“If I were a creature from another planet, or, more outlandish, somebody transported from 1940, what would I guess about modern people? ‘Their favorite color is black… they film everything as if under a metallic blackness. They enjoy spitefulness and cruelty. They don’t understand human creativity, they confuse it with bells and whistles and cheap tricks. They put no premium on kindness, grace, gentleness, nobility. Their women are harsh, and their men are either softheaded boors or monsters. There is nothing childlike in them. They think they appreciate beauty of the human form, but that is not so; they wish to transform it into something mechanical. They will say they are just joking with all this business, but that too is revealing: why should they find nastiness and spitefulness funny?’”
—Anthony Esolen, Sex & The Unreal City—
✦✦✦
It’s the summer of 2019. I soak in a hot tub beside a bar illumined by red lights on the rooftop of a high rise luxury hotel in Madrid. Listening to Yax Keyon’s “Chasing”, I feel the tips of my fingers go numb and loosen their grip on a glass of Johnny Walker Blue (which later, to my embarrassment, slips and shatters).
Two days prior I had been in Barcelona: where I gazed at a topless woman on the beach with dark tan skin and wavy black hair wearing a pink thong and sunglasses, who—having the rest of the long stretch of empty sand on which to sit—sat directly in front of me and laid down with a smile as wide as the Iberian itself. In another two days I would be in Pamplona: running from bulls and attending the matador shows, while locals paraded down the cobblestone streets carrying papier mâché figures in an event known as “The Procession of Giants & Bigheads”.
But on that night in Madrid, halfway though my time in Spain, I looked up at a group of stars large and small clustered around a beautiful bright full moon. In the morning the sun would beam into my room through the hotel’s originally “black” curtains that had faded over time and become a blotchy ashen gray; which was a blessing in disguise, as without the sun’s imposition my hangover would have made me miss the bus.
This trip, like so many others before it, typified my twenties. A time of excess. A time of having more pocket change than sense. A time of going everywhere while going nowhere and not caring to know it.
If this Epicurean season of my life filled with cockiness and hubris and selfishness could’ve been reduced to a song, I suppose it would’ve been that disco tune by The Killers:
I got gas in the tank
I got money in the bank
I got news for you baby
You’re looking at the man
Who’s the man? Who’s the man?
I’m the man, I’m the man
Who’s the man with the plan?
I’m the man
I don’t give a damn
Another memory surfaces. This one two years before Spain. It’s October 2017 and I’m 26, alone on a bullet train at 5 AM speeding toward Frankfurt International Airport from Düsseldorf. My stomach is full of beer and Jäger, my head is sweaty, and I see in the black reflection of my phone screen that my pupils are still dilated in the middle of a molly comedown.
Six hours before, a group from Portugal I had met at a hostel invited me to a rave. And since I had never been to a rave and had only seen raves in movies up until then, I thought “Hell why not?” Fast forward an hour later: amid the chaos of flashing lights and thumping music, the introduction of a smiley-faced tablet sent me into a state of euphoria that would fall like a trapdoor out from under me sooner than I expected.
Fast forward five hours, back on the train: I had never known before what people meant when they said they were “scatterbrained”, but now… now I knew… and it felt terrifying. Hundreds of thoughts raced in and out of my consciousness, and I couldn’t hold onto a single one. Paragraphs became sentences became words became letters became vague shapes and shadows. As if my mind was a television and someone else was holding the remote, flipping the channel every second. How did such a dreamlike state become this nightmare? I decided to put my earphones in and play Moby’s “South Side”, hoping (desperately) that my brain would latch onto the repetitive lyrics like a lifebuoy and recenter itself.
Here we are now, going to the east side
I pick up my friends and we start to ride
Ride all night, yeah, we ride all day
Some may come, love, and some may stay
It dawns on me once my mind slows—at last!—that I don’t actually remember how I got on the train. Nor do I remember ordering an Uber, or returning to the hostel and grabbing my backpack which was now resting against my leg. I glance down and notice a phone number written on my palm in green glittery ink. But sweat has smeared the last two digits.
✤
From 20th century memoirs like Henry Miller’s Tropic Of Cancer and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises to 21st century memoirs like Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ A Sense Of Direction and movies such as 2004’s Euro Trip, there has been a long tradition of stories (real and fictional) of young Americans vacationing in the continent of legal drugs, roads without speed limits, four-course meals for $15, and a more casual attitude toward casual sex. Indeed there has been a long tradition of young Americans—untethered from any commitments—engaging in what best could be deemed the opposite of diplomacy; behaving in risky and stupid ways in order to live the kinds of stories we would never tell our grandkids, and displaying to Europeans not “the better angels of our nature” but the beastly impulses of our appetites.
