'Consuming the Body: Contemporary Patterns of Drug Use & Theological Anthropology,' in Public Theology in Cultural Engagement, ed. Stephen Holmes (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), pp. 94-130. more

Public Theology in Cultural Engagement Editor STEPHEN R. HOLMES / BPaternoster: thinking faith . MILTON KEYNES • COLORADO SPRINGS • HYDERABAD Copyright © 2008 Stephen R. Holmes 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First published 2008 by Paternoster Paternoster is an imprint of Authentic Media 9 Holdom Avenue, Bletchley, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK1 1QR, UK 1820 Jet Stream Drive, Colorado Springs, CO 80921, USA Medehal Road, Jeedimetla Village, Secunderabad 500 055, A.P., India www.authenticmedia.co.uk Paternoster is a division of IBS-STL U.K., limited by guarantee, with its Registered Office at Kingstown Broadway, Carlisle, Cumbria CA3 0HA. Registered in England & Wales No. 1216232. Registered charity 270162 The right of Stephen R. Holmes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance wiih the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying, tn the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-84227-542-9 Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright © 1973,1978,1984 by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Limited. All rights reserved, 'niv' is a registered trademark of the International Bible Society UK trademark number 1448790 Cover Design by James Kessell for Scratch the Sky Ltd (www.scratchthesky.com) Print Management by Adare Typeset by Waverley Typesetters, Fakenham Printed and bound in Great Britain by J.H. Haynes & Co., Sparkford Contents Foreword Introduction 1. Can Theology Engage with Culture Stephen R. Holmes 2. Christology, Redemption and Culture Colin J. D. Greene 3. Election and Culture: from Babylon to Jerusalem Robert W. Jenson 4. Torah, Christ and Culture Stephen R. Holmes 5. Reformation Accounts of the Church's Response to Human Culture Colin Gunton 6. Consuming the Body: Contemporary Patterns of Drug Use and Theological Anthropology Luke Bretherton / 7. Culture and the End of Religion Colin J.D. Greene 8. The Legacy of Romanticism: On Not Confusing Art and Religion . y Brian Home J 6 Consuming the Body: Contemporary Patterns of Drug Use and Theological Anthropology Luke Bretherton Introduction Why are contemporary patterns of drug use an important topic for theological reflection? At a basic level, use of drugs, legal or illegal, is a widespread and controversial social phenomenon. However, it is not simply the levels of drug use that makes it an appropriate topic for theological reflection, nor is it the debate that surrounds such use. In whatever way the term 'culture' is understood, patterns of drug use need to be considered as an aspect of it. Yet, trying to find theological reflection on drug use is like trying to find an unprofitable drug dealer. Such scarcity of reflection begins to look worryingly like myopia when we consider the prevalence and centrality of drug use in contemporary life. This essay is an attempt to sketch out a theological response to the use of drugs in contemporary culture. My argument is that contemporary patterns of drug use, of whatever kind, firstly, are a paradigmatic instance of the modern, technocratic conception of the body as an object of manipulation, and subject to a regime of hyper- control; secondly, are the fruit of certain aspects of consumerism; and thirdly, contrast sharply with a theological account of the place of drugs in human life, in what they say about the human body and the way they shape human life together. It is important to note at the outset that an underlying assumption at work in this essay is that the use of drugs cannot be separated off as a realm removed from everyday life; rather, drug culture (insofar as such a thing can be identified) is a microcosm of, and intrinsically woven into, the mainstream of contemporary culture. Consuming the Body 95 1. A problematic field of study Before proceeding it is important to clarify what we are talking about when we talk about drugs. The World Health Organisation defines a 'drug' as 'any substance that, when taken into the living organism, may modify one or more of its functions'. This definition attempts to define the term 'drug' neutrally. A more colloquial usage is less broad than the WHO definition and tends to use the term 'drug' to refer to any non-medicinal, illicit chemicals such as cocaine. This colloquial usage points to only one negative aspect of drug use. However, in our understanding of the term 'drugs', we must take into account all aspects of the term. Yet this itself is problematic. Derrida famously points to the ambiguity in the word pharmakon in his study of Plato's Phaedrus. He notes how the term pharmakon - meaning 'a drug' - can signify both a remedy and/or a poison. A pharmakon can be - alternately or simultaneously - beneficent and maleficent.1 Without having to accept the literary theory Derrida stitches together out of the contradiction associated with the word pharmakon, we should take note of the ambiguity to which he alerts us.2 Derrida notes that Plato is suspicious of the pharmakon in general. Plato's suspicions extend even to instances of drugs being used exclusively for therapeutic ends and wielded with good intentions. Similarly, after scandals such as that caused by the use of the Thalidomide drug, we live in a society that is uncertain about its relationship to drugs, even those used for medicinal purposes. Derrida states that for Plato: "There is no such thing as a harmless remedy. The pharmakon can never simply be beneficial'3 Rather it is simultaneously pleasurable and painful, good and ill. Derrida states that the pharmakon always contains a mixture that is akin to 'relieving an itch by rubbing'. He notes that '[t]his type of painful pleasure, linked as much to the 1 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (trans. Barbara Johnson; London: Athlone, 1981), 70. 2 The ambiguous nature of drugs is born out by much historical evidence. Rudi Matthee notes how the introduction of tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea and distilled alcohol into Europe was accompanied by the same twofold reaction: these substances were viewed simultaneously as medicines and as a social menace. Rudi Matthee, 'Exotic Substances: the Introduction and Global Spread of Tobacco, Coffee, Cocoa, Tea, and Distilled Liquor, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries', in Drugs and Narcotics in History (ed. Roy-' Porter and Mikulag Teich; Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 24-51. 3 Derrida, Dissemination, 99. 96 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement malady as to its treatment, is a pharmakon in itself. It partakes of both good and ill, of the agreeable and the disagreeable. Or rather, it is within its mass that these oppositions are able to sketch themselves out.'4 Despite such contradictions, according to Derrida, Plato tries to master the 'ambiguity' of the word pharmakon, but his efforts prove futile.5 Likewise, our efforts will prove futile if we try to resolve the ambiguity of the human relationship with drugs by either emphasising one aspect (they are bad or they are good) or by claiming they are neutral. Drugs are never neutral: they have concrete effects upon us, effects which may promote or diminish human flourishing, or do both simultaneously. Thus, we must heed the musings of the Friar in Romeo and Juliet (a play in which the dramatic device turns on the ambiguous nature of a drug) when he states: Within the infant rind of this weak flower Poison hath residence, and medicine power: For this, being smelt, with the part cheers each part; Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart. Two such opposed kings encamp them still In man as well as herbs - grace and rude will: And where the worser is predominate, Full soon the canker death eats up the plant.6 Before we leave Derrida's treatment of the word pharmakon, we must note one more problem that attends any analysis of drug use. Derrida believes, that to properly understand the term pharmakon, it must be related to the word pharmakos which means not only 'wizard' or 'magician' or 'poisoner', but also 'scapegoat'.7 At the risk of a semantic 4 Derrida, Dissemination, 99. 5 Derrida, Dissemination, 102-3. 6 Romeo and Juliet, II.iii.23—30. As Shakespeare well knew, the ambiguous nature of drugs is matched by an equally ambiguous human nature. A parallel literary use of the ambiguous nature of drugs mirroring the ambiguous nature of man is developed by Kobert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. According to Lawrence Driscoll, Stevenson resists a simple binary opposition between Jekyll as the good/healthy man against Hyde as the evil/sick man under the influence of drugs. Instead, Driscoll argues that the characters of Jekyll and Hyde blur the boundaries between health and sickness, good and evil, so that one is healthily sick and the other has a sickly health, Jekyll commits suicide while Hyde has a love of life'. Lawrence Driscoll, Reconsidering Drugs: Mapping Victorian and Modern Drug Discourses (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 61. 7 Derrida, Dissemination, 130. Consuming the Body 97 sleight of hand, we should remember that not only aie drugs highly ambiguous, but their use is also highly contentious; drugs and drug users have often served as p/iarm«fcns/scapegoats in contemporary culture.8 In analysing drug use, we must beware of the moral panics and alarmist accounts that have attended most drugs, from coffee to crack cocaine.9 We must also avoid the tendency to make drug users - or any particular section of society, including doctors, pharmaceutical companies or 'drug barons' - a scapegoat, likewise, for the problems drugs can cause. Likewise, we must not imbue drugs themselves with a malevolent agency. When 'drugs' become an omnipotent demon with the power to curtail freewill and drag the unsuspecting victim into addiction, crime and death, it becomes rational to 'wage war' on the demon. The metaphor of a 'war on drugs' in itself comes to justify the massive use of actual military force to combat the imagined threat to civilisation. Instead of resorting to making a scapegoat of drugs or any particular section of society, I will seek to analyse how and why contemporary patterns of drug use are a symptom of, rather than alien to, the shape of Western, late-modern society. Bearing all this in mind, I will, for purposes of clarity, define the term 'drugs' heuristically, as referring to chemical substances that, when taken into the human body through ingestion, injection or some other means, modify one or more of the capacities of the body for either ampliative or therapeutic purposes and not for feeding or nourishing the body}0 That is to say, drugs are distinguished from a warm bed in that the physiological changes effected in the body are accomplished through becoming part of the body's chemistry rather than external stimulation. For example, in contrast to the actions of a pumice stone, a non-cosmetic skin cream, such as an eczema cream, works through being absorbed into the body. They are to be distinguished from changes brought about by ascetic practices, for example, fasting, in that drugs are an external substance added to the body rather than simply a somatic exercise. 