Robert Coles, Gluttony

HARVARD DIARY
Gluttony

By Robert Coles
November 1995

Robert Coles is Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard Medical School, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and a Contributing Editor of the NOR.

These days in the privileged precincts of America, gluttony is an all too evident aspect of our existence -- the overweight ones as victims, the determinedly thin ones as prideful winners in a constant war against temptation. I doubt Adam Smith and other early apologists for capitalism ever imagined how central to its survival a hyped-up consumerism would one day become -- the endlessly clever and manipulative messages that tell us to want more and more, hence by implication to live, always, on the very edge of dissatisfaction. Every day, in countless shopping malls across the land, millions of us assemble in an almost desperate effort to acquire things, as if our very worth as human beings is at stake. Young people in droves use those same malls as hang-outs, places to pass the time of day, places where they can gawk and themselves be regarded, and trysting places too -- in movies and restaurants and in the nearby armies of cars, themselves a memorial to a progression of sorts: from a helpful convenience to an economic and social necessity, not to mention a psychological instrument that lends itself to all sorts of symbolic expressions, all sorts of idiosyncratic needs, aspirations.

For many years I never did understand why such a desire to get, to have, to buy and buy, to eat up, to wear then set aside in favor of tomorrow's garb, to drive this car -- why all that hungry inclination to possess, to own (and show to others) amounts to a serious sin. Gluttony and greed struck me as serious, present-day vices, but not especially evil in a spiritual sense. But during my Catholic Worker days (when I had the opportunity to help out at a "hospitality house," and talk at some considerable length with Dorothy Day), I began to learn otherwise -- learn from her, and others close to her, not the virtues of asceticism (a misconception in the minds of some: that she and Peter Maurin were committed ideologically to a kind of Catholic Puritanism), but the distinct danger of a materialism that gets out of hand, becomes outright gluttony, hence sin. Here is Dorothy Day to help us, me, in 1968, to understand the progression I have just mentioned -- a response, on her part, to my inquiry as to her attitude toward possessions: "I'm not the one to judge others -- I have enough to do trying to keep myself in line [with respect to moral matters]. But I know -- from personal experience, that's how I know -- that anything, just about anything can turn into a trap for us: we want it, we get it, we want more, and more, and more -- and we're not [thereby] only greedy, we're ‘sinful.'"

She paused long enough for me to tell her that I didn't quite follow her move (for me, then, a leap) from greed to sin, unless we were embracing a kind of self-denial or self-abrogation that itself, so I was intent on arguing, could become quite sinful -- a manifestation of pride. Soon enough, I heard this: "I've never been interested in saying no to people -- to myself: no to good food, and no to nice clothes, and no to travel. I've loved all that in the past, and I still do, even if I live differently now [than was the case during her 20s, when she was, by her own description, a Greenwich Village bohemian of sorts]. I happen to enjoy myself here [at the Catholic Worker hospitality house on the lower east side of New York City]. I mean, these days fill me up -- I like talking with our guests [the poor whom she served a daily lunch], and I like being part of a community. You may think I'm an advocate of austerity, but that's because I conceal my gluttony!"

Her gluttony! I laughed -- and looked for her wry, ironic smile, so familiar to me by then. But I soon realized she was dead serious. I didn't have to speak in order to elicit the following disquisition of sorts: "You think I'm fooling! You haven't seen me in a book store! You haven't seen me when someone wants to borrow one of the books I love and tell people to read. When push comes to shove, when someone takes my words to heart, and asks me for a novel of Dickens or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky -- right there on my shelf, and not being read by me now and in the foreseeable future -- I'm likely to freeze. Oh, I don't say what's on my mind; I try to be nice, and often I'll lend the book, but I'm sure to ask that it be returned soon, and to tell you the truth, I'm almost counting the days, the hours, until that book is safely back here!

"You may consider all this trivia, but I don't -- because I see in myself not only the wish for more and more books, and the wish to hold onto them for dear life, but the meaning of this: I get so taken up with something, I lose all sense of [moral, spiritual] perspective -- and that's what gluttony meant, I think, to the Church Fathers -- you behave as if your life depends on eating this or getting that, rather than on God's judgment of how you're living this life He's given you!"

There was much more explanatory and self-critical comment; and I began to understand what she was getting at. Gluttony for her was not a matter of being challenged secularly: appetite control in the interest of longevity. Nor was gluttony a violation of a Puritan ethic -- the notion that less is better, by virtue of John Calvin or some environmental guru. Gluttony, for her, was a universal possibility, something that can arise in the poor (or those like her who essentially choose poverty) as well as the well-to-do: a hunger for something, a possessiveness about something, that becomes distracting, indeed -- a means by which one loses sight of God, amidst one's frantic eyeing of one or another object or option. Even the vernacular expression of being a "glutton for punishment" has an interesting implication to it that Dorothy Day would surely recognize: We can take on so very much hardship in this world, prove ourselves (proudly) virtual martyrs, and all the while overlook the why, the supposed purpose of such a sacrificial effort. A lived series of burdens become, themselves, a collective acquisition of a kind.

Gluttony, in a sense, is one of the more devious sins -- it is meant to be a diversion, and it readily succeeds to the point that we may recognize the nature of the deed (the eating, the collecting, the amassing, the buying and buying, spending and spending), but we overlook the larger significance of the particular preoccupation as it gets lived out. Put differently, gluttony shows us materially or emotionally driven, but we are all too apt to overlook the spiritual consequences -- and maybe, as well, the spiritual cause. "I don't have the time to go to church," I heard once from a patient -- and then, an explanation: "I could make the time, I know, but I don't see eye to eye with the Pope these days." Not a rare comment, and one I did not at the time choose to challenge. Instead, I listened as he moved directly on to what he did have the time to do -- go to auctions in search of stamp collections and a certain kind of "country antique": chairs, tables, lamps, all of which (save the stamps) he stored, ostensibly for his children, grandchildren. I had no interest in judging, even interpreting his actions and interests -- we had other things, pressing hard on him, to discuss. But I thought I'd heard something important, had been unselfconsciously taught something, yet again, by this person, a thoughtful and sensitive man who had a way of dropping provocative asides as he told of his life, its vicissitudes as well as its relative good fortune.

Unwilling to immerse himself in religious issues which vexed him, and which maybe threatened a comfortable adjustment to a contemporary, late 20th-century American set of values, he chose another road: that of catalogs, then shops, then bidding wars. He and his wife would chide themselves occasionally, laugh derisively at their "greedy ways," but were not at all inclined to understand them -- and by that last observation, I don't fault them in the psychiatric sense. It is tempting, of course, for all of us to do just that -- look for the covert emotional sources of just about anything we do. But there, too, we can become gluttons -- anxious to accumulate ideas, interpretations, theories, explanations. The issue is essentially ethical, if not spiritual -- in the words of David Riesman, not a theologian, but a shrewd, knowing observer of our end of the century (end of the millennium!) habits, preferences: "affluence for what?" That "what" is rhetorical of course, meant to turn our heads, to prompt a moment's pause -- so that we might wonder what it is that we want out of life -- what it is that we truly believe, what our purpose is in this time we're given here. In three carefully chosen words, a social essayist was suggesting that affluence (and the gluttony that can so inspire us to get money, then use it to satisfy dozens of tastes, if not sate ourselves) can go thoroughly unexamined by us, to our collective and personal detriment, both. No longer hungry in our bellies, we are hungry in our souls -- and sometimes mistake that hunger for a "psychological problem," when it is a larger, more "existential" one, of the kind that both Dorothy Day and David Riesman had in mind, I think, when they took a look at all of us as we take on the moral perils that go with life in this rich country of ours.