hen Emma Bovary’s seducer, Rodolphe, abandons her on the eve of their elopement, he writes her a letter: “Fate alone is to blame.” At the end of Flaubert’s masterpiece, Emma is dead, and her husband Charles has discovered her infidelities. He meets Rodolphe by chance in the market. They drink a beer together, and Charles at last says, “No one is to blame. It was decreed by fate.”

Sexual desire has the odor of fate, thanks to its power to create illusions, delusions, and compulsions and to bestow, with apparent indifference, great happiness or deep misery. So testifies the anonymous poet, who seeks to pull back the curtain of sentimentality and show its contradictions:

I shall say what inordinate love is:
The furiosity and wodness of mind,
An instinguible brenning, fawting bliss,
A great hunger insatiate to find,
A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind,
A right wonderful, sugared, sweet error,
Without labour rest, contrary to kind,
Or without quiet to have huge labour.

Inordinate love—a theological definition of lust—and sexual desire are of course, not the same thing. Lust is the misuse of sexual desire. It has a subjective form—a desire to use another human being for one’s own pleasure—and an objective form, a desire that goes outside the bounds of good social order, one that cannot be integrated into the rest of a human life. The clash between the two forms is the stuff of literature and legend, the richest tools we have to understand ourselves. Sexual desire can take the form of true love, a communion with the other. Communion invites a lifelong bond, lived out in the relentless awkwardness of another’s distinct existence. Yet there is a reason why sex appears ungovernable. Our sexuality is the seat of eros. Eros puts our lives into sharp focus and drives us toward the grand and the transcendent. It seeks the whole; it seeks the divine. Yet when frustrated it contracts the whole human world inside a closed sphere of phantasms.

Eros need not be expressed sexually. In Freud’s account of the chaste and enormously fruitful life of Leonardo da Vinci, sexuality is “sublimated” onto different objects. Freud’s forbear, Plato, imagines rather that the body is a temporary and ultimately unnatural home for our deepest desires. Eros was not sexuality hiding under love of wisdom, but the love of wisdom hiding under sexual desire. We need not make a judgement as to its original form to see that it can be directed into one form or another.

Teresa of Avila tells the story of a young woman named Doña Casilda. She is wealthy, beautiful, passionately in love with her fiancé. But when she attends the clothing of a Carmelite nun, she decides, against the wishes of her family, to renounce everything—lover, wealth, status—for a life of poverty and prayer. Her determination resembles that of a star-crossed lover. She tries three times to join, the second time jumping out of the carriage as her household brings firewood to the convent and clinging for life to the statue of the Blessed Virgin. After her family wrests her back, she runs away a third and last time. She finds herself left alone in a church for a single minute. She tucks her shoes under her skirt to run like a maniac a long way through the countryside until she reaches the monastery, where she spends the rest of her life.

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, as the story draws to a close, the brilliant doctor Lydgate is founding a new hospital for the study of fever and is in need of a new source of funding. Dorothea, widowed and restless with her great fortune, longs for some concrete good within her reach. This pair, each ardent for forms of greatness and devoted to their communities, have no hint of romantic interest between them. Eliot lets us see the prospect of a different kind of collaboration between the two, where each will have an opportunity to use the furthest reach of their talents and ambitions. Circumstances make the collaboration impossible just as it comes into view. Yet the jointly conceived hospital is itself a beautiful manifestation of erotic desire.

Just as eros need not be sexual, sex does not require eros. The most common—and least interesting—forms of lust are the products of conformity. “I wonder,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus.” Our desires, our passions, and their objects are shaped by other people: our immediate family, our friends, our community, and all of the tiny, invisible, unmentionable habits and norms that we call “culture.” Consider Saint Augustine’s account of his “sexual initiation,” rooted in shame, fear of exclusion, and desire for praise:

I was ashamed among the other youths that my viciousness was less than theirs; I heard them boasting of their exploits, and the viler the exploits the louder the boasting; and I set about the same exploits not only for the pleasure of the act but for the pleasure of the boasting. Nothing is utterly condemnable save vice; yet I grew in vice through desire of praise; and when I lacked opportunity to equal others in vice, I invented things I had not done, lest I might be held cowardly for being innocent, or contemptible for being chaste.

