Lust - the deadly sin of lesser desire
C. S. Lewis admitted to being addicted to lust as an undergraduate yet argued that “you might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of.” The desire he speaks of here is Joy—an inconsolable yearning for something far beyond the ability of mere lust to satisfy. Which is why lust—the disconnected yearning for a body, rather than a person—is traditionally considered the least serious of the seven deadly sins: deadly in their ability, that is, to be the gateway to the greater sins of murder, rape, theft, and fraud (the sins with which Dante fills his Inferno).
But to understand the way he deals with the seven deadly, or gateway sins, one must travel with him and Virgil up the seven steep terraces of Mt. Purgatory—a journey of purging through lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy, and pride, in preparation for Paradiso, the third and final kingdom of his great Trilogy, The Divine Comedy. It is a journey which, for some sinners, can take thousands of years, and for others, a mere moment.
But what must be understood, is that each deadly sin is, ontologically, a distortion of a particular desire—each of which is intrinsically good. And this makes the journey up Mt. Purgatory not a journey to stifle desire, but a journey to un-distort and increase them in the right direction; a journey to essentially re-train and re-sharpen them. For Desire is the universal gravity of Dante’s Trilogy.
So “it would seem,” observes Lewis, “that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.” And so, our sins are often caused by a lack of desire, rather than too much desire.
But in what way can lust be considered a lack of desire? I can only offer my own experience here: when I first fell in love as a college sophomore, I only realized, in retrospect, that I felt absolutely no lust towards the young brunette who had just disrupted my life. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, day or night, and yet the idea of lusting over her seemed preposterous—like choosing a muddy slum over a roaring ocean. Lust and Love simply would not mix.
Certainly, I longed to sense her body next to mine in chapel, and perhaps to even dare to briefly flicker my hand against hers. But sex? What on earth could sex offer me now? I was in love! As Lewis pointed out: “you might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure” to a man who has just fallen in love.
The experience was more painful than anything I had ever endured during five years in an oppressive boy’s boarding school in Africa. And I felt like Gimli, who, when leaving the faery world of Lothlorien, cried out: “Torment in the dark was what I expected on this journey. But I never would have come had I known of the wound of light and joy…alas for Gimli son of Gloin!” Like Gimli, I too had experienced some “torment in the dark,” but had never yet felt this “wound of light and joy.”
Like Kim Harrison in The Undead Pool, being in love was something I desperately wanted, yet knew “wasn’t going to happen…and something in me was withering. …and it hurt more than I thought was possible to survive.” And neither lust nor sex could alleviate it.
Lust is like a severed limb which has begun to rot. It can, at first, bring much pleasure when stripped and flaunted on stage. Or stuffed and preserved in a museum of beautiful and rare limbs. But eventually it will die if disconnected from the beloved. Or imagine, says Lewis, visiting a country where theatres can be filled “by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?”
Giovanni Segantini - The Punishment of Lust
And so, I remained a virgin through all four years of college, and beyond, because the thought of having sex--with the unrequited roar of true love still in my ears—felt like blasphemy. Yet lust doggedly remained: a constant companion distorting whatever images it could find—from legs to lips to labia. All I could do was refuse it any access to the temple of true love which I still preserved—inviolate—somewhere deep inside me.
In George MacDonald’s faery-world, Phantastes, Lust is able to prowl around in the guise of a beautiful woman, offering kisses (and more) to any man she encounters. But as soon as a man kisses her, her disguise is destroyed, and he finds himself in the arms of a hideous hag who will not let him go. In Fairyland, says J. R. R. Tolkien, the insides are on the outside; all disguises are stripped, and we see things as they really are. So, a kiss in Fairyland is never just a kiss; it is a promise of fidelity. Lips are connected to the soul of a real person. They are not, as we see them on Earth: sensuous organs of arousal, disconnected from the person.
And so, when Paris kissed Helen, “her lips suck[ed] forth his soul,”1 destroyed her marriage with King Menelaus of Sparta, and launched one of the bloodiest wars in the Graeco-Roman mythology. A kiss is never just a kiss. Lips are never just lips. Unless we swallow the bait of lesser desire—the first deadly sin.