8 For example, Marek Kohn gives an account of how women and racial minorities who used drugs, notably cocaine and opium, became scapegoats for wider social anxieties in Britain in the early twentieth century. Marek Kohn, Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (London: Granta, 1992). y Coffee was controversial when it first appeared in the Muslim world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Also Charles II tried to suppress coffee houses which were viewed-as 'nurseries of idleness' and hotbeds of sedition. Matthee, 'Exotic Substances', 36. ■" 10 This definition excludes antibiotic's, anti-virals and preventative medicines such as vaccines, since these act on parasites or 'alien' elements in the body as opposed to acting on the body as such. 98 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement Furthermore, although certain substances may also be used as food, such use is distinct from their use as drugs, although the use of a chemical substance as drugs and as physical nourishment may be simultaneous, for example, drinking beer. The use of a substance as drugs is identified by particular kinds of usage. The first kind of use is what I call 'ampliative drug use'; that is, it is use that seeks to extend, augment, enhance or literally amplify an inherent capacity of the body for recreational or religious purposes (not primarily for medicinal purposes). Ampliative drug use ranges from steroids, to enhance muscle performance, to alcohol, to enhance conviviality. Such use might or might not be 'good' depending on the particular end such enhancement seeks and the vision of the human good such enhancement is being measured by." The second kind of use is what I shall call 'therapeutic drug use', that is, it is drug use that seeks to cure, prevent or fix a real or perceived ailment of the body. Therapeutic drug use ranges from using antibiotics to prevent or heal an infection to using morphine as an analgesic. Again, there can be therapeutic use and misuse of drugs: for example, over-prescription of antibiotics leading to the development of iotragenic diseases. I will focus on ampliative drug use because, generally, it is considered to be more problematic; moreover, I believe that ampliative drug use illustrates more starkly the nature and shape of contemporary patterns of drug use. I am not, however, claiming there is a clear distinction between one category of use and the other; rather, ampliative and therapeutic drug use are different aspects of the same phenomenon. Before proceeding further and, in order to avoid confusion, the use of the term 'the body' within this essay needs to be situated within 11 Most ampliative drug use draws on one or more of five types of drugs. It should be noted that the following descriptions are extremely simplified accounts of what are complex phenomena and many of these classes overlap. At the same time, variations between different drugs must be accounted for. A rough typology can be set out in the following way: there are narcotics (which relieve pain and induce feelings of euphoria: e.g. opium and its derivatives); hypnotics (which cause sleep and can reduce feelings of anxiety: e.g. sulphonal and barbiturates); stimulants (which cause feelings of excitement and increase mental and physical energy: e.g. caffeine, tobacco, betal, tea, coca and qat); inebriants (which induce drunkenness: e.g. alcohol, ether and solvents); and hallucinogens (which cause complex changes in visual, auditory and other perceptions, e.g. cannabis, LSD, mescaline and certain mushrooms). All of them may create dependency while hallucinogens and stimulants may cause psychotic disturbances. Richard Davenport-Himes, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Social History of Drugs (London: Phoenix Press, 2001), ix-x. Davenport-Himes fails to note quite how heuristic his classification is. Consuming the Body 99 a theological anthropology. The Christian tradition presupposes an anthropology in which humans are conceived of as psychosomatic wholes. The body cannot be seen as distinct or separate from human capacities or attributes such as consciousness or autonomy as certain dualistic accounts suppose; for example, Ronald Dworkin argues for a separation between 'human life' and 'biological life'.12 Augustine is representative of the Christian tradition when he states that: A man's body is no mere adornment, or external convenience; it belongs to his very nature as a man/13 Within a theologically-derived account of the body, embodiment is a central feature of being a person, and the body is seen as a good gift from God. Thus, for the Christian, our body is not a possession that we can dispose of as we see fit.14 Alongside the affirmation of the human body as a part of God's good creation, human bodies are also affirmed as having a future in the in-breaking new creation. The eschatological affirmation of the human body in Jesus' acts of healing and, ultimately in the resurrection of his own body, underlines the value of human bodies in and of themselves. In addition, the eschatological future of humans as embodied beings emphasises the centrality of the body to the vocation of being a person in relation to God and others. Taking this theological anthropology into account, in referring to the human body in this essay, I will be referring to that which is the psychosomatic entity in and through which a particular person comes to be present or personally available to others. 2. Modern drug use in historical perspective Contemporary patterns of drug use cannot be understood outside their relationship to the processes of modernisation, notably, the development of technology (especially chemical technology), of global trade (initially through colonialism), of industrialisation and mass consumerism, and of bureaucratic control and the expansion of the nation-state.15 For example, the introduction into early modern Europe of coffee and tea, Ronald Dworkin, Life's Dominion: An Argument About Abortion and Euthanasia (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 69. Augustine, City of God, 1,13. " Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics III/A, 404-5T,''" For a broad-ranging discussion of the inter-relationship between all these elements, see David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the making of the modern world (Harvard University Press, 2001). 100 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement the most commonly used drugs, was inextricably bound up with the growth of colonialisation and the beginnings of mass consumption.16 Likewise, cannabis, largely unknown in Europe before the eighteenth century, was introduced into Europe through colonial expansion into Algeria, Egypt and India.17 Alongside the increasing range of plants available for use, from the early modern period onwards, was the application of the scientific method to medical practice and the study of plants. This application led to the isolation of alkaloids and the creation of synthetic and semi-synthetic drugs for medicinal use. Such developments were then combined with industrialised means of production. For example, cocaine, the psychoactive alkaloid in coca leaves, was identified in 1860 and its industrial production was begun in 1862.18 The introduction of cannabis into Europe provides a case study in the pattern of this expansion. The effects of cannabis were known about in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards, as a result of French and British colonial expansion and trade. Introduction was followed by a period of medical and recreational experimentation. Dr William Brooke O'Shaughnessy first began medical experiments with cannabis in the 1830s, while around the same time Parisian Bohemians, such as Flaubert, were experimenting with its more hedonistic potential. This experimentation led to its commercial exploitation. Under O'Shaughnessy's direction, a London pharmacist, Peter Squire, developed an extract and tincture of cannabis.19 By 1887, cannabis cigarettes were sold by pharmacists for the 'immediate relief in all cases of Asthma, Nervous Coughs, Hoarseness, Loss of Voice, Facial Neuralgia and Sleeplessness'.20 Inevitably, much of its use was not directly therapeutic. Concern about the effects of its use, both in Europe and its colonies, led to campaigns for greater restrictions on Rudi Matthee notes that tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea and distilled alcohols were introduced at a remarkably similar time and in a uniform way. Tobacco began to be used in Europe from the 1500s onwards, the first distillery was established in 1575 in Holland, coffee was introduced in the early 1600s (the first European coffee house opened in Venice in 1645), as was tea. Matthee, 'Exotic Substances', 25-8. On this, see the extensive discussion of cannabis throughout Davenport-Himes, Pursuit of Oblivion. Davenport-Himes, Pursuit of Oblivion, 94-6. P. Matthews, Cannabis Culture: A Journey Through Disputed Territory (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 172-3. Advertisement in the Illustrated London News, quoted in Matthews, Cannabis Culture, 173. Consuming the Body 101 its use, and control over its production. Official investigations were established, in order to respond to the concerns being raised. For example, in 1893, the Indian Hemp Drug Commission was established to investigate the impact of the drug in India. From World War I onwards, a policy of prohibition and severely-restricted control was introduced. A similar sequence of introduction and experimentation, commercialisation, taxation and/or legal regulation can be traced for virtually all other drugs. Attitudes towards psychotropic drugs such as cannabis or opium underwent a marked shift from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. In general terms, the shift was marked by a change from taxation to prohibition and the criminalisation of their use and distribution. This shift had a variety of causes, these included: geopolitical shifts, notably the rise of America as a world power and shifts in British Imperial policy;21 economic developments, particularly what was needed from workers within industrial processes of production as against what was required of an agricultural labourer; social anxieties about how drug use sapped the fitness of a country for war - related to this were racist fears about 'foreigners' corrupting young people; greater understanding of the toxic and habit-forming properties of drugs resulting from scientific research; and the campaigns by Evangelicals, Socialists and other social reformers who were concerned about how drug use was morally corrosive and a pauperiser. In many ways, the debate about drug use in Western societies has changed very little since the beginning of the twentieth century. A theological response to contemporary patterns of drug use needs to both understand the above historical background and also to stand back from it in order to develop critical theological perspectives on it. 3. Contemporary drug use as a symptom of, and gateway to, the technological society In order to develop a critical theological perspective on drug use, it is necessary to discern how drug use conforms to central discourses within contemporary culture. My contention is that drugs are,a form of technology and used as a means to 'progress' out of what is viewed as the tyrannous imposition of nature. As such, drugs are a symptom of modern, technocratic approaches to nature. America was very active and influential in promoting prohibitionist policies. 102 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement Oliver O'Donovan notes that what marks modernity from other moments of history is neither its instruments of making nor its technical achievements, but the way it thinks of everything it does as a form of instrumental making. Following Heidegger, and other critics of modernity, O'Donovan fears that practical reason and moral judgement have mutated into 'technique'. O'Donovan comments: 'Set free from obedience to comprehensible ends of action, confronting all reality as disposable material, [modern man's] primary imperative is manipulation.'22 Thus, the human body ceases to have given ends which we may discern and judge how best to fulfil, but becomes an object for manipulation and shaping according to our will. O'Donovan states: 'The fate of a society which sees, wherever it looks, nothing but the products of the human will, is that it fails, when it does see some aspect of human activity which is not a matter of construction, to recognise the significance of what it sees and to think about it appropriately.'23 In practice, the implication is that there is an inability to discern whether technical intervention is appropriate or not, because everything is seen as raw material waiting to have something made out it. O'Donovan states: 'If there is no category in thought for an action which is not artefactual, then there is no restraint in action which can preserve phenomena which are not artificial.'24 Everything from the environment to the human body becomes material for something to be made out of. However, unless we are attentive to creation and shape our own constructions in response to it, creation - whether it be the climate or our bodies - will break down, and with it, so will the products of our making and our laws imposed on creation. O'Donovan views this lack of attentiveness as a form of self-hatred: by asserting our freedom over and against creation, we end up hurting ourselves. In short, to set ourselves against the order of things is to be in self-contradiction. Yet this is precisely the 'modern' conception of freedom. O'Dondvan states: Technology derives its social significance from the fact that by it man has discovered new freedoms from necessity. The technological transformation of the modern age has gone hand in hand with the social and political quest of Western man to free himself from the necessities imposed upon him by 22 Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theory (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 274. 