The New Year’s Honours list informed us that a knighthood had been bestowed on the writer and actor Stephen Fry. That announcement revived in me memories of a debate I attended back in 2009.
The proposition under debate that evening was “The Catholic Church is a Force for Good in the World” and it was vigorously opposed and derided by Stephen Fry and the late Christopher Hitchens. During the debate and afterwards, both Hitchens and Fry expressed contempt for the Ten Commandments insofar as they were “commanded”, but reserved their <em>saeva indignatio</em> for the 9th Commandment regarding sexual “coveting”, denouncing it as an example of Orwellian “thought-crime”. Fry further denounced priests and monks as “sexually dysfunctional” on account of their vows of celibacy.
More recently Fry, in a podcast series of talks on the Seven Deadly Sins pronounced, during the episode on Lust:
“We know Jesus said that a sin committed in the head was as bad as one committed in fact, that to look lustfully was as bad as to commit adultery or as he puts it in the authorised version, “<em>that whosoever looketh on a woman to Lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart</em>.” He had a solution for that. “<em>If thy right eye offend thee pluck it out from thee for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.</em>”
“Most of us”, opined Fry, “would surely reject such a notion of a thought-crime and ask Jesus to get some fresh air and have a word with himself.” Fry’s lofty dismissal of Jesus’s words on the 9th Commandment is striking, for it seeks to remove the “heart” from moral considerations, separating it from the world of “fact”.
The passage Fry refers to is speaking not of inadvertent, non-voluntary attraction but rather, of the willed behaviour of a man who looks at/thinks about a woman: the behaviour of someone who seeks to satisfy his lust through staring or sexual fantasies.
As St James (James 1.15) memorably puts it, “every man is tempted, being drawn away by his own concupiscence, and allured. Then when concupiscence has conceived, it brings forth sin: But sin, when it is completed, begets death.” In other words, man’s free will yields to a bad desire when we internally consent to it and entertain and luxuriate in it such that we already commit sin, even if we do not go on to commit any further deed which the thought may encourage us to commit.
Stephen Fry is selective in condemning the notion of “thought-crimes” for he certainly believes there are such things as “hate-crimes” which are both morally and legally condemnable. Yet what is a hate-crime but a crime which is informed by a particular attitude of the heart towards, say, someone of another race? The idea is that such internal attitudes or thoughts can add something especially bad to a crime; for example, an assault on a person because he belongs to the hated group. That additional wrongness, which the law of this land recognises, is internal and involves a bad willing – a matter of what is in the heart. A judge condemning a “hate-crime” will, typically, be concerned to seek to eliminate such bad attitudes as well as punishing the external, more visible crime which the attitude engendered.
Even apart from the law (which also recognises internal will in the very notion of “mens rea”), what Fry and Hitchens denounced as “thought-crime” is central to any coherent understanding of the moral life. Yet there seems to be, for some, a special problem with the idea of sexual fantasies being wrong as opposed to other kinds of immoral thoughts. When is the last time you heard a denunciation of those who say it is wrong to fantasise about revenge or otherwise take pleasure in the thought of harming – say, mutilating – others?
If a society emphasises, as ours surely does, that more or less everyone has the right to “be themselves” in the sexual realm then criticism of another’s sexual values and behaviour cuts against a central, internalised assumption of that culture. To suggest that assented-to intimate desires of certain kinds might be legitimate subjects of moral criticism will be seen as striking deeply at someone’s “identity” – a self-created sense of identity very much based on the possession of certain desires. This is despite the fact that our society is not consistent and many people oppose “leering” or “perving” as well as particularly repulsive fantasies. Thinking of the appalling Pelicot case in France, most would not see it acceptable for a husband merely to fantasise about what Mr Pelicot orchestrated.
A self-created identity is necessarily a fragile one and will urgently seek recognition from society in order that it may be secured. It cannot be secure in terms of a divine order which informs what gets to count as our identity, and what gets to count as valuable and worthy of respect beyond the horizons of our self-creation. Chastity is a difficult virtue, not least because it demands a humanising of powerful desires which may insistently demand that they not be humanised at all. Max Scheler noted the phenomenon, in a different context, of “ressentiment”, which originates in persons and groups when certain values appear to them unattainable. It is, in his words, “a self-poisoning of the mind…a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgements. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract and spite.”
When it comes to chastity, ressentiment seeks to devalue the goods at stake which demand respect so that, as John Paul II put it, “man need not struggle to raise himself to the level of the true good, but can ‘light-heartedly’ recognise as good only what suits him, what is convenient and comfortable for him.” And in order for that delusion to be maintained, purity must be demeaned and with it, any sensitivity to the fact that saturation in unchaste desires damages us profoundly, including in our ability to appreciate the very marital goods which make sense of human sexuality.
That such “self-poisoning” is, in our society, encouraged and rewarded through the bestowal of knightly honours merely demonstrates the danger of ignoring – however selectively – what goes on in our hearts.
Anthony McCarthy is author of<strong><em> <a href="https://lms.org.uk/product/ethical-sex">Ethical Sex</a></em></strong>
<em>(Getty Images)</em>
