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The metaphysics of the one-night stand

By Peter Sellick - posted Tuesday, 25 January 2005


The view that human life has no purpose is told with wit by Terry Eagleton in his book After Theory:

The point about human nature is that it does not have a goal. In this, it is no different from any other animal nature. There is no point to being a badger. Being a giraffe does not get you anywhere … Because, however, human beings are by nature historical creatures, we look as though we are going somewhere - so that it is easy to misread this movement in teleological terms and forget that it is all for its own sake.

This statement is disappointing in a book that claims to be critical of the stripping of meaning that has taken place in cultural theory. The fatal mistake here can only be spotted by someone steeped in the scriptures, namely, that humans are created in the image of God and animals are not. An identification with animals would justify the one-night stand on the grounds that it is man’s nature to take any sexual opportunity that comes along, a line that is common in the texts of the evolutionists. But as Eagleton notes, we are historical creatures and we need to thread the beads of experience onto a single strand. His conclusion that this strand only looks like a journey towards a telos is true for anyone who is not a part of a transcendent story, a story that overshadows and makes sense of chronological time.

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Chronological time may only make sense in the light of the eternal, that which does not pass away. Another name for chronological time is the secular, this time of our lives that passes away. While the secular is our legitimate realm and should not be used as a pejorative, secularism denies the reality of the eternal. Another word for the eternal is “spirit” which is not an aspect of the secular that can be denied by scientists but which refers to the unseen truths of our existence. Thus “spirituality” cannot be just another aspect of personality. Rather, it is the Spirit that impinges on us and clothes the secular in meaning.

That meaning, in the biblical mentality, consists, in large part, of a particular view of time that proceeds from creation to fulfillment. In the gospels the time of fulfillment is called the kingdom of God or heaven that is present in the person of the one true man, Jesus. This is the scheme that gives secular time a goal and hence fills life with purpose. That purpose is beatitude, the vision of God that even now illuminates our life although not in its fullest expression. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:13, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known". The idea that life is a journey towards heaven is true. Our problem with it is that that eternity has been secularised. This is what Luther objected to: heaven, hell and purgatory became a part of this world and hence potentially under our control by the buying of indulgences. The modern rejection of life as a journey towards heaven is based on this misunderstanding.

If we now look at Updike’s couple on their business trip we see that sin is an attempt, indeed an impossible attempt, to live life in a purely secular way. It is their conceit that they think that they made “a stab at significance”. In the absence of the eternal this is all that is left for them. Perhaps this is the character of our age, that we must resort to providing our own significance. How else can we explain the whirlpool of popular culture? The stark contrast to this occurs in the Eucharist, “The body/blood of Christ keep you in eternal life”.

The loss of the direction and purpose of human time in the eternal means that time becomes “time on our hands”, time that we may spend any which way without regard for its fulfillment. This timelessness is a hallmark of modernity that holds sway in the wake of an abandoned church. What does this leave us with? The popular view is that it leaves us with freedom, that fundamental human calling. But this freedom from unitary life purpose opens up the gates of a human hell, “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose”. How many works of art, especially film, have probed this void, the characters depicted pushed and pulled by desire at its most changeable and vapid. Contemplation of this void has taken on a religious caste, as if we have been finally shown the unembroidered truth. However, this truth is only the truth of how lost we are, not the truth that will lead to our true flourishing.

It is obvious that the Christian telos denotes an ethos, an ethic. In this ethic the one-night stand may be compared with marital love as actions out of time and within time respectively, of an act that denies a future and one which forges a future. This is an ethic that overarches the vows we make and practical reason and the law of the land, that includes the whole of life since it is based on an understanding of the goal of all human life. We must confess that this has been used by the church as a crude form of blackmail, the reward or punishment being an objectified heaven and hell projected beyond death. The resultant incredible moral scheme has been a major reason for the present day abandonment of the church as well as the origin of a great many jokes set in front of St Peter at the pearly gates. It has also made it difficult to reclaim the central Christian premise that life is a journey towards God.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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