23 Oliver O'Donovan, Begotten or Made? (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 2. 24 O'Donovan, Begotten or Made?, 3. Consuming the Body 103 religion, society and nature. Without this social quest the development of technology would have been unthinkable; without technology the liberal society as we know it would be unworkable.25 It is my contention that drugs - as a technology - are central to Western, liberal society, and the way we approach drugs is characterised by seeing them as a means by which to manipulate the body according to our will. This is not to say that drugs, of whatever kind, may not be used in ways that attend to the created nature of the body. Rather, it is to claim that drug Use, under the mantle of a technological society such as ours, will only be correctly adopted either rarely or by accident. That the use of drugs is determined by a technological rationality becomes especially apparent when we look at the anxieties sur- rounding the spectral figure of the 'addict'. The state of being an addict - whether of heroin, nicotine or caffeine - is feared and socially proscribed, because it is seen as being out of control, dependent on something, in a state wherein the body is not subject to the will. To be dependent on a drug is to deny the modern conception of freedom by making oneself subject to necessity. Such dependence constitutes a betrayal of the modern project and a retrenchment to barbarity. However, the fixation with a particular kind of dependence masks the ways in which society as a whole has become entirely dependent on drugs to maintain a particular conception and experience of normality or homeostasis characterised by comfort or gemutlichkeit. We deploy great vats of syrups, cartloads of pills and reservoirs of lotions in order to liberate ourselves from the everyday tyranny of the body's aches, pains, tiredness, allergies and the general effects of aging. And we are increasingly employing yet more kinds of drugs to tailor our personality and physical abilities to fulfil our desires or alleviate our anxieties about our sense of who we should be or what we should be able to achieve. One recent example of such tailoring is use of the drug Prozac. The psychologist Peter Kramer calls such tailoring 'cosmetic pharmacology'.26 Yet, as with all human attempts at self-salvation from the effects of sin and deatly the irony is that our liberation turns out to be bondage. We are, in effect, dependent on the technology of drugs to maintain our freedom from bodily necessity and constraint, but, by constantly manipulating our body O'Donovan, Begotten or Made?, 6. Peter Kramer, Listening to Prozac (London: Fourth Estate, 1994). 104 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement to maintain our cosiness or to fulfil our desire to be a different kind of person, we find ourselves in self-contradiction: we require ever higher doses to circumvent the diminishing returns of the potions we use, we then require more treatments to heal us from the sickness these drugs induce, and ultimately, despite all our best efforts and the strictness of our regimes, we can never win the battle against a body in which death is at work (2 Cor. 4:12). Ivan Illich identified the counterproductive dynamic at work in our technological, medicalised drug culture as clinical, social and cultural 'iatrogenesis': that is, drugs and medicine have themselves become a major threat to health.27 Central to the drive to maintain physical comfort - to be, in the words of Carl Elliot, 'better than well' - is the modern conception of suffering.-8 Within modernity, illness, pain and suffering are pointless: that is, they can play no role in helping us live our lives well. O'Donovan notes that suffering has become unintelligible in contemporary society, because it is a society orientated towards the individual and the exercise of the individual will. He states: 'The role society, on earth and in heaven, could play in justifying the individual's suffering is removed. The late-modern age, accordingly, is in perpetual rebellion against the "pointlessness", the "waste" of suffering.'29 The replacement of wisdom by technique and the resort to technological means to 'solve' any perceived suffering exacerbates this rebellion. O'Donovan points out that, within the logic of modernity, suffering in any form must be eliminated through technical means.30 Thus, when all else fails, we are given another pill - Valium or Prozac - to make us feel happy and calm, despite our condition. However, the drive to maintain physical comfort or, as is increasingly the case, to maintain a sense of self-fulfilment, ignores how physical or psychological pain is part of the way in which we may order our lives properly in response to the created order. For example, if I am tired and have a headache, the body does not need a coffee and'an aspirin, but a rest. Yet, under the logic of contemporary modern life, bodily pain does not serve to alert me to my social, economic or political conditions (i.e. why am I having to work late); rather, bodily pain is a provocation to tighten up our regimes of control 'over' the See Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine - Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1977). Carl Elliott, Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York: Norton & Co., 2003). O'Donovan, Desire of the Nations, 276. O'Donovan, Begotten or Made?, 3-12. Consuming the Body 105 body (I need to exercise more, eat better, buy a more comfortable chair, buy a stronger brand of headache pill, etc.), and thus treat the body as an object of manipulation. The same can be said of the use of enhancement technologies to address psychological or emotional pain. The quest to change my body, whether pharmacologically or through surgery, to make me feel better about myself, ignores the need to address a lack of virtue or character or the need for emotional healing. As Illich argues, within our technological civilisation, pain has become a demand 'for more drugs, hospitals, medical services, and other outputs of corporate impersonal care' and has become a source of 'political support for further corporate growth no matter what its human, social, or economic cost'.31 We see the same dynamic when it comes to recreational use of ampliative drugs such as LSD, cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy. Much of the rhetoric that surrounds use of these drugs is of liberation: 'free your mind'. Moreover, they are seen as ampoules of rebellion and social non-conformity: 'turn on, tune in, drop out'.32 Yet, such use is in actuality conformity to the heart of the modern project. The ways in which drugs such as LSD and ecstasy are used reflects the desire to engineer an experience: more often than not, a 'high' or a good time. Why risk not enjoying yourself when you can chemically ensure that you will, like your friends, appreciate the music and won't get tired after a stressful week at work? Yet such engineering of experience imperils what it means to be human, for it deprives human existence itself of certain spontaneities of being and doing, which depend upon the reality of a world which we have not made or imagined, but which simply confronts us to evoke our fear, love and delight. A personal, spontaneous response to music and dancing is entirely different in kind from those resulting from a chemically manufactured response. Furthermore, drugs are used to manage the responses of the mind and body to maximise the enjoyment of a night out: ecstasy (to make you happy), amphetamines or cocaine (to keep you going), LSD (for its visual effect) and cannabis or temazepam (to 'chill out' and 'come down' at the end of it all). And drug dealers are just another service industry, responding to consumer demand. { Illich, Limits to Medicine, 142. Reflecting on the reasons he used drugs, the writer Will Self articulates exactly these sentiments, stating: 'I revered drug-taking as a blow against conformity and a blow against the hierarchy and.a blow against what was quite a privileged middle-class background.' Will Self and Steve Turner, 'Getting a Fix: Steve Turner talks to Will Self, Third Way 24.5 (2001), 18-21 (p. 20). 106 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement Far from freeing their minds, most clubbers and weekend party animals are bureaucrats of fun, administrating their enjoyment like a corporate manager organising her schedule. In doing so, they combine features of all the archetypes whom Alasdair Maclntyre identifies as the moral representatives of modernity Maclntyre states that the values and morals of every culture assume embodied expression in the social world through certain archetypes or characters. He sees the primary moral representatives of contemporary culture as the aesthete, whose primary evaluative criterion is pleasure and the avoidance of boredom; the manager, whose key criterion for evaluation is effectiveness in matching means to predetermined ends; and the therapist, who, like the manager, seeks effectiveness, not of an organisation, but of the individual.33 Thus, beyond the rhetoric, taking drugs is deeply conformist and conservative: drug taking conforms to the technocratic logic of modernity and conserves those patterns of life that are shaped by a modern vision of the good life (whether hedonistic or otherwise). Taking drugs is thus a moral imperative within the logic of modernity: they are a valuable technology through which we can manage and manufacture a better, more fulfilling life. I am not saying that all use of drugs to manipulate the body is necessarily bad. There is a place for using chemical technology The issue is whether using drugs in a manner determined by a technical rationality is a usage that enables human flourishing or not. 4. Contemporary patterns of drug use as a symptom of material conditions Contemporary patterns of drug use are indicative of more than just a particular approach to suffering; they encapsulate the ways in which we discipline our bodies in our culture. The individual body is, to some extent, always interpreted and ordered to reflect social, political and economic relationships. The body is both a symbol of these relationships and a medium through which such relationships are realised, realigned or replaced.34 In contemporary Western societies, one of the primary modes of involvement in society is as a consumer, rather than, say, an agriculturalist, warrior or hunter-gatherer. As Zygmunt Bauman puts Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (2nd edn; London: Duckworth, 1994), 24-30. On this, see, for example, Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: the Body and the City in Western Civilization (London: Faber & Faber, 1994). Consuming the Body 107 it: 'The way present-day society shapes up its members is dictated first and foremost by the need to play the role of the consumer, and the norm our society holds up to its members is that of the ability and willingness to play it/35 Thus, we must attend to how contemporary patterns of consumption shape the relationship between the body and drugs, and encourage people to control their responses to life through adjusting their bodily chemistry. In short, we must answer the question: how does consumerism encourage drug use? We must consume things in order to live; however, children are not born with a set of wishes to consume the goods on offer in late-modern, capitalist society. Rather, they are aroused into desiring them. Robert Bocock comments that: Consumption has emerged as a fundamental part of the process by which infants enter western capitalist cultures and their symbolic systems of meaning. Foods, drinks, toys, clothes and television are part of the early experiences of consumption of young children in western societies. Infants and children are being socialised into being consumers during the very early states of development.36 In his novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland has a poignant scene in which a group of twenty-somethings try to remember a precious moment from childhood that does not involve a commercialised, consumer experience.37 They succeed, but only just. Whether future generations will be able to recall experiences that do not involve some kind of consumer exchange is an open question. The forming of children into consumers involves widespread drug use. Children 35 Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998), 24. For a wide ranging theological critique of consumerism, see Vincent Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (London: Continuum, 2004). It should not surprise us that in a society characterised by consumerism, the deregulation of drug use is called for. Bauman states: 'A society of consumers is resentful of all legal restrictions imposed on freedom of choice, [...], and manifests its resentment by widespread support willingly offered to most "deregulatory" measures.' Arguably, in contemporary debate, the real point at issue in calls for legalisation of drugs is not the morality or otherwise of taking drugs, nor is it making appropriate distinctions between different kinds of drugs and their effects, but the prohibition against using potential objects of consumption. Miller, Consuming Religion,-29. 