March 30, 2024: Lust
Good morning. The post is again early today, as I wrote most of it on Friday and won’t have much writing time today. This is the final installment of my Lenten series on the seven deadly sins. Although it’s not Lent anymore; the Triduum—from Holy Thursday two days ago to Easter tomorrow—is a separate liturgical period.
Here is the full series:
We’ve looked at many areas of morality and the Catholic Church’s position in particular on issues throughout this series, and today we are going to look at some of the most controversial and misunderstood subjects. I’ll do my best to present the Church’s positions accurately, even though I probably won’t be entirely successful.
But first, we need to understand what lust is, and there is more to it than simply disordered sexuality. According to Wikipedia, lust “is a psychological force producing intense desire for something, or circumstance while already having a significant amount of the desired object.” That “something” isn’t necessary sex. We also talk of a lust for power or of bloodlust. Another definition comes from St. John Paul II. Many of his early sermons as pope have been coalesced into what we now know as the Theology of the Body. One aspect of that is as follows.
He understood lust basically as the instrumentalization of another person, where we value someone else not in their subjectivity and as persons to be our love, but merely as objects to be used or tools for pleasure. This reduces the human person to something lesser.
Again, while John Paul II was speaking of sexuality, we can understand this in a broader context. For instance, most of us are accustomed to thinking of business relations in a transactional manner: the value of an employer is the paycheck, and the value of an employee is their value added for the company, and not recognizing any intrinsic value. Or, coming back to ecological brokenness, we are accustomed to viewing the nonhuman world has instrumental to human needs, and not as having any intrinsic value.
This sort of instrumentalization is bad enough in the context of business relationships, but when it governs our approach to romance, it is the source of a large fraction of what goes wrong. The transactional mindset to romance leads to what I would call a consensual set of sexual ethics. By consensual ethics, I mean that the yardstick for judging the morality of an action is that all affected parties freely consent.
While consent is obviously a necessary condition for ordered sexuality, it is far from sufficient. For one thing, “affected parties” is always broader than first appears, and our thoughts, words, and actions have effects that go far beyond what we first imagine. An obvious manifestation of this is with ethics surrounding abortion. It is well known that the Church opposes abortion at all stages of the fetus’ development from conception. While the USCCB statement refers to modern scientific understanding of embryology, the Church’s position should also be understood as carrying a vitalist element: that human life—which entails moral obligation—is not reducible to brain activity or the capacity to experience pleasure or pain.
The USCCB statement also makes it clear that their position on abortion is part of a broader understanding of social justice, which means that the sanctity of human life must be respected in the context of warfare, poverty, immigration, capital punishment, and euthanasia. It is a mistake, that unfortunately many pro-life activists make, to think that the phrase “sanctity of life” refers only to abortion.
The limitations of consensual ethics to romance go deeper, however. Sexuality is a central part of our individual lives and of our situation as a species, and it has a central purpose in Creation. I touched briefly at the end of last week’s post on how we go astray when we think that the attainment of pleasure and avoidance of pain is the central, or even the only, moral principle. When we apply this thinking to romance, we make the mistake of thinking that the purpose of dating or of marriage is our own pleasure, so long as the relationship is consensual.
The Church promulgates four pillars of a healthy marriage: it is faithful, free, indissoluble, and fruitful. These pillars help us understand where things can go wrong.
“Faithful” means that the marriage should be between two baptized spouses. It means that faith should be a central part of the marriage and also of the upbringing of children that may result. It underscores that a marriage goes beyond a mere transactional relationship, and that the marriage’s role in Creation is celebrated.
“Free” means free consent, referring to the principles of consent as outlined above. Both spouses should enter into the marriage without coercion, should fully understand the commitment they are making, and should be prepared to follow through. Wedding vows are sacred and are some of the most important vows that a person will ever make.
“Indissoluble” indicates the belief that marriage is a sacred commitment that ends only with the death of one of the spouses. Thus, the Church does not recognize a concept of divorce. However, the Church does have a process of annulment, which is a determination that the marriage was not canonically valid. Annulment is controversial, with some Catholics thinking that it shouldn’t be necessary at all and other thinking that the process is too lenient.
Indissoluble also means a monogamous commitment. It rules out adultery, even with consensual polyamorous or polygamous arrangements. It rules out fornication—sex outside of marriage—and dating indefinitely without any intention of ever getting married.
“Fruitful” is an openness to having children and a commitment to raising them. Thus fruitfulness rules out same-sex marriages, the use of artificial contraception inside of marriage or out, and masturbation. It does not mean that a couple must have children to be considered validly married, nor does it means that the couple should have as many kids as they can.
