Pygmalion

There is a Greek myth about a sculptor named Pygmalion. He was a gifted craftsman but he despised the local women because he found them to be petty and immoral. But one day, this bachelor stumbled upon the perfect piece of ivory, from which he carved what to him was the image of an ideal woman, a woman of exquisite beauty and grace. So enamored with his own handiwork was Pygmalion, that he dressed the statue in silken garments and adorned her with jewels and named her Galatea (which means something like “sleeping love”). Pygmalion even went so far as to beg the goddess Aphrodite to bring his statue to life so he could marry her.

Now the ending to this Greek myth has Aphrodite granting the love-sick sculptor his request, but I wish to back off that ending a bit and use Pygmalion and his statue as an object lesson regarding the nature of sin. Particularly I wish to use this illustration to discuss some of the dangers of one of the most pervasive social disorders of our culture today: pornography.

Greek myths aside, we can well envision an artist (painter or sculptor) setting out to create a work that makes manifest that artist’s conception of the ideal human form (be it woman or man). We can also imagine the artist, assuming his or her skill was adequate to the task, becoming so enraptured with his or her own creation that he or she pined away with longing for the work to be filled with breath and step lovingly into the arms of the one who formed it.

The problem, of course, is that the work of art is not alive. It does not dream or feel or breathe. It cannot respond to touch or speak into the ear of the adoring artist. But what may well happen is that the sculptor or painter may so pour out his or her life with longing for the ideal to become real that the opposite actually happens. Rather than the artist bringing the artwork to life, the obsession for the beauty displayed on the canvas or in the stone may actually drain the artist of life such that the artist more resembles the lifeless art than the other way around.

I hope you followed that, because this is one of the great dangers of pornography. Men in particular find themselves drawn to the beauty of the outward form of these two dimensional images of women. It can become such an obsession that the man is literally consumed with lust for that which can only be beheld with the eye. The images are lifeless (even if they move). They cannot return one’s embrace, they cannot share one’s dreams, they cannot offer comfort in sorrow or pain, nor can they share moments of joy and ecstasy.

What these lifeless idols can do however, is drain the life and humanity from a man (or a woman I suppose, but that is less common). Pornography can so change the way a man thinks of women, that he can no longer relate to real flesh-and-blood women as the human totality that they are. The one trapped by pornography can become as lifeless and two-dimensional as the images he pursues.

CS Lewis put it well: We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man… that he “wants a woman.” Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). — The Four Loves.

Pornography offers no life or love. Rather, it drains its victims of love and life. It consumes its paramours – body and soul. Well do we learn a lesson from the lifeless stone of Pygmalion. Well do we heed the injunctions of the apostle Paul: Flee from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace (2 Tim 2:22). If you struggle here, remember that God alone can call the lifeless soul from the clutches of sin into the blazing glory of true life. Call upon Him, and then get some help.