Letter #134: Lust in Action

The Solace of Our Sin

Sponge!

I’d forgotten that Augustine quote about “having no motivation for the evil but the evil itself.” Exactly! Now we’ve opened up so many avenues of exploration, I have to type very fast to get them all in.

We’ve stumbled on the discovery that Christianity requires the practice of spiritual excellence meant to develop the capacity for joy in this world of darkness. Like every good thing, achieving this excellence requires effort. As with achieving physical excellence, there are negative efforts, like giving up stuff that’s bad for you, and positive efforts, in which you build the muscles you need.

But there’s something in us that desires the bad stuff like a wanna-be Schwarzenegger wants chocolate cake — and not just cake but fatness. The evil itself.

Now let me add one more complication. We confessed to being drawn to consciousness-marring horror movies and the anger-hell of X. But horror movies and X are not essentially bad. They’re essentially good! A terrific horror movie like Alien or Night of the Living Dead can be a scary, insightful delight. And X is a great platform for fact-checking the lies of authorities and the news media. The problem is: these good things can be corrupted and we are drawn to that corruption.

The same is true of creation itself.

In a corrupt world, it’s easy to understand why some religious people retreat from creation entirely. They become cloistered or celibate or, like Tolstoy after his conversion, abandon the work they were made for. They won’t even engage with art that tells the ugly truth because the ugliness disturbs them. This is how Christian culture devolved from King Lear to God is Still Not Dead, Part XIV.

But the world — business, politics, romance, art — these aren’t bad things, they’re good things that can be corrupted. And we — good things corrupted — are drawn to the corruption.

An example. Augustine and Aquinas both believed that sex itself was not evil, but had been corrupted by “concupiscence” — lust. Milton dramatized this in Paradise Lost. He wrote an Edenic sex scene in which Adam and Eve meld in “the rites mysterious of connubial love.” But after their expulsion, things are different. Eve inflames Adam’s senses. He seizes her willing hand and they go at it “with ardor.”

This heat, Milton says, is “the solace of their sin.” Yes, sex is actually more exciting when seasoned by lust than it was in the sweetness of innocence.

Every happily married couple experiences this. The joy of faithful love is pro-rated, a life-enhancing intimacy of fidelity over time, as opposed to the instant ecstasy of that “expense of spirit in a waste of shame” that is “lust in action.”

So it is with ambition and desire and art. Not bad things. Good. If your eye offends you, sure, cut it out. But for me, the greater Christian journey is to live into the goodness at the core of the corruption.

More to say, but for now…

Love,

Dad