In Defense of Purity
Dietrich von Hildebrand
Originally published in German as Reinheit und Jungfräulichkeit.
KölnMünchenWien: Oratoriums Verlag, 1927.
First English Edition:
London: Sheed & Ward, 1931.
Published 2017 by Hildebrand Press
1235 University Blvd., Steubenville, Ohio 43952
Copyright 2017 Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project
All rights reserved
Cataloguing-in-Publication Information
Von Hildebrand, Dietrich, 1889–1977, author.
[Reinheit und Jungfräulichkeit. English]
In defense of purity : an analysis of the Catholic ideals of purity and virginity / Dietrich von Hildebrand; foreword by Alice von Hildebrand; preface by Leo Scheffczyk—Sixth edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
LCCN 2017942244
ISBN 978-1-939773-03-6
1. Sex—Religious aspects—Catholic Church.
2. Virginity—Religious aspects—Catholic Church.
I. Von Hildebrand, Alice, writer of foreword. II. Scheffczyk, Leo, writer of preface. III. Translation of: Von Hildebrand, Dietrich, 1889–1977.
Reinheit und Jungfräulichkeit. German. IV. Title.
BV4647.C5V62 2017 241’.66
QBI17-823
Book design by Mark McGarry, Texas Type & Book Works Set in Adobe Caslon
Cover design by Marylouise McGraw
Cover Image: Portrait of a Young Woman, by Sandro Botticelli, in the Städel of Frankfurt, Germany. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Front Cover Font: Circular Bold by Lauren Brunner
www.hildebrandproject.org
Contents
Foreword by Alice von Hildebrand
Preface by Leo Scheffczyk
Preface by Dietrich von Hildebrand
PURITY
CHAPTER ONE
Sex Distinguished from Other Bodily Appetites
CHAPTER TWO
The Relation of Sex to the Spiritual Life
CHAPTER THREE
The Three Aspects of Sex
CHAPTER FOUR
Impurity
CHAPTER FIVE
Purity and “Insensuality”
CHAPTER SIX
Purity as a Positive Virtue
(a) The attitude of the pure
(b) The pure man’s specific perception of value and his response to it
(c) The indispensable supernatural foundation of purity
(d) Note on the attitude of the pure to art
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Intrinsic Dangers of Sex
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Reformation of Sex Effected by Wedded Love
CHAPTER NINE
Recapitulation: The Ideal of Wedded Purity
VIRGINITY
Introductory
The Nature of Consecration
CHAPTER TEN
The Nuptial Relationship with Christ Common to All Souls in Grace, and the Special Marriage of the Consecrated Virgin
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Ascetical Significance of Virginity
CHAPTER TWELVE
Virginity as Undividedness
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Positive Mission of Natural Goods and the Condition under Which Their Renunciation is Supernaturally Fruitful
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Virginity as an External Form of Life and the Outward Sign That All Things Are Forsaken for Jesus’s Sake
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Secret of Virginity as Wedlock with Christ
CONCLUSION
Consecrated Virginity as a State of Love
Index
Dietrich von Hildebrand
Dietrich von Hildebrand was born in Florence in 1889, and studied philosophy under Adolf Reinach, Max Scheler, and Edmund Husserl. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1914. He distinguished himself with many publications in moral philosophy, in social philosophy, in the philosophy of the interpersonal, and in aesthetics. He taught in Munich, Vienna, and New York. In the 1930s, he was one of the strongest voices in Europe against Nazism. He died in New Rochelle, New York in 1977.
Hildebrand Project
We advance the rich tradition of Christian personalism, especially as developed by Dietrich von Hildebrand and Karol Wojtyla (Pope St. John Paul II), in the service of intellectual and cultural renewal.
Our publications, academic programs, and public events introduce the great personalist thinkers and witnesses of the twentieth century. Animated by a heightened sense of the mystery and dignity of the human person, they developed a personalism that sheds new light on freedom and conscience, the religious transcendence of the person, the relationship between individual and community, the love between man and woman, and the life-giving power of beauty. We connect their vision of the human person with the great traditions of Western and Christian thought, and draw from their personalism in addressing the deepest needs and aspirations of our contemporaries. For more information, please visit: www.hildebrandproject.org
Editorial Board
General Editor: John F. Crosby*
Franciscan University of Steubenville
Rémi Brague
University of Paris, Sorbonne, Emeritus Romano Guardini Chair of Philosophy, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Emeritus
Rocco Buttiglione
John Paul II Chair for Philosophy and History of European Institutions Pontifical Lateran University
Antonio Calcagno
King’s University College at The University of Western Ontario
Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz
Technische Universität Dresden, Emerita Hochschule Heiligenkreuz
Dana Gioia
Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture University of Southern California
John Haldane
University of St. Andrews Baylor University
Alice von Hildebrand*
Widow of Dietrich von Hildebrand
Joseph Koterski, SJ
Fordham University
Sir Roger Scruton
Writer and Philosopher
Josef Seifert*
Edith Stein Institute of Philosophy, Granada, Spain
D. C. Schindler
Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family Washington, DC
Christoph Cardinal Schönborn
Archbishop of Vienna
Fritz Wenisch*
University of Rhode Island
* * *
*Student of Dietrich von Hildebrand
Special Thanks
We gratefully acknowledge the vision and generosity of the many friends who have supported the publication of this book.
