Temperance and Gluttony

Virtue & Vice #7

Grab a pint of ice cream (I just finished one), and let’s get started with our discussion about temperance and gluttony. Up first, gluttony, the overindulgence of anything to the point of waste or selfishness. Most of us are probably familiar with gluttony regarding food, particularly overeating, but gluttony involves more than just quantity but also quality, when, and why as well.

Gluttony is the inability to tell ourselves no. Eating an entire bag of sour cream and onion potato chips or binging 6 hours of Army Wives are obvious examples that I’m sure none of us have experienced in our personal lives.

In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, we find the following in Letter 17 which perfectly demonstrates gluttony regarding quality:

The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of catching souls, in your last letter, only shows your ignorance. One of the great achievements of the last hundred years has been to deaden the human conscience on that subject so that by now you will hardly find a sermon preached or a conscience troubled about it in the whole length and breadth of Europe. This has largely been affected by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of Delicacy, not gluttony of Excess. Your patient’s mother, as I learn from the dossier and you might have learned from Glubose, is a good example. She would be astonished—one day, I hope, will be—to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the quantities involved are small. But what do quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness, and self-concern? Glubose has this old woman well in hand. She is a positive terror to hostesses and servants. She is always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sigh and a smile ‘Oh please, please . . . all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast.’ You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others. At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practising temperance.

So next time your kiddo says, “I will only eat my spaghetti with one bowl for noodles and cheese and a second bowl for sauce,” serve that spaghetti in one bowl and tell your child they are welcome for you are helping them to combat gluttony.

Finally the when and why. Have you seen the candy bar commercials when someone turns into a cranky person when they are hungry? That “hangry” is also gluttony. On-Demand streaming, Doordash, and Amazon Prime are just a few manifestations of our inability to wait patiently. If you ask yourself why you’re consuming the beverage, food, or TV show and you have NO idea, also gluttony.

God doesn’t give us a list of “no” or “don’t” to make our lives hard. The reality is the complete opposite. He made us to have joy, happiness, and freedom. He desires for us to experience all of the right things in the right way. When we can’t say no, we don’t have the ability to enjoy and we become slaves to our uncontrollable desires. To remain free from this slavery, we must practice temperance, being able to control ourselves, self-restraint. Temperance pulls our senses into control with reason to regain freedom in enjoyment. This self-denial requires practice, patience, and prayer.