by Неизвестный
The goods to which human beings, and men in particular, aim are referred to in the Qur’an as pleasure, wealth, and power. “Made to seem pleasing to humanity is love of desires for mates [pleasure] and children [power], and heaps and hoards of gold and silver [wealth], domesticated horses, and cattle, and fields [wealth and power]. Those are the conveniences and enjoyments for the life of the world, while the finest resort is the presence of God” (3:14).
In other words, pleasure, wealth, and power are means, not ends. The true end is ultimate concern. The pursuit of these attractive goods as ends can lead to despair for those who attempt to create meaning out of their pursuit. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, whose blind pursuit of power leads him to the abyss of despair, ends his life concluding that he is a mere shadow, without substance, trapped in a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Like Macbeth’s pursuit of power, revealed to him in the end as empty, the lustdriven pursuit of bodily pleasures is another attempt at sustaining one’s meaning for the time being. Lust was referred to as the sin of luxuria in Latin. From it, comes our English word “luxury,” but the Latin meaning is closer to exuberance, or superfluous abundance. Lust is only possible with animal spirits and with vitality.
In her essay on the deadly sins, Dorothy Sayers identifies two main reasons people are susceptible to the sin of luxuria: “It may be through sheer exuberance of animal spirits: in which case a sharp application of the curb may be all that is needed to bring the body into subjection and remind it of its proper place in the scheme of man’s twofold nature. Or—and this commonly happens in periods of disillusionment like our own, when philosophies are bankrupt and life appears without hope—men and women may turn to lust in sheer boredom and discontent, trying to find in it some stimulus which is not provided by the drab discomfort of their mental and physical surroundings.”
When this is the cause of lust, she continues,
stern rebukes and restrictions are worse than useless. It is as though one were to endeavor to cure anemia by bleeding; it only reduces further an already impoverished vitality. The mournful and medical aspect of twentieth century pornography and promiscuity strongly suggests that we have reached one of these periods of spiritual depression, where people go to bed because they have nothing better to do. In other words, the “regrettable moral laxity” of which respectable people complain may have its root cause not in Luxuria at all, but in some other of the sins of society, and may automatically begin to cure itself when that root cause is removed.3
Is the “root cause” of the sins of incontinence—the “hot sins” like lust and gluttony—simply boredom? Kierkegaard believed that man’s inability to find any real meaning in life resulted in an indifference, a cynicism, and a boredom with it. The aesthete, who believes he is leading a life in pursuit of pleasure, exemplifies the nihilistic malaise of the modern age. The aesthete’s hedonistic life is rooted in his boredom. The irony is that the things he finds to entertain and distract him from his boredom soon become the very sources of boredom: “The boredom that comes later is usually the fruit of a misguided diversion. It seems doubtful that a remedy against boredom can give rise to boredom, but it can give rise to boredom only insofar as it is used incorrectly.”
In Pornified, an excellent study on the insidiousness of pornography, Pamela Paul arrives at a similar conclusion: “So many women and all so easy; a man tends to gorge. And once he’s seen a thousand bare bottoms—no matter the variety of form and function—they start to look the same. Men pummel through woman after woman, plunging into an inevitable cycle of diminishing returns.” She quotes one study of men who were shown pornographic films five days a week for ninety minutes each time, who became less interested in and aroused by the material. “What initially thrills eventually titillates, what excites eventually pleases, what pleases eventually satisfies. And satisfaction sooner or later yields to boredom.”4
This is the inevitable state of the aesthete who lives for pleasure. He seeks pleasure to remedy his boredom, yet the very thing he seeks as a remedy becomes a source of his spiritual ailment once again.
Consciously or not, the hot sins of gluttony, lust, and avarice are rooted in attempts to address one’s spiritual vacuum. Each begins with the pursuit of real goods, but not correctly as the means to real happiness that comes from an integrated ethical life rooted in virtue and responsibility. Rather, they are an end in themselves, the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Eating not to live, but living to eat; loving not to give, but lusting to take; accumulating wealth not to support, but to create a false sense of security. In short, they are sins driven by emptiness within, mere distractions to avoid confronting a lack of knowledge of life’s purpose and relevance.
CHOICE, ANXIETY, AND ENNUI
Ibn Hazm (d. 1064), the great ethicist and theologian of Muslim Andalusia, believed that at the core of the human being was dread, that every action was an attempt to ward off anxiety: “Thus the seeker of wealth in fact seeks to repel through it the anxiety of poverty; the seeker of fame is primarily concerned to repel the anxiety of subordination or subservience; the seeker of pleasure simply wishes to repel the anxiety of missing its enjoyment.”5 We hear an echo in Kierkegaard’s observation that the seeker of pleasure is attempting to repel boredom, because boredom seeks to repel the state of ennui in which we face our mortality and irrelevance. “Choosing” the hedonistic life of an aesthete is not a choice, but an abstention of choice.
This is profoundly consistent with Islam’s doctrine of freewill, a doctrine embedded in the Arabic language itself. “To choose” in Arabic is akhtaara, and “choice” is ikhtiyaar. The tri-radical source of the word is khayr, which means “good.” The verbal form ikhtaara literally means “to choose good for oneself.” Choice is the act of choosing what is good.
