Decadence and Pride

My apologetics text makes a distinction between two kinds of sin: decadence and pride. Pride is the desire to exceed the inherent limits in being a creation rather than a created, and in being human rather than God. Pride is the attempt to be god. We seek to exceed the limits placed upon us, and we pretend to know more than we actually know, to do more than we actually do and to be more than we actually are.

Decadence is supposed to be us running from our humanity. We seek freedom from the pain of choice and so we become more like an animal than a person. This is us letting our desires run wild, without seeking self-control. Pride is pretending to be god. Decadence is pretending to be an animal. Both sides of sin, then, are about living out untruths, or running from the truth.

I think that this distinction is a weak one. I am of the opinion that pride is the root of all sin. Underlying decadence is a desire for godhood no different from what one finds in the extremely prideful. For in pleasure, in the id run wild, one finds the unmitigated joy of rebellion itself. The secular hedonist, bound by no rules and limited by neither society's judgments or God's watchful eye, is motivated in part by the thrill of making oneself one's own god. There have been very thoughtful and deliberate decadents who saw in their rejection of the higher forms of life, a kind of godhood. Surely the ultimate authority of God is grounded in His existence as the Form of the Good. It is God's place as moral judge that really makes Yahweh God. To remove God from that place, to make oneself one's own arbiter of right and wrong, to reject any judge but oneself...what could be more prideful than this?

Of course part of the impulse to decadence is the desire to make oneself less than human. As Hunter S Thompson argued so powerfully: "he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." But it is the in the power to choose what one is: human or beast, that real power lies. It is the raw power of true and utter self-determination that brings the thrill of beast-hood. For a human, choosing to be an animal is to gain the power of God, and in that choosing is a rather divine thrill.

Reinhold Niebuhr put this best, I think. The thrill of evil, the absolute divine ecstasy of sin itself, is often left out of every rational system of ethics, which my apologetics text seems to rely on. The same writer insists that ethics is what will make one truly happy. I'm sorry, but this seems like the worst kind of BS. It is, in the end, merely an insistence. The fact that the author gives it the air of knowledge puts a bad taste in my mouth. To the drug addict who looks at the world as a community of fools, denying themselves the only one true happiness: that found in a needle, or a line of powder or in the smoke of a pipe, this hand-waving comes off as less than convincing.

The truth is that a fully developed religious life and a completely embraced self-divinizing decadence have more in common than either one has with a kind of Apollonian, rationalistic search for 'happiness'. I can tell the stories of a spirit set free, of an adventure beyond any known by the senses or the rational mind. Ethics may be objective without God, but they aren't that fun. With God, with the adventure of faith, the ethical is transformed into a magical journey, a titanic struggle against forces of evil. I can tell a story, and indeed a true story, that sounds convincing. Happiness isn't found by drawing inside the lines, at least not for a great many of us. That seems as clear as day to me. Decadence is deifying for the same reason tyranny is: it offers a life less ordinary, and gives us the sense that we are breaking free of the box that the universe, society, whatever has put us in.

Religion offers nothing if it simply offers another box or another reinforcement of the boxes that are already out there. It must be a kind of reckless abandon that stands in opposition to the chains the rational, the reasoned, the 'moral' sets upon us. That is not to say there is not an ethical dimension to religion. Far from it. It demands a commitment and a life that stands as an insult to the compromising ethics of the world. But the structure and expression of that ethic cannot be simply stated. It stands beyond words, and beyond sight. Without this aspect of religiosity, without the sense that I am doing in some sense 'what cannot be done', there can be no believable insistence that one has moved into a place that really offers what the writer thinks ethics does: a life that conforms to the full depths and heights of human nature.