By Clement Harrold, Catholic Herald. (Image: Wikimedia Creative Commons)
When recounting the effects of lust on the soul, the late German philosopher Josef Pieper described its tendency to “destroy the structure of the person” by directly undermining prudence. The result of this, he argued in The Four Cardinal Virtues, is that lust “begets a blindness of spirit” which makes it almost impossible to perceive spiritual goods. Conversely, it is the virtue of chastity which “more than any other makes man capable and ready for contemplation”.
Along similar lines, St Thomas Aquinas points out in his Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate that even an evil man is capable of delivering prophecy (think of Balaam in the Book of Numbers, or Caiaphas in the Gospel of John). The only person who is unable to prophesy is the one who is dominated by sins of the flesh. The reason for this is that sins of the flesh cloud our spiritual senses through the irrational fixation on bodily pleasures. Such pleasures are good in themselves, but when we pursue them at the expense of reason, we lose something of our humanity in the process. Instead of acting as persons, we reduce ourselves to the level of the animals.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Dante portrayed lust as being wholly incompatible with inner peace. I’ve written previously about Dante’s ingenious structuring of the Inferno, including his depiction of the unchaste souls who are doomed to suffer an eternal torment of being swept about by a violent wind. As always, the poet’s contrapasso reveals something significant about the particular type of disorder towards which the sin is directed. By refusing to channel and discipline his lower desires, the lustful man allows himself to be pulled this way and that by his most base and mercurial passions. Thus lust robs us of the power of contemplation, while at the same time leaving us with an acute sense of interior turmoil.