Lust: disordered desire

In the fourth of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, Belle Tindall explores how Lust minimises or sensationalises sex and desire.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

In the Emmy-nominated HBO show, White Lotus, we’re introduced to three generations of a glamorous Italian-American family: F Murray Abraham, Michael Imperioli and Adam DiMarco play a grandfather, father, and son, two of whom are in an ever-present battle with a sex addiction. Lust has made a home in this family, it has dug out and paved its own neuropathways, and ultimately blown these people apart. Scene after scene, we witness these men pathologically view women as nothing more than bodies to conquer, much to their own despair. You could say that Lust is the unseen, unspoken, yet undeniable villain of the entire series. We witness it obliterate relationships of all kinds and ultimately make way for danger and death to ensue.

It’s a masterful case-study in how destructive of a force Lust can be when left unchecked, not only to the objectified, but also to the one who can’t help but do the objectifying.

I conducted a little experiment in preparation for writing this piece, I asked five friends of mine who would not, and never have, identified as Christians, for the three things that they most associate with Christianity.

Out of those five people, four of them mentioned Christianity’s rather peculiar sexual ethics. Now, I know that as far as research goes, this isn’t the most scientific finding. But it is telling. An article on lust may just be the least surprising thing one could find on a magazine site that offers ‘Christian perspectives on just about everything’. In popular culture and common thought, Christianity is to sex is what Jamie Oliver is to sugary drinks: an almighty party-pooper, a tiresome force that is out to spoil everybody’s fun. That’s largely a result of Christian sexual ethics being reduced to a set of repressive ‘don’ts.’

Don’t have casual sex, or any kind of sex outside of the confines of marriage, for that matter.
Don’t watch pornography
Don’t explore self-sex
Don’t talk about it
Don’t think about it

Just don’t.

As such, Christianity’s view of sex has been regarded as square or prudish at best, and oppressive and cruel at worst. And here you are, having stumbled upon an article which is about to place Lust back in its familiar old ‘deadly sin’ category. Ground-breaking, I hear you cry.

Well, allow me the pleasure of beginning this piece by saying something that is less predictable: Lust is not interchangeable with sexual desire. The two are not one and the same.

Sex is good. Very good, in fact.

According to the book of Genesis, the book that acts as the Bible’s start-line, it is one of the first instructions ever given to humanity. It’s an apparent component of our purpose (pre- ‘original sin’, might I add). We’re told to go ahead and multiply, to increase in number, to have sex. But it doesn’t end there. If it did, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Bible presents sex in purely practical and procreational terms. But, not so. From one biblical poem to another – this time, the Song of Songs. This book is nothing short of erotic literature, it is a fully-fledged sex-scene. The composition and inclusion of this book speaks volumes, it does away with the notion that sexual pleasure and desire are some kind of inherent evil. On the contrary, if it’s a biblical perspective that you’re after, here it is: sex was designed by God and gifted to humanity. For procreation, yes. But also, for pleasure, intimacy, and well-being.

So, in summary: sex is a gift, a very good one at that.

With that firmly in mind, let’s return to Lust. If Lust is not sexual desire, per se, what exactly is it?

It is a perception of sex, and a corresponding desire for it, that has been either minimised or sensationalised. Sex is a gift, that is the Christian insight at least, but Lust wants to blur your vision, it wants you to believe that sex is either more or less than a good gift. Lust seeks to disorder your desire.

To only desire one third of a person, to regard them exclusively as a body, is to undermine their full personhood.

The belief that sex is inherently meaningless, that it can be devoid of any kind of sacred or unique value, often acts as a wide-open door to Lust. It is also the predisposition that tends to normalise Lust, allowing it to hide in plain sight. That is, until it has damaged us and/or others. Lust tells us that we can obtain a person’s body, without paying any heed to the rest of them. It lessens them in our sight, it reduces them, it de-humanises them. This may sound a little dramatic, but if we are the sum of our bodies, our minds, and our souls – then to only desire one third of a person, to regard them exclusively as a body, is to undermine their full personhood.

