Continuing my sporadic series of excerpts from Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body in Simple Language by Sam Torode, ©Philokalia Books
"In the Wisdom literature [of the Old Testament], lust is often compared to fire. …
"… [I]tcreates an insatiable desire to satisfy the body and its senses. … In its restless pursuit of satisfaction, lust drowns out the voice of conscience and dulls sound thinking. …
"This was the image of lust familiar to Jesus and his audience. While the men described in Proverbs and Sirach have already committed adultery, Christ takes a step back. Before adultery is committed in the body, he says, it is commited in the heart, through the eyes.
"The way we look reveals what is in out hearts. As we saw in our earlier reflections, sexuality flows from the gift-giving, nuptial meaning of the body. In marriage, husband and wife are called to become one flesh, forming a selfless communion of persons. But lust looks at the body in a way that denies its nuptial and procreative (life giving) meaning.
"… How is lust a form of adultery? Both violate the true meaning of the body. Both cheapen sexuality and reduce the body to an object.
…
"Sexual desire can be a destructive force. In order for it to be the positive, creative power it was meant to be, it must be transformed by Christ."
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2 comments:
I guess I'd take issue with the term 'adultery' if it's meant to apply to someone like myself. I am not married, so it seems unlikely, by a strict reading of the semantics of the word, that I could "cheat" on someone.
If it means 'adultery' in an abstract sense of me having this quasi-nuptual relationship with Christ, then I'd have to say that it's stretching the semantics of 'marriage' and 'adultery' to the breaking point. It sounds no more than a fancy, elaborate way of saying "hands off your cock! eyes off that boy! mind on Christ and Christian things!"...which is, by the way, a form of communication that is likely to mean more to me: being direct.
And, am I understanding it correctly here, but a man could conceivably lust after his own wife? I know that wasn't necessarily the point in this post, but that seems to be something one could potentially take away from it.
I don't think that we need to find a way in which single people are married in order to be able to apply the saying of Jesus. So I wouldn't go the route of saying that one is married to Christ, or God, or the church. It seems to me that it's enough to say that since lust is a matter of a devaluing of the other, in one's heart, that the unmarried person can have a comparably sinful heart.
As for lust within marriage, you're quite right. At one point JP II actually said that one could be lustful toward one's spouse, if one regarded her as merely an object for his own pleasure. As you might expect, there were those who found this incomprehensible, despite the fact that the concept of rape within marriage is hardly new.
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