The Ninth Commandment

You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife …

Saint Gregory of Nyssa believed sexual difference arose because of the fall. Genesis 1:26-28 already speaks about God creating the human being ‘male and female’ but this was because God anticipated what was to happen. They would fall from grace and so end up needing the sexual organs with which God equipped them from the beginning.

Saint Thomas Aquinas disagreed with Gregory about this and said that our sexual desire and capacity are part of the original and good creation. Before the fall Adam and Eve might have enjoyed sex and conceived children just as they ate of the good things of the garden. We are the image of God in our capacity to reproduce, he says: as God is from God so human beings come from human beings. It means there is a fuller ‘imaging’ of God in the living human animal than there is in the angel which is purely (and therefore only) spiritual.

So when does sexual desire become sinful? It depends on the context in which it is found and how it is acted upon – by whom, with whom, in what way. The desire itself cannot automatically be sinful whereas acting on it may be sinful. It depends on people’s commitments and ‘states of life’. As well as being respectful of human dignity in ourselves and in others, sexual activity should be appropriate to who we are and what we are about.

Christian teachers often link lust and gluttony. To treat a person lustfully is a way of chopping them up into manageable bits with a view to incorporating them into ourselves. Lust loses sight of the other person as a human person, makes them something less than that, and is happy then to ‘have’ them with a view to its own pleasure. It acts without proper thought for the other person as also without proper thought for the third person, the potential child, which the sexual drive is always also about.

Marriage is the place for sexual activity. It is not absolutely impossible that we may, by God’s grace, live always in perfect chastity, living our sexuality only in ways appropriate to our commitments. Such perfect chastity seems rare, though, for a number of reasons: the strength of this desire, the fragmentation of fallen human nature, and the things human beings need to learn about intimacy, life and love.

Dorothy Sayers wrote that people fall into lust for two reasons. One is because of the sheer exuberance of animal spirits when, she says, a sharp application of the curb may be all that is needed to bring the body into subjection and remind it of its proper place in the scheme of human nature. Calm discipline, then, along with a sense of humour.

People also fall into lust through sheer boredom and discontent, she says, giving in to lust ‘because they have nothing better to do’. Where people’s mental and physical surroundings are drab and uncomfortable, where the philosophy they are offered is bankrupt (modern myths about sex, for example), where people’s vitality is impoverished and their culture superficial, then they will fall into a spiritual depression from which the satisfaction of lust seems to provide some partial, temporary release.

Sometimes, in giving way to lust, people are genuinely seeking love, although the two realities are very different. Shakespeare contrasts beautifully the effects of love and lust:

                                                                                     

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain

But lust’s effect is tempest after sun

Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain

Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done

Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies

Love is all truth, lust full of forged lies

-       Venus and Adonis, stanza 132

For Christians there is another level of intimacy, life and love, a fuller context in which everything is to be understood and lived out. This is the intimacy, life and love given in Christ’s relationship with us, the friendship with the Father in the Holy Spirit that Christ establishes for us. The great moment in which this love is celebrated is the Eucharist, the moment of greatest intimacy with Our Lord, where our love is sealed and our life increased, where all our desires are satisfied. As the liturgy says, the bread from heaven contains in itself all delights. When the love of Christ controls us, all our desires find their proper place.