C.S. Lewis: Sexual Morality

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…The devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so “natural,” so “healthy,” and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them.  Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour.  Now this association is a lie.  Like all powerful lies, it is based on a truth — the truth, acknowledged above, that sex in itself (apart from the excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is “normal” and “healthy,” and all the rest of it.  The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal.  Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense.  Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse of health, good humour, and frankness.  For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing.  Every sane and civilised man must have some set of principles by which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to permit others.  One man does this on Christian principles, another on hygienic principles, another on sociological principles.  The real conflict is not between Christianity and “nature,” but between Christian principles and other principles in the control of “nature.”  For “nature” (in the sense of natural desire) will have to be controlled anyway, unless you are going to ruin your whole life.  The Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards obeying the others.

…People often misunderstand what psychology teaches about “repressions.”  It teaches us that “repressed” sex is dangerous.  But “repressed” is here a technical term:  it does not mean “suppressed” in the sense of “denied” or “resisted.”  A repressed desire or thought is one which has been thrust into the subconscious (usually at a very early age) and can now come before the mind only in a disguised and unrecognisable form.  Repressed sexuality does not appear to the patient to be sexuality at all.  When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression.  On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else.  They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes.  Virtue — even attempted virtue — brings light; indulgence brings fog.

C.S. Lewis
Book 3 Chapter 5, “Sexual Morality”
Mere Christianity