36 Robert Bocock, Consumption (London: Routledge, 1993), 85. 37 Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (New York: St Martin's, 1991), 87-96. 108 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement are fed caffeine in soft drinks; injections and medicines are a central feature of how children's bodies are managed and prepared to face the world; and pill shaped sweets and lozenges are standard fare.38 More significant than the link between drugs and the forming of children into consumers is the way in which the body itself has become commodified. Baudrillard argues that the body has become one more object to be consumed. He states: The body is [...] the finest of these psychically possessed, manipulated and consumed objects. [...] The body is not reappropriated for the autonomous ends of the subject, but in terms of a normative principle of enjoyment and hedonistic profitability, in terms of an enforced instrumentality that is indexed to the code and the norms of a society of production and managed consumption.39 It is my contention that our use of drugs is the paradigmatic way in which we consume, and literally devour, our bodies; that is to say, drug use encapsulates the primary way we manipulate and maximise the 'hedonistic profitability' of our bodies. Drugs themselves - whether used for ampliative or therapeutic effect - are perhaps the ultimate consumer product. In a society in which, according to George Steiner's pithy aphorism, all cultural products are calculated for 'maximal impact and instant obsolescence',40 drugs give an instant, maximally-intense hit and, unlike sunglasses or CD's, they are used up in one go.41 In a society of experience collectors, ampliative drug use bypasses the equipment and preparation needed for a parachute jump or sailing trip and does not require the spatial and temporal investment of an adventure holiday or visit to Disneyland. Instead, they deliver a hit of pure experience without the need for training, travel or time. And apart from anything else, there is a huge Eric Schlosser sets out, for example, the ways in which soft drinks containing caffeine have been directly targeted at children and have replaced nutritious drinks like milk in the diet of American children. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: What the Ail-American Meal is Doing to the World (London: Penguin, 2001), 54-7. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (trans. Chris Turner; London: Sage, 1998), 131. Quoted from Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, 28. Bauman states: 'Consumer goods are meant to be used up and to disappear; the idea of temporariness and transitoriness is intrinsic to their very denomination as objects of consumption; consumer goods have memento mori written all over them, even if with an invisible ink.' Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, 28. Consuming the Body 109 commercial investment in our continued use of drugs of all kinds.42 In short, in a consumer society, it is entirely rational to take drugs for ampliative purposes. Drugs may poison and consume or use up our bodies, just as cars consume and use up our environment, but they powerfully satisfy the desires, albeit fleetingly, of persons whose hearts and minds are conditioned to consume, rather than seek first the kingdom of God. Many critics of consumerism find fault with what they see as the scandalous waste generated by it. Such criticism, articulated, for example, by environmental groups calling for greater sustainability, is born out of a moral vision that sees the massive production of what is surplus to requirement as dysfunctional. However, as Baudrillard contends: All societies have always wasted, squandered, expended and consumed beyond what is strictly necessary for the simple reason that it is in the consumption of a surplus, of a superfluity that the individual - and society ~ feel not merely that they exist, but that they are alive.43 The movement beyond sheer necessity, so that a surplus, or more-than- is-strictly-necessary-to-survive, is produced, is the precondition of generating 'culture' in whatever way it is defined. Baudrillard states: The notion of utility, which has rationalistic, economistic origins, thus needs to be revised in light of a much more general social logic in which waste, far from being an irrational residue, takes on a positive function, taking over where rational utility leaves off to play its part in a higher social functionality - a social logic in which waste even appears ultimately as the essential function, the extra degree of expenditure, superfluity, the ritual uselessness of 'expenditure for nothing' becoming the site of production of values, differences and meanings on both the individual and the social level.44 But Baudrillard is wrong to think of this surplus as 'waste'; the issue is not waste or 'expenditure for nothing', but how a surplus is produced, used and to what end that surplus is directed. The movement beyond sheer necessity is what enables movement towards consummation or In 1999, the US Food and Drug Administration approved'Paxil, which, like Prozac, is a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Paxil is designed for use in relation to 'social phobia' or 'social anxiety disorder', which-some suggest are simply technical sounding terms for shyness. GlaxoSmithKine who produce the drug spent $91,8 million advertising Paxil directly fo. consumers. Elliott, Better Than Well, 57-9. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 43. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 43. 110 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement fulfilment which is a movement beyond mere survival. However, the critical issue here is what kind of consummation is being aimed for in our society. The costly and extravagant expenditure of the woman who purchases a bottle of nard, in order to anoint Jesus before his crucifixion (Mark 14:3-10) signals something rather different from the women who, in the L'Oreal adverts, suggest you should buy L'Oreal perfume 'because you're worth it'. Instead of the sacrificing of a costly ointment on behalf of another - an act that foreshadows Christ's own death - the L'Oreal advert proposes that the pearl of great price is my own wellbeing, and that it is worth any sacrifice to ensure. The contrast between the kind of surplus generated from a social order organised around the economy of Christ's death and resurrection, in which the priority is to seek first the kingdom of God, and that of a social order structured around the satisfaction of my desires, begins to look like the contrast between the ecstatic communion of the messianic banquet and the anarchic tumult of a Saturnalia or Bacchanalia. However, before we launch into a jeremiad against the link between drugs and consumerism, we must address the following question: as a form of costly often unnecessary expenditure, what kind of human consummation are contemporary patterns of drug use really enabling? And this question, perhaps surprisingly, maybe considered by reference to Marx's infamous maxim that religion is the opium of the people.45 If we are attempting to understand how the body is both a symbol of social, political and economic relationships, and a medium through which such relationships are realised, realigned or replaced, Marx^s_ critique of religion is a helpful means to assess whether or not drug use is currently contributing to a Christian vision of human' consummation. Whether religion is, or ever was, the opium of the people is open to question.46 However, the functioning of opium in the way Marx envisaged (that is, the way that led him to use it as a metaphor for religion), is what I shall analyse now.47 This 45 For an account of the genealogy of the expression 'opium of the people' see Helmut Gollwitzer, The Christian Faith and the Marxist Criticism of Religion (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1970), 15-23. ,!6 For a critique of Marx's treatment of religion, see David McLellan, Marxism and Religion: A Description and Assessment of the Marxist Critique of Christianity (London: MacMillan, 1987), 7-32. ,7 For a pithy summary of Marx's critique of religion, see Alasdair Maclntyre, 'Marxism and Religion', in Marxism and Christianity (2nd edn; London: Duckworth, 1995), 103-16. See also Denys Turner, 'Religion: Illusions and Liberation', in The Cambridge Companion to Marx (ed. Terrell Carver; Cambridge: CUP, 1991), 320-37. Consuming the Body 111 Marxist reading of drug use complexifies the previous point about contemporary patterns of drug use being a symptom of consumerism by identifying how drug use is simultaneously a protest against the dominant technocratic, capitalist, consumer hegemony and a means of conforming to it. For Marx, religion was opium because, in a context of violent repression, or where the oppressed lack political and economic power, religion was simultaneously protest and consolation49 Marx states: 'Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.'49 In the same way, drug use of, for example, crack-cocaine or heroin, by the socially- and economically-marginalised, or even by those seeking to escape their privileged upbringing, serves as both a rejection of the status quo and as a relief or escape from their present condition.50 Thus, drugs may play a revolutionary role by stimulating a thirst for a better social order; however, they become wholly reactionary when they distract humans from seeking to establish a good society Furthermore, for Marx, religion had become a means to legitimise, to the power elite whose interests are served by the system, the deprivations of poverty and powerlessness.51 Drugs function in a similar way. Their use by certain sections of the population serves to legitimise existing inequalities. Drug use is made a causal factor in crime rates and inner city deprivation, so that wider questions about contemporary economic and political conditions are glossed over. Marx believed that, in addition to acting as a narcotic, as a mask for, and legitimiser of, oppression, religion enabled the power elite to reconcile themselves to the system, which also inhibits them from being fully human. Similarly, drugs are the opiate of all the people, because they provide, to the weak an illusory satisfaction to an Engels clarifies what he and Marx see as the difference between Christianity and a true revolutionary consciousness when he states: 'Both Christianity and the workers' socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society.' Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'On the History of Early Christianity', in On Religion (trans, not stated; Chico: Scholars Press, 1982), 316-47 (p. 316). Karl Marx, 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's '"Philosophy of Right": Introduction', in On Religion, 41-58 (p. 42). The Exodus Collective based in Luton are a good example of how use of narcotics can become a focus for protest and a consolation. For an account for their activities and vision, see Matthews, Cannabis''Culture, 35-43. See, for example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (trans. Samuel Moore; London: Penguin, 1967), 92. 