; agreeable sensations or emotions; the feeling produced by enjoyment or the expectation of good.” Pleasure’s exact character remains ambiguous. It can be a matter of the intellect, or an emotion, or a sensation, for it has to do with the whole person. It is related to “enjoyment,” “contentment,” “happiness” and “blessedness.”

Such pleasure is central to God’s intention for humankind. It was characteristic of life in the Garden and is again made central in the biblical portrayal of our future life with God: “They will hunger no more, and thirst no more . . . for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Rev. 7:16-17 NRSV).

Pleasure and Pain

In the biblical text quoted above, pleasure is linked closely with pain—with hunger and thirst and tears. Yet many in Western society seek today to shield themselves from all pain. By stressing affluence and overindulgence, and by papering over all that is unpleasant, however, the culture of the West has found pleasure strangely hollow. Paul Brand has argued, based on his work with lepers, that the inability to sense pain also destroys opportunities for pleasure. This would seem metaphorically to be the case.

Brand quotes the Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang, who summarizes an ancient Chinese formula for happiness. Among the thirty supreme pleasures in life are such mixtures of pain and pleasure as (1) finally being able to scratch a private part when alone (!) and (2) feeling rain on dry skin after being thirsty in a dry and dusty land. As Augustine noted, “Everywhere a greater joy is preceded by a greater suffering.” It is not pain’s absence but its secession that is significant.

Two Misunderstandings of Pleasure

Hedonism. This term has been used rather broadly to cover any philosophy of life that elevates pleasure. Although there have been advocates of hedonism throughout the ages, it has more often been critiqued. One recalls the ancient Greek king Tantalus, who, having stolen ambrosia from the gods, is condemned to thirst for water that is always receding as he stoops to drink and to hunger for a fruit that swings out of reach as he seeks to pick it. Pleasure, when it is stolen or fixed upon, soon becomes tantalizingly out of reach.

The writer of Ecclesiastes discusses this problem regarding pleasure’s apotheosis. “Come now, I will make a test of pleasure; enjoy yourself” (Eccles. 2:1 NRSV). The Preacher gives himself to all forms of enjoyment—wine, houses, gardens, pools, possessions, treasures, singers, concubines—only to find his life vain: “I said . . . of pleasure, `What use is it?’ ” (Eccles. 2:2 NRSV). To devote oneself to pleasure paradoxically produces despair. “Whoever loves pleasure will suffer want” (Proverbs 21:17 NRSV; cf. Proverbs 14:12-13; Luke 8:14; 2 Tim. 3:4).

Christians have rightly counseled against all forms of promiscuous pleasure—being consumed by sex, food or materialism—for such activity proves hollow. In this way the Christian church has echoed the sage advice of Ecclesiastes. When pleasure becomes a compulsion, even an addiction, it ceases to be pleasurable without increasingly strong “fixes.” Rather than create satisfaction, such overindulgence in pleasure produces low self-esteem, a sense of alienation, a difficulty in handling stress and an increased level of anxiety. Hedonistic pleasure is a perversion of true pleasure.

But although few Christians would advocate in the abstract such hedonism, many Christians, particularly in the West, are living a modified hedonistic lifestyle. The title of Neil Postman’s critique of television, Amusing Ourselves to Death, captures the essence of pleasure’s contemporary misuse. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is more characteristic of the life patterns of many Christians than we would care to admit. In his apocalyptic novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley provides a similarly dark vision of a people controlled by too much pleasure. He portrays people as overcome by the technologies they adore. Reduced to egoism and passivity, they lose all capacity to think. Truth becomes irrelevant in this trivial culture. Here again is an updated hedonism all too close to the reality of Western culture.

Asceticism. If hedonism is characterized by an overindulgence in pleasure, asceticism is characterized by its underindulgence. Christians have found it easy to critique a fixation on pleasure (even if they are sometimes inconsistent in practice), but they have found it more difficult to recognize pleasure’s wrongful denial. Asceticism teaches that one ought out of principle and devotion to deny one’s desires, to absent oneself from authentic good and/or to inflict pain on oneself. Such action is not seen by ascetics as an end in itself but is carried out (1) to free the soul for pursuit of higher knowledge, (2) to avoid the world, which is thought to be evil, or (3) to imitate the cross of Jesus. It is thought that by repressing pleasure one can test one’s devotion to God and attain to a special knowledge of the divine. Out of such beliefs arose some forms of the monastic life.