Does Augustine’s use of his sexuality to conform and compete disappear as he gets older? The great expression of the lust of his youth, on account of which he excoriates himself most, was his faithful relationship with a woman he lived with for fifteen years who bore him a son. This was entirely conventional for a man of his class. Does he ever surrender to overwhelming natural appetites? Hardly. He follows conventions and submits his desires to them. His drama arrives when he receives a deeply unconventional call to celibacy, one that will foreclose his social and political ambitions as well as his private satisfactions. His new ambition, like Doña Casilda’s, is to unite so far as possible with divine wisdom.

What then is sexual desire, and under what conditions should we call it lust? Our bodies perceive sights, sounds, textures, and tastes, and our perceptions are shaped deeply and irrevocably by words, images, and social conventions. Without these mediate forms, our powers to perceive and understand could not obtain anything that was not itself a mere shape, noise, or knock: for instance, a living animal, a geometric form, an account of the sun and stars, the glimmer of a human soul, or any cause either immanent or transcendent. Yet the experience we gain from words and images opens up our capacity to be deceived. We generate them and combine them creatively through the powers of the imagination. This means that our deception can be self-inflicted and self-sustained. The essential exercise of freedom of thought and imagination permits us to be enchanted by entire worlds that stubbornly obscure the world outside of us.

The capacity for human beings to trap themselves in the pleasures of mere experience was what Augustine called concupiscence. Our experiences give us pleasure; concupiscence draws us to fixate on the pleasure itself rather than the object or activity that bears it. We find ourselves trapped by the inner surface of our experience, in a windowless pocket where neither love nor understanding is possible.

All of us have this inborn tendency, which has a parallel in a vice of the intellect that Augustine calls the “lust of the eyes” or curiositas. Through our eyes comes the power to know and to understand. As we come to know and understand, say, a geometric proof or the art of woodworking, we experience both knowing and understanding. Such an experience is pleasant, and the pleasure can be separated and sought as an end in itself. Consider the desire to rubberneck at car accidents, to see the twisted wreck of the vehicle, the wounds of the injured, the distress of the bereaved. No learning takes place in such experiences. Yet we experience something like the pleasures of learning, just as we do (say) in watching hockey players beat each other bloody on the ice. I feel a different sort of pleasure in learning and knowing when I humiliate a hapless dummy in public, crushing him with my mastery of what appear to be facts and logic. It is possible, but hardly necessary, that any teaching or learning takes place. Rather, the knowledge or understanding that I should seek continually is replaced by something else, a pleasure that occupies my attention and so draws me away from my deeper object.

Concupiscence infuses every aspect of human experience, not just sexuality. Augustine dwells on the pleasures of the theater, where the heights and depths of human feeling can be felt without any real object to generate them. He describes feeling inordinate grief over the death of a friend, to the point that he suspects he loves his feeling of grief more than the friend himself. In love and lust, concupiscence draws us from the real presence of the other human being to our own pleasure.

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It is of course enormously difficult, especially in matters of the heart, to distinguish fantasy from reality. One sure sign of the enclosed inner world, the capsule pleasures of fantasy, is a perception of necessity or fate, a denial of our active role in choosing and imagining. In this way, to both the narrator and reader of Madame Bovary, the final appeal of Charles and Rodolphe to fate is ironic. Emma Bovary is beautiful, bored, and restless; she marries the local doctor and finds her life stretches out in tedium and superficiality. As a housewife she is effectively useless, engaged in a kind of performance, with lace curtains, neat household accessories, and hair styled perfectly over her ears. Her servant cooks for her and raises her child. Her husband, lacking the cunning or the imagination of her lovers, fails to express the depth and breadth of his devotion to her. Her seducer, Rodolphe, sees from his wide experience that she is susceptible.