The fear of instrumentalization of human life also underlies many of the Church’s teachings about biotechnology, particularly the opposition to in vitro fertilization. The Church’s position is based on three considerations: that IVF necessarily entails the destruction of many embryos, which are considered to be created persons; that IVF severs the link between sexuality and procreation; and that IVF treats human life as a commodity rather than as a gift. This view is not shared by many individual Catholics. These issues will be salient in many other ways in coming decades, depending on how biotechnology develops.
There are biotech issues that I struggle with. Modern science and medical technology allows billions of people to live who otherwise couldn’t and to live comfortable lives, and we should praise God that such things exist and that humans have been able to take part in their cocreative process. Instead, many Catholics show, at best, a grudging toleration toward modern medicine and have been willing to entertain hostile, even conspiratorial, views toward medicine, such as conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines (a view which is contrary to papal statements). I remind the reader that I owe my own life to modern medicine.
For someone who believes in and rigorously applies the aforementioned principles, there are still some major pitfalls.
First, the Church’s teachings about marriage and sexuality can come across as arbitrary and puritanical if one does not understand where they come from. And I also don’t fully understand everything. For example, I’ve asked and have had it explained to me the moral distinction between artificial contraception, which is proscribed, and natural family planning, which is permitted. But I still don’t understand. This can lead one to accept all teachings that they agree with and reject all teachings that they don’t agree with or understand. Understanding takes work.
Second, and perhaps the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed, Christian principles about sexuality do often carry a judgmentalism that crosses the line into bigotry, especially against homosexuals and transgendered people. Regardless of any other principles, bigotry is a grave sin, and slogans such as “hate the sin, love the sinner” do not come across with much credibility. This is something that Christians need to confront and handle much better.
Third, there is what can be called the box-checking problem. A person can fall into the habit of thinking that, since they’ve followed all the rules, everything is fine. A major driver of Americans’ more accepting attitude toward divorce is the perception of a great many loveless marriages that are held together only by a taboo against divorce.
Fourth, there is the perception that the purpose of all these rules, really, is to forbid pleasure, and the stereotype that if it feels good, then it must be a sin. Sometimes there is a certain moral pride in self-denial. But this misses the point entirely.
One theme I’ve tried to come back to in this series is the wounds that lead us into sin. Dating and marriage are hard. Every reader has, no doubt, had at least a few bad experiences over the years. Maybe we’ve been cheated on. Maybe a partner has been abusive, irresponsible, or otherwise severely broken. Maybe we have struggled greatly to find a suitable partner in the first place. Maybe, at times, we have been the source of problems. These are our fears, and they are very real, well-grounded fears. Oftentimes, lust has an element of control, because we don’t want to be vulnerable to being hurt in these ways.
Love is not blind. When infatuated, it is easy to look at reality as we want to see it, and not how it actually is. Done right, love requires patience and careful thought. And even then, there is always the risk of things going sideways. Not all of us are destined for marriage and children, and we might simply have to accept that.
But love is blind in the sense that, if we do move forward, it will at some level have to be an act of faith, and we have to recognize that neither ourselves nor our spouse is perfect and be ready to forgive. And there is always the potential for tragedy. For my part, I don’t regret my own marriage, even though it didn’t turn out in the way that I had hoped.
Another theme that I have tried to come back to in this series is mortality. The most basic fact about our earthly lives is that they will eventually come to an end. Love can’t change that, but love, along with faith, is one of the few things in which we can begin to transcend that reality.
Concluding Thoughts
Next week, I plan to return to an environmental topic, and so I want to share a few final thoughts about this series as a whole and the media fast. I have very much enjoyed writing it, and I am grateful for those of you who have commented that you enjoyed reading it. There are already a few additional things that I wished I had discussed in previous posts, and some things that I wish I had discussed differently. This is inevitable. I’ve covered a lot of ground in the last seven weeks, but obviously I can’t cover everything.
One purpose of this series has been to examine my own conscience and to uncover ways in which I have fallen short. The details of this examination belong in a confessional rather than on this blog, but I have found the writing to be productive in that regard.
I don’t very much like repeating topics, and I don’t think that I will ever do a deadly sins series again, but I do expect to come back to religious topics again in the future. Three topics in particular that I would like to tackle in greater depth are the problem of evil, ecological brokenness, and whether to regard suffering as redemptive. There are many others.
As far as the media fast, I mentioned at the beginning of Lent that I am foreswearing forms of media (social media, YouTube, video games, music, books, etc.) except those which are needed for professional obligations, this blog, or are Christian in nature. Although I am very much looking forward to getting back into some of these things after Easter, I have also come to appreciate how spiritually corrosive some media can be, including a lot of so-called Christian media. Lent is to be a time of transformation; we go back to our normal lives after Easter, but it should be a new normal, and not exactly the way things were.