We’re not big on denying our appetites these days.
“Suppressing” is what we call it, and we say it’s not “healthy”. And we say it’s not “healthy” because the goal in life—we believe—is to be “happy”. In previous centuries the goal of life was to attain virtue. But now, it’s to be “happy”.
And while I could get into the historical weeds about how and when this shift in the Western worldview occurred, I’ve decided that any such digression would only be a distraction from the main point of this essay: that hedonism has an expiration date. And if you don’t acknowledge the expiration date of your hedonism—insisting that your life can always be one big party that lasts forever and ever, no matter how many years pass and no matter how old you get—you will eventually wind up bitter, ugly, anxious, and alone.
But one attracts more flies with honey than with vinegar, and it isn’t very good strategy on my part to warn people off of hedonism using threats; wagging my finger like a haggard old woman with a wart on her face and barking through flecks of spit “You’ll regret prioritizing pleasure over virtue!” (Not to mention I already kinda went this route in a previous essay, What Happens When It’s Time To Give Up Your Youth?)
Instead a better approach would be to analyze hedonism and what motivates it, and then articulate an enticing alternative to the unrestrained life of a boar that doesn’t—in turn—make one a bore. To dissect the social, political, and spiritual forces that sustain hedonism, and then ask what transcendent counterforce is strong enough to finally restrain world-weary hedonists living in a hedonistic society from (once again) going over budget at the casino, or from eating a meal so big their stomach balloons, or from pouring vodka on the curves of a naked body and licking every drop. Essentially, we have to candidly acknowledge that sin is fun*, damn fun I tell you, and then ask what—by comparison—is worth leaving it behind?
This is a letter to the hedonists.
✤
Any decent essay about hedonism is mostly going to be an essay about sex. Yes of course hedonism is not characterized entirely by sex; I’ve just mentioned other pleasures in which people overindulge or indulge in the wrong way. But I think any discussion of hedonism has to deal primarily with sex, because if we’re honest—while hedonism encompasses a collection of various vices—sex still dominates the majority of a hedonist’s headspace. Few hedonists think about high-stakes poker games as often as they think about sex. Few hedonists think about Burger King Whoppers as often as they think about sex. Perhaps a higher number of hedonists than “few” think about drugs or alcohol almost as much as they think about sex, but I would still bet one of my kidneys that 99.9% of people who live hedonistic lifestyles prioritize sex in their thoughts over any other vice they have.
So… sex.
A lot about the way American civilization treats sex is contradictory and, quite frankly, hypocritical. For instance, the way we talk about sex in educational and professional settings has an antiseptic feel to it.** It’s very medicalized and de-eroticized and detached from the libidinal and the animal. By contrast, the way sex is treated in entertainment media is bawdy and manic and over-the-top, and divorced in its vulgar expression from anything resembling the authentic attraction and arousal felt by most regular people in the course of their lives. And the result is that we’re now in this weird cultural space where lust and horniness are largely confined to solitude and the screen—not even just with porn—but with “semi-sensual” media like Instagram and TikTok. Our civilization, really in the past 15 years, has become a kind of dystopian House of Mirrors where on the one hand extreme promiscuity and strange fetishes are publicly celebrated as long as they can be commodified, but on the other hand the response toward normal healthy sexuality (and especially toward normal healthy male sexuality) is draconian when it comes to non-commodifiable interactions and attempts at interaction.
This offers a window into one way a modern hedonist is made. Hedonism can be defined as striving to attain maximum pleasure with minimum effort. And the contrasting tones of “cold sterility” and extreme promiscuity American society uses to describe sex—despite seemingly being at opposing ends of a spectrum—both work in tandem to encourage a utility mindset about sex. A mindset that says that sex exists primarily for personal pleasure (not intimacy or procreation), that the equivalent to going without sex for an extended length of time is the same as going without food for an extended length of time (hence the relatively recent invention of the phrase “sex-starved”), and thus any religious or social rule, taboo, or norm that restricts an individual’s access to sexual satisfaction is fundamentally anti-human. In the materialist worldview humans are pleasure-seeking creatures, not meaning-seeking creatures; thus, placing barriers around pleasure—under a materialist framework—is considered an egregious violation. The consensus of the majority of Americans between the ages of 18-30 is almost unanimously libertine: “Pleasure above all else, so long as it does not trespass on the pleasure of another.” And pleasure-above-all-else necessitates the simplicity of transaction. Anything more than transaction is an obstacle to instant gratification, and demands exactly the type of patience we’re trying to discard in the first place.***
Yet more than utility, there’s an air of meanness to modern hedonism.
