The Sin of Onan?

This is the section I wrote on masturbation, in response to some point of my father's, I forget which. Perhaps it was his attack on the claim that IVF is necessarily immoral because it involves masturbation. I don't know that that is the case, but I have a hard time disagreeing with the Church on self-gratification, as seen below. As my subject line implies, I realize my blanket statement about the Old Testament banning masturbation is at least open to question. It's something that, since I've written it, I have realized is at least controversial, but I have not yet taken the time to look into it, so I'm offering it here unexpurgated, sort of an archaeological shard of my mindset at the time this letter was written (sometime last summer).

Regarding masturbation, I have come to believe it is immoral. This is not an easy thing to say, and I suppose could be regarded as hypocritical, because it is an action I have had a hard thing keeping myself from. These are the reasons I do believe it is immoral: for one, it is expressly rejected in Scripture (at least in the Old Testament – I don’t know whether it is mentioned in the New Testament, nor what qualifies something spoken of as a sin in the OT as a sin in the NT – I understand that the coming of Jesus means a sea change in the way we think about God, but I don’t know the rationale behind the rejection of some prohibitions and the keeping of others). Two, it uses the sexual faculty for the purpose of personal pleasure alone, and, in my case at least, can be a very powerful lure, to the point that many hours over one’s life are wasted in daydreaming about an ever-widening series of encounters, each of which loses its charm after awhile and has to be replaced by some other, quite possibly stranger and more immoral encounter. That which is not sexual comes to seem useless in a world where this need dominates, and giving into it does not satisfy, but only increase the urge. If you’ll forgive me more poetry, C. S. Lewis has a poem called “Lilith” that a scholar named W. W. Robson thinks is about the temptation to and the sterility of (in more ways than one) masturbation:

When Lilith means to draw me
Within her secret bower,
She does not overawe me
With beauty’s pomp and power,
Nor, with angelic grace
Of courtesy, and the pace
Of gliding ships, comes veiled at evening hour.

Eager, unmasked, she lingers
Heart-sick and hunger sore;
With hot, dry, jeweled fingers
Stretched out, beside her door,
Offering with gnawing haste
Her cup, whereof who taste,
(She promises not better) thirst far more.

What moves me then, to drink it?
— Her spells, which all around
So change the land, we think it
A great waste where a sound
Of wind like tales twice told
Blusters, and cloud is rolled
Always above yet no rain falls to ground.

Across drab iteration
Of bare hills, line on line,
The long road’s sinuation
Leads on. The witch’s wine,
Though promising nothing, seems
In that land of no streams,
To promise best — the unrelished anodyne.

Three, in a saying by Jesus that you yourself have quoted to me, “‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart’” (Matthew 5.27-8). Masturbation, at least for me, pretty much requires that I commit adultery in my heart, as images of women I have known and seen are instrumental to the act. And before I was married it pretty much meant that I committed fornication in my heart.

Since I have been accused of the faults of the Pharisees, hair-splitting and unthinking rule-following, I would like to explain what I think is the spirit, rather than the letter of this law. First, I don’t think that Jesus thought committing adultery in the heart to be wrong, but committing fornication in the heart to be permissible. Second, I don’t think this line condemns those who look at a woman and find themselves momentarily enraptured, even momentarily caught up in a fantasy. I think it condemns those who cultivate such thoughts, dishonoring the independence and privacy of those they use in their daydreams, wasting the time of their brains and bodies, directing their desires towards that which is sinful.

I have from time to time been successful in resisting this temptation, but the only recent success has been the last two-to-three weeks. Thinking on how much my attempt to adhere to the Church’s teaching has angered and saddened my wife, her parents, and perhaps others, I realized that, if only out of justice to them, I need to resist the sins that are so easy for me to accomplish, and which are so self-serving in their aims. My other great sin is my laziness, or, if laziness is too strong a word, my resistance to getting things done, which allows me to be behind when I am at work, and allows me to accomplish very little of enduring consequence during the summer months, when I have talents and abilities that could be put to more use.

Regarding masturbation as a means to an end, as it is in the case of IVF, I would have a harder time judging it as immoral. If testicular cancer, for instance, could only be cured by an operation preceded by masturbation, I doubt there would be moral condemnation of the act. This agrees with what you have said about the intention of the act being important in the definition of sin.

One last comment: I have been somewhat faithful in my rejection of this action, but often only in a somewhat painful, legal sense. I still have not purged my mind of "the witch's wine," and will undoubtedly continue this struggle for much of my life.