Read Time: 15 minutes
Recently, two of my favorite cultural commentators, Dennis Prager (a *conservative Jew) and Matt Fradd (a traditional Roman Catholic), sat down to talk about pornography. The discussion, which at times was actual debate, was good in many respects. Both men were able to articulate descent positions on both the dangers and evils of pornography and the sin of adultery. But, where there was a substantive difference, was on the issue of lust itself. This disagreement on what lust is, or how bad it is, mitigates to some degree Prager’s rejection of porn. For Fradd, to avoid lust is a non-negotiable, moral imperative.
Prager’s view on lust, as opposed to the act of adultery, seems to excuse it from the register of moral illegitimacy. Fradd, alternatively, assumes the more explicit command of Christ to not lust in one’s heart (Matt 5:27-30), making it akin to adultery, as well as the Aristotelian/Thomistic interpretation of lust as an objectification or instrumentalization of the human subject. The human person, being made in the image and likeness of God, possesses intrinsic value and, therefore, cannot be reduced to a mere object or means of gratification.
However, here I would like to offer some additional, theological perspective to what, in the end, was a partial disagreement over the nature of pornography and its ultimate source: the sin of lust. First, I will summarize both of the participants’ views on pornography and lust, and then try to fill in some theological lacunae.
Prager’s View: Lust is Not Sinful
Prager has told the story for many years about his father, a wonderful Jewish father and husband, who, in spite of his high ethical standards, looked at Playboy magazine throughout his life (15.30-17.30 min) He reiterates some of this personal story in the interview, but it is one I have heard him speak about over the years on the radio (I have been listening to Prager since the 1990’s, and he has been my favorite radio show host ever since, especially after Michael Medved’s quasi-departure from talk radio). According to Prager, his father viewing porn (what by today’s standards would be considered very “soft” porn), did not negatively affect the 72-year marriage between him and his wife (28 – 30 min).
I have no doubt that Prager’s parents were happily married, in spite of his father’s Playboy subscription. After all, it is questionable, according to Prager, whether or not his father’s natural attraction to other women was in any way wrong. This would especially be the case if his wife had no qualms about it. Prager has a moral interpretation of this that is, apparently, grounded in his Judaism.
According to Prager, adultery on the Jewish view can “only be committed with one organ,” and “that organ is not the heart” (2 -3 min). Prager sees a real difference between Christianity, and more precisely Jesus’ commands in Matthew 5, and Judaism in the area of morality. This difference has to do with that of intention versus behavior. According to Prager, Judaism, unlike Christianity, is “behavior based.” Christianity, he says, is also behavior based. However, Christianity is equally, if not more so, concerned with the thoughts and inner life of the individual (2-4 min).
This interpretation enables Prager to maintain that the actions of his father (God rest his soul) could not be adulterous, because his father never acted upon his sexual desires. Thoughts and deed are strictly separate on this accounting. As such, Jesus’ injunction about lust in the heart being analogous to adultery is simply inapplicable. Lust, being only in the mind, is not in itself sinful. One can lust after women and remain righteous before God, so long as one does not act out on the desires. Prager goes on to point out that of the 613 commandments of the Torah, not one forbids a man (or woman) to lust (6 -7 min).
Jesus’s Command About Lust Is Deeply Jewish
While I respect and admire Prager greatly, this is one area of his thinking that I simply do not comprehend. Certainly I am no Hebrew scholar, or Old Testament expert like Prager, who is now on his fourth commentary, Leviticus. Still, I have read the Old Testament many times, and am working my way through the JPS Torah commentary, edited by Nahum Sarna. I am halfway through the 4th book in the series, Jacob Milgrom’s magisterial commentary on Numbers. I have read every word of each of the first four books, to include every excursus. According to most scholars, the JPS series is considered the gold standard of Torah commentary. Again, this makes me no expert like Prager, nor do the two Old Testament theology classes I took in Seminary. But, I have tried to do my due diligence with regard to the Hebrew Bible, specifically to the Torah and its commands.
That said, what I fail to see in the Old Testament, in the Torah as well as the Prophets and Writings, is Prager’s interpretation of the Mosaic law being merely behavior oriented. Space will not permit me to give an exhaustive, or even substantial, list of all the passages of Scripture where God judges the heart–meaning specifically the inner thoughts and intentions of man. Further, I do not think I am reading New Testament theology back into the Hebrew Bible when I claim that God in the Old Testament clearly cares about the inner life of man, even more so than He does of man’s behavior.
