96. The danger of unnatural desires
96. THE DANGER OF UNNATURAL DESIRES
Why are some desires harder to overcome than others? Especially greed and lust?
. . . concupiscence (unregulated desire) is twofold; one is natural, the other is not natural. Natural concupiscence cannot be actually infinite, because it is of that which nature requires, and nature ever tends to something finite and fixed. Hence man never desires infinite meat, or infinite drink. . . . But non-natural concupiscence is altogether infinite . . . Hence he that desires riches, may desire to be rich not up to a certain limit but to be simply as rich as possible (I-II,30,4).
Greed for the things money can buy (“natural wealth”) is a bad thing, but it is finite. You can only enjoy a finite amount of food or drink, houses or cars, or even sex. But greed for money (“artificial wealth”) is infinite. You can always want more. It’s like a drug: you have to have higher and higher doses of it to give you the same “buzz” you used to get from little bits of it. And this never stops. It is Hell’s false infinite.
It’s also essentially competitive. You want not just money but more money than anyone else. Even if you’re the second richest person in the world, you are resentful of Number One, as Satan was resentful that God was Number One. Thus this kind of greed is more dangerous because of three things: (1) It is not natural but supernatural, not from the world but from the Devil, from Hell. (2) It is infinite, it has no limit. (3) And it is essentially competitive. The greed here is not for the money but for the power it gives you. You want to be like God, in total control of everything. So it really comes down to competitive pride, in the last analysis, which is the primal sin, the worst sin, the Devil’s sin. Ordinary greed for natural wealth is bad enough but it only comes from the world, not from the Devil.
The same is true of lust. Ordinary lust is bad enough, but it only comes from the flesh, not from the Devil. But there is also an unnatural lust that comes from the Devil. Lust for enjoying a woman’s or man’s body, or for intercourse with that body, is finite. You can only enjoy one body at a time. But lust for your own pleasure as such, pleasure that is under your control, the pleasure of being in control of pleasure—that is infinite, and that is really pride, jealousy of God, resentment at your own finitude. This is Hellish lust; it is really egotism and pride in disguise.
This is the greatest danger of masturbation: it can foster egotism, it can make you actually prefer the fantasy person you create to the real person God created, because it wants to be in control, where there is no other, where you are God, where you create your own dream world. But the whole training of life is to overcome this egotism. (See Charles Williams’ terrifying novel Descent into Hell on the eternal danger of this egotism, whether it is about sex, or money, or anything else.)
In rejecting the real human other, who is not perfect, and who has free will and thus unpredictability, in favor of one’s own fantasies, which are perfectly predictable and totally under your own control, one is really rejecting God. Our neighbor and our world are the two roads out of Hell, i.e., out of pure egotism, that God has put in everyone’s path to make salvation as easy as possible. Although natural lust misuses neighbors as objects rather than persons, using them rather than loving them; and although natural greed misuses things by loving them rather than using them, unnatural lust and greed are really forms of pride, which is the sin from Hell, not from the flesh or the world. In Hell there are no neighbors and no world. Sartre is profoundly wrong when he famously says that “Hell is other people.” Hell is precisely the lack of other people. I think it is also the lack of other things, real things; that is why many mystics say that the fire in Hell is not material fire, for that is something real outside yourself. It is a companion, an other, though a painful and terrifying one. I think it more likely that Hell is worse than that: it is total aloneness.