Lust

This article will define and distinguish lust and illustrate its role in representative mythologies and theologies. Etymologically the Anglo-Saxon word lust and the French borrowing desire were very close synonyms. As late as the fifteenth century, lust could mean something as benign as preference or wish, but in modern times, at least since the English renaissance, the word lust has generally been restricted in meaning to something more powerful, something more unreasonable or unethical, and certainly something more sexual, while desire remains the more general and more benign term. Unlike the medical term libido, which connotes the normal and perhaps instinctual sex drive, lust usually has connotations of conniving, excess, or the otherwise abnormal. Libido is also generally undirected, whereas lust is for someone or something.

Lust is frequently contrasted with love, especially by moralists of adolescent sexuality, who fear that the one somehow might be mistaken for the other. With the demise of dynastic marriage, in European and North American cultures at any rate, in which money is the primary inducement to marry, this fear that lust will be mistaken for love now drives most modern romantic narratives. It is for this reason, perhaps, that so many Americans popularly understand a marriage of convenience to be about satiating lust rather than accomplishing some social, political, or legal goal. Science might someday collapse distinctions between love and lust, but until then it might be said that love is generally considered to be the purer of the two emotions, not quite as concerned with sex.

Myths often explore the role of lust in relationships or in the psyche. The Greek myth of Ares and Aphrodite, in which the god of aggressive war is caught the very act of sex with the goddess of sexual love, suggests the passions in lust and war have something in common. In Hindu mythology Brahma, the creator, lusts for his daughter Shatarupa and in attempting to follow her with his gaze, grows three additional heads. After her apotheosis, Brahma grows a fifth head to follow her to heaven, but Shiva, the destroyer, cuts it off since his lust is incestuous. In another myth Shiva incinerates Kama, god of love, after he has attempted to stir Shiva's sexual passions. Rati, Kama's wife, pleads with Shiva to restore him, which he does, but only as an incorporeal image, representing true love rather than physical lust.

Lust is the popular translation of luxuria, the last of medieval Catholic theology's seven deadly or capital sins. Like all capital sins, lust is a sin of thought that leads to sinful actions, such as sodomy or incest. St. Augustine's (354–430) distinction between use and enjoyment is valuable in understanding how lust works in this system of sin. All things, Augustine reasons, may either be used to bring oneself closer to God or may be enjoyed in themselves, self-indulgently, separating one further from God. In this sense sexual activity is not necessarily lustful if it is engaged in for the purpose of generation: Sex may be used to do God's will, following his injunction to be fruitful. In this system lust is not simply the desire to have sex but the self-indulgent desire to have sex. The logical consequences are myriad. As the desire for sexual pleasure itself, lust is therefore still possible within lawful sexual relations, so even a married couple must be on guard against lusting after one another. This logic helps inform the Catholic Church's stand on artificial birth control, which enables couples to have sex without intending to reproduce, indulging lust. Another logical consequence of this definition of lust is that it must be distinguished from adultery or fornication in that lust is considered a root cause of these actions, not an action in itself. Such theoretical distinctions are notoriously difficult to keep in practice, as Jesus himself suggests when he says, "Whosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:28).

Dante's Inferno (1307) contains perhaps the best symbolization of lust so conceived. Dante devotes the second circle of the underworld to the lustful, who are driven incessantly round the vast ring by harassing winds, just as lust torments the living, driving them from one unsatisfying partner to the next. Dante's chief example of the lustful are Paolo and Francesca, whose lust for one another was inspired by reading a romance about Launcelot, another famous figure for lust and adultery. As noted before readers must be on their guard not to confuse the love Paolo and Francesca so clearly feel for one another with the lust that they indulged.

see also Abstinence; Libido.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alighieri, Dante. 1980. Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. 1995. De Doctrina Christiana [On Christian teaching], ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Regan, A. 2003. "Lust." New Catholic Encyclopedia. Detroit: Gale.

Williams, George Mason. 2003. Handbook of Hindu Mythology. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

                                        Erick Kelemen