Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins | Date: 15 April 2011, 14:11
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There are seven classic deadly sins, and most of them are deadly dull. I couldn't read a book about gluttony, for instance, and pride, envy, anger, sloth, and greed are all either humdrum or so obviously bad for you that there would seem no point in studying on them. Oxford University Press, however, in conjunction with the New York Public Library, has brought out a volume on each of them, none of which I will read. But lust, well, that's another subject altogether. There's a deadly sin that I really like, and refuse to see as sinful. Lust is worth participating in and thinking about, and the Oxford volume _Lust_ by philosopher Simon Blackburn provides an encouraging set of essays that will not please those who insist that lust is just as bad as gluttony or greed. "It might seem, then," writes Blackburn, "quixotic or paradoxical, or even indecent, to try to speak up for lust. But that is what I shall try to do." Try, nay - he succeeds.
Lust has gotten plenty of bad press, a short history of which Blackburn enjoys giving. Plato put a shamefulness upon lust that it has never subsequently shaken. It was an axiom, however, that shame was inherently connected to lust, and that although there was no shame in enjoying a good meal, there was in enjoying a good coition. Saint Augustine has the reputation of demonizing lust for all Christians thereafter, but Blackburn points out that by the time he came along, "the cult of virginity was in full swing." Augustine insisted that it was regrettable to feel pleasure when one impregnated one's wife, but coitus just for the sake of pleasure was incomparably naughty. Though Christianity mostly abandoned such extreme views, and though Augustine might be seen as a moderate compared to other writers on the subject, lust has never recovered from the calumny Augustine had thrown on it. Lust, however, is essential; we are all products of it, and even religious moralists today generally allow that it has a place, even though they might define that place as only within sanctified marriage. Blackburn's main philosophical defense of lust is, surprisingly, the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who is not usually noted for liberal views. Hobbes wrote of the "delight of the mind" in reciprocal pleasure-giving, a play of imagination as well as of genitals. There was nothing intrinsically immoral about it.
_Lust_ is a little, concentrated book, with color illustrations of various masterpieces depicting humans and gods at sexual play. Blackburn has reinforced his view by quotations of poetry, mostly Shakespeare but also Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay (who in a sonnet admits a lover's proximity made her "feel a certain zest/ To bear your body's weight upon my breast", but adds, "let me make it plain:/ I find this frenzy insufficient reason/ For conversation when we meet again.") Blackburn's optimistic volume places lust quite properly as a central delight in life. Those other deadly sins may still be deadly sins, but even so, let us count only six from now on.
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