Love as the Antithesis of Lust
Modern day mutations of an ancient virus
If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.
— Matthew 5:29
Who is really behind lust?
Lust is a virus. A virus in the shape of an afterthought, a cloud of emotions, a cool breeze of reward; but with flaming eyes and teeth as sharp as swords, it growls but also courts, maims and caresses, condemns and acquits. It is desire and hate, personification and objectification, ecstasy and despair, triumph and complete annihilation.
It whispers in the broad daylight and screams in the dead of night: “You know what you want: reach out and take it. There must be a reason the Big Guy gave you desires and passions, don't you think? Pursue them. Give in, enjoy, feel. After all you will soon be gone. Don't trust that old sadist. How can suffering in humility lead you to Paradise? Did you forget who gave you knowledge of Good and Evil? It was I, yes, because of me you can feel and taste and touch and gorge and stretch yourself across all the lands of men; because of me you live in time; because of me your mortal life has an end and because of me it has acquired purpose. So what else really is there but me? Go on, have a bite; it's only an apple.”
Infecting the world
Lust kills love. It is the absence of essence and the domination of the flesh. As the gaze pierces lustfully only objects are discerned, empty husks of men, playthings of perverse desires. The lustful are incapable of conceiving the fullness of the soul; for them everything revolves around pleasure, and if it is inadequately satisfied - which is completely subjective since everyone has a different idea of when enough is enough - then red flags are raised, signalling a deviation from the predetermined path of hedonism and objectification. Make no mistake, this is not a victimless crime; the victims are no more the objects of lust than the lustful themselves.
You walk down the street. A beautiful woman catches your gaze; you notice a faint smile. You are swept away in passion as her intense perfume conjures up memories of a future. She passes you by, you turn around, look down, check her out lustfully; her bright skin peeks behind a thin dress. You are trespassing. You are not meant to think of her this way, not yet. You have not earned it because you do not know a thing about her, nor she about you. You are greedily trying to grab the prize with dirty hands before even joining the race. You have now made her less ethereal and magical; less of the girl with the sweet smile and vernal freshness; less of a person with a unique soul and more of an object for your sexual fantasies, no matter how dim they may be when they first appear. As you indulge in lustful thoughts, ignoring the truth of her personhood - all the potential flaws and quirks and awkward gestures and childish immaturity - you too become an object of desire; a slave to passion; for what is your purpose now but satisfaction. Empty, hollow, meaningless satisfaction that one day is quenched and returns the next stronger than ever.
If you want a manual on how to ruin love and reduce the complexity of the human soul down to a bunch of bones covered in flesh, this is the way. It will of course skew your view of the world and the purpose of humans in it. There is no way to maintain a true loving connection with someone if all you see is a body and its potential to bring you pleasure. The obsession of modern society to make everything revolve around sex is rooted in this sickness of the soul; this lifestyle of impermanence and passion that inevitably leads to loneliness and self-loathing.
Lust cannot survive if it does not mutate, and what is this mutation but constant novelty: endless, chaotic novelty. The girl with the faint smile excites you because she is not yours; she is uncharted territory filled with hidden treasure. Social media has become a soft porn industry that hooks men and women based on illusions of an ideal; dating apps constantly bombard the brain with novelty, fooling even the most rigid mindset that they can choose a partner like they choose shirts; masturbation is self-love; passions are natural and nature is inherently justifiable. Minimal effort is required to be rewarded with the up to now unimaginable; free access to the most private aspect of a human being. Not love, faith or trust, not even a personal story, dreams, hopes and aspirations that have the power to enchant the sensitive heart. These may be the most precious aspects of a person - aspects that only a divine connection may reveal - but that was in a world of spirit. We live in a world of flesh. It is a barren wasteland of bodies that are substituted like mannequins; hollow with glass eyes gazing downward. In this world the most private aspect is also the most commonly provided good: instant sexual gratification with no immediate consequences.
Immediacy, however, is shortsightedness.
Return to spirit
Once pleasure can be effortlessly achieved, the pursuit of a seemingly less valuable and extremely more arduous reward, that is personal connection and lifelong companionship, sounds absurd. In a material world, where does the soul dwell?
