The Joy of Religion: Exploring the Nature of Pleasure in Spiritual Life
Ariel Glucklich
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020
The Joy of Religion is a book that combines religious-historical description with evolutionary-psychological analysis in order to explain the complex manners of controlling and enhancing pleasure in religious history and in social evolution. All religions describe spiritual experiences as pleasant, and the goal of the religious pursuit as profoundly joyful. But many religions also condemn sensory pleasures and the desire for objects of pleasure. In this book, I resolve this apparent contradiction by showing how religious practices that instill self-control and discipline transform one type of pleasure, novelty pleasure, into the pleasures of mastery and play. Using historical data and psychological analysis, I detail how the rituals, mystical practices, moral teachings, and sacred texts of the world’s religions act as psychological instruments that induce well-being. I also show that in promoting joy and pleasure, religion also strengthens social bonds and enhances an individual’s pursuit of meaning.
The book covers a great deal of religious materials that focus on pleasure, including pre-Socratic Greek literature; Hellenistic Jewish thought; early Christian mysticism; sectarian groups from Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity; Hindu rituals; contemporary Jewish Shabbat services; devotional and theological reflections from Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism and many others.
What this book seeks to achieve in examining the religious uses of pleasure is the joining of a close cultural study of religious phenomena such as values, doctrines, experiences and actions, with psychological-evolutionary theories in a manner that is non-reductive. Pleasure is an ideal area of examination because, like pain, it is both an explicit topic of religious discourse—a complicated cultural product—and an empirical fact of human and animal psychology. For example, rituals are probably historically related to ancient games, and games—structured forms of play—are both culturally and biologically connected with less structured play behavior. A fundamental feature of play (and games) is fun or the distinct pleasures of bodily manipulations, pretend, mastery of rules and so forth. These facts are universal features of known cultures throughout history and, as archeological evidence shows, prehistory. The pleasure of games and rituals, thus, are key to understanding the function of religion in the evolution of culture, including cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions.
Two goals are thus accomplished here: Evolutionary theory—grossly simplified, to be sure—is recruited to explain an apparent paradox in religious attitude toward pleasure, both celebratory and excoriating. At the same time this book does not reduce specific religious phenomena, such as the pleasurable celebration of a New Year ritual, to biology or evolutionary psychology. The religious experience of any given individual is far too subtle and complex. It is only the pleasure dimension of religious experience, including thought and action, that allows me to explore the link between the scientific theory and religion.
However, pleasure is not an easy phenomenon to understand and can be a source of serious methodological errors, especially with regard to religion and religious experience. That is, while it is easy to discuss pleasurable displays and pleasure discourse, the heart of pleasure remains ineffable. Psychologists call this “hedonic tone” or “hedonic gloss”—the very goodness of the feeling: Is this the same feeling exactly when we eat ice cream and solve a word puzzle? Does the external “cause” of the pleasure change the nature of the hedonic tone or is the gloss the same even when we are aware of distinct causes such as ice cream and achievement? This is a critical question because we see pleasure both celebrated and excoriated in religious texts and it is important to decide whether the pleasure feel itself is condemned or only its perceived causes. I believe that in order to properly understand the way that evolutionary motivational psychology functions in religious thought and practice this question must be addressed. Unfortunately, the language of pleasure, the semantic value of terms in used to describe pleasure, do not help us understand either the nature of the hedonic tone or the psychological and social function of pleasure.
While pleasure, or joy, semantics frustrates us, religions around the world and throughout history have manufactured in practice an impressive range and flavors of positive states. The Joy of Religion argued, then, that a basic framework that does not discriminate such states based on semantic nuances would be useful. This is a functional framework, which is based on human decision-making in response to external-internal and environmental-social circumstances. The framework consisted of three fundamental hedonic consequences that emerge from the decision-making, the adaptive, process. These were:
- Novelty-replenishment.
- Mastery.
- Play.
You can feel joy from drinking water in the desert (a), from conquering a high peak in the Himalayas (b) or from blowing soap bubbles (c). It is not the word that tells us where the positive feeling belongs: where it came from, what sort of social role it fulfils and even—to some extent—how it feels.
And so, in religious literature we have reasonably clear evidence of such useful functional discrimination in relationship to the positive feelings that go by a variety of names. If the positive feeling is associated with the senses or objects of sensory desire, it is probably (a) and then often excoriated. In such cases a word like pleasure is more common than joy or gladness, but this is not an ironclad rule. In contrast, if the positive feeling is associated with self-control, obedience to internal authority, extreme effort, modesty or humility, this is probably a case of (b). In such cases the positive feeling receives praise and is rarely described as “pleasure.” Instead joy and gladness are more common.
Finally, if the positive feeling is associated with events or states that are divorced from commonplace reality, either a ritual setting or an individual pursuit that is imaginative, counterfactual, and entirely voluntary—but that requires a certain level of mastery, this is a case of (c). The terminology that describes such a feeling includes—in addition to joy—words like thrill, ecstasy, bliss, rapture. None of this is precise in a mathematical or grammatical level of accuracy. But there is an underlying order, a “law” perhaps—in the scientific sense of the word.
The argument that supports this idea of an order is as follows. Some pleasures pose a threat to the wellbeing of a group—religious or otherwise. Such pleasures need to be controlled for the sake of the collective. Other pleasures actually benefit the group. But these can be difficult and must be learned. For example, if one learns to enjoy patience and charity, not to mention empathy, as gratifying skills, the group benefits. Groups with more altruistic individuals fare better than groups with too many selfish and lazy individuals. This is persuasive, but still too basic. It turns out that culture—and religions—offer a great deal more in life than just the enjoyment of altruism for moral rewards. Hence, play is the context where one enters freely into the life of the mind, the imagination and utilizing the tools of mastery, can move in the realm of play this way or that—like a surfer cutting through the wave and not just clinging to the board. At the most rarefied levels play is masterpiece art, Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”—beautiful and enjoyable far beyond what the story of the gospel requires. It is also St. Francis’ Little Flowers: an enjoyable journey into the experiences that inspired him to write. The consolations and meaning-inspiring joys of the religious life manifest in play—but only for those who have already learned mastery.
It would be premature to connect that highest of good feelings to evolution in a simple bio-sociological reduction. It’s true that play has a role in the psychology of other mammals. It is also true that in the field of neuro-esthetics beauty has been linked to evolutionary biology. Finally, it is true that the field of religious studies is not privileged in the sense that it lies beyond psychological or even biological theories. After all, the focus of this book has been pleasure in a variety of forms and pleasure is a biological fact. But the extent of the reduction I was willing to pursue was behavioral adaptation: human decision to approach or avoid. As it turns out, such a mechanism has enormous consequences that can be utilized and manipulated to produce the most rarefied and meaningful affects.
The most elevated hedonic affect is play and while the fact of playing is rooted in biological psychology, the rules of play reach—via culture—upward and beyond—the simple biological theory. The experience of play, discernable by means of careful introspection, is as free and unpredictable as the pattern of paint splatter on the canvas of Jackson Pollock. It feels this way, and that is why we refuse to acknowledge the biological and even the psychological roots of our religious experiences. However, it turns out there is a pattern in Pollock’s splattered paint and I believe there is also a pattern to the nature of pleasure in religious life and religious experience. If we exclude religious doctrines, ideas, and the broad spectrum of actions, this pattern certainly appears to apply to the pleasure we get from all of these.
