Artist: Pieter van der Heyden
“Extravagance weakens power, it emasculates the body.”
Lust, or lechery (Latin, "luxuria" (carnal)), is intense longing. It is usually thought of as intense or unbridled sexual desire, which leads to fornication, adultery, rape, bestiality, and other immoral sexual acts. However, lust could also mean simply desire in general; thus, lust for money, power, and other things are sinful. In accordance with the words of Henry Edward Manning, the impurity of lust transforms one into "a slave of the devil".
Lust, if not managed properly, can subvert propriety.
German philosopher Schopenhauer wrote as follows:
"Lust is the ultimate goal of almost all human endeavour, exerts an adverse influence on the most important affairs, interrupts the most serious business, sometimes for a while confuses even the greatest minds, does not hesitate with its trumpery to disrupt the negotiations of statesmen and the research of scholars, has the knack of slipping its love-letters and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts".
Dante defined lust as the disordered love for individuals, thus possessing at least the redeeming feature of mutuality, unlike the graver sins, which constitute an increasingly agonised focussing upon the solitary self ( a process begun with the more serious sin of gluttony ). It is generally thought to be the least serious capital sin as it is an abuse of a faculty that humans share with animals, and sins of the flesh are less grievous than spiritual sins ( love excessive, not love turning ever further awry toward hatred of man and God ).
In Dante's Purgatorio, the penitents walk deliberately through the purifying flames of the uppermost of the terraces of Mount Purgatory so as to purge themselves of lustful thoughts and feelings and finally win the right to reach the Earthly Paradise at the summit. In Dante's Inferno, unforgiven souls guilty of the sin of lust are whirled around for all eternity in a perpetual tempest, symbolic of the passions by which, through lack of self-control, they were buffeted helplessly about in their earthly lives.
