Evagrius describes the second vice of lust as follows: “The demon of unchastity is concerned with greed for the body. Those who lead a life of abstinence find themselves more exposed to his assaults than others. For the demon would have them stop practicing this virtue. Anyway, so he would have them believe, it yields no profit. It is typical of this demon to play out before them impure actions, to dirty them, and finally to lead them astray into speaking and hearing words as if all that were taking place before their eyes.”
Sexuality is a crucial force in human beings. It contains the longing for vitality, for self-transcendence, for ecstasy. Sex can be an important source of spirituality. Evagrius certainly doesn’t deny that. But he sees the danger of taking refuge in a world of appearances. Sexuality has a great deal to do with frustration. Many people who can’t endure disappointment take flight into sex. In that case it is not a place of intimate love and ecstasy, not union with the beloved, but fantasizing one’s way into the illusory world of sexual satisfaction. Evagrius is speaking not of the union of man and woman in the sexual act, but of the flight into sexual fantasies. Here sexuality becomes an illusion. Instead of meeting a real person and giving oneself over wholly to that person, I use sex to represent to myself my own world, an illusory world where everything is wonderful. I don’t have to have any consideration for anyone, but just live out my sexuality by myself.
This is a real danger, as indicated by the many reports today about sexual exploitation of children and sexual harassment of women in the workplace. Here sex is not being really lived; people shy away from taking the trouble to give themselves to the other and carefully achieving union with that person. Sex is seen as the satisfaction of lust, not as the expression of a love that feels its way into the heart of the other person. And so, with their non-integrated sexuality, people injure the dignity of others. There are hardly any .more painful injuries than sexual injuries, hardly any more brutal and degrading forms of violence than sexual violence, when it lowers people to the level of a commodity.
In his description of unchastity, Evagrius shows that he is in no way rejecting sexuality, a charge often made against the early monks. Instead he points to the fact that, just like eating, sex can be misused to flee from reality. Through the use of eating one stuffs one’s anger and frustration. By using sex one can satisfy oneself, even if one is not content. And we can take refuge in it, if we do not trust ourselves to really meet another person and give ourselves to that person. In this case a faulty encounter, an inadequate readiness to love, is compensated with sex. In truth this harms the person, checks the process of becoming fully human, and perverts sex into a blockade of God, while an integrated sexuality worthy of human beings is always an expression of love for God.
Spirituality becomes alive only when sexuality is integrated into the religious path. When spirituality runs shallow, it bears witness to the fact that sex has not been contemplated and accepted. Evagrius doesn’t want us to suppress sex, but to deal with it consciously. And without such conscious dealing with sex there is no human maturity and no real spirituality.
~Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers
