Theology of the Body (TOB): Lust

Lust and the Nuptial Meaning of the Body:

Lust limits, blurs and distorts the nuptial meaning of the body - the body’s capacity “of expressing love with which the man-person becomes a gift, thus fulfilling the deep meaning of his being and his existence.” After sin, this capacity of the body to summon to communion, express and realize it “was weakened and dimmed. As a consequence, the human body has almost lost its capacity of expressing love and the gift of person. “The more lust dominates the heart,” says John Paul II, “the less the heart experiences the nuptial meaning of the body. It becomes less sensitive to the gift of the person, which expresses that meaning in the mutual relations of man and woman.”

Lust can pass itself off under many disguises. John Paul II warns that “it is not always plain and obvious. Sometimes it passes itself off as ‘love,’ although it changes its true profile and dims the limpidity of the gift in the mutual relationship of persons.

Lust “depersonalizes man, making him an object ‘for the other.’ The person is reduced simply to an object of sexual enjoyment. Lust unilaterally reduces the inter-personal relation of man and woman to the what is bodily and sexual. Thus, they become “almost incapable of accepting the mutual gift of the person.” Their inter-personal relationship “do not express communion, but they remain unilaterally determined by sex.”

Lust, affirms John Paul II, “entails the loss of the interior freedom of the gift.” It limits and reduces the person’s self-control and self-mastery, and “makes impossible the interior freedom of giving.