"Yoohoo! Count D! I brought you something" I say, flipping open a book and reading:
The task, for Lactantius, was not only to draw believers away from their pursuit of human pleasures; it was also to persuade them that God was not, as Epicureans believed, entirely absorbed within the orbit of divine pleasures and hence indifferent to the fate of humans. Instead, as Lactantius wrote in a celebrated work written in 313 ce, God cared about humans, just as a father cared about his wayward child. And the sign of that care, he wrote, was anger. God was enraged at man—that was the characteristic manifestation of His love—and wanted to smite him over and over again, with spectacular, unrelenting violence.
I pour myself a drink and continue:
A hatred of pleasure-seeking and a vision of God’s providential rage: these were death knells of Epicureanism, henceforward branded by the faithful as “insane.” Lucretius had urged the person who felt the prompting of sexual desire to satisfy it: “a dash of gentle pleasure sooths the sting.” Christianity, as a story rehearsed by Gregory demonstrates, pointed in a different direction. The pious Benedict found himself thinking of a woman he had once seen, and, before he knew what was happening, his desires were aroused:
He then noticed a thick patch of nettles and briers next to him. Throwing his garment aside he flung himself into the sharp thorns and stinging nettles. There he rolled and tossed until his whole body was in pain and covered with blood. Yet, once he had conquered pleasure through suffering, his torn and bleeding skin served to drain the poison of temptation from his body. Before long, the pain that was burning his whole body had put out the fires of evil in his heart. It was by exchanging these two fires that he gained the victory over sin.
I glance around, but still no sign of him...
What worked for the saint in the early sixth century would, as monastic rules made clear, work for others. In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.
The infliction of pain was hardly unknown in the world of Lucretius. The Romans were specialists in it, dedicating vast sums and huge arenas to public spectacles of violence. And it was not only in the Colosseum that Romans could glut themselves on injury, pain, and death. Plays and poems, based on the ancient myths, were often blood-drenched, as were paintings and sculptures. Violence was part of the fabric of everyday life. Schoolmasters and slaveholders were expected to flog their victims, and whipping was a frequent prelude to Roman executions. This is why in the gospel account, prior to his crucifixion, Jesus was tied to a column and scourged.
But for the pagans, in the great majority of these instances, pain was understood not as a positive value, a stepping stone to salvation, as it was by pious Christians intent on whipping themselves, but as an evil, something visited upon rule-breakers, criminals, captives, unfortunate wretches, and—the only category with dignity—soldiers. Romans honored a brave soldier’s voluntary acceptance of pain, but that acceptance was far different from the ecstatic embrace celebrated in hundreds of convents and monasteries. The heroes of Roman stories willingly met what they could not, in good conscience, avoid or what they felt they had to endure in order to prove to their enemies their dauntless courage. Outside the orbit of that heroic obligation, there lay the special philosophical discipline that enabled the classical sage to regard inescapable pain—of kidney stones, for example—with equanimity. And for everyone, from the most exalted philosopher to the humblest artisan, there was the natural pursuit of pleasure.
There was definitely a sound coming from somewhere, I decided to continue:
In pagan Rome, the most extravagant version of this pursuit of pleasure came together in the gladiatorial arena with the most extravagant infliction and endurance of pain. If Lucretius offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pleasure principle, Christianity offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pain principle. Early Christians, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, the sinfulness of mankind, and the anger of a just Father, found the attempt to cultivate pleasure manifestly absurd and dangerous. At best a trivial distraction, pleasure was at worst a demonic trap, figured in medieval art by those alluring women beneath whose gowns one can glimpse reptilian claws. The only life truly worth imitating—the life of Jesus—bore ample witness to the inescapable presence in mortal existence of sadness and pain, but not of pleasure. The earliest pictorial depictions of Jesus were uniform in their melancholy sobriety. As every pious reader of Luke’s Gospel knew, Jesus wept, but there were no verses that described him laughing or smiling, let alone pursuing pleasure.
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