Sayyid Naquib al-Attas, the contemporary Malay philosopher, persuasively connects the notion of choice to the idea of freedom. “The choice that is meant in ikhtiyaar is the choice of what is good, better, or best between the two alternatives,” and thus “A choice of what is bad of two alternatives is therefore not a choice that can be called ikhtiyaar; in fact it is not a choice, rather it is an act of injustice done to oneself.” Freedom, he writes,
is to act as one’s real and true nature demands—that is, one’s haqq [truth] and one’s fitrah [original nature] demands—and so only the exercise of that choice which is of what is good can properly be called a “free choice.” A choice for the better is therefore an act of freedom, and it is also an act of justice done to oneself. It presupposes a knowledge of good and evil, of virtues and vices; whereas a choice for the worse is not a choice as it is grounded upon ignorance urged on by the instigation of the soul that inclines toward the blameworthy aspects of the animal powers; it is then also not an exercise of freedom because freedom means precisely being free of domination by the powers of the soul that incites to evil.6
This enslavement to the inciting self is entirely ignored in our public discussions about freedom. Moral freedom, the freedom to act prudently and virtuously, is dismissed in any discussion of freedom in the modern context of political and circumstantial freedom. Destructive moral dissolution, which was once rightly termed licentiousness, is now considered a type of freedom. According to the Qur’an, these destructive tendencies are a result of the dominance of the commanding self, infantile and domineering, in its unrestrained state.
The fourteenth-century Egyptian poet, Imam al-Busiri, cautions against letting desire take charge of one’s self:
Do not attempt to break its appetites through wanton indulgence
Notice how food only strengthens the glutton’s craving.
The self is like an infant—if you leave it, it will grow up loving to suckle,
But if you wean it, soon it will lose its desire for the breast.
Divert the self’s desires and avoid empowering it—
Whenever desire takes charge, it either destroys
or defiles.
Shepherd over it as it grazes freely in the field of actions,
But should it find the pasturage sweet, restrain its casual roaming.
How often it has found some deadly pleasure delightful,
Not knowing that poison lies hidden in cream!
Be on guard against its traps of hunger and satiety—
An empty stomach can be worse than a full one.7
The wantonness and self-centered nature of the aesthete prevents him from having any mature relationships; others are merely toys in his pursuit of infantile self-gratification, and he is quite literally a “playboy.” Kierkegaard wisely identified the aesthete as being on a continuum of pleasure—from the crude plebian pleasures of the brutish class to the rarified genteel pursuits of the elite, but whether the pleasure is Oprah or the opera, the sundry indulgences of humanity find the matrix of their pursuits in the self and its desires.
Kierkegaard believed that each of us is confronted with a choice—an “Either/ Or” choice either to renounce our free will and to choose not to choose in our pursuit of pleasure, or to embrace our true self and pursue not pleasure but the ethical life of virtue, which is rooted in commitment to others.8
In choosing the ethical life, one does not renounce pleasure. It simply becomes meaningful in ways unimaginable to the aesthete. Kierkegaard writes, “I am no ethical rigorist, enthusiastic about a formal, abstract freedom. If only the choice is posited, all the esthetic returns, and you will see that only thereby does existence become beautiful and that this is the only way a person can save his soul and win the whole world, can use the world without misusing it.”9
The pleasure monger can only misuse the world because he takes as means other people who should be seen as ends unto themselves. He exploits them for his pleasure or participates in their exploitation by feeding the machine that is exploiting them. The ethical person, on the other hand, is transparent to himself and hence to others. Kierkegaard states, “The person who lives ethically has seen himself, knows himself, penetrates his whole concretion with his consciousness, does not allow vague thoughts to rustle around inside him or let tempting possibilities distract him with their juggling; he is not like a magic picture that shifts from one thing to another, all depending on how one shifts and turns it.”10 He can now develop in his life “the personal, the civic, the religious virtues, and his life advances through his continually translating himself from one stage to another.”11
MODERATION AND PLEASURE
This ethical life is the life of the second stage of the soul known in the Qur’an as the reproachful self. It is an introspective self that does not commit wrongs willfully but always strives to do what is right, and if the self gets the better of a person in this stage, he or she feels remorse and redresses the wrong. The ethical person may lust but will struggle against that impulse and, more importantly, will not “love to lust.” Commenting on the Qur’anic verse, “Made to appear good to humanity is love of pleasure from spouses, children” (3:14), Fakhr al-Deen al-Raazi distinguishes physical and spiritual desire.