112 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement authentic demand, and they provide to the powerful a false justification for an oppressive system. Marx held that to criticise religion was to direct people to their oppression, in order that they might transform it from an inhuman reality into a human one: Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality, so that he will revolve round himself and therefore round his true sun.52 What might have once been true for religion is now most certainly true for drugs. Criticism of contemporary patterns of drug use is a necessary part of any proper critique of our culture that seeks to alert humans to their own oppression. However, I do not criticise patterns of drug use so that others might think and act and shape their own reality, nor that they might be liberated through simply changing their material conditions. Rather, I criticise contemporary patterns of drug use in order to develop a clearer picture of where we are in relation to the pattern of life set out in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is the only means by which we might be liberated from the present conditions of sin and death, and might be conformed to reality as created and fulfilled by God. The above critique of contemporary patterns of drug use is encap- sulated in much of the literature and art associated with drug use. This literature is pervaded by a sorrowful despair and aching nihilism. It seems to centre on journeys to nowhere, trips that end in oblivion, movement that exhausts itself: for example, Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool- Aid Acid Test, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas (subtitled: 'A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream'), Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper's film Easy Rider and Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. Here are, debunked, the dreams and aspirations of progress and a better life that modernity has so faithfully pursued. Jack Kerouac's On the Road serves as a good example of the criticism of modernity implicit in much drug-related literature. After a dizzying number of road trips across 1950s America (an America notably unscathed by World War II) and extraordinary bursts of frenetic and chaotic idleness fuelled by Benzedrine, cannabis and alcohol, Kerouac's Marx, 'the Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right'", 42. Consuming the Body 113 On the Road reaches its culmination in a trip to Mexico. There, the main protagonists - Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise - encounter what they take to be primal innocents or noble savages in the form of Mexican Indians. Kerouac writes: Strange crossroad towns on the top of the world rolled by, with shawled Indians watching us from under hatbrims and rebozos. Life was dense, dark and ancient. They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks. All had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the.back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilisation could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way. Our broken Ford, old thirties upgoing America Ford, rattled through them and vanished in dust.53 The passage represents a sorrowful critique of modernity, found time and again in the literature associated with drugs. Kerouac originally conceived of the book as a quest novel like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.5^ But On the Road contains no allegory of moral and spiritual growth, only a mournful travelogue of fruitless journeys already made by different roads. Despite the hiatus of the 1960s, when many thought drugs presaged a new age - the Age of Aquarius - the nihilistic tone in drug-related literature soon returns.55 In 1971, Hunter S. Thompson fictionalises an epic drug binge he embarked upon while making a trip to and from Las Vegas. He compares his drug-induced paranoia and nightmare visions with the fabricated lunacy of Las Vegas, and concludes that the American dream has become an inferno, and drugs, far from freeing the mind, are merely a way of coping with the political and social bedlam that surrounds him.56 Thompson writes: 53 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (London: Penguin, 1972; repr., 2000), 273 54 Ann Charters, Introduction to On the Road, vii-xxxii (xiv). ■ 55 Even Tom Wolfe's paean to the LSD evangelist, Ken Kesey, closes with the rejection of Kesey's Nietzschian vision of a revaluation of values beyond morality and drugs, wherein everyone was to become a 'superhero', their life an act of artistic self-creation. Instead, the 'beautiful people' of Haight Ashbury took a solipsistic and passive turn to~ inner tranquillity that presages the gemutlichkeit culture of our age. 56 For a more contemporary take on the' lunacy of Las Vegas as the apogee of .a consumer, technocratic culture, see Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 234-9. 114 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fuelled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling 'consciousness expansion' without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously. [...] Not that they didn't deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create [...] a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.57 Thompson's metaphysical nihilism lies behind his criticism of the idealism of Leary and others. For Thompson, the central dynamic of 'Acid Culture' was not spiritual, but commercial, and far from bringing 'consciousness expansion', drugs created a generation of 'permanent cripples'. The work of authors like Thompson suggests that drug use habituates us to our material conditions, which are now the conditions of mass consumerism and a technocratic society. But, even if drugs do largely function in this way, we must ask whether they necessarily function in this way. It is important to analyse more fully contemporary attempts to use drugs in constructive ways. The primary form this shaping has taken is to try to conceive of, and structure, drug use as a mystical experience. I shall now assess whether Thompson is too quick to dismiss 'Tim Leary's trip'. 5. Drug use as a means to mystical experiences There are those who would reject the account I have given of con- temporary patterns of drug use as the fruit of the attempt to manipulate the body and reduce it to an object of consumption. Some have claimed that drugs, notably LSD, may be a source of transcendence to a higher consciousness, and many have noted a search for 'spirituality' among those who experiment with ampliative drug use.58 This is a view that needs to be taken seriously. Drugs have always been associated with religious practices. There is a long and continuing history of Hunter S. Thompson, Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas (London: Flamingo, 1993), 178-9. For example, Kenneth Leech, Drugs and Pastoral Care (London: DLT, 1998), ch. 7. Consuming the Body 115 the religious use of plants that contain psychedelic or mind-altering substances. Wine, central to the Christian Eucharist, is just such a mind-altering substance. However, more interesting than the fact that consciousness-changing devices have been linked with religious practice is the possibility that drugs actually initiated many of the religious perspectives which, taking root in a tradition, continued after their origins in psychoactive substances were forgotten. Gordon Wasson goes so far as to argue that most religions arose from such chemically-induced theophanies.59 What are we to ma'ke of these claims, and what do we make of the use of drugs as part of Christian worship? The first thing to be clear about is that there is inevitably some degree of correspondence between drug-induced experiences and religious or mystical experience. Even the Bible notes that chemically-induced psychic states bear some resemblance to religious ones. Peter had to appeal to a circumstantial criterion - the early hour of the day - to defend those who were caught up in the pentecostal experience against the charge that they were drunk: 'These men are not drunk, as you suppose. It's only nine in the morning!' (Acts 2:15). However, there is a critical difference between the mystical experiences born out of ascetic discipline and religious ritual, and the changed consciousness induced by drugs. The difference turns on the vision or telos of human consummation from which each is derived. It is my contention that the contemporary claims to mystical experience from drugs only emphasise the critique I have already given. The disciplining of the body, the socialisation of drug use and the education of desire within a religious framework and its particular vision of what human consummation involves is entirely different in kind to modern attempts to induce mystical experiences through chemical technology. The interpretation of some contemporary drug experiences, notably those achieved through LSD, as equivalent to mystical experiences, have mostly been based on a conception of mysticism as a phenomenon common to all the major religious traditions and sharing certain generic characteristics. For example, Walter Pahnke argues that the experiences described by mystics are directly comparable to those facilitated by psychedelic drugs. He does not claim that drugs automatically lead to a mystical experience. He recognises that every experience is a mix of three ingredients: the drug itself, the psychological makeup of the 59 Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Ehtheogens and the Origins of Religion (New Haven: Yale, 1986). 116 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement individual and the setting (the social and physical environment in which it is taken). Pahnke's argument is based on an experiment in which he administered psilocy bin to ten Harvard theological students participating in a Good Friday service (ten other students received a placebo) and compared their experience to a ninefold typology of mystical experience.60 His study was based on the presupposition that, while there may be some variation, all mystical experiences share certain fundamental characteristics that are universal and not restricted to any particular religion or culture.61 William James gave the classic statement of this view in his 1902 Gifford lectures, 'The Varieties of Religious Experience'/'2 However, such a view is based on a modernist reading of religion that seeks to strip away the historical phenomena and doctrinal content of a particular religion and reveal the essence of any given faith tradition. Such an approach, as Schwobel and others argue, fails to attend to the inherent particularity of each religious tradition, and constitutes a totalising discourse that erases the substantive differences between religions, in order that they either conform to a general abstract notion of religion, or are remoulded into instantiations of a general religious metaphysics.63 Instead, all religious experience is tradition-situated and can only be interpreted in the light of a particular tradition.64 The somatic phenomena may or may not be 60 Walter Pahnke, 'Drugs and Mysticism', The International Journal of Parapsychology 8.2 (1966), 295-313. 61 The characteristics were: unity, transcendence of time and space, a deeply-felt positive mood, a sense of sacredness, a sense of illumination felt at an intuitive level that was nevertheless felt to be authoritative in nature, paradoxicality, alleged ineffability, transiency, and lastly, persisting positive changes in attitude and behaviour. 62 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans Green, 1902). Even those who do not directly equate drug- induced experiences with mystical experiences still take an essentialist view of mystical experiences. For example, R.C. Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957). 63 Christoph Schwobel, 'Particularity, Universality, and the Religions: Towards a Christian Theology of Religions', in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (ed. Gavin D'Costa; New York: Orbis, 1996), 30-46. 