And I say “modern hedonism” because the hedonists of old, like Ovid for example, or Casanova, were willing to write poems and letters and songs about women in order to seduce them; and also expected that the culmination of those seductions would take many weeks or months. But modern hedonism is a different beast from theirs. Modern hedonism is mean and impatient. And it’s mean and impatient because it’s been combined with convenience, instant gratification, and technology. Our addictive screens have become procurers, and now can even converse on our behalf if we want them to. In the past, if you wanted to live a sexually hedonistic life, a) you at least had to choose among a limited number of options of people that were in your immediate community, which in its own way forced you to see those people as people, and b) you at least had to improve your conversational skills and charm well enough to capture (and hold) the interest of a person. This required learning through a lot of trial and error what got you kissed and what got you slapped. Which required courage, perseverance, and patience.
But with the explosion of dating apps over the last 15 years, a market mentality has developed when it comes to human beings that incentivizes rapid fire dismissal and harsh judgement (“Lady I don’t want to match you on Tinder, I want to harvest you for beef tallow to cook my fries.”, “Don’t swipe me on Bumble if you’d need a stepping stool to kiss me, Lord Farquaad.”) And no, this is not me reasserting the tired and stupid lie that “Looks don’t matter. All that matters about a person is what’s on the inside.” Of course looks matter. They’re not everything, but they’re certainly not nothing. No, what I’m getting at, is that having an infinite number of potential partners waiting at our fingertips whenever a current partner annoys us or merely starts boring us—on a psychological level—leads us not only into believing that everyone in our lives is so easily disposable, but that we also shouldn’t have a problem with being easily disposed of. Not only do we begin to view others cheaply as a result of the modern melding of hedonism with immediacy and endless variety… but we begin to view ourselves cheaply too.
This quasi-vampiric process by which we select our one-night-stands and situationships is then followed by a variety of degrading post-hookup rituals. Men ask for naked pictures or take them in secret when the women aren’t looking, add their snapshots to a collection, and show the collection to friends these women have never met and likely never will meet. “Behold! The museum of Past Conquests! Lean over my shoulder and gaze upon the nude bodies of strangers; the non-consensual viewing of whom in any other circumstance would be a crime.” Conversely (though far less exploitative and demeaning), women steal clothing items from previous boyfriends and fuckbuddies and “forget” to return them when relations end. “Behold! These boxer briefs from Abs! This ball cap from Blue Eyes! My jersey from Girth! And alas, we come to you, you pot-bellied fiend lying back on my bed like a triumphant koala. What have you to offer me at the end of this tryst?” I suspect these post-hookup rituals by men and women in the modern West are how we convince ourselves that casual sex isn’t doing any real damage and that none of this is as big a deal as our subconscious is screaming to us that it is.
Yet a second way exists for how some hedonists are made, beyond the corrupting effects of technology and the contradictory ways we treat sex in the West (especially in the United States). In some cases what leads to a person eventually becoming a hedonist is their refusal to rank their degree of affections. A “voluntary Williams Syndrome”, if you will. A situation where a person gives the same amount of positive attention (however briefly) to a guy or girl they just met at a party as they give to their dog; which, now that they think about it, is the same amount of positive attention they give to their best friend; which, actually, is the same amount of positive attention they give to their grandmother. St. Augustine warned about this when he talked about Ordo Amoris: the portion of affection that is allotted to each object should be in accordance with the level of affection that is appropriate to them. By contrast, if we display equal amounts of affection toward all the individuals (“objects” in Augustinian terms) in our orbit without differentiation—instead of adjusting the amount of affection based on what each object’s relationship is to us—what results is a “flattening” effect; where, because we have given everyone in our lives the same amount of positive attention, we unknowingly train ourselves to actually not view any relationship as special and we start to feel empty. We then seek to numb this emptiness through pursuits of pleasure.
This second path to hedonism is somewhat different from the first, in that rather than the meanness typical of the first, the problem with the second is of being too affectionate with too many people. But you’ll notice that despite this difference, the resulting hedonism produces the same fruit which is ultimately a devaluation of others.
