Permissible Lust?

In the first volume of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy, Guy Crouchback learns from a chance conversation that because he has a valid sacramental marriage with a wife who divorced him, civilly married and then divorced others, and has recently been having casual sex with nobody knows how many men, it is morally permissible for him, as her husband, to himself sleep with her. With that knowledge, he meets with her in a hotel room and is at the point of succeeding when his plans are derailed by a chance telephone call.

Some readers will probably have an instinctive, unthinking aversion to a man sleeping with a promiscuous wife. Others’ minds might turn to potential children not being able to know who their father is or not receiving Catholic educations, considerations which are as valid as they are irrelevant to Waugh’s point and pedantic to belabor.

But no amount of clamor over such considerations can compete with the vociferous howls sure to emanate from those who will insist that even when such considerations are moot, sex with such a wife is almost certain to be sinful in practice—coming from moral rigorists whose predictable arguments will have no basis in traditional theology’s coolly intellectual understanding of the ends of marriage, who will merely regurgitate a very different, very modern, very emotionalist and unaccountably popular “personalist” philosophy.

Differences between the two are simple. Personalists divide sexual attraction into supposedly permissible form (“self-giving” or “loving” or “intimate”) and prohibited form (purely physical attraction or desire for one’s own pleasure). Traditional theology insists that morality is not determined by the form of attraction but by why one willfully chooses to act on it. More bluntly, desiring sex for the same reasons and enjoying it in the same way can range from mortal sin to the most virtuous use of sex depending on whether a man chooses to enjoy himself in that way with a prostitute or with his wife and for the sake of procreation. Traditional theology insists that morality is not determined by the form of attraction but by why one willfully chooses to act on it.Tweet This

Until the twentieth century, all moral theology books taught this doctrine and knowledgeable personalist philosophers will not dispute the fact. They will merely insist all those old theology books were wrong.

Even more horrifying to personalists is the way some of those books use the word “lust.” Most commonly, it is applied to sexual morality in the way “murder” is applied to the morality of killing, designating sin. But some theologians use “lust” analogously to “killing”—distinguishing between sinful and permissible forms of each. 

The latter theologians made clear that what personalists condemn as “lust within marriage” is permissible if chosen for a legitimate end—procreation, the unity of the spouses, avoidance of sin, etc. More than that, indulging in “permissible lust” for the sake of procreation, the first end of marriage, is more virtuous than having “self-giving and intimate sex” while indifferent to whether a child is conceived.

Traditional theology also defines “unity of the spouses” more broadly than personalists. Personalists limit it to “self-giving,” “intimacy,” and whatnot. For traditional theology, “permissible lust” is a legitimate way for spouses to enjoy themselves together—benefiting their relationship in the same way they would by playing a game. “Lustful sex” with a spouse is similarly permitted to overcome the temptation to have sex with others, since the will chooses the pleasure to avoid offending God rather than purely for its own sake. 

Traditional theology does not even require spouses to be consciously aware of using “permissible lust” for a legitimate end—any more than a penitent needs to be consciously aware of having a firm purpose of amendment while receiving absolution. All that is necessary is an ongoing, internal, implicit disposition of the will to have sex only because doing so will inevitably serve some good end.

Venially sinful “lustful marital sex” requires choosing the pleasure entirely for its own sake, indifferent as to whether good ends are served.

The irony is that the personalists’ rigoristic requirements take their lead from the theories of German philosopher Max Scheler—who apostatized from the Catholic Church and abandoned his wife so he could “make a gift of himself to” and “be intimate with” another woman. Unsurprisingly, the first thinkers to challenge traditional Catholic teaching on contraception, divorce and civil remarriage, and so on, were influenced by Scheler.

What is surprising is that Catholic thinkers sincerely interested in finding persuasive arguments for orthodox conclusions attempted to build on that quicksand—Scheler’s personalist influencing Pope John Paul II, the once prominent defender of Humanae Vitae Dietrich von Hildebrand, and numerous professors at some of the better Catholic colleges and universities. By now it has trickled down to become fairly pervasive thanks to numerous popular pundits and “Theology of the Body” seminars.

Burdening consciences with personalist rigorism would be sufficiently regrettable in a morally normal society—though I suspect that in the absence of today’s permissiveness most serious Catholics would merely laugh at it. Given how many people now consider Catholic doctrine absurd, we emphatically do not need rigorist caricatures that can only confirm them in their opinions.