True Love Is Not Mere Lust

A couple days ago a man flying first class from Salt Lake City to Boston was caught gazing on child pornographic images. This is but one of countless examples of men and women seeking to satisfy sexual appetites without concern for a committed personal relationship. In such situations sex is reduced to mere lust. C.S. Lewis described the situation in The Four Loves:

We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he "wants a woman." Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition. One does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes.

Lewis goes on to say that modern society's focus on sex per se has led to the idolizing of sex. In that sense devotion to the old goddess of love has returned. Venus or Aphrodite or Freya or by whatever name this goddess was known still has millions of devoted worshipers. However, this is not mutual love. It is mere self-centered lust.


The ancient Greeks had a word for mutual love. They called it Eros. This type of love makes a man want a woman not as a piece of apparatus. No, he wants a particular woman for who she is. He wants to be her lover. If all goes well that particular woman wants that particular man in turn. She wants to be his lover. Thus the two become captive to one another. They want no other. They have discovered the mystery of life. It is this sweet mystery of life they celebrate. The mutual love implanted by their Creator into their very being is fulfilled. No longer is the man alone. No longer is the woman alone. The two have become one, flesh of flesh and bone of bone. Such love naturally leads them to promise to be faithful for life.


Marriage as a permanent institution flows from this love. This is the very definition of marriage, the lifelong union of one man and one woman. Yet in itself Eros is not enough to sustain marriage. Eros within us has been damaged and impaired by our sinful nature. It is all too easy to "fall out of love" and revert to that natural self-centered tendency within us all the Bible calls sin. So we create laws to protect and sustain marriage, even when that happens. But such laws are often powerless to do what they were designed to do and we must create yet other laws to contain the damage of quarreling, separation and divorce.


Only the selfless love of God revealed in Christ can renew and sustain Eros. The Apostle Paul speaks of this as submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ (Ephesians 5:21-33). In such love a husband and wife gain glimpses of an even deeper mystery, the eternal love of God that will be fulfilled in all of His children in the age to come. Of this the Apostle says, "This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church."


We will return to this later. Next time we will examine the second purpose of marriage: the procreation of children.