The third way a hedonist can be made, and the final way I’ll talk about here, is through masquerading. Where a person who is unsatisfied with themselves will start “trying on” edgy archetypes in an effort to become (or at least appear) more interesting. Understanding that this probably sounds a bit too esoteric and high falutin’, I’ll define “trying on archetypes” simply as: a person adopting patterns of behavior and a set of mannerisms/styles intended to convey to others a major change in themselves. Johnny feels like he’s been seen as a pushover his whole life, so he starts wearing his hair messy and buys a black leather jacket to become the Rebel. Suzy feels like she’s never been seen as the pretty girl, so she starts wearing red lipstick and heels to become the Bombshell. All well and good. All innocent enough. Nothing out of the ordinary. But where the interplay between hedonism and masquerading occurs, is when a person who is self-conscious about their innocence compared to their jaded peers embraces a Chaos archetype in order to (paradoxically) both stand out and fit in. Fearing that their innocence has caused them to be judged as “sheltered”, they flirt with transgression and flout norms at every opportunity; fearing that their innocence has made them too agreeable they become combative; fearing that their innocence has made them too trusting they challenge everything; fearing that their innocence has made them “invisible” to others, they act recklessly and put themselves in harm’s way so they can revel in the panic and concern of those around them (who are “finally paying attention”). This “shedding of innocence that one is self-conscious about” in order to embrace a Chaos archetype can be motivated by a lot of things: capturing the eye of an attractive “bad boy” or “bad girl”, defying a strict mother or father, desiring to discover “the world’s secret spaces”, etcetera etcetera. But the motive doesn’t really matter. What matters is the hidden danger: when you play dress-up with a Chaos archetype, a weird spillover happens where the archetype “bakes itself into you”. You gradually become what you present as. The two don’t stay separate. You fool around with certain Ways of Being and it becomes your being, because the archetype itself has agency and not just you.
And yes, I know that sounds strange and ridiculous, but it isn’t. You don’t live in a strictly material world. You live in a spiritual world too. And one of the odd aspects of living in a spiritual world is that if you act like a particular kind of character long enough, the character becomes infused with you. In this way then, the Chaos archetype can best be described as parasitic and indefatigable in its determination to lead its insecure host to a chaotic life that’s not “chaotic” in the romanticized, fun, Salvador-Dali-art sort of way (that the host probably imagined), but “chaotic” in a very real and despairing sort of way. A guy plays around with the “alpha male confrontational badass” persona, without understanding that the majority of men who are actually like that either wind up behind bars or in pools of their own blood. A girl plays around with the manic pixie “alternative” Natalie-Portman-from-Closer persona, without understanding that the majority of women who are actually like that are mental and emotional wrecks. The archetypes we choose to embody have an agency independent of our own, and if the archetype is wicked, it will actively and aggressively consume us.
Sir James Frazier, in his 1890 anthropological work The Golden Bough, talked about how the ancients understood far better than we “rational” moderns how acting transforms into being, when he described the ceremonial reenactments of an Iron Age goddess cult in Zela circa 400 B.C.:
“Here then at the great sanctuary of the goddess in Zela it appears that her myth was regularly translated into action; the story of her love and the death of her divine lover was performed year by year as a sort of mystery-play by men and women who lived for a season and sometimes died in the character of the visionary beings whom they personated. The intention of these sacred dramas, we may be sure, was neither to amuse nor to instruct an idle audience, and as little were they designed to gratify the actors, to whose baser passions they gave the reins for a time. They were solemn rites which mimicked the doings of divine beings, because man fancied that by such mimicry he was able to arrogate to himself the divine functions and to exercise them for the good of his fellows. The operations of nature, to his thinking, were carried on by mythical personages very like himself; and if he could only assimilate himself to them completely he would be able to wield all their powers. This is probably the original motive of most religious dramas or mysteries among rude peoples. The dramas are played, the mysteries are performed, not to teach the spectators the doctrines of their creed, still less to entertain them, but for the purpose of bringing about those natural effects which they represent in mythical disguise; in a word, they are magical ceremonies and their mode of operation is mimicry or sympathy.”
Yes on one level to be a modern hedonist is to be utility minded. But on another level to be a hedonist is to act out an ancient paganism. Hedonism is idolatrous ritual unconsciously performed; where symbolic inversions, evocations, and the spirit of human sacrifice (not the practice itself) take the form of activities that are secular on the surface, and participated in by unknowing men and women who—deep in their Chaos archetypes—think they’re JuSt HaViNg FuN. The drunken horny frat bro serves Bacchus. The “slutty Halloween nurse” serves Venus. The young Wall Street exec who can never make enough money serves Pomona. The rowdy football fan at a game who can’t control his rage serves Mars. And those entities will get their worship. They have always gotten their worship. This is why St. Paul warned in 1st Corinthians 10:20-22 (in clear reference to Old Testament, deuterocanonical, and apocalyptic passages like Psalm 106:34-38, Baruch 4:7-8, and Enoch 19:1-2) that even though the pagan occupants of ancient Corinth believed they were worshipping their gods, they didn’t truly know who they were worshipping. Because the “gods” are not actually gods at all, but something quite more sinister.