64 Constructivist accounts of mysticism recognise that there are substantive differences between particular kinds of mysticism. They argue that mystics do not have context-free, 'pure' experiences that they later interpret according to their own particular cultural and theological presuppositions. The very nature of the experience is itself socially constructed according to the culture, beliefs and expectations of the mystics having the experiences. For examples of such an Consuming the Body 117 similar; however, the significance of what happens to the body can only by understood within a particular tradition and will be informed by the spirit of that tradition. Thus, the question we must ask is, what spirit informs the spirituality of those who use drugs to induce mystical experiences outside any formal religious tradition? Perhaps the clearest Christian formulation of how to test what spirit informs a particular group of people or phenomenon is given by Christ when, after warning about false prophets who disguise their true identity, he states: 'By their fruit you will recognize them/65 The question then is, what constitutes good fruit? Within the Christian tradition the answer to this question is understood to be the fruits of the Holy Spirit: that is, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, all of which are given 'for the common good'.66 Thus, a critical question to address to contemporary patterns of drug use is whether they produce the fruit of the Holy Spirit or some other crop. It is my contention, based on the analysis of contemporary patterns of drug use given above, that the spirit that informs the modern use of drugs for mystical ends is the spirit of a technocratic and consumer culture. The body is not trained and adapted to particular kinds of experience; rather, it is viewed as raw material for choice and intervention, and a technological solution is deployed to reach beyond the created and fallen limits of perception. I am not claiming that all drug use today for mystical ends is informed by such a spirit. I am simply saying that the foremost contemporary advocates of drugs as a means to a mystical or cosmic consciousness are situated within a particular discourse that is informed neither by a religious tradition (although it borrows from many traditions) nor inspired by the Holy Spirit. Instead, its context and inspiration is the Zeitgeist of modernity.67 approach, see Steven Katz, ed., Mysticism and Religious Traditions (Oxford: OUP, 1983). However, constructivist theories have come under criticism for the way in which they fail to take sufficient account of the concerns of the mystics and literature they study. Furthermore, the whole study of mysticism, from James onwards, is now criticised for being located within a modernist and psychologised framework that inherently misreads the phenomenon of 'mysticism'. For example, see Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and 'The Mystic East' (London: Routledge, 1999), chap. 8. Matthew 7:15-20. Galatians 5:22-23; 1 Corinthians 12:7. One could, perhaps, read the use of drugs by Timothy Leary and others for mystical purposes as an extension-of the attempt in Theosophy (and related late- nineteenth century movements) to reconcile religion and science through finding 118 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement Within the various strands of Christian mysticism, there is an emphasis on mystical experiences as part of an ongoing process of personal transformation, movement towards participation in God and care for the world and society around one.68 However, drug use of itself usually, hut not always, seems to militate against such personal transformation and movement towards loving relationship with God and neighbour. Aldous Huxley, one of the most prominent advocates of drug use for mystical ends, states; 'Mescalin opens the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplation ~ but to a contemplation that is incompatible with action and even with the will to action, the very thought of action/69 The phenomenon of inaction is observed by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test He draws a contrast between Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who were actively trying to situate the taking of LSD within a philosophical and ritualised framework, and those who simply took LSD for its own sake. Wolfe gives the example of Paul Hawken, who, in 1965, was a political activist who risked his life for the civil rights movement, but a year later, as part of the Haight Ashbury psychedelic scene, is pouring scorn on his previous commitments while doing nothing in particular.70 We can conclude that drugs by themselves cannot constitute a means to transcend oneself or become a better person. At best, they merely amplify what is already there; at worst they induce a kind of quietism about oneself and the plight of one's neighbour. In this respect, Baudelaire's analysis of his experiences of cannabis may be applied to all mind-altering drugs. He states: The idler has contrived to artificially introduce an element of the super- natural into his life and thoughts: but he is, after all, and in spite of the heightened intensity of his sensations, only the same man augmented, the same number elevated to a much higher power. [...] Thus let the sophisticates and novices who are curious to taste these exceptional delights take heed; they will find nothing miraculous in hashish, nothing but the excessively natural. The brain and body governed by hashish will scientifically verifiable techniques for contacting a spiritual realm. For an account of Theosophy (and its influence upon American alternative culture), see Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (New York: Schocken Books, 1996). See Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Text and Commentary (4th edn; trans. Theodore Berkeley; London: New City, 1997), 263-9. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (London: Flamingo, 1994), 26. Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (London: Black Swan, 1989), 315-17. Consuming the Body 119 yield nothing but their ordinary, individual phenomena, augmented it is true, in number and energy, but always faithful to their origins. Man will not escape the destiny of his physical and moral temperament: for man's impressions and intimate thoughts, hashish will act as a magnifying mirror, but a pure mirror none the less.71 Even when the emphasis given is to the nature of the experience itself and not to drug use as a means either to transform one's desire or to achieve a 'higher consciousness' there is no guarantee that drug- induced experiences resemble the somatic dimensions of a profound, personal encounter with God. Drug-induced experiences may well resemble something else entirely. Christian mystics caution us that not all of their striving leads to experiences that are mystical. For example, the writer of the Cloud of Unknowing warns of the dangers of turning from the true spiritual quest - the quest for God - and seeking 'empty, false physical comfort in so-called refreshment, in relaxation, of body and spirit!'72 The writer goes on to say of those who are distracted from seeking God that, even if they escape the trap of seeking physical comfort, they might well fall into another trap, that of seeking: an unnatural glow and heat within, caused by the abuses of their bodies or their sham spirituality. Or again they feel a false heat brought about by the fiend, their spiritual enemy, because of their pride, materialism and human inquisitiveness. They thoroughly deserve all this, their spiritual blindness and physical discomfort is caused by their spiritual pretence and animal behaviour.73 In the light of these comments in the Cloud of Unknowing, we might want to go so far as to say that, when situated within the conditions of modernity, the claim to use drugs for mystical ends is nothing more than a kind of ersatz mystical practice.74 But more probably, it is a form of magic that seeks to blur the line between God and creature in a human quest to reach beyond ourselves and make use of creation 71 Charles Baudelaire, 'Artificial Paradises', in Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader (ed. Mike Jay; London: Penguin, 1999), 15-17 (p. 16). ' / 72 The Cloud of Unknowing (trans. Halcyon Backhouse; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), chap. 45. 73 Cloud of Unknowing, chap. 45. 74 As is the attempt to use Christianity for mystical ends.- The use of drugs for generating a mystical-like buzz is no more corrupt or corrupting than the attempt to use Christian spiritual disciplines and encounters with the Spirit for 'getting high'. 120 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement for self-consummation. However, while the immanent may provoke wonder and may even point beyond itself, it can neither initiate relationship with God nor can it directly reveal to us enlightenment about God. Therefore, we should be extremely suspicious of all claims to experience the numinous through contemporary patterns of drug use, and conclude that the ecstasies experienced under drugs are wholly different in kind from the pentecostal ecstasy that is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Whether chemical substances can be helpful adjuncts to faith and traditioned forms of religious practice is another question. The peyote- using Native American church seems to indicate that they can be, as does the use of alcohol in more conventional Christian worship. There appears to be no reason to suppose that chemicals cannot aid the religious life, but the use of chemicals for religious purposes is always shaped and limited by a particular religious tradition that prohibits and excludes such religious use from being informed by a technical rationality, hedonistic gratification and consumerism. Within the Christian tradition, the use of drugs should always be determined by whether or not they contribute to human consummation in the body of Christ and not the consumption of the human body by man. Aldous Huxley has given an eloquent and perceptive statement on the mind-expanding use of drugs. His essay 'The Doors of Perception' is perhaps one of the most widely referred-to statements on drug use ever written.75 For a work of such renown, it is surprising that his conclusions about drug use and mystical experiences are not more adhered to. Huxley argues that ecstatic modes of expression are a proper part of Christian worship. However, there is a bifurcation in which God is acknowledged at a verbal and cognitive level, but excluded from how most people seek euphoria or ecstasy; namely in what Huxley calls 'religion's chemical surrogates' - alcohol, marijuana, coca and the like.76 Drugs such as peyote, he argues, may be more compatible with Christian worship and could help overcome the false dualism between ecstatic euphoria and Christian worship that leads people to resort to 'religion's chemical surrogates'. He does not propose, however, that drugs can lead to Christian ecstasy. He states, T am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other Allusions to Huxley's essay are a leitmotif of recent art and literature associated with drugs, from the cover of The Beatles 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band' album to references in more contemporary films, for example, The Matrix. Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 47-8. Consuming the Body 121 drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realisation of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision.'77 Rather, what he suggests is that 'the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available'.78 The question is whether drugs like LSD and mescalin should be used as a means of enabling or priming ecstatic experiences within the context of Christian worship. It is at this point that we must part ways with Huxley. Huxley, quite apart from his Jamesian conception of mysticism, believes that psychotropic drugs can cleanse the doors of perception and even enable us to see 'what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence'.79 In effect, Huxley supplants Christ, as the mediator and healer of true perception, with chemicals. However, there can be no return to Eden. Drugs cannot cause the cherubim's fiery swords to be drawn back. Neither can drugs enable us to see ourselves more clearly, 'For now we see in a mirror, dimly' (1 Cor. 13:12: NRSV). What clarity of vision we can receive is not given by chemicals but by the Holy Spirit, and is an eschatological vision, not a pharmacological one. 6. Drug use within the history of redemption Having analysed how contemporary patterns of drug use manifest particular features of modernity, we shall now turn to how drugs can be understood within the history of redemption. We shall endeavour to understand how drugs should be used in the light of a theological anthropology. 