"One thing have I desired of the Lord, [and] that I will seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and inquire in His temple." (Ps. 27:4)
We all know why pornography in any form is wrong. The arguments have been made again and again. It is the objectification of human beings that reduces and degrades an individual person's unique Image-bearing self down to a mere sexual object. It is also inherently selfish, a one-way street of desire, where everything is taken in by the voyeur but nothing given in return, and thus reduces and degrades the voyeur to a mere appetite, an animalistic maw, a black hole, an empty void and abyss. Pornography is the hell of the users and the used.
Whatever you want me to be...
There is, however, another reason why it is wrong, a reason that strikes at the very essence of what pornography is and therefore its essential perversion. To put it another way, if evil is merely the corruption and perversion of some good, then pornography, being evil, is essential a perverted good, and it is the perversion of that good that reveals the true tragedy. And guess what? It isn't about sex. We assume this, and understandably so (for pornography speaks to sexual desire), but it is not the true core, the most basic good it corrupts and destroys. Peel back the sexual, and you find a more fundamental drive, one that speaks to a unique element of our humanness: we are built to behold.
When David says there is "one thing" that he desires above all else, we need to listen careful to his answer. What he desires is intense intimacy and communion with God (which is the true sense of the word "dwell" in Hebrew), and that intimacy comes in two forms. One is the pursuit of true knowledge ("to inquire in His temple"). The other is aesthetic appreciation: "behold" in Hebrew means to contemplate with pleasure. This is no small thing. It is similar to the experience one may get when considering a work of art (such as a painting or sculpture or building), but is also similar to the experience everyone has when they look at their beloved, especially eye to eye. Indeed, looking upon beautiful things does something to us that we can't quite understand. We feel drawn in and locked out, called forth and ignored, embraced and left behind. And all this merely in the act of seeing that is also somehow experiencing. To see is, in some way, to experience; and the more intense or profound the sight, then the more intense or profound the experience.
Eye to eye
This was not lost on philosophy, and certainly not Christian philosophy. Plato and Aristotle both saw the contemplation of the "Good" as the highest end to human pleasure and happiness (though they disagreed on how to reach such contemplation), and later Christian thinkers like Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, and Aquinas would work off of them and conclude that since God is "the Good" and God is love, then the only way to truly contemplate Him was to love what we contemplated, to behold Him with pleasure. It is from this logic that Dante's Divine Comedy concludes with the Beatific Vision, the pure beholding of God that is also communion with God.
This Vision is no mere fancy of mystics. On the contrary, it is exactly what Christ prayed for in reference to all believers. During His prayer in John 17, Jesus refers to "the glory" that He enjoyed with God "before the world was" (vs. 5), and that that same glory would pass on through Him to all who believe in Him (vs. 20-23). What exactly is this "glory" that Christ shared with God before the world was made and that He now shares with all believers? The communal love found in the Trinity itself: "that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us.... And the glory which Thou gave Me I give to them, that they may be one, even as We are one: I in them and Thou in Me.... That the love with which Thou has loved Me may be in them, and I in them" (vs. 20-26).
In both the Old and New Testament, the "glory" of God is shorthand for his essential nature, who and what He really is at His core. What Christ revealed about God's "glory" was the mystery of communal love found in the Trinity, and it is that "glory" we are called to and swept up into so that we may behold: "Father, I will that they also, whom Thou has given Me, be with Me where I am, that they may behold my glory which Thou has given Me, for Thou loved Me before the foundation of the world" (John 17:24). This is eternal life: to know God and Christ in a deep, intimate way (John 17:3), the intimacy of seeing that is also experiencing, for we were built to behold.
Dante approaches home...
It is that good that pornography fundamentally perverts. We are built to behold the Good, whether in its substance found in the triune love of the Godhead, or in its beautiful shadows found in sunsets, in paintings and sculptures, and (yes) in the naked, freely given body of the beloved to whom you also freely give yourself. Our eyes were made to see God, and thus experience God, now and forever, and this is what makes pornography so perverse and yet so powerful: it is tapping into our fundamental drive to behold the Good, to behold God, to have the door open and the clouds part and the gray rain curtain of this world rise up and away and reveal the home our hearts ache to have, our real home, our real Lover and Friend.
We are built to behold, and porn is the perversion of beholding.