Learning to Re-Lent

A Reflection on the Benefits of Self-Imposed Limits

It is a truth only half acknowledged that a person in possession of a comfortable and affluent life must be in want of asceticism. This is perhaps why, in Huxley’s Brave New World, John the Savage rejects the socially engineered happiness of the World State and declares instead, “I don’t want comfort.” But Huxley doesn’t ever seem to give a positive vision of the good life. He only seems to offer a dystopian vision of what the good life is not. But why would someone want to claim “the right to be unhappy”?

Perhaps the answer is related to the way in which giving up things can clarify one’s perspective for what is meaningful. Although C. S. Lewis wrote that he was “no friend to asceticism for its own sake” and that he liked his “tea and tobacco too much for that,” he nevertheless admitted in a letter, “there’s a place for giving things up when they get between you and [God].” If we’re honest with ourselves, I think it’s safe to say many of us in our modern world have things between us and God. This is why David Bentley Hart, after masterfully diagnosed the evils of our age in his essay “Christ and Nothing,” argues for a return to the Desert Fathers. “To have no god but the God of Christ,” he writes, “means today that we must endure the lenten privations of what is most certainly a dark age, and strive to resist the bland solace, inane charms, brute viciousness, and dazed passivity of post-Christian culture—all of which are so tempting precisely because they enjoin us to believe in and adore ourselves.”

More than Delayed Gratification

The gale-force pressure to prioritize and worship the self in our present age is undisputable. This is the danger of relying on the human efforts of perfection alone, without reference to the targeted spiritual dimension of man. To be sure, there are obvious physical and psychological benefits to certain practices of self-denial, as the rise of Jordan Peterson and others in the business of rebranding classical stoicism can attest. Consider the famous sociological “Marshmallow Experiment” at Stanford in the 1960s, where researchers wanting to measure the effects of self-denial put hundreds of children between the ages of four and five to a simple test: they placed a marshmallow on the table in front of each child and gave each the choice to have one now or two later. The researcher would then leave the room for fifteen minutes. The film footage suggests that for some young souls those fifteen minutes were not unlike Christ in the desert with Satan at his elbow. Some kids physically covered their eyes with their hands to avoid giving into temptation. Some sang songs and talked to themselves (a wise intuition). And some simply yielded to temptation without struggle or resistance. After repeated analysis of the way in which these children later developed, the study suggested that the principle of “delayed gratification” correlated to success and contentment in many other areas of life later.

But even if we were to make the “based” new stoics proud with our “delayed gratification” and our program of self-improvement, it still does not fully account for the spiritual benefits of our Lenten practices in this season. After all, the entire church calendar is oriented around the life of Christ. Lent is the penitential season leading up to Christ’s passion and culminating in Easter, a time where we imitate that part of Christ’s life in the wilderness where he fasted for forty days and was tempted by the devil, remaining faithful, and thereafter beginning his ministry. All the health benefits of fasting aside, why would we impose limits to our Christian freedom—going without food—especially when binding the conscience seems like legalism.

To answer this, we must remember that the human creature is a mysterious combination of body and soul, a divine blending of physical and metaphysical properties of existence. The ancients divided man into three parts: the head, the heart, and the belly. C.S. Lewis says that education, for instance, is the process of learning how “the head rules the belly through the chest.” In other words, the appetitive part of man, our flesh, is so strong that without aid of the heart or chest (virtuous habits), the belly would rule our better intuition or judgement. Rationalism is to no avail, for to train the mind alone (without the chest) will result in clever ways of justifying the satisfaction of our baser or carnal passions. Part of developing a “chest,” is the development of the cardinal virtue of temperance, which involves the wise and appropriate application of self-denial. But what is the goal? Jesus shows us in the desert.

Our Lord did not resist the temptations of the flesh merely to avoid the carbs. Jesus establishes the way of the church “militant,” meaning that the Christian life is nothing less than a fight against the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Resistance to these three temptations correspond to the three Lenten practices of almsgiving, fasting, and prayer, respectively. These seem to correspond to the cultivation of the theological virtues of love, faith, and hope. Thus, when Jesus resists these temptations, he is modeling for us what it means to be human—“human” not merely in a stoical earthly sense, but “human” as having been made in God’s image and therefore possessing a metaphysical telos or purpose.

The Exercise of Self-Rule

It is quite simple. If food is placed before a hungry animal, the animal will consume it every time. Anyone with pets knows this. But humans are not bound by their appetites or instincts in the same way. A creature bearing the image of God is possessed with that stamp of divinity that may allow him to deny himself the pleasure of satisfying his belly in favor of some higher and more perceptive purpose. Thus, fasting, then, is the spiritual part of man saying to the physical part of man, “Stomach, you don’t rule me.”

We were made for God and not for the earth or for ourselves. Because of this we must learn to discipline our animal desires (or any unholy desire, for that matter). This means first learning to say no to things. And saying no to something is not the same as the resignation that comes when a thing is all gone. Saying no is quite straight forward: a thing is there, you can have it, but you choose not to for a reason. That reason is the key. To lose that “reason,” says Milton in Paradise Lost, is to be like a city that has lost its king. We were made to be kings and queens, and a good monarch must learn to rule himself before ruling a city. If we have never built up the muscles of self-denial or tightened the sinews of temperance, then how can we expect to resist the tempter? If we have never formed habits where we can say “no” to any desire that might wish to be gratified, then the likelihood that we will resist temptation when it comes is very, very low. Bet on it.

It is by temperance that we learn to order our loves. Our self-denial in lent is to be more like Christ, and in so doing we can learn to love God as our highest good. This reorders all the other goods in our life, including our own self. It is a kind of paradox. Just as losing one’s life for Christ’s sake is the only way to gain it back.