Lust judgment

Joe Walker starts off a blog entry on love and lust with an interesting juxtaposition of quotations:

• "But what was it that delighted me save to love and to be loved? Still I did not keep the moderate way of the love of mind to mind--the bright path of friendship. Instead, the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire."


• "If you have to ask someone if he'll still love you tomorrow, then he doesn't love you tonight... I know I have never intentionally set out to use anyone. But we are judged by our fruit. The fruit of casual sex is the persistent habit of objectifying sexual partners, to the point of being unable to perceive people except in terms of how they relate to one's own wants and desires."

The first is from St. Augustine's Confessions, while the second is from my own book. The saint has long been one of my favorite authors; I think I may have read his Confessions even before I was a Christian — during that time after I got into Chesterton, when classic Christian authors began to be enticing.

The rest of Walker's entry is insightful; he's blogging Augustine's confessions for Lent.