Love vs. Lust

Inspired by my prude post, reader Thomas Wyld sent me a link to this article on the Guardian website: Face to Faith. I think the writer here does an excellent job explaining why lust is a sin and why, when you come right down to it, people generally prefer love:

If lust is wrong, what is it that makes it so? For one thing, it represents the pursuit of instant gratification - "I want it, and I want it now ..." - which is always a perilous business. This is why the dictionary defines it as "libidinous desire, degrading animal passion"; to lust is to elevate the animal in us above the human. Worse, lust treats its object as precisely that - as an object, not a person. Amnon used Tamar; and once he had got what he wanted, he spat Tamar out.

But Christians - and, of course, others - insist that sex should primarily be the climactic expression of affection and tenderness: of love, indeed. Human beings (uniquely?) have sex face to face - a posture that symbolises relating to, rather than simply using, another person.

It is true that two people may happily agree to give their bodies to one another without any kind of mutual commitment, and that is a long way from the rape of Tamar. But offering one's body in this way is also a long way from offering one's self, a long way from saying: "I give myself to you because I love you exclusively; and there is no more intense and beautiful way of doing so than what we share together in this act."

This reminds me of what C.S. Lewis had to say on this subject in The Four Loves:

We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he "wants a woman." Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.

Eros is romantic love, which is one of the four types of love discussed in the book.