Sexual sin on its own is rather minor, but its results - what Aquinas called the Eight Daughters of Lust - can be devastating. To read more on this topic, check out Edward Feser's writings: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/02/whats-deal-with-sex-part-ii.html
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The sexual instinct is the most powerful instinct that we have.
And this is for a very good reason.
If it weren't so powerful, if it didn't drive so much of our behavior, most of us would choose celibacy.
The act of sex, the consequences of sex, these are terrifying to us.
Just ask any teenager that's first feeling those stirrings and wants to approach the opposite sex, but is just so nervous of what's going to result.
The challenges of trying to bond with the other half of the species who thinks differently than us, who needs different things than us, who is our complement, but nearly impossible to understand.
Think about raising children, the amount of effort and work that goes into it, and the amount of heartbreak that results.
If the sexual instinct were any less intense, most of us would choose celibacy.
And because it is this intense, it is very, very prone to abuse.
It overwhelms us, it dominates the mind.
And so it's very easy to go into sin.
Sin, meaning that you're missing the mark.
You're not doing something quite right.
You're going off in the wrong direction.
And when you are overwhelmed with lust, it is very easy to do this.
Now, sex in and of itself is one of the least of the sins.
It's up there with overeating, having a little bit too much cake after dinner.
Lust is pursuing something that is good, but simply doing it slightly the wrong way.
And if you're going to talk about sins that truly damn the soul, envy, treachery, hatred, pride, those are demonic sins.
Whereas lust is a human sin.
It's something that everybody has experienced and everybody has messed up to one degree or another.
It's hardly the worst of them.
But it's dangerous because of what results from engaging in sexual sin.
The physical consequences are self-evident.
Having sex at the wrong time with the wrong person when you're not ready for it can result in a lot of heartbreak, a lot of cruelty, a lot of damaged emotions.
It can result in unwanted children or children that you're not prepared to raise or that you're now raising with the wrong person.
Sex exposes you to infections, to disease.
It's a very powerful vector for these bugs to get into you.
On the purely material sense, sex is very dangerous.
But even on the spiritual side, even though sex itself is not that great of a sin, it can lead to sins that are very, very destructive of your soul.
Thomas Aquinas listed eight daughters of lust, which he identified as being the result of sexual sin.
The first four are sins of the intellect, failures of the intellect, whereas the last four are failures of the will.
So what does this mean?
What is the intellect?
What is the purpose of our intellect and what is the purpose of our will?
The purpose of our intellect is to behold the truth, to perceive the truth.
This is scientific truth.
This is personal truth, moral truth.
This is to perceive the best way to go about achieving our ends.
Because the truth is just one of the many faces of God, coequal with the others.
Truth and goodness are equally embodied in God, and when we fail to use our intellect, we fail to accurately perceive God.
And the will, the will has, again, a twofold nature.
The will is there to regulate our animal instincts.
Animals need do nothing more than follow their instinct.
But men being half animal and half angel, we are called to regulate those animal instincts and employ them in the best manner possible.
Our will is used to regulate that.
But our will is also there to look towards the ineffable, to look towards the good, to will good in the world, to will good in ourselves, and to will good for those around us.
And so a failure of the will is when the will is weak or where the will is looking elsewhere.
Now the first four daughters of lust, they are of the intellect and they tend to be a confusion of means and ends.
The first is what Aquinas calls the blindness of mind.
This is where the ends are lost into lust.
The means are still there.
The intellect is still there regulating the means, finding the best means, but the ends itself, the happiness and pleasure of sex itself is viewed as the end, as opposed to simply one step towards a higher end.
You've seen this before with people that confuse their addiction for being good, with the glutton who regularly overeats and takes pleasure in the food, but shows no regard for their body.
They have lost what the end of food is, that pleasure from eating is only one part of what eating is.
They think the end is the pleasure itself.
And so think of the sodomite.
He who pursues pleasure for pleasure's sake without realizing that it's just one facet of something higher, and thus he loses himself in false ends.
