A friend in Greece, and a Life Sentences subscriber, texted me the other day with a question prompted by something I said in the first episode, something about gluttony. Her question was, ‘Can you be a God glutton?’ At first the question made little sense to me, so she texted a follow-up. ‘I mean, is gluttony only a bad thing? What would good gluttony look like?’
Ah, an excellent question! One that strikes at the heart of the Christian understanding of virtue and vice. After all, what is vice? Is vice evil? Can there be good vice? In fact, what is good? What is evil? If you know your Bible, you’ll know that the knowledge of good and evil is foundational. Get it right, and Paradise is yours. Get it wrong, and you’ll be out on your ear.
‘Well,’ I texted back, ‘I once read somewhere that gluttony is the fallen, inverted form of prayer. So, good gluttony is prayer.’
‘Too abstract,’ she complained. ‘What would that mean in practice?’
Hmm, prayer feels pretty concrete to me. ‘Is it such an abstraction?’ I replied. ‘I meant it quite literally. After all, prayer is the mind’s ceaseless, voracious feeding upon the divine. Surely that’s good gluttony. Bad gluttony, however, is the mind’s unnatural and obsessive attachment to food. This means that, just like all passion and vice, gluttony is a problem, not with the body, but with the mind.’
After a further creative back and forth, she brought the exchange to an end. ‘It would be helpful to emphasise that gluttony is a state of mind that does not only pertain to eating. As you explained lust to cover more than just sexual lust, gluttony too expands to cover many passions and excesses, no?’
Yes indeed.
‘Taste and see that the Lord is good!’ sings the Psalmist, hymning the way the mind eats, for God is the food of the mind. If the body survives by eating food, the mind survives by eating God. So, just as the body’s natural desire is for food, the mind’s natural desire is for God, for contemplation of the Good, for absorption in invisible, eternal reality.
However, when it turns away from God, the mind falls from absorption in the divine—from the contemplation of invisible spiritual truth—to absorption in sense perception. And because the mind is a cohering faculty, becoming one with whatever it contemplates, its absorption in sense perception causes it to identify with and become attached to objects of sense perception.
Blinded to its true nature as mind by being stuck in sense-perceptible reality, the mind can’t help but identify, unnaturally, with the fleshly body. From knowing itself properly as a mind with a body, the mind comes to mistakenly believe itself to be a body with a mind. It becomes, in the words of the Fathers, a ‘carnal mind’.
The carnal mind adopts as its own the drives and desires that, though natural to the body, are unnatural to the mind. Instead of uniting with God in prayer, which is its true sustenance, the carnal mind unites with the body’s desire for material food, blindly confusing the body’s sustenance for its own. In this way, prayer becomes gluttony.
So, is there good gluttony? In a sense, yes. Good gluttony is prayer. But it’s perhaps better to say that gluttony is perverted prayer. Gluttony is the perversion, inside the carnal mind, of the spiritual activity natural to the mind, prayer. Fish swim, the mind prays. The carnal mind, however, stuck in sense perception and fleshly desire, is like a fish flapping about in the mud—which is to say, though swimming, the fish isn’t swimming; though praying, the mind isn’t praying.
What’s worse, by trying to substitute food for God, the carnal mind only ends up twisting the body’s natural desire for food into something out of all proportion to its proper end. The body naturally eats to live, but when possessed by a gluttonous mind, the body grows insatiable and instead of eating to live, it lives to eat. This is because, even when stumbling about blindly, the mind is still a mind, still made for eternal joy, still unsatisfied with anything less than infinite bliss. Only now, in its blindness, it seeks, in vain, that eternality in fleeting sensual pleasure. In fact, according to the Fathers, sensual pleasure itself is a consequence of the mind’s fall from absorption in the divine, and is but the ghostly echo, in the carnal mind, of the eternal bliss that the mind truly longs to know.
Virtues that flourish within the mind when it nourishes itself properly on heavenly food are twisted into vice. Haunting its fleshly body like a ghost haunting a house, unaware that it has died, the carnal mind turns what should be a warm, pleasant home, one full of wide, clear windows drawn open so that the sun fills every corner with light, into a cold, gloomy, nighttime den, one where all the virtues of body and soul are inverted. And in a final tragic flourish, having twisted its natural desire for divine contemplation, through identification with the body, into an irrational compulsion for perpetual pleasure, the carnal mind ends up destroying the body itself—just as the ghost leads the house he’s haunting into ruin.
So yes, gluttony is more than just an insatiable appetite for food. We must not minimise the problem of overindulgence in food and drink, but moderation is not the sum total of the spiritual life, certainly not for its own sake. Rather, understood fully, gluttony is the mind’s mindless pursuit of permanent sensual gratification in the widest sense.
So, the man seated at the dinner table shovelling platefuls of food into his face is no more gluttonous, in the widest sense, than the man who controls what he eats in order to maintain a sexually attractive outer appearance, whether in order to indulge the pleasure he feels by the flattery that his outer appearance pays to his inner self-image, or to avoid the shame he feels when his outer appearance falls short of that sexy inner ideal. In such a man, gluttony may have been refined into what we call vanity, but it is gluttony nonetheless, still a form of the carnal mind’s thirst for sensual gratification.
Likewise the obsessive need, all-pervasive today, to be giving the carnal mind, through endless, mindless scrolling, little dopamine hits of excitement or information or opinion. Call it ADHD if you want, but it’s gluttony plain and simple, an insatiable thirst for sensual pleasure. Only in this case, that thirst is indulged, not directly by the body, but indirectly by the imagination, which is merely sense perception in a subtler mode, sense perception as stored in, drawn from, and arranged by the memory.
And so, yes, in all of this, the body is not the problem, and gluttony is not the fleshly body’s natural inclination to eat. Rather, the problem is the mind, the carnal mind’s unnatural and obsessive attachment to eating—and through that unnatural attachment, its attachment to all sensual gratification. Ideally the mind should feel anxious when it feels empty of God. This is called ‘the fear of God’. But the carnal mind feels anxious when it feels empty of sensual pleasure. Instead of lurching toward prayer as it should, the carnal mind lurches toward eating—or any equivalent obsession.
So, when I said in the first episode that the Church Fathers held that being embodied is essential to being human, I meant it. But that doesn’t mean this body of flesh is thereby to be indulged. Not at all.
We have been given these bodies in order to crucify them, to ‘crucify the flesh’ after the pattern of Christ. This is why Christ said that when your faith is weak—that is, when your mind is in carnal mode—the only way to expel a demon is ‘through prayer and fasting’—that is, by sacrificing the carnal mind. Crucifying the flesh sacrifices the carnal mind, paving the way for the mind’s resurrection—through which, according to the Fathers, one acquires a renewed, vivified, heavenly body, a body not of flesh, but of spirit.