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Foreword
By Alice von Hildebrand
Written to appear in this new edition of In Defense of Purity, by Dietrich von Hildebrand (Steubenville: Hildebrand Press, 2017).
RARELY DOES a book come along that takes up a perennial theme in such a fresh and unexpected way as to transform all subsequent discussion of the issues. This is one of those books. A concern for purity, especially purity of heart, of course, is as old as many ancient faiths, and common to most. But in this book, Dietrich von Hildebrand inaugurated a new approach to thinking about sex and how the body reveals the human person.
Few thinkers have succeeded so well in showing that the intimate sphere is essentially deep; that it touches the very core of the human person in a way that other bodily desires, like hunger and thirst, do not. The human person is so closely united with his body that they essentially belong together. This uniquely close connection between sex and the person sheds light on why sexual vices are a sort of desecration that befoul the human soul in a way that gluttony and drunkenness do not.
From a young age, and continuing through his formative philosophical studies, Hildebrand was convinced that sex was different from other bodily instincts. He had an innately strong sense for the mysterious domain of sex, and was an attentive student especially of the affective aspects of the human person (see, for example, his other books The Heart and The Nature of Love).
Hildebrand’s intuitions of the depth and mystery of sexuality fully blossomed in him when he entered the Catholic Church in 1914 at the age of twenty-four. He now saw more clearly that the intimate sphere was linked to God, and that in marriage man and woman collaborate with God in the bringing forth of a new human person. But he also saw that purity was opposed, so to speak, from two sides. On the one hand, there was the perennial allure of the flesh and the destruction left in its wake. On the other hand, in reading contemporary Catholic works following his conversion, he was struck by their emphasis on the dangers of impurity and that they seemed to forget that the ugliness and gravity of this sin could only be perceived in the light of the shining virtue of purity.
So this is what he set out to do in In Defense of Purity: to explore purity as a positive reality and only in light of its beauty to describe its contrary. (This is the same approach that Karol Wojtyla would later take to purity in his Love and Responsibility, which was the philosophical ground of his famous Theology of the Body talks). The book explores purity in connection both to married love and to consecrated virginity. To contemporary eyes and ears, this pairing will seem contradictory; in Hildebrand’s treatment, however, we see how purity lies at the root both of a self-giving sexual love and also of the self-gift, soul and body, made by the consecrated virgin.
From its first appearance in 1927, In Defense of Purity was widely recognized as groundbreaking. This was not because its author proposed abandoning perennial Christian teaching on love and sexuality. On the contrary, he contributed by deepening the Christian understanding. He was the first Catholic thinker to distinguish the “procreative” meaning of the conjugal act, which had long been recognized, from the “unitive” meaning of it. This distinction has been crucial for all Christian reflection on marriage since. And, indeed, the Church has incorporated the “procreative” and “unitive” meanings of marriage into her teaching at the Second Vatican Council.1
The book is full of other rich insights, many of which my husband would go on to develop in later writings. Particularly significant is his idea that only love—and love as a movement of the heart and not just of the will—has the power to transform sexual passion into an unparalleled expression of love.
Another major contribution is his critique of the idea that purity is just a lack of bodily vitality or the absence of sexual desire. He opens our eyes to the fact that “insensuality” (his term for a weak sensibility for the vital sphere), far from being a virtue (even if, inevitably, it may prevent some people from committing sins of impurity) is in fact something most regrettable: for it cripples those affected by it from a full understanding of the nobility of a total self-donation. It is in giving oneself that one is fully oneself. This also sheds light on virginity, which, likewise, is not a holding back of oneself but a total, complete, heroic giving of oneself to God.