The second daughter of lust is rashness, and this one will turn you into a fool.
The man who engages in sex rashly, they have the correct end in sight.
The end is romance, love, marriage, but they act rashly.
They are so overwhelmed with lust, they don't think about who they're doing it with, about how they're going about it.
They have the correct end, but rather than discipline their mind and think about what they're doing, they rationalize what they're doing.
They turn themselves into a fool, getting married too early to the wrong person or having sex too early and thus undermining the relationship.
The second daughter of lust is when you lose the means, when you don't think about what you're doing.
The third daughter of lust is thoughtlessness.
This is the person who has completely abandoned the intellect.
They do not think about the means and they do not think about the ends.
They are the sex addict.
Think of Hank Moody in Californication or the eponymous Bojack Horseman.
Both of these characters will have sex at the drop of a hat.
They don't plan it out, they don't think about it, they don't think about who they're doing it with.
They don't have any end in mind.
And so repeatedly, they have sex with the wrong people at the wrong time, hurting the other person, hurting themselves, hurting their friends, and destabilizing their own life because they don't think about it at all.
And the fourth daughter of lust is inconstancy.
This is the Lothario.
They have means, they have practiced, they have thought about how to pursue sex effectively.
Their ends are very romantic.
But because there is so much unbridled lust in them, they use the means and the ends.
They use it to excess.
And then once the act is completed, they become inconstant.
The vows that they made, the professions of love are no longer something they believe in.
They believed in it entirely while they were inflamed with lust, but with lust sated, they change their mind.
The four failures of will occur when the will is not focused in the correct direction.
And so the first, the fifth daughter of lust and the first failure of will is self-love.
This is the porn addict.
The will is supposed to be focused on the world around you.
It's supposed to be focused upon God.
That is the direction that the will should be pushing you in.
But he who engages in self-love, who puts the will entirely towards themself and who ignores the outside world winds up becoming a very sick sort of introvert.
Their will drives them to the point where they cannot truly perceive others.
And so you have the worst pathetic of the porn addict who has no idea how to speak to others.
The next daughter of lust is the hatred of God.
This is the hatred of what is good and true.
This is where the lust drives the person to will a reality which cannot exist, which is contradictory in nature.
Thus we have the fetishist.
He who takes pleasure not in the true act of sex, but in a twisted and broken act of sex, an act of sex that can never truly satisfy them.
And because their will is focused upon the impossible, they start growing resentful, angry, and eventually hating all that is good and true in the world.
The seventh daughter of lust is love of this world.
The will is focused not on the ephemeral, it is focused entirely on the objective.
They put all of their life essence into that which is temporary.
We have the pornographer, the man who dedicates his life and his artistry into celebrating the most bestial and venal nature of man, who focuses all of his will and energy on the merely animal.
He takes all of the beauty of artistic creation and degrades it because his will never looks above the horizon.
And the eighth and final daughter of lust is despair of a future world.
This man has so soaked himself in sexual sin, has so depleted himself, has so burned himself up in lust that he has no will left.
He becomes a coward.
He despairs of virtue.
He might see what the purpose is.
He might see the ends, the true ends that he should be following.
He might see that the path he's on is leading to utter destruction.
But he has become a nihilist.
He lacks the will.
He has dissipated his will into excess and has given up on any hope of truth, beauty, or virtue.
The intensity of sex easily leads into these eight daughters.
It easily clouds the mind and breaks the will.
And yet, nonetheless, for some men and some women, The pursuit of lust can actually, because it is such a minor sin, and because it is a good thing that they are pursuing, can lead towards enlightenment.
Those that keep a clear mind, that define the means and the ends, might eventually find themselves, might find their will starts looking upwards.
Rather than falling down into sin, they stumble upwards into virtue.
But nonetheless, there are many, many snares here.
Sex is such a powerful instinct that it must be sated in the correct manner, lest you fall astray, lest you destroy not only your life, but your soul itself.
And you wind up dragging yourself down and dragging everyone around you down as well, and committing horrors that you can never undo.
