MASTURBATION

'The folly of masturbation (as well as recreational sex) is that it silences the urge to love. The individual aborts an opportunity for growth and ends up being more empty and more lonely. Though masturbation can numb the yearning for intimacy, its satisfaction is momentary and not growth-orientated. Masturbation turns oneself inward, making one intimate with self while impeding one's true longing: authentic intimacy with another.' 

William F Kraft, Whole and Holy Sexuality, p.105. 

MASTURBATION

'Human sexuality is inherently social, and masturbation is not. In that sense, it represents a failure to fulfill the nature of Christian sexuality as God designed it.'

Matthew Lee Anderson, Earthen Vessels, p.135.

IMAGINATION & MASTURBATION

'The true exercise of imagination, in my view, is (a) To help us to understand other people (b) To respond to, and some of us, to produce art. But it has also a bad use: to provide for us, in shadowy form, a substitute for the virtues, successses, distinctions etc. which ought to be sought outside in the real world - e.g. picturing all I'd if I were rich instead of working and saving. Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres. After all the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol III, p.759.

MASTURBATION

'For me the real evil of masturbation wd. be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against him ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is alwys adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his own unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end they become merely the medium through which he is increasingly adores himself.'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol III, p.758.