A more subtle, yet just as pervasive, form of a disordered sexual desire would be to regard sex as more than a gift, to sensationalise it, to mistake it for love. Lust’s other tactic is to suggest that sexual activity is tantamount to value. It seeks to convince us that to be sexually desired is to be appreciated, and being sexually active must equate to being actively loved. Lust wrongly offers us sex as a source of worth, affirmation, and significance. In such cases, we may not be regarding someone as a means to a physical end, so much as a means to an emotional one.

Whether its tactic is to minimise or aggrandise, Lust whispers in our ear, encouraging us to regard another person as an object to possess, a tool of gratification. All the while, telling us that it doesn’t matter, because sex doesn’t matter.

As is the case with all of the deadly sins, it’s not that you possess them, as much as they begin to possess you. Lust can be a demanding master, indeed. Insatiable, even. And indescribably harmful.

The demand for restraint on the part of the powerful, purely for the protection of the poor and the vulnerable was nothing short of jaw-dropping.

Lust has much to answer for. In its darkest and most insidious extremity, often intertwined with toxic perceptions of power, Lust has led to atrocities being committed against people who were ever-so-wrongly treated as objects.

There is a reason that Lust is regarded as ‘deadly’.

Tom Holland recalls that in Graeco-Roman households, for example, it was utterly taken for granted that the bodies of enslaved people were objects to be possessed, owned, and utilised for physical gratification. In fact, Holland recounts how their bodies were spoken of in the same terms as urinals. People were regarded as nothing more than literal places/products for their masters to relieve themselves.

When placed in this context, the sexual ethics that were being adopted by early Christians were radical, not square. The very idea that there was something morally good about standing up against the whisperings of Lust was unheard of. The demand for restraint on the part of the powerful, purely for the protection of the poor and the vulnerable was nothing short of jaw-dropping. Historians note that as the Christian movement began to bubble up, so did a rather radical sexual revolution.

Not quite so Jamie Oliver-esque after all.

This revolution was fuelled by the idea of imago Dei, the notion that every person was made in the very image of the one who did the making. Therefore, every person is worthy of being treated as such, of being afforded unconditional dignity and worth, of being acknowledged for the uniquely valuable individual that they are. It was also, in part, a defiant re-enchanting of sex; it was a bold reminder that sex was always supposed to be healthy, enriching and inherently good. That it is precious and fragile, and therefore needs to be guarded with the utmost care. Such notions leave very little room for the reductive tendencies of Lust. Christianity, in its very essence, wages a war on such things.

This is not to say that Christians have won such a war, nor have they always fought this war well. To say so would be telling only half of the story, and do a significant disservice to those, for example, who have had shame heaped upon them in the name of purity culture (ironically, a culture which was/is also fuelled by reducing a person to the sum of their body parts).

But the war itself is one that is still worth fighting, surely? For the sake of others, ourselves, and sex itself.

Status, grievance and resentment: C.S. Lewis on the surprisingly modern business model of hell

60 years after its author’s death, The Screwtape Letters image of hell as an unscrupulous business is still relevant. Simon Horobin tells how C.S. Lewis came to author the influential bestseller.

Simon Horobin

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University.

A comic book style cartoon of a small squat devil looking quizzed in hell.

A scene from Marvel Comic's version of The Screwtape Letters.

November 22nd is the sixtieth anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis, an event that was overshadowed by the assassination of JFK on the same day. Although he is best known today as the author of the Narnia stories, the obituary that appeared in The Times newspaper a few days later noted that it was in fact The Screwtape Letters which sparked his success as a writer.

Initially published as a series of letters in the church newspaper The Guardian, The Screwtape Letters appeared in book form in 1942. The idea came to Lewis during an uninspiring sermon at Lewis’s local parish church in the Oxford suburb of Headington, in July 1940. Provisionally titled ‘As one Devil to Another’, the book would form a series of letters addressed to a novice devil, called Wormwood, beginning work on tempting his first patient, by an older, retired devil, called Screwtape. In finding Screwtape’s voice, Lewis was influenced by a speech given by Adolf Hitler at the Reichstag and broadcast by the BBC. What struck Lewis about the oration was how easy it was, while listening to the Führer speaking, to find oneself wavering just a little.

Lewis dedicated the volume to his friend and fellow Oxford academic, J.R.R. Tolkien. After Lewis’s death, having read an obituary in the Daily Telegraph claiming that Lewis was never fond of the book, Tolkien noted drily:

‘He dedicated it to me. I wondered why. Now I know.’