The most glaring example of God judging the inner life of men comes in the fist few chapters of Genesis, when God determines to destroy all of mankind with a great flood on account of “every plan devised in his [mankind’s] mind” being “nothing but evil all the time” (Gen 6:5). Concerning this issue of man’s inner life, Sarna comments:
Literally [translated] ‘every product of the thoughts of the heart.’ In biblical psychology, mental phenomena fall within the sphere of the heart [leb], which is the organ of thought, understanding, and volition, not of feeling. In later Hebrew, yetser, ‘the thing devised, the product’ is the term for the innate impulses or drives in human beings that dispose them to good (yetser tov) or evil (yetser ra’) and that can be controlled and directed by the exercise of the will. God’s observation is a judgment on the moral state of man at that specific time.
Nahum Sarna, Genesis, 47
I do not see how Prager’s understanding of the moral law being primarily behavior-based in any way comports with the clear biblical data, let alone Sarna’s explication of that data. It is obvious in this first mention of “the heart” of man, that God cares primarily about man’s “thought, understanding, and volition” and it is this “moral state” that God observes and judges. If this is true, then the heart is indeed “the organ” through which one can commit sin, even adultery. The genitalia, as such, cannot be judged.
But this is only the first of 598 references to leb (the heart) in the Hebrew bible, many of which have similar contexts as that of Genesis 6:5: the inner workings of man’s mind and will. Moreover, it is only this intimate connection of the inner thought life with one’s outward deeds that makes sense of so many biblical passages that relate to the proper worship of God. The totality of the prophets makes literally no sense if this is not the case, as Isaiah clearly points out:
And the Lord said:
“Because this people draw near with their mouth
and honor me with their lips,
while their hearts are far from me,
and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men,
14 therefore, behold, I will again
do wonderful things with this people,
with wonder upon wonder;
and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish,
and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.Isaiah 29:13-14
To the prophets, it is not only Israel’s deeds that are under divine judgment, it is their inner orientation; it is their thoughts and their desires that are on trial. Ezekiel prophesies concerning God’s solution to this problem of the inner life of His people:
22 “Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. 23 And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. 24 I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.[a] 28 You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.
Ezekiel 36:22-28
It may be true that Prager’s Judaism, the Judaism of today, focuses more on behavior than on intent or inner life. But if that is the case, then this is a Judaism that is far removed from biblical Judaism. Old Testament examples of God’s judgment of the thought life of both Israel, and mankind generally, could be multiplied a hundred fold. David’s cry to God presupposes its truth: “Search me, oh LORD, and know my heart, try me and know my thoughts!” (Psalm 139:23)
It is for this reason that Prager is wrong to say that there is a deep discrepancy between Judaism and Christianity in this aspect of morality. For Jesus’ injunctions about the role and importance of the heart were not novel. They were but reminders of what God had already spoken to His people, and the nations, though His Word and in His laws. Thus, Jesus’ teaching about lust being analogous to adultery is not a “Christian” teaching, it is a fundamentally Jewish one!
Fradd’s Opposition: Lust Is Intrinsically Sinful
Fradd charitably counters Prager’s dismissal of lust using both Aristotle’s understanding of instrumentality and Aquinas’ view of lust as the objectification of the person (12-14 mins). He correctly points out that to objectify a person, here a woman, is to reduce her to something less than a human being made in God’s image and likeness, and possessing intrinsic value. The woman (or man) being lusted after becomes an object in the mind of the one lusting, the purpose of which is gratification of the self, not the benefit of the other. This is a privation of love, and, as such, sinful. One might go even further to say that a human being technically cannot be objectified in reality, since every human being is, essentially, a subject. Thus, the imaginative act of objectifying a person is not just morally problematic, it is metaphysically false.
Fradd goes on to make another point worth noting. Sexual desire and lust are not identical. Sexual desire, or attraction, is involuntary. Lust, however, entails an act of the will (i.e., the heart) that occurs after the initial involuntary reaction to that which the individual finds arousing. Moreover, nudity, lust and pornography need to be distinguished. One can appreciate the naked body, or depictions of it (as in the Sistine Chapel), as the apex of God’s creation (21:40 min). However, context determines whether a certain display of nudity is honorable, pointing to the Good, or whether it is dishonorable, meant to feed the baser instincts of the mind and the will. As such, pornography is not to be confused with art, and sexual arousal not to be conflated with lust.
In the general principle and the particular instances, Fradd is correct (as we imagine any good Catholic would be). While Prager’s view of lust as not sinful mitigates his views on the inherent evil of pornography, Fradd rightly points out that pornography is always abusive, both of the one viewing the pornography, and the one being viewed. However, it needs to be said that in the interview Prager makes it quite clear that although he sees some pornography as acceptable (mainly the softer versions of a past generation), he does not jettison the notion completely of an ideal state of affairs. His practical reasoning simply leads him to accept a certain kind and degree of willful lusting. This is where he and Fradd part ways.