Rodolphe achieves his goal with a few simple tools: secrecy, flattery, feigned earnestness, and the sense of touch. Emma’s eventual degradation is so complete that the reader can forget that she resists Rodolphe at first. She would have undertaken nothing without his meticulous and persistent contrivances. Rodolphe’s cunning, his own boredom, and his cynicism belie any irresistible impulse, or anything deeper than interest in a safe and particularly satisfying kind of entertainment. When Emma imagines that he might challenge her husband to a duel, he laughs contemptuously. Emma herself has been won over not by an overwhelming physical response but by the resonance of their affair with the “lyrical legion of . . . adulterous women” she has encountered in novels. At last, her life is worthy of literature: “The long dream of her youth was coming true.”

The desire to be beautiful and to live a beautiful life is sufficiently grand, powerful, and deep to distinguish Emma’s passion from the social autopilot under which young Augustine operates. The desire to possess beauty for oneself is the distinctive mark of the erotic. Emma’s eros might have been drawn out by some real possibility in the world, by love, work, or service. Instead it is captured by Rodolphe’s deception and the practical limits of an adulterous affair. But her desire is not limited by the constraints of reality; she is trapped within an inner theater, a Plato’s cave in which she feeds the fire and shapes the shadows herself.

One sign that Emma’s affairs are her own entertainment is her use of costumes and accessories. Rodolphe arranges with Charles to give her practice riding to improve her health. She argues with her husband, in her last attempt to resist being drawn into the affair, that she cannot ride without a habit. Charles tells her to buy one; the narrator drily remarks, “It was the riding habit that decided her.” The riding habit is only the beginning. Emma wastes her household’s resources on gifts for Rodolphe: a ring, a cane, a riding cape in which to elope. (Later in the novel the expensive stage settings are lavish hotel rooms for meeting Leon, her second lover.)

Rodolphe and Emma are each entertaining themselves, but their modes of entertainment are distinct. Rodolphe, like many other seducers of literature, is a serial operator. He enjoys Emma, especially for her purity of devotion, but his inner core, if he has one, is untouched. Emma, by contrast, believes that her drama is real. When Emma mouths clichés about love, Rodolphe recalls that he has heard prostitutes say the same things. He cannot imagine how anyone could possibly invest them with real meaning: “The more flowery a person’s speech, he thought, the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed.” Here the narrator intervenes:

Fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Here we get a hint of the depth not only of Emma’s character but of erotic love. For Rodolphe, sex is simply a form of entertainment; he is gratified by the mechanics of the human spirit. For Emma, the deepest human depths have been touched. She is lured not by a sequence of pleasures stretching indefinitely into the future but by the prospect of a life’s fulfillment.

Her story ends badly. But this does not mean it is impossible for two people trapped in the drama of mutual use to see one another. The curtain of fantasy needs only to drop long enough for the soul to come trembling to the eye.

In Chekhov’s novella The Duel, the protagonist Laevsky has seduced another man’s wife and moved with her to the Caucasus. When the story begins, Laevsky has just intercepted a letter informing his lover that her husband has died. But we learn that the fire has long since gone out. The prospect of marriage is now viable but uninteresting. Laevsky is overwhelmed by a desire to escape; he spends much of the story trying to borrow the money for the train fare to St. Petersburg, where he will begin a new life with (one assumes) a new lover.

Laevsky is too weak and hapless to be repulsive, although some avoid him on account of the scandal, and one of the local doctors despises him. He has exactly one friend, whom we are led to believe would be friends with anyone. The woman he lives with, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, is also weak and hapless. Her beauty and charm are shown to us only through her imagination. By happenstance she is drawn into two affairs, one of them coerced, the other a hoped-for way out of debt. At one point, her sole friend scolds her for her dirty underclothes.

Laevsky is unable to raise the funds to escape to St. Petersburg. He finds himself drawn into a duel with the doctor who hates him. The night before the engagement, one of his girlfriend’s lovers leads him to her rendezvous with another. As he leaves their house in the early morning to fight his challenger, he sees her wrapped in a rug “like an Egyptian mummy.” He puts his arms around her, kisses her, looks into her face, having “realised that this unhappy, sinful woman was the one creature near and dear to him, whom no one could replace.” He survives the duel and reforms his life.

