But I say, walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.
C. S. Lewis once remarked that he was a “converted pagan living in a nation of apostate Puritans.” Most serious Christians in the English-speaking world are in something of a similar situation. That is, because of the overwhelming dominance of American culture, American habits of thought tend to color the thinking even of those who are not themselves American. One clear example of this is the way in which an average person will react to Paul’s phrase “the desires of the flesh.” Being a culture of apostate Puritans, secularized Americans and those influenced by them have a more or less adolescent obsession with sex and therefore assume that everyone else must share their obsession.
Thus, when Pope John Paul II publishes an encyclical such as Veritatis Splendor that is a wide-ranging philosophical discourse covering acres and acres of human thought, the only thing the media can do is comb through it in search of a couple of remarks about sexuality and announce that the Church is hung up on sex. In the same way, when Paul speaks of the “desires of the flesh” most modern readers have difficulty grasping that he has in mind far more than our sex drive (which, in Catholic understanding, is neither good nor evil any more than hunger or thirst are moral qualities). Rather, for Paul, the desires of the flesh include not only fornication but “impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.” This means that the central sin for Paul is not illicit sexual desire but is rather the focus on the self as the center of the universe. Moreover, for Paul, health and life consist not of the denial of sexuality (he, like Jesus, exalts marriage as a great thing (Ephesians 5) but in “walking by the Spirit” — the very Spirit who invented sex and said, “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). If we walk by that Spirit, we shall find not only sex but all that is human transformed by the mutual self-giving love that is at the heart of life in Christ Jesus.
