Guilty Pleasures

For Wednesday, 22 June 2005
Proverb 10:23

Doing wrong is like a joke to a fool,
but wisdom is pleasure to a man of understanding.

The ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, writes, "excellence is concerned with pleasures and pains; it is on account of pleasure that we do bad things, and on account of pain that we abstain from noble ones" (Nicomachean Ethics II.3). We are people of excellence, Aristotle suggests, when we "delight in and are pained by the things that we should be...for the good man tends to go right and the bad man to go wrong, especially about pleasure." He goes on to add later, "The pleasure proper to a worthy activity is good and that proper to an unworthy activity is bad" (X.5).

Aristotle's philosophical insight resonates with the biblical insight of today's proverb. Whether it's a child sneaking into mischief or a college student getting herself drunk or an adult ingulging in vicious gossip, fallen people tend to see their wrongdoing as a joke, as harmless fun, or, at best, a guilty pleasure. As creatures made in the image of our Creator, however, we cannot help but know that what we find pleasurable is, often enough, neither beneficial nor good. Even the pagan Aristotle saw that.

Augustine, however, in criticizing pagan virtue, unmasked Aristotle's continued problem - no amount of sheer moral effort can free us from the ongoing struggle with those things we know we ought not to do, but nonetheless enjoy (City of God XIX). The life of the moral pagan is still one of spiritual unrest, ongoing conflict, and internal warfare, all of which infect and confuse our relationships with both ourselves and others.

True freedom - the freedom to find joy and pleasure in the very wisdom of God - such freedom comes only by grace, through the death and resurrection of Christ, by which we die to sin and its pleasures and begin to live to God and the enjoyment of new life in Christ. Such enjoyment, found in trusting what God has done for us in Christ, gives us a taste even now of "the peace of heaven." As Augustine notes, this peace "alone can be truly called and esteemed the peace of reasonable creatures, consisting as it does in the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God" (XIX.17).