✤
I suppose it’s here where I should snuff out any hint of pretentiousness that might be perceived. “Let him that thinketh he stand take heed lest he fall” and that sort of thing. To be clear, men who have abandoned hedonism are still prone to say “Sweet ma’am hot damn” when a lady with a nice figure in a dress walks past during a strong breeze. And I’m sure women who have abandoned hedonism still make similar remarks about 6’2” muscular men they see at the pool or gym. This is because men and women who have abandoned hedonism are not mountaintop monks that levitate in lotus pose. Evolution is still true. The spiritual does not negate the animal. But the spiritual can tame the animal and bring it under submission.
How?
Some in the churches might be inclined to answer that the means by which a sexual hedonist, particularly, “reforms themselves” lies in some version of purity culture.
I’m not a fan of purity culture. And I’m not a fan for three reasons, two Christian and the third admittedly “unChristian”.
One, the problem with purity culture is that it’s just as fixated on sex (while pretending not to be) as the hedonism it combats. Its don’t-think-about-a-purple-elephant approach virtually guarantees the sabotaging of well-meaning practitioners. And it’s wrecked an enormous amount of havoc on Christian young people by convincing them that the preservation of virginity until marriage is the center of the Christian life, when the center of the Christian life is and always will be Christ and His mercy. Yes it’s true, that the more sexual partners you have, the less likely you are in the future to successfully pair bond in a monogamous long term relationship. Yes it’s true, that if you live within a small community and sleep with multiple men or women in that community, it has a tendency to ruin your reputation as a potential husband or wife in that small community. And yes it’s true what St. Paul says, that every time you have sex with someone new, a part of your soul and a part of their soul becomes “blended” (which has a rather terrifying supernatural significance beyond my—or anyone’s—comprehension). But those who may once have vowed to preserve their virginity until marriage and failed are not “chewed gum” or “a squeezed-out tube of toothpaste” or “a rose without petals”, they are and always will be children of the Most High God and their value lies in that.
Two, I’m not a fan of purity culture because it’s clear that a lot of female commentators who have made “purity” their cottage industry—and gear their content mainly toward other young women—have a neurotic discomfort with the very idea of sex. They speak of sex almost as a “necessary evil”; stopping just short of suggesting that the best babies are made through holes in sheets with the lights turned off. Fond of saying things like “A Godly man will love you without wanting to see you naked” and “A holy partner will lead you to the cross and not the bedroom”, this peculiar bunch’s not-so-subtle scorn of the sexual instinct eventually led Catholic writer Megha Lillywhite (on her popular blog Classical Ideals) to respond in frustration: “Too many religious girls are single or end up with men they’re not attracted to, because deep down their sexuality frightens them. They want a man to behave like a woman; always nice, never confrontational, with zero aggressiveness or ‘unsettling’ sexual vitality. Many religious girls regress into a childlike state and want a relationship with an effeminate male, because it does not challenge them in anyway. They cleave to their religion in order to hide behind it, then call that ‘piety’. For the record ladies, any straight man with an OUNCE of testosterone who likes you DOES want to see you naked. This doesn’t mean you need to go and do that, but to pretend his desire is unnatural or ‘not good’ is asinine, and reveals someone who is too uncomfortable with sexuality to be mature enough for marriage.” The demonization of physical desire among certain female “purity” pundits (whether intentional or not) becomes especially enraging when I think about the dozen or so horror stories I’ve heard about devout young women on their wedding night curling up naked in the corner after the deed, crying from shame, while bewildered grooms beg their new brides to tell them “what they did wrong”.
Three, I think there’s a real blindspot among purity culture’s most vocal advocates, which is that marriage for most people happens closer to 30 now than 20, if it happens at all. (According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average age for a man to marry is 31 and the average age for a woman is 28. In 2005, over 55% of people under age 34 were married, while in 2025 married people under 34 are down to just 32%.) Laying aside what economic or social set of circumstances caused the average age of marriage to go up and the rate of marriages to go down from what they were historically, is it not as evident as I think it is that the longer some individuals go without losing their virginity, the weirder and more stunted they act? This opinion might be controversial, but whatever, it’s mine: not everybody—and perhaps not even most people—but a lot of people (and I confess I’m thinking mostly of young men) who stay virgins past the age of 25, start behaving a bit strange. Make of that what you will. The movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin—despite its crudeness—was indeed onto something. Namely, that ya don’t wanna be a 40-year-old virgin. And while I confess I haven’t kept up with the “latest developments” in Christian purity discourse (having renounced my atheism of nearly a decade and returned to religion only after I met my wife and got married a few years ago), from what I’ve gleaned from faith-based podcasts and YouTube channels, no one seems to know what exactly to say to those unfortunate unmarried souls who have “saved themselves” for years and are only getting older. For a generation who was told at every youth rally and devotional that “God was writing their love story”, many were hoping that that story would be a short novella and not a long, winding, seemingly-meandering, unfinished tome. For those who made vows of premarital celibacy in their teen years and haven’t wavered in keeping them since, “true love waits” becoming “true love waits and waits and waits” can create a helluva lot of resentment.