6.1 'Natural Mystic' As stated before, drugs are ambiguous. All drugs, whether generated within creation (for example, cannabis and opium) or fabricated from creation (for example, Paracetamol and MDMA), have the capacity to poison or heal, lead to human alienation or enable greater personal presence between humans. The location of drug use i£, in the first place, the human body, and the body is, in itself, a created good, withits own 77 Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 50-1. 78 Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 51/' 79 Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 7. 122 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement limits and purposes. Drug use should not usurp or overstep the created boundaries of the body. The use of drugs should instead seek to work within and attempt to fulfil the created goodness of the body. Thus, for example, the use of drugs to deny (rather than heal or enhance) the physical limits of the body, such as using amphetamines or caffeine to completely deny physical tiredness, are prohibited, because such use constitutes the claiming of an illegitimate freedom that is inherently self-defeating. For example, one of the limits drugs like amphetamines seek to deny is the limit of time. Time and space are not constraints that we need liberation from, human existence in time and space is not to be circumvented or diminished through technologies of perception, but as Christ's incarnation affirms, creation is the proper location for humans to live and work and have their being. Thus, physical time limits on the duration we can work are good in that they set physical limits that help shape and properly order human relations. Perhaps the most important limit to the human body is that life itself has an end or goal beyond itself. Karl Barth states: 'Life is no second God, and therefore the respect due to it cannot rival the reverence owed to God.'80 Barth points out that the respect owed to life as a good in itself has as its limitation: 'the will of God the Creator Himself who commands it, and the horizon which is set for man by the same God with his determination for eternal life'.81 What Barth says points also to how Christians understand the basis of their life: it is not their own but received as a gift and loan from God which can only be fulfilled in communion with God. Thus, Christians seek to live within these limits, recognising that between these limits lies the sphere of true freedom. They bear their life in trust for a certain time. In Christianity, life is a good, but it is not the greatest good. When drugs are used to prolong, protect or fulfil (whether hedonistically or medically) life at any cost, then such use indicates that life itself has come to rival God in human estimation, and the drugs themselves are being used illicitly; that is, they have become an adjunct to idolatry. 6.2 'Exodus' That we live east of Eden, and in need of redemption from our condition of slavery to sin and death, has enormous ramifications for how drugs Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 111:4 (trans, by AX Mackay and others; Edinburgh- T&T Clark, 1961), 342. Barth, Dogmatics 111:4, 342. Consuming the Body 123 should be used. Firstly, the goodness of a particular drug cannot be ascertained with regard only to its properties or capacities, but will only become transparent in how it is used and to what end its use is directed. Secondly, we cannot eliminate what causes us to stumble by banning or abstaining from drugs. Drugs may open a door to the sin of gluttony (for example, drunkenness), but drugs themselves are not the cause of such sin. Even those drugs that can induce a physiological dependency, for example heroin, may be used with temperance over long periods of time.82 What leads to gluttony is the character and circumstances of a person rather than the substance itself.83 Christ's teaching on what defiles us is an important check on overinvesting drugs themselves with corrupting properties. Throughout the Gospels, Christ is portrayed as in conflict with many other programmes for the purification and holiness of Israel.84 One of the central conflicts is with an approach to holiness that involves ritual purity, while ignoring character and intention. Mark 7:18-23 states: lesus said to them,'[...] Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?' (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, 'It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.' (NRSV) 82 Whether it is the chemical effect of a drug that induces a physiological dependency or whether dependency is caused by the fear and pain of withdrawal is a matter of much dispute. A related issue is the interaction between the user's expectation ('set') and their physical and social context ('setting') in determining the effects of drugs. Variables in either of these change the experienced impact of a drug upon the body. 33 There is much debate between those who think drugs can artificially induce dependency in anyone (thus restricting exposure is key) and those who think that the chemicals themselves and their supply matters less than the personal and cultural values that modulate the demand for and use of any particular drug. Proponents of the former view point to the link between proximity and high rates of dependency. Proponents of the latter view point to examples such as the contrast between rates of alcoholism in Ireland and Italy or Spain: despite high levels of per capita consumption of alcohol in all these countries, alcoholism in Ireland is far more widespread. For an example of the second view, see Stanton Peele, 'A Moral Vision of Addiction: How People's Values Determine.Whether They Become and Remain Addicts', Journal'of Drug Issues,' 17.2 ,(1987), 187-215. 84 For an account of these conflicts, see'Marcus Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1972). 124 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement The use of drugs may greatly exacerbate our folly and licentiousness, but drugs do not cause them. The contrast between Dr William Stewart Halsted and Samuel Taylor Coleridge illustrates how it is not drugs per se that lead to drug binges and personal breakdown. Halsted (1852-1922), one of the four distinguished founders of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, sustained a dependency on morphine all his life while also being a practising surgeon of famed skill.85 By comparison, Coleridge proved consistently unable to control his opium dependency, and the effects of his physiological and psychological dependency on the drug greatly compounded his personal, artistic and professional problems. However, the roots of Coleridge's problems lay not in his physiological dependency on opium, but in tragic flaws in his character, for example, his procrastination. Holmes notes that when, after 1814, Coleridge did finally confess to the full extent of his opium dependency, his admissions emphasise its moral as well as its physical dimensions. Holmes states that Coleridge's letters of confession 'reveal a strong philosophical or religious dimension, based on the notion of the corrupted human will - Coleridge's version of original sin ... Opium of course was his own particular sin, but it arose out of the fallen condition of mankind.'86 If what causes problems with drugs is not initially or primarily the drugs themselves but our sinful characters, then we must learn how to manage our responses to drugs in the light of our fallen condition. Managing our responses to drugs means undertaking to school the flesh and avoid establishing patterns of life (either corporately or individually) that encourage dependency on drugs. It is important, at this point, to make a distinction between temperance and abstinence. Temperance movements have generally confused one with the other, but temperance does not mean abstinence. Rather, it means 'the practice or habit of exercising self-control or moderation'.87 Temperance is thus what Paul is referring to with regard to sexual relations in 1 Thessalonians when he calls for each one of us to know 'how to control [our] own body in holiness and honor, not with lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God' (1 Thess. 4:4-5'. NRSV). Edward Brecher, Licit and Illicit Drugs; the Consumers Union Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens, and Marijuana - Including Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), ch 5. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 356. 'Temperance', New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (CD-ROM ed.; Oxford: OUP, 1996). Consuming the Body 125 John Paul II argues that the virtue of temperance is what Paul means when he calls for purity. In John Paul IPs view, the virtue of temperance has a twofold aspect: it is both abstention from the passion of lust and, at the same time, control of one's own body in holiness and honour.88 However, control and abstention from lust (rather than abstention from any particular created good) must be balanced with the need to avoid legalism. In Galatians 5, Paul talks of the mutual antipathy of Spirit and flesh (5:17); however, as O'Donovan notes, Paul's use of the term 'flesh' unites both flesh as 'desire' (epithymia) and flesh as 'law' (nomos).89 In other words, legalism and licence are two sides of the same coin. Thus, legalistic abstention from, and prohibition of, drugs is as pernicious as the gluttonous or lawless use of drugs. Both constitute a false valorisation of one's own flesh and a denial of the work of the Spirit. Our proper response to drugs is one of temperate use; for it is through temperance that we properly respect the created goodness of the human body and grow in our detachment from what, in the human heart, is the fruit of the lusts of the flesh, rather than the fruit of the Holy Spirit.90 We must also avoid overinvesting any particular substance with demonic properties and denying the goodness of creation. Paul's teaching in 1 Corinthians 8 is particularly relevant here. NT. Wright sees 1 Corinthians 8 as an attempt to fight a battle on two fronts: that is, against a gnostic-like dualism (which constitutes the rejection of the goodness of the created order) and against paganism (which constitutes the deification of the created order).91 Drugs can become a form of idolatry or be used, like meat, as part of a wider system of idolatry. For example, we have already analysed the link between drugs and the idolatry of consumerism. However, for Paul, idols have no real existence (1 Cor. 8:4), and the things we consume do not, in and of themselves, establish our relationship with God or alienate us from God (1 Cor. 8:8). However, idols, and meat sacrificed to them, signal a real phenomenon that must be dealt with and not sidestepped. To place oneself in the sphere of idols is to be involved in demon worship. Wright states that for Paul: 88 John Paul II, The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1997), 200-1. 89 Oliver O'Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 12. 90 John Paul II, The Theology of the Body, 205. 91 N.T. Wright, 'Monotheism, Christology.arid Ethics: 1 Corinthians 8', in The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 120-36 (p. 125). 126 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement To enter an idol's temple, and eat there alongside those who are actually intending to share fellowship with this non-god, this hand-made pseudo- god - this is to invite created powers to have an authority over one which they do not possess, a power which belongs only to the creator-God revealed in and through Jesus the Messiah.92 Therefore we may conclude that Paul is saying to avoid eating meat in temples of idolatry, but that the purchase and consumption of meat from the market is licit (for to say anything else would be to lapse into Manichaeism). Our problem, of course, is that the marketplace has become the temple. In this situation, there must be an emphasis on creating mature habits of consumption, characterised by temperance, which are neither bound by the practices of the idolatry of consumerism, nor subject to the idolatry of technology, but directed to consummation in Christ. By saying that our primary concern is developing temperance in how we use drugs, am I saying that no drug is off limits? As with meat sacrificed to idols, so we must say of drugs: "'All things are lawful", but not all things are beneficial. 