Despite Tolkien’s misgivings, the public devoured the work and it quickly became a bestseller. Although, as Lewis pointed out, numbers of sales can be misleading. A probationer nurse who had read the book told Lewis that she had chosen it from a list of set texts of which she had been told to read one in order to mention it at an interview. ‘And you chose Screwtape?’, said Lewis with some pride. ‘Well, of course’, she replied, ‘it was the shortest’.

Not all readers approved of its sentiments. A country clergyman wrote to the editor of The Guardian withdrawing his subscription on the grounds that much of the advice the letters offered seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical. The confusion no doubt arose from the lack of any explanation surrounding their circumstances; in a later preface Lewis gave more context, though refused to explain how this devilish correspondence had come into his hands.

Its publication by Macmillan in 1943 brought Lewis to the attention of readers in the United States; when Time magazine featured an interview with him in September 1947, it carried the title ‘Don v. Devil’. A picture of Lewis featured on the magazine’s cover, with a comic image of Satan, complete with horns, elongated nose and chin, and clutching a pitchfork, standing on his shoulder.

For Lewis, the war did not present a radically different situation, but rather aggravated and clarified the human condition so that it could no longer be ignored.

The Screwtape Letters are the product of the war years, during which Lewis wrote many of his most popular works. It was in 1941 that he delivered the first of his broadcasts for the BBC Home Service, which launched his career as a public apologist for the Christian faith. In 1942 Lewis published Perelandra, the sequel to his first space travel novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938), in which his hero, Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist – another nod to Tolkien – is summoned to Venus to prevent a second fall. Although it was published in 1950, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins with four children being evacuated to the countryside to escape the London blitz. In setting his stories in outer-space or the fantastical world of Narnia, Lewis could be accused of writing escapist fiction that avoided the realities of a world in conflict. Lewis, however, believed that the war had not created a new crisis, but rather brought into clearer focus an ever-present struggle between good and evil.

For Lewis, the war did not present a radically different situation, but rather aggravated and clarified the human condition so that it could no longer be ignored. As he remarked in the second of his Broadcast Talks:

‘Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage’.

The key point, writes Screwtape, is to fix the patient’s attention on ‘real life’ – but don’t let him question what he means by ‘real’.

Lewis’s message to a country living in fear of occupation by German troops was that the invasion had already happened. They had been summoned not to their country’s defence, but to its liberation. When the Pevensie children stumble into a snow-covered Narnia under the control of the tyrannical White Witch, they are told in hushed whispers of the rumours of Aslan’s return: ‘“They say Aslan is on the move—perhaps has already landed.”’ It is a reminder that Aslan enters Narnia as a rebel, intent on overthrowing the Witch and installing the rightful kings and queens on the thrones of Cair Paravel.

The Screwtape Letters do not ignore the war during which they were written; Wormwood’s patient is killed in the London bombing. But, for Screwtape, a war is of no value unless it results in winning souls for his Father Below. His advice to his nephew is concerned with diverting the patient from engaging with universal questions by distracting him with everyday preoccupations and sense experiences. While these might involve the immediate conflict, they could also be the excitement of a new romance, a falling out with a friend, the prospect of promotion, or an obsession with food. If the patient should begin to speculate about spiritual matters, Screwtape advises Wormwood to deflect him with academic theories and philosophies that avoid confronting the question of whether the Christian faith might actually be true. The key point, writes Screwtape, is to fix the patient’s attention on ‘real life’ – but don’t let him question what he means by ‘real’. It is ironic, Screwtape observes, that, while mortals typically picture devils putting ideas into their minds, their best work is done by keeping things out.

Despite numerous requests for sequels, Lewis was reluctant to twist his mind back into the ‘diabolical attitude’ and revisit the spiritual cramp it produced. Numerous spin-offs have appeared to fill the void, with Screwtape emails, audio and stage performances and even a Marvel comic book adaptation. Despite this, readers continue to turn to the original work. After all, Lewis’s depiction of hell as an unscrupulous business concern, whose employees are perpetually concerned about their own status, nursing grievances and resentment, speaks to our modern age just as much as it did to Lewis’s own.