Lust in Chekhov’s story is a humble sin, worthy of pity. It causes no wars and burns no buildings. In the strange but not impossible sequence of events in the story, lust blossoms into a love that cracks open two human beings and drives them to do what it takes to take care of one another. In Madame Bovary the light of tenderness appears rather late, and in the midst of its most horrific scene, but it does arrive. In the final unwinding of Emma’s life, the merchant Lheureux seizes everything the family owns, and she gives herself a large dose of arsenic. When she is first seized with convulsions, Charles flings himself to her side, on his knees:

“Speak to me! What did you eat? Answer, for heaven’s sake!”
And he looked at her with a tenderness in his eyes such as she had never seen.

It is unclear whether the narrator means that she had never seen this tenderness in Charles’s eyes or she had never seen it at all. Moreover, we do not know whether she only sees it because she is dying or he only shows it to her then. It is sufficient, in any case, not to lighten the darkness of the novel but to prove the truth of her character. The tenderness, offered or seen too late, is the thin stem on which the deeper life she craved might have grown.

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Lust consists in the reduction of our desire for communion into a form of entertainment, a play in an inner theater, one where the actors take real blows and bleed real blood. It is not hard to count the harms dealt out by Emma’s affairs or to argue about which character is most at fault. Yet the book invites us to more strenuous and important forms of reflection.

Our inherited conventional morality, such as it is, focuses on rules, rule-breaking, and acknowledged harm to individuals. Yet the sphere of morality is not that of law and punishment but that of happiness. The question is not whom Emma Bovary harmed so much as how she might have lived instead. This question is much harder; it makes demands on our social and political imagination that extend far beyond the evaluation of individual choices.

The moments of tenderness I have pointed to, in Chekhov and in the final moments of Emma’s life, are prompted by the crackling presence of another human body. One face looks into another; the soul comes trembling to the eye. Real light enters the darkened theater. For Laevsky and Nadyezhda, there is a chance that they can see each other truly. They marry and live in the open, and he works to pay off his debts. The debt-fueled dual fantasy world has been dissolved into a real human community of love and work.

The role of debt in permitting and sustaining the toxic inner worlds of our characters should not be ignored. The narrator of Madame Bovary does not shrink from revealing the hidden structure behind Emma’s costumes and props. Lheureux knowingly feeds Emma’s life to the dry-goods industry of which he is a part. He seeks to smooth the way from Emma’s impulse to cash in his pocket and grants her loans that are far beyond her means. He makes separate loans to Charles, keeping each secret from the other. A mountain of credit builds up over several years, which Lheureux counts as capital he will recover. In the ruling fiction of the time, one which we still live under, the laws of acquiring wealth operate independently of any other public order. The political reflections of Plato and Aristotle clarify what we fail to take seriously: every habit of life in a community either promotes or corrodes human excellence and flourishing. No social activity is neutral. Even the supposed laws of economics are bound by the deeper law of the human good.

The image of the human being that upholds unbounded consumer culture is a strong and free isolated individual, calculating costs and benefits. It is a false image. Closer to the truth is the myth told by Aristophanes in the Symposium, that we are cut slices of larger, more powerful beings who once plausibly aspired to be divine. In a way that we cannot understand, our “desire and pursuit of the whole” brings us nearer to the vision of the divine we once held and lost.

We share with the fictional characters we have discussed a debt-driven consumer culture. Governing that culture is the myth that the free exercise of a mere consumer choice absolves us from civic responsibility, the cultivation of ways to make it easy to be good and difficult to harm oneself. We also share a culture in which our eros is easily dissipated, wasted on a thousand trivial fantasies. Eros is not a “fate” as Charles suggests but a force susceptible to engineering, just as many creeks can be channeled into a flood and a great flood dispersed into a thousand trickles.

Our weaknesses are inborn, and for individuals, grace is the surest aid. Yet we surely owe one another a world where lust is difficult. The cultivation of eros requires tales and stories of human greatness, tempered by critical reflection on human folly. So as always, I recommend the study of the classics. Yet the shaping of thought and imagination is not sufficient. We need to build communities where the presence of real human bodies draws us on to love and to work, so that slender stems of tenderness, on which humble sinners can escape from their prisons, have room to grow.