So it’s clear to me that the answer for the sexual hedonist is not returning hat-in-hand to a purity culture that was never going to work for them or anyone else in the first place. A person’s unhealthy fixation on sex will not be fixed by an unhealthy fixation on sex in the opposite direction.
The same can be said of abstinence approaches to other vices. If you’re a gluttonous hedonist, you’re not gonna stop eating a lot of food by thinking “I shouldn’t eat a lotta food. I shouldn’t eat a lotta food. I’m not gonna eat a lotta food…” If you’re a hedonist who really likes gambling to the point of financial ruin, you know damn well you’re not gonna break that habit by thinking “I’ve gotta avoid casinos, I’ve gotta avoid casinos, I’ve gotta…” No!
To break free of a fixation requires being overtaken by the beauty of something else. One has to fall in love to fall out of habit. One has to discover fulfillment to overcome craving. You don’t quit a lifestyle by constantly thinking about the lifestyle you’re trying to quit, you quit a lifestyle because something so much better has come along. In the words of the 20th century Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a member of the German resistance who was later martyred by the Nazis, “The pursuit of purity is not about the suppression of lust, but about the reorientation of one’s life to a larger goal.”
It’s not that sin isn’t fun anymore (of course it is), it’s just that—for former hedonists who have left behind worldly overindulgence to pursue spiritual strength—our love for the Maker of All Things and our desire to live eternally with Him has become so great, that we are enticed to forgo certain activities our flesh might still find enjoyable. We trade the (often illusory) promise of momentary ecstasy for the promise of the Beatific Vision.
What is the Beatific Vision?
It’s the promise that souls who depart this mortal plane “in good standing” will be able to ascend to the highest tier of Heaven where they can look directly at God as He actually appears (not disguised); and by looking at Him, are filled with a happiness so thorough and overpowering that it’s impossible to feel it in this earthly life. Imagine the moment of your life when you felt the most intense happiness, whatever that moment was: You fell madly for a guy or girl and they revealed that they were also crazy about you. You didn’t think you’d be a good athlete, but at the end of a game you scored the winning point. You graduated at the top of your class in a really hard degree field. You grew up poor, but after a lot of hard work you bought your first house or car. You were honored for showing valor in an emergency situation or in combat. Whatever the moment was that brought that happiness, think back on how intense that happiness felt, imagine that intensity multiplied by a thousand, and even if you manage to imagine that intensity multiplied by a thousand, that still wouldn’t make a dent in the intensity of happiness you would feel with the Beatific Vision. The full appearance and essence of God is your soul’s completion. The absolute end point of your heart’s desire. To fix your eyes upon the Vision is not only to know God but to be known fully in turn. You’ll never get bored of it. You’ll never want to look away. Knowing that, wouldn’t you do anything to reach the Heavenly realm after death?
In the words of the poet Dante in Paradiso:
“I had always imagined heaven as a destination, as a place believers went to when they died. But it is far more than that. As I moved upward through the levels of paradise in my ascent to God, I came to realize that I was not so much going somewhere as becoming someone. I wasn’t just traveling; I was changing. As my eyes grew stronger, I saw more and more of the heavenly light, but I also participated in it more and more. […] I encountered both activity and contemplation, but they were directed, not toward mathematical theorems or philosophical formulas, but toward a personal triune God who wants to be known and who freely pours forth self-knowledge. […] Far from a place of stoic calm, heaven overflowed with rapture and jubilation; everywhere and on every level the blessed souls sang and danced with joy. […] I myself as I approached the presence of God felt suddenly calm, but it was a rapturous calm that took me out of myself without effacing my identity. As I gazed on the supernal form of God, I was able to do what I could not do on earth: study and enjoy the object of my contemplation at the same time. I would tell you more, my friends, but the Vision so ravished me with its beauty that it sank into a portion of my soul that lies deeper even than memory. Still, the feelings it provoked in me remained. Such is the case with vivid dreams: we wake to find that all of the images have faded, but that the strong emotions associated with them continue to trouble us throughout the day. […] I saw, though I did not understand, the dual mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Just as vitally, I apprehended, though I could not fully comprehend, how I myself fit into the divinity and humanity of God the Son. That knowledge came to me in a flash of revelation that cleaved my mind in two and drew me into the very heart of the Beatific Vision. Alas, my friends of the future, I have neither words nor images nor analogies to describe that surpassing knowledge that was granted to me in the Empyrean of God. And that is as it should be, for, if you would know how your own individual story merges with that of the Incarnate Son, then you must take the journey yourself.”