Materialism leaves no room for the spirit. Placing logic center stage in this era of comfort and liberation - even though the latter is illusory - has not delivered us in the slightest from stupidity and absurdity. We talk a good game, demolishing the spiritual world as irrational and ridiculous, but we don't act accordingly. We love in a spiritual way - recognizing even, in our most private moments, that our love does not belong in the material world - but nevertheless worship the false gods of ideology and materialism with fervor comparative to the cults of antiquity. The new gods are worldly entities elevated to a place where our true God once stood. Spirituality is not utilitarian, as the self-help gurus promoting a faceless divinity would have us believe; because if gods have no face then we, as their creations or offspring, have neither a face nor individual value. What purpose then does the distinction between good and evil serve in such a world where everything is energy, form and void, and us wandering puppets in the mercy of faceless impersonal cosmic forces, being no different than the electron or the galaxy?
Good and evil indeed have faces; love has a face, so does hate, anger, sorrow, tranquility; the Greeks knew that and expressed this personification through tragedy. We know that too, deep down, as we act instinctively in a devastatingly discriminatory loving manner. Love cannot be restricted spatially or temporally because it is not a material interaction; it can exist in a vacuum but also permeates all reality. We love relatives that are long gone, unbothered by the gaping void of space and time; we love our pets during their lifetime and after their passing away, unrestricted by the difference in species; we love strangers and show kindness and compassion by sacrificing our immediate well-being for their sake.
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.
— Matthew 5:43-48
We know God is a person because we know His love and have evidence of His communion with us; He is not detached from our suffering and afflictions; He humbled Himself becoming a Man and through Him we can be saved. Thus, if the language of the material universe is mathematics, the spiritual world is governed by love and grace.
“Love is love”. This phrase encapsulates both the inescapable reality of the spirit of love but also the hypocrisy in the modern world. This, being a circular definition, provides zero insight into what exactly is being implied. The mere existence of such a sentiment, however, proves that spirit is still at work even in our meager modern worldview; there is still a thirst for love, the tragedy being that we are looking everywhere but the actual source. For many God is anger, commandments, restrictions, intolerance, oppression; someone rising up and saying instead that “God is love” invites the mob’s convoluted and nonsensical utterings, that can generally be considered an opposition to love itself, as if there exists a higher kind of love than God’s love. If restrictions, warnings, rules, thou shalt not’s and the like are antithetical to love, then parents hate their children, teachers hate their students, spouses hate each other and all people hate everything by simply establishing rules among even the most typical relationships and exchanges. True freedom comes through some kind of restriction; not abstract and unfounded restriction, but Godly love and guidance. We see this in our daily lives. One cannot do science, for instance, without restricting himself in the principles that rule the material universe; one cannot read a book without knowing the structure of language; one cannot play football without being subjected to its rules. Without restrictions things cease to be things.
So is with love also.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
— John 3:16
It is indeed true that talk of love is often focused on the descriptive and not the experienced. A strict analysis of love might risk its degradation - as is true of fairy-tales, for instance, that the more thorough the analysis the less enjoyable they tend to get when experienced1. That is not to say that there shouldn’t be any trace of analysis ever, on anything, but that careful consideration is key to the quality and essence of the thing being described.
Equating love with other words is a problem that does a disservice to the nature of love. If love is higher than everything then how can other words be equated to it; especially such outrageous words as tolerance and acceptance which, I would argue, are antithetical rather than synonymous, given the current state of language in the fallen world. But what makes some words more suitable to describe this mysterious thing we call love, and others not? As far as I can tell - and for me to be considered an expert on language would be laughable - some words work as a gateway to the transcendent - as they should when talking about God’s love - and usually also happen to go against base human desires. Such words would be sacrifice, humility, forgiveness, charity, compassion, service. These words may only point to the nature of love, but they can still serve as an indication that true love is action and not feelings. Saint Paul says:
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
— 1 Corinthians 13:4-7
Inexorably then, we are called to deny ourselves and our passions that only widen the hole in our souls: the God-shaped hole that the modern world has made so evident. What joy that we should live in such an age where evil and perversion are rampant. What joy that in the midst of this insanity the Spirit of God becomes painfully clear. Our life, our culture, our world is not Christ-centered anymore so evil is runs rampant. The times of concealment are over. Evil is as evident as ever.
I say let us rejoice; for the clearer the evil, the brighter God’s Truth that illuminates all life.
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The analytic study of fairy-stories is as bad a preparation for the enjoying or the writing of them as would be the historical study of the drama of all lands and times for the enjoyment or writing of stage-plays. The study may indeed become depressing.
— J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories
A helpful warning John. Thank you
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
— John 3:16"
This is by far the meaning of love.
Nice article John!