Christians are not the only people with reservations about ethical hedonism. But the leading of a Christian life—along the broad lines traced out in the New Testament, say—has often seemed to be particularly disprobative of the theory that the moral end consists in pleasure. And it is not just a theoretical matter: among Christians, pleasure has been ignored, suspected, feared; and only sometimes welcomed. What I shall try to do in this article is examine what substance there is behind this hesitancy, and what significance pleasure should still have in the Christian life. To do this successfully we shall have to clarify the concept of pleasure. This is a task that needs to be done as much for the sake of our moral philosophy as for the sake of our Christianity, and the way in which I shall proceed will be to develop the meaning and the importance of pleasure in close connection with another (and perhaps slightly less controversial) feature of the Christian life: spontaneity. I can anticipate the general drift of the paper here by saying that pleasure, roughly speaking, is felt spontaneity. This has important implications, as does the fact that, for all their doubts about hedonism, Christians have traditionally made use of a number of words not unrelated to ‘pleasure’: words like ‘joy’, ‘contentment’, ‘blessedness’ and ‘happiness’.

His chapter title ‘Childish arguments for images at the Council of Nicaea (787)’, in John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, suggests the bitter and painful divisions that have arisen in the Church over the issue of image veneration. From Biblical through Patristic to Reformation times, Iconodule, Iconophile and Iconoclast dissension has remained unresolved. Calvin's 'disgust' at Nicaea IPs ‘absurdities’ and Orthodoxy's anathemas against Calvinist ‘heretics’ are symptomatic of the widespread disagreement and divergence in the Church over this fundamental question of the Faith.

Man, Sartre once wrote, is ‘nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.’ If he is to bejudged, therefore, it will have to be on the basis of his actions. As long as he is alive, however, his actions remain incomplete; he may continue in the same general direction, doing more or less the same kind of things he has always done, or he may change his course, thereby giving his life a totally different meaning. It was just such a change that Kierkegaard was hoping to find in Bishop Mynster. Mynster, he believed, was betraying Christianity by the kind of preaching he did and the kind of life heled; but he could redeem himself by declaring that it was not really the faith he was proclaiming, but rather some watered-down version of it. Kierkegaard therefore waited till the Bishop died and only then, after all his acts were complete, did he begin his famous ‘attack on Christendom’. Up till April the fifteenth 1980, the day Sartre died, it was likewise possible that a dramatic change would take place — perhaps a confession, like Aquinas’, that all he had written had merely been ‘straw’. But that was not to be; apparently Sartre died, not regretting anything he had said or done. This does not mean necessarily that the way is now open for an ‘attack on existentialism’; but it does mean that Sartre has become himself totally, as he would have put it, and we are in a position to apply to him those words that Inez, a character in Huis Clos, applied to Garcin: ‘One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life and nothing else.’