I don’t know about you, but to me that’s an infinitely more compelling message to a hedonist who’s weary of hedonism and looking for a deeper life than “just stop indulging your passions ‘cause it’s sinful”.
Perhaps the best example of a person who left behind a hedonistic life is St. Mary of Egypt. During the 4th century, as a young and beautiful woman, Mary made a lucrative living selling her services as a prostitute in Alexandria and later in Jerusalem; though she later admitted to loving sex so much that she often gave herself away for free to men who didn’t have money to pay her. One day, however, as she was soliciting near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher during a festival, Mary decided to enter into the church to find potential clients among the young men who hadn’t yet gone to confession (employing the faulty theological reasoning that if they were about to have all their sins absolved, they might as well slip in one last yipee-ki-yay). But when she tried to cross the threshold of the door, an invisible force restrained her from entering. Confused and in disbelief, she tried to walking in a second time only to be prevented twice from going in. Attempting to enter a third time—now with extreme embarrassment, as pilgrims passed her by into the church and shot her judgmental looks—Mary broke down in tears when the invisible force blocked her entry once again. Beginning to wander away in despair, racking her brain as to what this mysterious prohibition might mean, she sat down to rest beneath a statue of the Virgin Mary holding an infant Christ. In that instant the statue looked down, and told the prostitute that if she renounced her carnal appetite and pursued a life of service to God, she would enjoy an eternal reward so spectacular it would put all her past earthly pleasures to shame. This encounter changed Mary’s life.
She went to live in the desert and didn’t leave for 47 years; “communing with God” by conversing with Him, meditating on Him, and gradually ascending the spiritual “mansions” within (what St. Teresa of Avila would later call) the “interior castle”. She never sought glory for herself in doing so. She never sought praise. The entire account of her life comes not from anything she wrote herself, but from the deathbed recollection of a priest she befriended shortly before her own death.
We know of St. Mary’s existence 1600 years later only because God—through His divine providence—decided that her story should be preserved through the breaking voice of a man about to exhale his last breath. And the reason, I believe, for why God did this, wasn’t so you would go live in a desert, or fast to the point of near-starvation, or deprive yourself of sleep (as was St. Mary’s ascetic practice). No, it was so that burned-out hedonists who were weary of the world could find inspiration in a person like them who gave up her lifestyle for the hope of an ultimate post-mortem payoff more grand than our wildest imaginations could conceive. It’s not impossible. It’s not unrealistic. Most importantly, it’s not “not worth it”.
A temptation that most of us face is the temptation of false moderation. True moderation is knowing that alcohol is good. Food is good. Sex is good. Games and risk are good. But these things are good only when enjoyed within proper parameters: proportion, time, place, etc. The virtue of prudence, then, is what separates good earthly pleasure from hedonism, and true moderation has prudence at its center. But false moderation, by contrast, is a lie whispered to the weary hedonist in an effort to keep them a hedonist, and it sounds something like this: “I can get a tad drunk”, “I can hookup with strangers occasionally”, “I can pig out on a meal once or twice a week”, “I don’t need to pull cash out of the ATM and put it in a Ziploc bag for a strict casino budget. I can intuit when to stop.” In essence, false moderation attempts to persuade the weary hedonist that there’s such a thing as being a little bit of a hedonist. Yet true moderation distinguishes itself from false moderation by being a moderation of things not a “moderation of excess”.
False moderation is tempting because obviously we want to remain fun and joyful people. We don’t want to become prudish freaks. We worry that in shedding our hedonism, we’ll stop “being ourselves” and it scares us. So we try to convince ourselves that on a line with sin on one end and virtue on the other, there’s a spot in the middle labeled “half and half”. But it doesn’t work that way. There is no neutral spot on that line. There is no stationary spot either. We are either moving toward what is Good and away from what is Empty, or we are heading toward the Empty and away from the Good. Always. At every point in our life. And contrary to the corrupting voice in our heads telling us we’ll stop “being ourselves” the more we move toward the Good, the opposite is true. It’s excess, banality, and vulgarity that distort us. It’s overindulgence that turns us into people we were never supposed to be. By returning to the Good, we become “ourselves” as we were always meant to be. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “The world offers us comfort, but we were not made for comfort. We were made for greatness.”
