We fast not for God, but our egos By Theodore Dalrymple Self-denial is no longer about depriving ourselves of pleasures for religious reasons, but about improving our life-expectancy in the face of self-indulgence, argues our reporter, who has given up Lent for Lent

ONCE UPON A TIME, mortification of the flesh was an aid to spiritual reflection and purification. People abjured pleasures during Lent to remind themselves of Christ's suffering on their behalf, and to remind them of their own sinfulness. It was an aid to self-perfection, conceived as the imitation of God. Nowadays such mortification is simply the continuation of self-indulgence by other means, because for us only the flesh is real. That is to say, the flesh is willing, but the spirit is nonexistent. As everyone knows, we live in a post-religious age, though not a post-superstitious one. Our sense of sin has shrivelled, so that it is scarcely more than a vague rumour descending from a distant and ill-remembered past.

A few years ago a famous fitness instructor was asked whether she had any vices. Yes, she replied, she liked coffee, and sometimes even went so far as to drink it. This was not a joke: keeping fit was for her a business. A weakness for coffee was her idea of wickedness because she thought that if she drank it, she might become less fit or, even more wickedly, fall ill.

So much for two-and-a-half millennia of strenuous philosophical reflection upon virtue and what it means to be good. The good person is now one who avoids coffee - or sugar or chocolate - and thus preserves the temple of his or her body intact.

It seems almost as if Dr Chasuble's famous remark in the Importance of Being Earnest, enjoining Miss Prism to be charitable because none of us is perfect (he himself admitting to a peculiar susceptibility to colds) has been transmuted from a joke into a complete and sufficient philosophy of life.

In so far as people still give up something for Lent, they do so as a kind of seasonal diet that takes place annually between the overindulgence of Christmas and the summer holidays, when they hope not to appear too ridiculous in a swimming costume. As for our sense of guilt, it now applies mainly to such self-indulgences as will harm our appearance or our health.

This guilt, unattached as it is to any transcendental form of punishment (such as eternal hellfire), places but a weak restraint upon our appetites and passions: never have we been fatter, drunker, angrier or more given to taking drugs.

Convinced as we are that this life is all we have, that it is but a brief interval of consciousness between the two eternities of oblivion before our birth and after our death, we veer between two imperatives that are not always fully compatible: to live as long as we can, and to enjoy ourselves as much as possible throughout our all-too-short span. A dialectic is thus set up between pleasure taken in haste and contrition experienced at leisure.

For since the science (or at least the discipline) of epidemiology first came into the world, we have been taught to believe that a long life requires the avoidance of precisely those things that we would rather do and rather eat. Just as criminology is the science of finding excuses for criminals, so epidemiology is the science of discovering the harm in pleasures.

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