On Porn

In The Brothers Karamazov, Liza Khokhlakov tells Alyosha about a recurring dream of hers. In the dream, she's alone in her room at night and she becomes aware of demons skulking in the corners and overhangs. Slowly, they close in around her and stretch out their claws to take possession of her body. Then she makes the Sign of the Cross and they scatter back into the shadows—but right away she has the urge to curse God, and the demons start to come back. Then she makes the Sign of the Cross once again, and once again they scatter. "It's great fun, and awfully exciting," she says. Alyosha reveals that he's had the same dream.

I've had that dream as well. I've always been more interested in Evil than is good for me. Over time I've come to know when I'm looking too closely at the Enemy, even from ostensibly constructive motives: I start shying away from virtuous thoughts. If I'm following some mean or shameful train of thought and a chance word or image calls to mind (say) the Blessed Virgin, I'll find myself quelling the association. And that's when I need to cut the train of thought, say a Hail Mary, and find something else to think about. Wouldn't it be lovely if I always did that.

But the forbidden is enticing. The extreme banality of that sentence is evidence enough of its truth; almost nothing is better known to us than the allure of the locked door. Even before Original Sin had bent us, we gravitated towards the one thing we were told to stay away from: how much more so, now? "There can be no good without evil": the daylong refrain and refuge of puddle-deep philosophies. Nor then can there be flesh without leprosy. True enough, the freedom to choose garbage and poison must exist if one is to come freely to the banquet; but, definitionally, no one ever needs to choose the Ugly Path. But of course it's great fun, and awfully exciting.

God is Triune, and IS Triune from all of eternity. He begets Persons through Love. The human family is patterned on the Holy Trinity, creating through mutual self-giving. It took me a long time to understand why masturbation is a mortal sin. It's because it's patterned on Satan. The Enemy isn't triune, isn't in union with any other person, but he still seeks the power of God without participating in the nature of God, the gifting of God, the self-sacrifice of God. Masturbation is a gash in the soul from that cataclysmic effort to rip the power of Creation out of the hands of Love.

I can't give a ready definition of Art. It's something like participation in the Divine quest to bring forth beauty and truth, but of course that's superlatively nebulous. Still, like everyone, I have a reasonable sense of what is and isn't Art, in practice. In the same way, I don't have an objective, universal definition of Pornography; but someone on the internet once rather insightfully defined it as anything in which you lose interest immediately after masturbating. What makes porn porn is that the enticement to Satanic self-love is the dominant or sole purpose of the image. And now here's the terrifying part:

We're all responsible for each other. The man who sells pornography, who furnishes me with temptation, bears a part in my punishment (woe to him by whom offenses come); but, also, I bear a part in his punishment because if I hadn't yielded to the temptation he offered, his own suffering in Purgatory would be less. Our sins couple and yield putrid fruit. And the woman in the image—already victimized by the seller and dehumanized by the buyer—will also suffer in the scourging of all this Purgatorial remorse. That woman, who is someone's daughter. Who could someday be my daughter. I would kill everyone to keep that from happening to Sonya, but she'll be just as free as I am to perpetuate the cycle of the Enemy.

And that's what Porn is now. My daughter's face, defiled. My daughter's face in Hell.