'All things are lawful", but not all things build up' (1 Cor. 10:23: NRSV). There can be no drug that is not licit, although there may be many drugs of which we might say they are not recommended. Conversely, there canbe no drug which we are commanded to consume, not even wine at the Eucharist. We cannot be commanded to consume a drug because, as Paul exhorts us, each should be concerned for the consciences of others in the community, and where patterns of consumption might cause a scandal to 'weaker' members, these substances should be avoided. Thus, for example, the practice of teetotalism by some Baptists in Russia may well be an appropriate response to extremely high rates of alcoholism in that country. But such abstention is a tactical measure, limited by particular circumstances. Nevertheless, our situation is a bit more complex than simply counselling moderation in all things and restraint where appropriate. If the location of idolatry in a technocratic, consumer culture is the body itself, then there is a direct rivalry between the body as a temple of consumerism and the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit.93 If drugs are a primary means of habituating ourselves to certain aspects of modernity, then all forms of drug use, therapeutic or otherwise, may be instances of what Paul calls 'sins against the body'; that is, drug 92 Wright, 'Monotheism, Christology and Ethics', 134. 93 1 Corinthians 6:19. Consuming the Body 127 use directly turns the body away from glorifying God and denies that our bodies were 'purchased at a price' through Christ's death and resurrection. Thus, within a technocratic and consumer society, drug use turns the body itself (as distinct from the act or substance) into a witness against God in a manner parallel to fornication.94 Thus, while we may, in theory, moderately or occasionally consume drugs such as alcohol or tobacco in good conscience, when we recognise how consuming these drugs constitutes a way in which we participate in contemporary forms of idolatry, and how such use makes of our bodies objects of consumption by an all-pervasive system of domination, then temperance may, in practice, not always be enough. At the present time, abstinence may well be a necessary form of gospel witness. 6.3 'Redemption Song' As well as being circumscribed by the conditions of witness, all use of drugs is relativised by the gift of the Holy Spirit and the fulfilment of time when there will be no more tears (and thus no more need for therapeutic drugs) and when we shall all be caught up in the euphoric ecstasy of the messianic banquet (and therefore, there will be no more unfulfilled desire for personal ecstasy that some drugs simulate and parody). All drug use is relativised as an activity limited to this age, with no significance in the age to come. Furthermore, we live between the times, betwixt this age and the age to come. Any attempt to falsely resolve that tension, either by engineering a permanent contentment now (through 'cosmetic pharmacology') or by chemically-induced attempts to experience God's kingdom come, are both ruled out, for they both seek to deny the eschaton as a gift given by God (which may, through the Spirit, be experienced now). In short, we cannot use drugs to create, what is in effect, an artificial paradise. The wine of the Eucharist is but a provisional supplement to the wine of the Spirit.95 1 Corinthians 6:18. Conversely, it is precisely the properties of wine which constitute part of its appropriateness for use at the Eucharist. The way in which wine acts as an inebriant is part of its theological symbolic value as a token of the eschaton and resurrection gladness. Thus, grape juice is not as good as wine. Moreover, the use of grape juice completely misses a central point of the use of bread and wine at the Eucharist; the pattern for the eschatological transfiguration of all creation is given at the Last Supper: Christ did not take pristine grain and grapes; instead, he took bread and wine, the products of human labour^ creativity and culture (i.e. creation as priested by humans) and transformed them (not raw creation) into an anticipation of their eschatological fulfilment. Again, central to the appropriateness of bread and wine 128 Public Theology in Cultural Engagement Given that the wine of the Spirit is available now, there is no need to get drunk on wine.96 As a provisional supplement to the wine of the Spirit, drugs may be used both therapeutically and in an ampliative way to enable personal presence, either through healing the body or enhancing personal relations. For example, the use of alcohol to promote conviviality is good in the light of the telos of human being as communion with God and each other.97 Indeed, the use of wine to foreshadow the messianic banquet lies at the heart of Jesus' actions at the wedding feast at Cana (John 2:1-11). Conversely, when drugs militate against greater personal presence and a deepening of communal relations, then a line has been crossed between proper use and abuse. The line between the use of alcohol (or cannabis) to enable conviviality and being drunk (or stoned) is drawn at the point at which alienation and the sundering of personal relations sets in. We must always ask, when someone is using alcohol (or cannabis) whether that person is more or less physically, spiritually, emotionally and rationally present to others and, if they are, at what point does the drug in use inhibit both an individual's present ability and their future capacity for personal presence to God and others.98 Drugs that create a false, chemically-induced sense of profound community (as distinct from a convivial or congenial one) are rendered illicit. While we may anticipate the messianic banquet in this age, at the Eucharist is their intrinsic properties. Parallels may be drawn, for example, with the use of stained glass windows, the colour and light refracting properties of which are intrinsic to their use as icons. Or as the physician who treated Coleridge for his opium addiction, Dr Daniel, noted, after an evening with the poet, 'The Conversation was mantling like Champagne - & Laughter, as I have often observed, is the most potent Producer of Forgetfulness, of the whole Pharmacopeia, moral or medical.' Holmes, Coleridge, 360. On the theological significance of laughter, see Karl-Josef Kuschel, Laughter: A Theological Essay (trans. John Bowden; New York: Continuum, 1994). It is a false view of human relations to think it is possible to be wholly personally present to everyone all the time. Human relationships properly operate on a scale from casual exchanges in a bus queue to the profound conversations of deep friendship or the vulnerability of sexual intercourse. Conviviality lies somewhere between these two poles. This, of course, raises the huge question of what it means to be personally present to others. Two important and related questions are whether enhancement technologies like Prozac enable or disable authentic personal presence and how such technologies may function to enable the kinds of personal transformation that formation into the form of Christ entails. Discernment of how different drugs affect human relationships and personhood will become ever more pressing with increasing use of psychopharmacology. On this, see Elliott, Better Than Well. Consuming the Body 129 such anticipations are shaped by Christ's crucifixion. Our joy in the communion presently available is found as, by the Spirit, we 'put to death the misdeeds of the body' (Rom. 8:13). The intrinsically strong effect of drugs like ecstasy short circuits the cruciform nature of personal relations, by attempting a technological solution to the painful, time- intensive dynamics of repentance, forgiveness, attentiveness to one's neighbour, sacrificial self-giving and all the other aspects of personal transformation that are required for profound community between humans." The ecstatic joy of the Prodigal's embrace by his father is entirely different in kind to the unity enjoyed solely under the influence of drugs, the value of which is debased precisely because it is fabricated. One is an event of hard-won communion, the other is simply one more consumer event. Indeed, rather than bear witness to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in its life together, such drug-induced patterns of ecstasy and community constitute a parody of it The above theological deliberations can be summarised in terms of a series of questions that can be addressed to any drug. These are: Firstly, in the light of who we are as created beings, is a particular drug being used to manipulate or control the body in a way that denies the bodies created goodness and its created limits? Secondly, given our status as fallen beings, is the use of a particular drug idolatrous or not? And, furthermore, when we look at the context in which a particular drug is being used, is temperance or abstinence called for? Thirdly, as those who are redeemed through Jesus Christ and who may now enjoy communion with God, does using a drug make us more or less personally present to others and, if it does, at what point does the drug in use inhibit both an individual's immediate ability, and their future capacity, for personal presence to God and others? A related question to this last one is whether a particular drug being used allows for the cruciform shape of redeemed human relations before Christ's return, or does it seek to create an artificial paradise? The application of these questions to the drugs we use or proscribe should help in discerning the licitness or otherwise of any particular drug. 7. Conclusion ^ In conclusion, there is much more that could be said on the topic of drugs. However, I have sought to understand how, in the contemporary However, this is not to rule oiit the possibility that milder forms that have an effect analogous to small quantities of alcohol may be licit. Public Theology in Cultural Engagement context, drugs are used and what, in the light of theological criteria of evaluation, they signify. I argued that contemporary patterns of drug use are: firstly, a paradigmatic instance of the modern, technocratic conception of the body as an object of manipulation; secondly, the fruit of contemporary patterns of certain dynamics within consumerism; and thirdly, that in what they say about the human body and the way it shapes human life together, contemporary patterns of drug use constitute a denial of the reality of the body as a gift of God, subject to sin, but redeemed through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and open to fulfilment through the perfecting and empowering presence of the Spirit as we await Christ's return. 7 Culture and the End of Religion Colin ].D. Greene Introduction In this volume, the various contributors are endeavouring to face some of the difficult and complex issues involved in working out a coherent and constructive theology of culture. It goes without saying that all of us are daily involved in this task whether we recognise it or not. The reality of living in the modern world means we are immersed in a huge tidal flow of cultural artefacts, influences and consumer-driven flotsam that continually present us with theological, ethical and philosophical problems. However we choose to describe our present cultural situation - postmodern, post-secular, post- Christendom, post-industrial, post-Christian, post-ethical - the predominance of the prefix 'post' suggests that the changes we are presently experiencing in our cultural hinterland are so vast, so complex and potentially catastrophic that both the Christian church and the theological establishment are in danger of simply being left out of the equation altogether. It is for this reason that I would like to concentrate on one particular aspect of our present cultural situation that has become so firmly situated in the cultural mores of contemporary society as to go virtually unchallenged. Moreover, I would suggest that this factor is the primary reason why Christians and theologians are not regarded as essential contributors to the discussions and debates that largely determine our future cultural horizons. I refer to what has become known as the privatisation of religion or the marginalisation of religion, from the public life of society and culture in general. This is a factor that signals for many the end of religion as a coherent system of beliefs and values that could unite a society or culture in a common sense of purpose