Lust

The seventh commandment (the sixth in Lutheran and Catholic counting) says, “You shall not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14), and Jesus carried it into the heart: anyone who “looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Paul wrote, “Flee from sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:18), and Joseph did just that: when his master’s wife tried to draw him to her, he left his cloak in her hand and ran outside (Genesis 39:12). The story of King David is told plainly in 2 Samuel 11. At the time when kings march out to war, “David remained in Jerusalem”; from the palace roof he saw Bathsheba, sent for her, and then had her husband Uriah put where he would be killed in battle. Later preachers began the story with that idle evening.

Evagrius called this thought porneia, the word Paul uses for sexual immorality; the Latin lists said luxuria, the Slavic tradition blud. Later lists set chastity against it, and in the Psychomachia of Prudentius, Chastity defeats Lust in the second battle of the poem. Dante put the lustful on the seventh and last terrace of Purgatory, walking through fire while they sing and call out examples of chastity.