The Problem With Pleasure

The problem with pleasure isn’t that it exists. In other words, it isn’t the same thing as the problem of evil. The problem isn’t that pleasure exists, no, it is how we seek it and what we seek it from that is the problem.

I was discussing this with a friend the other night and I gave her a piece of advice that I have come to rely on as a philosophy in my life. That advice is that the devil doesn’t sell us hell. When we sin, when we get entrapped in the “wickedness and snares of the devil…” it isn’t because he marketed some evil thing he created and we bought it. Instead he took a creation of God and deceived us with it in some way, he used the distorted form of some good thing against us.

The devil doesn’t create, he lies. He doesn’t give us his side of the story and hope we agree with him, he makes us believe the God story isn’t worth the effort. So, the problem with pleasure isn’t that we seek it; it is that we seek it from the wrong things and in the wrong way. The devil doesn’t make us seek pleasure from bad things he creates, he makes pleasure empty by distorting something good, the devil doesn’t create – he distorts. So we find ourselves seeking pleasure, but never being fulfilled. Even when we seek good things, we are left empty because even things created by God are not, and can not, be an end in themselves. God is the Alpha and the Omega.

Beauty

Take beauty, a favorite topic on this blog. Many have talked about what beauty is, and why true beauty transcends any distortion, any slip into evil, and any inclination of sin. But, there is often a component that is left out of the equation, that component is pleasure. Again, the problem of pleasure isn’t that it exists, but how we seek it, and what we seek it from. So when some argue that to appreciate beauty, to find truth in beauty lets us escapes all sin, they fail to recognize that it is precisely the distortion of beauty that is sin. Again, the devil does not make ugly, he distorts beauty. Pornography isn’t created ex nihilo, it is the distortion of beauty, nudity, and love, into provocative, porn, and lust. It isn’t that those that argue that we should view beauty as truth are wrong, but they cannot forget that what makes a sin, sinful, isn’t just the distortion of the good but our pleasure seeking desire for it.

C.S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, said:

Paradisal man always chose to follow God’s will. In following it he also gratified his own desire, both because all the actions demanded of him were, in fact, agreeable to his blamelss inclination, and also because the service of God was itself his keenest pleasure, without which as their razor edge all joys would have been insipid to him. The question ‘Am I doing this for God’s sake or only because I like it?’ did not then arise, since doing things for God’s sake was what he chiefly ‘happened to like’. 

Sin isn’t just the indulging in something that is a distorted good, but it is the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. It is the false premise that we can be fulfilled with a beautiful thing itself. Certainly that pleasure can put us on a road to God, but the seeking of pleasure can also lead us down a false road. Beauty appreciated apart from God is a sin itself. The truth of beauty isn’t intrinsic in itself apart from God, it is God-trinsic. [Philosphy folks: cf. Euthyphro Dilemma] Intrinsic, in this sense, must mean that its nature is something that stems from God, to God, for God. Now, if this is what those that argue that beauty is truth mean, and that it is good in this sense, then they are correct. But, if they fail to believe that man can in fact sin, in his desire to achieve pleasure from beauty – then they are incorrect. While the seeking of pleasure from something good, does not distort the beauty – it distorts the seeker, but it still stems from the desire of the beautiful.

Again, C.S. Lewis said it better in The Screwtape Letters:

[Pleasure], it is His [God’s] invention, not ours [demons]. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. 

This is why most people don’t start seeking bad things, of an extreme degree, to fulfill themselves with pleasure. The devil works us away from the natural condition, and towards the least pleasurable. As I said, he doesn’t sell us on hell. He doesn’t tempt us with eternal damnation lakes of fire. Instead, he says, “Eat this apple.” “Don’t you want to know things, feel things, and be the master of your own desires?” Small steps, a slow fade, he sells us what we want and what seems to be a natural inclination.

“…Until they rest in You.”

Wherein lies the problem with pleasure. St. Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You [God].” So if we try to fulfill our heart’s desires with things that aren’t God – we are leaving ourselves unfulfilled. As we pursue beauty, and fill it with anything less than pure beauty, which is God himself, we are leaving ourselves empty. The God shaped hole in our heart can only be filled by one thing – God. When we sinned the first time, we started down a path of pleasure seeking that will never be fulfilled; until we step back and realize that nothing will fill it – unless it is God.

The Apple

In fact, the devil doesn’t want to give us any pleasure or fulfill us in any way. He doesn’t even want to have us fulfilled with a distorted good, because then we would feel some sense of fulfillment. No, instead he wants us to continually long for something which we will never get. Think alcohol here, it isn’t that alcohol is bad, it is when we continually crave it. When it becomes an end in itself, when even when we have it that isn’t enough. This pleasure seeking, without end, is the sin – not the thing desired. Of course this isn’t to say that the thing iself can’t be sinful, it can, but it isn’t a requirement. We could want love, desire it, and seek it – but never be fulfilled. The Love here isn’t sinful, but the quest for it in ways that aren’t God focused is.

Just like beauty is good, and to be beautiful a thing must be redolent of God by its nature; yet, if we seek something because it is beautiful and not because that beautiful thing leads us to God, then we are missing the point entirely. Certainly one could argue that for a thing to be beautiful it must be intimately connected to God in its form and purpose, but this is exactly the first step the devil takes. Because he cannot produce anything pleasurable, the first trap he sets for us is to take a thing of beauty (or anything true) and separates God from it.

The apple is a perfect example. God made the apple, and the tree from which it came. It was good, not evil. God didn’t forbid us to eat of it because it was bad, He didn’t want us to eat of it because of what it meant for us,  he put a limitation on it, he didn’t call it evil. It was a recognition of our human nature, it was a recognition of what happens when things are separated from God. It was a recognition of what happened to the devil himself.

So what did the serpent do? He tricked us. He told us, the apple was good on its own. It was pleasurable, and so if we wanted pleasure to eat of it. So we did. It wasn’t that the apple was bad, in fact the apple was pure goodness. The devil didn’t tempt us with a sick and poisoned apple. I dare say he tempted us with the most perfect apple ever made. What was bad was our desire for it, our pleasure seeking for the good. In our mind, God made it, and therefore it was good. Since it was good, it was good that we wanted it. In that instant, we made God secondary.

I will agree with those that say we shouldn’t ignore things of beauty because they may, or do, lead us to temptation. Yet, again, I will add the caveat that we must acknowledge the possibility of this slide. Again, the apple. It isn’t that all pleasure is bad, it is the ways and means in which we seek it that are our downfall.

God – that which we seek, from whom we are filled

So the problem with pleasure isn’t that it exists or even that we seek it. God made pleasure, not the devil. God made pleasure because he loves us. So instead of avoiding pleasure, what we should do is seek the one pleasure that fulfills and is aligned with the intrinsic inclinations of our heart and seek that which will fill it – God. Our keenest pleasure needs to become once again, doing things for God’s sake must again become our greatest pleasure.

The problem with pleasure is that we seek it for its own ends. We seek it to fulfill a desire in our heart, a hole, that is made bigger every time we seek pleasure from something that isn’t God. If God made it, then that thing is good, but if we seek that thing for itself, then even its own beauty and goodness cant help us. We must seek it, because it is from God and we must seek it in its proper form, time, and because it is redolent of its Maker. We can never seek something separate from God.

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Read more from Joe at Defend Us In Battle