For nearly a century, In Defense of Purity has been pivotal in the lives of countless readers, some discovering the gift and meaning of their sexuality and others finding and feeling confirmed in a religious vocation. One such reader was Dorothy Day, who counted In Defense of Purity among the best books she had read on the Christian life. Its influence is clear in her own reflections on purity:
Some choose evil because they have not seen the good...Those who suppress sex wrongfully, who hate the flesh, either become neurotic prudes or fall into the opposite extreme of excess. Those unwilling or unable to accept the attitudes of the conventional and puritanical bourgeoisie are easily betrayed by that “poisonous fascination” of which Dr. Von Hildebrand writes.2
No work that I am aware of offers a more fundamental and penetrating treatment of the great and beautiful and neglected virtue of purity. May it once again find a receptive audience.
Alice von Hildebrand
Widow of Dietrich von Hildebrand
Co-Founder, Hildebrand Project
* * *
1. See Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World—Gaudium et Spes, 1965, par. 50.
2. Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 63.
Preface
By Leo Scheffczyk
This preface originally appeared in the German edition, St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1981.
In Defense of Purity is one of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s smaller works, yet for this very reason it became a jewel in the hands of this master of thought and word. He has very nearly perfected the intellectual penetration and illuminating interpretation of an object made possible by the immediate philosophical intuition of essences. So vividly are the values of purity and virginity made to emerge from the heart of the Christian ethos, and to stand forth in their individual character, that they begin to shine on their own.
The inner tension and stirring quality of these subtle reflections derives neither from the moral requirements of purity and virginity nor from any pedagogical guidance for their realization. These would be derivative, secondary expressions of a more extrinsic approach to the topic.
What Hildebrand offers is this: by looking at these Christian attitudes through the lens of love, he achieves an intuition of their value and radiance that appeals immediately to the mind. But this does not come at the expense of the sphere of sensuality and the body. On the contrary: Hildebrand sees “purity” as the spiritual and personal transformation of sensuality, which ultimately contains a reflection of the divine. “Virginity” entails a further intensification of this value through a belonging to God in the totality of one’s humanity and directly to Christ for the sake of the kingdom of God. If ever the dualism opposed to the Christian conception of the body has been rebutted and completely dispelled, then it is in this work in which Hildebrand bears eloquent witness to the spiritual character of the body in both marriage and virginity.
When this book first appeared in 1927, many people were brought to a new depth of understanding and some even to conversion. Times have changed so much that the entire realm of values has been reduced to the biological, and the Christian ethos to a form of moral self-improvement. All this only increases the significance of this work, which cuts t
hrough the fog of the zeitgeist and raises our eyes to the full mystery of creation, which is uniquely revealed in an appreciation of the bodily sphere.
Leo Scheffczyk†
Professor of Theology, University of Munich
Preface
By Dietrich von Hildebrand
THE FOLLOWING study is the result of lectures delivered at a session of the Federation of Catholic Students’ Unions held at Innsbruck in 1925. Its purpose is an analysis of the nature of purity and virginity, not a study of sex education nor the formulation of practical rules of conduct, not even a defense of purity and virginity against their detractors. For this reason the question of which I shall primarily treat is not how much is lawful in this field, but what constitutes the complete virtue of purity and wherein the ideal of purity consists. It is my intention to undertake a detailed study of ethics in which the principles and facts on which my treatment of these particular problems is based will be fully explained. The reason for uniting in one study purity and virginity is of a practical nature. Although virginity represents in its significance and value something completely new and autonomous with respect to purity, its inmost nature is intelligible only when we have understood that of the person, which is also the decisive factor for purity.
I must express the deepest gratitude to my friend and loyal colleague S. J. Hamburger, for the liberal and most valuable help in the preparation of this book.
May this book assist many readers to attain a deeper understanding of the radiant virtue of purity and the mysterious beauty of virginity and inspire them with a new love for both so that more and more “they may be able to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth” (of the Divine Love) “and to know the love of Christ which surpasses all knowledge.”
Purity
CHAPTER ONE
Sex Distinguished from Other Bodily Appetites
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to understand the virtue of human purity without first considering briefly the distinctive character and unique position of sex in human nature. Among the activities and appetites of the human body, sex occupies a unique position. When we consider eating, drinking, and sleep—indeed, bodily pleasure as a whole—we find this entire province of human experience characterized by a lack of depth. Delight in a good dinner, for example, or annoyance at a bad one, belongs of its nature to the superficial zone of human experience. The enjoyment of sleep, or the pleasure we take in being comfortable or in a glass of wine, is also essentially on the surface, and men who give experiences of this kind an important place in their lives we consider superficial.
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