[O]ne’s desire for bodily pleasures is something the self is naturally inclined toward and is a fixed faculty of the human, whereas his inclinations to spiritual delights come as a result of short-lived epiphanies that dissipate with the least of causes. Hence, it is of no surprise that the majority of people have extreme predilections toward bodily pleasures. As for spiritual predilections that only occurs among unusual people and only for periods that are limited in their duration. For this reason, God said, “Made to appear good to humanity is love of pleasure.”12
While these pleasures are not intrinsically negative, they become so with immoderate indulgence. Moderation is the route to an ethical life that results in happiness. Extremes on either side of the golden mean are physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually harmful. Both moral philosophy and religion warn of the dangers of intemperance, as expressed in gluttony, drug abuse, sexuality, and other wanton behavior. Sidi Ahmad Zarruq, the fifteenth-century scholar and Sufi master, says, “The self by its nature is inclined toward extremism in both guidance and deviance.”
Admittedly, religion has too often been sexually repressive. Shame-based efforts to restrain licentious behavior end up failing if the behavior can be hidden from public view. The anonymity and privacy afforded by modern technology enables people to pursue their pleasures without fear of exposure and subsequent shame. But both religion and a commitment to an ethical life outside of religion can effectively address the problem for many individuals struggling to keep their lust in check.
Commitment is the ground of ethics. It is a daily struggle to be committed, to not succumb to solipsistic egoism. Chastity, which is too often conflated with prudery, is not abstinence from sex but the ethical regulation of it. As St. Thomas Aquinas stated: “It belongs to chastity that man may make a moderate use of bodily members in accordance with the judgment of his reason and the choice of his will.”13 Of profound importance for the well-being of men and women is the move beyond lust into the realm of love, which binds one person to another, as he or she is bound to oneself. Love is the gravitational force that holds families together and sustains even the commonweal.
Lust, on the other hand, is merely self-gratification. It is devoid of ethical responsibilities or a commitment to another. Dante finds the penitents on the seventh cornice recalling the great acts of lust past:
“Sodom and Gomorrah,” the new souls cry.
And the others: “Pasiphae enters the cow
to call the young bull to her lechery.”
The reference to Pasiphae comes from Greek mythology. The god Poseidon sends Minos a bull as a gift for sacrifice, but Minos adds it to his herd of bulls. In revenge, Poseidon makes Minos’ wife Pasiphae fall in love with the bull. She conceals herself inside the effigy of a cow so the bull can mount her. The result is the Minotaur, half bull, half human. Lust gives birth to monsters.14
CHASTITY AND COMMITMENT
True love—not the bestial “love” of lust—is the desire to give pleasure to the other as well as receive it, the former being generally the stronger desire. But acts of betrayal can destroy love; it is chastity that enables one to ethically commit to another without the destructive element of betrayal. While many traditional cultures are seen as patriarchal cultures in which marital taboos maintain male dominance, the reality is quite the opposite: curtailing men’s lust by commitment to the marriage bed is the victory of distinctly female virtue over male nature. In their book Brain Sex, Anne Moir and David Jessel argue that:
While men are turned on by glossily reproduced pubic regions of impersonal pin-ups, women achieve moderate erotic stimulation from something very different—the imagination of a sexual relationship. Just as they are more likely to be aroused by the pornographic depiction of a couple coupling, they find gratification in the bodice-ripping romances of popular fiction, which have an overwhelmingly female readership. . . . Men want sex, and women want relationships. Men want flesh, and women want love. Just as the boys wanted the balloons, toys and carburetors, the girls have always wanted contact, and communion, and company.15
While as a result of the women’s movement in the past forty years ground has been undeniably gained in the necessary rights of women leading to a more just society, there also has been a downside. The sexual freedom that has accompanied the newfound rights has had a tragic side effect that victimizes women. The predominately male characteristics of sex without love, pleasure without commitment, and desire for women without inhibitions have overturned the more communitarian female virtues of loving commitment, meaningful sex, and modest social proprieties that engender respect of the opposite sex.
Chastity, while far too often perceived as an antiquated “woman’s virtue,” has been a steadfast guardian of human well-being and an effective restraint from falling into the potentially bottomless pit of lust and wantonness. But human beings ultimately find more satisfaction from et
hical, intellectual, and spiritual awakenings than they do from sensual awakenings, especially when they are experienced within the nexus of moderation, virtue, and love. We often associate appetites with base instincts and neglect the very real rational and spiritual appetites of human beings.
When pure lust is served, the venues for intellectual and spiritual pleasure are often blocked. It is chastity that regulates one’s sexual desire, enabling one to explore the other necessary aspects of life that afford a fully human experience.
Chastity in the Islamic tradition is, as in the Hellenistic and Christian tradition, seen as one of the four cardinal virtues, where it is usually called temperance, and one that protected the individual from his own destructive inclinations as well as the community from moral disintegration caused by licentiousness. And while Muslim society was notably far more sensual than European Christian culture, the religious elite was constantly lashing out at the loose morals of many of the Muslim societies throughout their fourteen hundred years.
Imam al-Ghazali, an influence on Aquinas and perhaps the single greatest Muslim religious thinker, says: “The virtue of chastity concerns the control of one’s bodily appetites and sexual desires. It is in order to insure the self ’s subordination to its rational component so that its enjoyment or restraint is in accordance with one’s intelligence. It is a moderate position between licentiousness and lack of desire. Wantonness is excessive sexual appetite and extreme pursuits of pleasure that the rational component rejects and forbids.” Thus, he continues,