Filling in the Blanks: Lust as Violation of Free Will
I am going to piggy back off of Fradd’s comments, which, for the most part, were spot on regarding both the moral status of lust as well as our response to it. There is an additional feature to lust which, I think, once articulated further demonstrates lust as inherently sinful. Lust, unlike involuntary sexual arousal, is a willful violation of the freedom of the person lusted after.
As Fradd pointed out, there is a volitional act that occurs, or can occur, after an initial, involuntary sexual impulse or attraction. However, this volitional act has a certain kind of mental content. It is an imaginative act, one that generates images in the mind of the person being objectified. Moreover, these images are not static, they are dynamic. Our fantasies are not like a series of Polaroid snapshots, they are far more like a motion picture. As we fantasize about the object of sexual desire, we manipulate the person in the fantasy, making them do things that they, as far as we know, would never do. Or, even if we were to find out somehow that the person would do such things, it is still not them doing it in the fantasy, it is us, the fantasizer, using their image to do it.
This imaginative manipulation of another’s actions is a clear violation of their free will, not to mention a violation of anything that could be construed as “consent.” When one throws God’s moral commands into the mental mix, the fantasy takes on an even graver reality, as we manipulate the image of the person to do not only what they might not want to do, but what God doesn’t want them to do.
If there were some form of lust that had no mental content, perhaps we, or Jesus, would be less inclined to relate it to the act of adultery. However, it seems impossible to conceive of lusting without some mental content– mental content of the kind I just outlined. To speak of lust without such content would seem to speak merely of sexual arousal, which, as Fradd points out, is involuntary and, therefore, not sinful. Moreover, if as Christians we take the human soul to be a real, ontological substance, there is a sense in which we are taking the image of a person’s body and manipulating their soul by making their bodies do things their souls otherwise would not do. These cognitive acts cannot be considered morally neutral; they are gravely evil, even if common to all men (and probably many women).
To imagine what this might be like in moral terms, consider the following Christian beliefs: 1) all things will be revealed before God in heaven, to include every thought thought and every word spoken (Heb 4:11-13; Rom 2:12-16, 14:10-12; Matt 5-7), and 2) that some of the men or women we lusted after on earth will be in heaven with us. One might infer from these two eschatological facts, that every lustful and manipulative thought we have had about someone else will eventually be known, not only to God but also to those we lusted after. This may sound like a bitter pill to swallow, but given most Christians’ prior ontological commitments, it seems rather plausible, if not likely that this will be the case. It is not a comforting thought, to be sure. Fortunately, we have the rest of the Christian story, especially Christ’s atonement, to give us the comfort and cure we so desperately need.
Afterword: C.S. Lewis’ Great Omission
In perhaps my favorite C.S. Lewis novel, The Great Divorce, there is an interesting omission by Lewis within the plotline of the novel. It is not something one notices immediately. But, after two or three readings, the astute reader picks up on it. In the second half of Chapter 11, we meet the only ghost (the damned) from the grey town (hell, maybe purgatory) who winds up receiving salvation, and, consequently, staying in heaven. This is the man who struggles with lust, here symbolized by the red lizard. The ghost himself is “oily and dark,” which bespeaks the nature of his particular vice. In time we learn that this man’s sin, quite different from the others, is not one of pride, but of concupiscence. It is a sin of the senses.
What is also noticeable in this pericope, and again different from all the others, is that this man who struggles with lust does not meet anyone in heaven who was a prior acquaintance of his on earth. All the other ghosts, all of whom choose to return to hell, meet with a human counterpart in the heavenly realm, someone they knew personally while they were alive. But not the concupiscent man. He is encountered by no friend or relative, but instead by a mighty angel. It is the angel who poses the question to him: “Shall I kill it?,” meaning the man’s sin. Why does Lewis change the formula for the man struggling with lust?
The answer seems to be because the man never actually committed any sexually deviant act. His outward behavior was not reflective of the inner workings of his mind, and heart. There was no “other” person in life with whom he fornicated. There was no person to meet him, because all of his lust was carried out in the realm of his own mind–in his own fantasy. The sin was ultimately against his own self, as the apostle Paul tells us all sexual sin is (1 Cor 6:18). Lewis’ omission is once again a sign of not only his literary genius, but his biblical awareness. Lust is not only a sin against another, it is also a sin against our self. Yet we too are made in God’s image, and, as such, are without excuse.
*In a previous version of this article I had referred to Prager as an “orthodox Jew.” It seems that “conservative” is the more appropriate description for his form of Judaism.
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