Life's Pleasures Quote by John Fiske

A single word does the dirty work here: mummery. Fiske isn’t politely asking whether he should keep up appearances; he’s confessing that the ritual now feels like theater, and that the theater demands his body even after it’s lost his belief. The question turns communion from a sacrament into a moral test of authenticity: not whether God is present, but whether Fiske can stand to perform assent.

As a philosopher writing in the late 19th century, Fiske sits inside a cultural pressure cooker. This is the era when Darwin’s aftershocks are still rattling parlors and pulpits, when “respectable” society expects churchgoing even as educated people privately renegotiate what they can honestly affirm. Communion day intensifies that pressure because it’s not passive attendance; it’s participation. You don’t just listen. You ingest. The body becomes a signature.

The subtext is double-edged. On one side is integrity: the fear that taking the bread and wine without faith is a kind of self-betrayal, or worse, a public lie. On the other side is social belonging: refusing communion can read as a declaration of exile, a statement that you’ve broken with the community’s shared story. Fiske’s phrasing captures the modern predicament before it had a name: the anxious gap between outward rituals that still organize communal life and inward convictions that no longer cooperate. The line’s power is its refusal to grandstand; it’s an ethical wince, aimed not at religion’s hypocrisy, but his own.