Augustine, writing in De doctrina Christiana (a.d. 427), sought to distinguish between things that are for enjoyment and things that are for use. To take “pleasure for its own sake” in anything other than God would be sinful. Thus Augustine counseled it to be wrong to enjoy eating or sex or other natural “pleasures.” Instead, these activities should be viewed instrumentally as a means whereby we can better enjoy God. We should not take pleasure in the temporal, thought Augustine, but only in the eternal.

Such a disparagement of everyday life has led Christians throughout the ages to undervalue the pleasure of God’s creation. In Victorian England “worldly” amusements were avoided—theaters, novel-reading, dancing, alcohol, card-playing. Even the playing of charades was to be limited to children. A similar suspicion of life’s commonplace joys leads some Christians today to question their “right” to have pleasure. Behind this continuing legacy is an incipient dualism, a pitting of body against soul. In this way created life is misunderstood. Rather than reduce or deny pleasurable activity, perception and emotion, Christians need (1) to discover a wider range of pleasure in the whole of God’s creation and (2) to root that pleasure in its ultimate source—God the Creator and Re-creator of life.

Pleasure: Its Divine Possibility

Pleasure can be holy or profane, licit or illicit. If it turns one from God, the Creator of all pleasure, it is sinful (cf. Luke 8:14; 1 Tim. 5:6; 2 Tim. 3:4; Titus 3:3; James 4:3-4; 2 Peter 2:13). But the same pleasure can also turn one toward God, the giver of all life (cf. Psalm 104:10-15; Eccles. 2:24-25; Eccles. 5:19; Eccles. 9:7; Acts 14:17; Phil. 2:13; 1 Tim. 6:17; James 1:17).

Nowhere is life’s dual possibility better highlighted than in the book of Ecclesiastes. We have seen above how the Preacher finds hedonistic pleasure to be vain. But this wisdom writer also interrupts his otherwise frontal assault on humankind’s misguided attempt to independently find meaning in life to advise readers to enjoy life from God as a gift. We are to accept our lot with pleasure and enjoy the days of our lives that are granted us by God (cf. Eccles. 2:24-26; Eccles. 3:12-13, 22; Eccles. 5:18-19; Eccles. 8:15; Eccles. 11:8-9). The Preacher exhorts:

Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love. . . . Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might. (Eccles. 9:7-10 NRSV)

Despite his inability to discover any ultimate or overarching purpose for life, and despite the pervasive reality of death, the writer of Ecclesiastes finds in the blessings of life given by the Creator to his creatures a sure cause to rejoice.

Pleasure: A Potential Path to God

The experience of pleasure needs no outside validation. It is a natural consequence of the gift of life from God the Creator and Sustainer (1 Tim. 4:1-4). Yet the experience of pleasure can lead to a belief in God. G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy remembered his conversion and linked it to his reflection on the sense of delight and wonder that at times marked his world. So too did C. S. Lewis, who in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, understood Joy as a voice speaking at his side—“something too near to see, too plain to be understood, on this side of knowledge” (Lewis, p. 180). This Joy he experienced as he listened to Wagner, gazed at a flowering currant bush and read George MacDonald. Through experiences such as these, both Chesterton and Lewis concluded that the world could not explain itself, nor the “magic” in it. If this magic, or Joy, was to have meaning, which it was perceived to have, it must have, in Chesterton’s words, “someone to mean it.” In this way, pleasure was the indirect means by which both of these writers came to Christianity.

References and Resources

P. Brand with P. Yancey, Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994); G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Lane, 1909); A. Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper, 1989); R. K. Johnston, “ `Confessions of a Workaholic’: A Reappraisal of Qoheleth,” in Reflecting with Solomon, ed. R. B. Zuck (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994) 133-48; W. Kerr, The Decline of Pleasure (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962); C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace & World/Harvest Books, 1955); J. I. Packer, Hot Tub Religion (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 1987); J. Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Portland, Ore.: Multnomah, 1986); N. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin Books, 1985); P. Yancey, “The Problem of Pleasure,” Christianity Today 32, no. 9 (1988) 80.

—Robert K. Johnston