✤
I want to conclude by pointing out how living as a hedonist in a hedonistic age is the least “edgy” way for one to live.
In his 1976 essay for the New York Review of Books titled “The Narcissist Society”, Christopher Lasch recounts the statement novelist Tom Wolfe made to him that “Most people, historically, have not lived their lives thinking ‘I have only one life to live.’ Instead they lived thinking that they were living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives.” This insight from nearly 50 years ago highlights the fact that for most of human history, the average man and woman following the religion, customs, and moral norms of their parents and grandparents made hedonism rare; which by extension made the hedonists of history stand out as “unique” and “exciting”. Hence we arrive at a bit of a paradox: the hedonist requires a conservative culture in order to be viewed as different. If everyone is libertine, then hedonism—at least as a spectacle which garners the fascination of an “old fashioned” public—ceases to be. A harem full of women, or men, or women and men, loses its joie de vivre in a society without families. The gentleman on his boat with ten bikini-clad “secretaries” can no longer be charmingly rebellious in a land where traditional ideas of marriage and parenthood have been discarded by everyone.
To a certain extent, for those of us who live in Western democratic societies steeped in Enlightenment liberalism, our beliefs about equality sort of lead naturally to a hedonistic selfishness; even within people who otherwise don’t live hedonistic lives.
For example, when it comes to our expectations of relationships, modern men and women want it all. The genes, the income, the quick wit, the sexual know-how, and the “emotional intelligence” to boot. And we expect that anyobody we choose, should be able to be all of these things. Because if everybody is equal, then all people must be capable of reaching the same emotional, sexual, physical, and spiritual heights. So our partners have to be the Swiss Army knives of romance, and if they aren’t, we leave, because we’re convinced some other person out there is. Rarely, however, do people turn such expectations back on themselves. Rarely do they force themselves to admit that 1) if they can’t give it all to someone else, they don’t deserve it all from someone else, and 2) that no one—in fact—is capable of giving it all.
A man cannot be transparent and tantalizingly mysterious. Likewise a woman cannot be both shy and the gregarious life of the party. A man cannot be an excellent breadwinner and give his wife and kids a large amount of quality time. A woman cannot be a happy full-time homemaker and a high-achieving corporate employee. A man who is a limpwristed “sensitive listener” and loves turtlenecks and a good cry is likely not going to be a dominating seducer that chokes his woman until she turns blue. A woman who is authentically innocent and takes a certain pride in being “sweet” is likely not also going to be a ravenous nymphomaniac in the bedroom who ties her man up and bites him.
Here the advocates of polyamory and swinging might rush in, insisting that as long as there’s consent from all parties involved, couples can use different people to fulfill their different desires. But this makes a mockery of commitment; of our ability to control our impulses; of growth and maturity; of the entire point of marriage and relationships (which is to seek the good of the other and not our own pleasure). Non-exclusivity mocks the very definition of love as sacrificial. When it comes to how we should exist in relationship to one another, the only way to not make a mockery of love, and to honor its sacrificial nature (expelling the subtle hedonism latent in all modern Western persons) is to understand that there is give-and-take and compromise and learning to live without. How’s that for a concept? Learning to live without. Learning to live without whatever quality we fantasize our partner having, and waking up every morning willing to say of that person “I choose you. I choose you today as I did yesterday, above all others. And I intend to choose you again tomorrow.”
The narcissism of both male “I’m a king” culture and female “I’m empowered” culture to “demand more because we deserve more” is a rotten attitude that will destroy all goodness, beauty, and truth. And it springs, again, from a presumption we have of equality, where essentially—if all people are equal—then all people must be capable of reaching the same emotional, sexual, physical, and spiritual heights. Which means that if our partners do not reach those heights, it must be a moral failing. They are guilty of abdicating. They are guilty of refusing. Convenient logic if you’re contemplating leaving somebody for lacking in any one area.
Of course, relationships and sex and the complicated interplay between men and women are but one aspect of modern hedonism, which encompasses so many different attitudes and vices and can have more than one cause. So when we step back and just consider hedonism broadly, I think a neat bow we can tie on the subject goes as follows:
Lasting joy is the opposite of instant gratification, not just as an end result, but in terms of the process by which each is brought to fruition. As such, lasting joy cannot be achieved unless one lets go of hedonism. What this entails then, is that there’s a point in one’s life where youthful selfishness and indiscretion have to be sacrificed (often in exchange for immediate hardship) so that through the acquisition of wisdom and temperance over years and decades we can reach a Final Form always intended for us.
