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unit has become an alliance of
two self-contained egos who
will be faithful only as long as
the terms of the "treaty" remain
advantageous.
And since we cherish our sing–
ularity, we ftee commitment. We be–
lieve it is better to live together
without benefit of clergy-that
way, no one really has to give up
anything. As psychoanalyst Herbert
Henden has said, our culture has
made caring seem like losing. And
so couples live together unmarried.
It
is the way to enjoy a readily ac–
cessible sex partner without having
to surrender any of one's individual
sovereignty. And none dare call it
"fornication," to our ears a slightly
antiquated word which suggests a
time when people looked outside
themselves for their moral stan–
dards. Other ages saw sex in terms
of a transcendent morality. Today,
we make hobgoblins out of "repres–
sion" and "inhibition" ; they are our
hobgoblins because they cause us to
res train ourselves.
Sex, for us moderns, has been re–
duced to so many neurons firing in
the brain: an affair of the nervous
system, not of the heart and emo–
tions. Consider the modero sex
manuals. They are mostly written
without consideration of what in
other times was called (here is an–
other quaint phrase) the "sanctity of
marriage." Rather they are written
for " sex partners. " And sex is
presented as technique. A workout.
A set of gymnastic exercises to be
learned much like a quarterback
manages football plays. But sex is
not considered to be an expression
of love, the prototype of God's !ove
for His people.
No, that's all syrupy Victorian
drivel. We moderns are interested in
getting our neurons to tire at the
right time. Sex is the relief of ten–
sion. But it is not love. And no one–
including God- is going to put a
crimp in our sexual style.
Or consider another best-seller,
the
Hite Report.
1t
is a hymn to
masturbation. Why, it asks, should a
woman worry about sexual fulfill–
ment with her "partner" when she
can do it all herself? Why indeed.
Ours is an age which does not sim–
ply tolerate masturbation, it glo–
rifies it. l ndeed, such a glorification
The
PLAIN TRUTH April 1978
is the logical extension of our pre–
occupation with the solitary, unre–
strained self.
Moderation in All Things
So what's wrong with our culture's
glorification of the self?
It
is a problem of balance. Mao's
China, where individuality was sys–
tematically expunged and the self
was made to merge into a kind of
collectivist mud, obviously does not
embody the good life. We are worth
something in ourselves, because it is
true that in one sense our selves are
all we've got. But much more than
that, we are worth something be–
cause we are made in the image of
God. And that is the error that our
modern culture- at least this phase
of it- has made. God is shut out of
the how-to-get-power universe. He
is not part of the intimidate-your–
way-to-success books. He is ex–
el uded from the joy-of-sex
manuals.
The psychological reason God is
excluded from the modern mjnd-set
is that God is incompat ible with our
personal sovereignty. God has au–
thority, legitimate authority: When
we acknowledge God, we acknowl–
edge we are not the masters of the
universe.
C. S. Lewis describes the attitude
we get into in wantiog to uphold the
sovereignty of the overweening self.
In his autobiography, Lewis tells us
why, as a onetime atheist, it was so
important to him that God not be
acknowledged as part of reality:
' 'What mattered most of all was my
deep-seated hatred of authority, my
monstrous individualism, my law–
lessness. No word in my vocabulary
expressed deeper hatred than the
word
interference.
But Christianity
placed at the center what then
seemed to me a transcendenta l
Interferer"
(Surprised by Joy,
p.
172).
But our self-seeking is ultimately
counterproductive. Happiness can–
not be directly made its own end.
And yet happiness is the proper end
of all our activity. Are we caught in
sorne monstrous cosmic paradox,
coodemned by sorne malevolent
God to misery because we seek our
own happiness and are thereby
barred from it?
Fortunately, the universe has not
been contrived by a malevolent
God; rather by a loving Creator
who has ordained that man should
indeed be happy. But that ultimate
happiness can on ly come from
doing the wiU ofthe Creator.
We can better understand the
reason for this principie if we con–
sider what Lewis says later on in his
autobiography about not being able
to achieve happiness by seeking it
directly. Lewis relates how he finally
learned the principie that we cannot
"enjoy" something while we are at
the same time "contemplating" it:
"It
seemed to me self-evident that
one essential property of !ove, hate,
fea r, hope, or desire was attention to
their object. To cease thinking about
or attending to [a person with whom
one is in !ove] is, so far, to cease
loving; to cease thinking about or
attending to the dreaded thing is, so
far, to cease being afraid. But to
attend to your own love or fear is to
cease attending to the loved or
dreaded object. In ·other words the
enjoyment and contemplation of
our inner activities are in–
compatible. You cannot hope and
also think about hoping at the same
moment, for in hope we look to
hope's object and we interrupt this
by (so to speak) turning around to
look at the hope itself'
(Surprised by
Joy,
p.
218).
Lewis seems to be saying that we
cannot be happy if our attention is
directed to our own happiness.
What might at first appear to be a
paradox is really simply the way the
human mind works.
But it is a lesson at least tempo–
rarily lost on America in the l970s.
We shall continue our pursuit of the
wind: the vain emptiness of trying
to attain happiness by concentrating
on our own happiness itself, instead
of seeking it in the service of God.
The words ofChrist may stick in our
throats; we may hide from them,
seek to bury them, banish them
to the nether worlds of our con–
sciousness, but they a re nonetheless
true:
"Truly, truly,
1
say to you, unless
a grain of wheat falls into the earth
and dies, it remains alone; but if it
dies,
it
bears much fruit. He who
!oves his life loses it, and he who
hates his life in this world will keep
it for eternallife."
o
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