In Defense of Purity

by Dietrich von Hildebrand

  It is obviously beyond the power of language to describe sufficiently, or even “deduce,” the evil inherent in the nature of sex when treated as its own end. All that can be done is to keep our gaze steadily fixed upon it. Its peculiar quality must be apprehended intuitively. For, apart from the universal impossibility of “explaining” and “proving” the distinctive nature of pure qualities, we are here faced with a secret of a quite special kind, since we are dealing with a fact the significance of which is rooted in a region beyond the normal field of our intellectual vision. We are face to face with the mystery of sex.2 The fact, however, is too plainly visible to admit of doubt. Whenever sex is indulged for the sake of its sensuous appeal, and whenever it is withdrawn from its place in marriage and separated from its function as the expression of reverent and lawful wedded love, whereby, as we have seen, its quality is completely changed, the person concerned is defiled, his soul is made captive to the flesh, and a mysterious apostasy from God takes place, unmatched for its peculiar enigmatic quality by any other sin.

  Finally, the abuse of sex also involves a special defilement of the guilty party when the nature of sex is misconceived and a man surrenders himself to it unthinkingly simply as a source of pleasure. This is the case with the dull bestial impurity distinctive of the fleshly man.3 Of those positive and negative aspects of sex which have just been discussed he perceives none. He misconceives the nature of sex, treating it exactly like the pleasure of the palate. He pursues the physical pleasure of sex solely for its pleasure, without understanding its peculiar nature. A man of this type falls below the level of the animal. Although in this case there is no surrender to the specifically “corrosive” quality of befogging charm or of diabolic evil lust—for these aspects of sex are not so much as conceived—there takes place, nevertheless, not to speak of the degradation and desecration, a defilement of an altogether special sort—a bondage to the flesh entirely different in kind from that involved, for example, by surrender to the pleasures of the table. Although the person concerned sees only a difference of degree between the pleasure of sex and other kinds of pleasure, the “sensualization” of the spirit which results from surrender to this pleasure differs not only in degree, but in quality, from the entirely different “sensualization” to which the glutton exposes himself. The havoc, incomparably further reaching and different in kind, here wrought upon the spirit, although the person concerned assimilates sex to the pleasure of eating, becomes intelligible when we consider the fundamental tendency to submerge the spiritual that belongs to sex when brought into full exercise.4 This bestial surrender, unthinking and instinctive, to sexual pleasure as pleasure is a particularly gross instance of the submersion of the spirit in the physical. A person of this kind, however, is not submerged in the vital flood of his bodily life, like the sinner who yields himself to the specific charm of sex or to diabolic evil lust, but, in the dead physical substance of his body, is literally submerged in matter. And obviously this fleshly impure man is also distinguished from the glutton by the fearful desecration and degradation which his conduct involves.

  No employment of sex, however, which is for any reason unlawful is free from impurity. Even if physical sex is not treated as an end in itself, and the motive of the sexual act is, on the contrary, the desire for a genuine union of love, the sexual surrender not only involves a sin of disobedience, but, over and above that, a specific sin of impurity, whenever the union is forbidden on any ground whatsoever. For the moment a man defies a prohibition in the sexual sphere the union becomes in one way or another a passive yielding, a being carried away. This, it is true, does not mean that physical sex is directly made its own end, but it always involves an undue preponderance of the sensual factor. No other sphere is so sensitive to the touch of illegitimacy. Any breath of levity, any even momentary self-forgetfulness under the influence of passion, any abandonment to the passing moment, contradicts radically the significance of this union, its ultimacy, its seriousness and its irrevocability, and therefore always involves not only objectively, but subjectively also, a material impurity; indeed, in a certain sense, a desecration.5

  A certain impurity in the narrower sense can indeed make its appearance even apart from the abuse of sex. This occurs when sexuality, entirely unknown to the party concerned, strays into other spheres and his attitude in these produces a certain sexual satisfaction which, however, is, of course, completely different from any actual physical realization of sex. We often come across men who will to be pure, who, wherever they recognize its presence, carefully avoid any conscious surrender to sex taken in isolation for its own sake, but who nevertheless are not genuinely pure, for they seek and find a certain sexual satisfaction in their love of excitement, their craving to make an impression, their sensibility, their self-importance, their carriage, the entire rhythm of their lives. Men of this type often consider themselves particularly pure, and speak of sex with disgust.6 They consider themselves raised far above everything sexual, even perhaps despise the union of wedlock, because they consider it too fleshly and themselves too precious to surrender their person to another in this fashion. Such men are often particularly prudish, and turn with disgust from anything in which the existence of sex finds open and unambiguous expression. Yet all the while their entire nature is charged with an oppressive sexuality; they live in an atmosphere of sexual constraint, and the manner in which they move, speak, and meet particular situations betrays the active presence of sex. It is obvious that this bondage to the spell of a negative sexuality cannot be treated as amounting to sinful impurity in the proper sense. Indeed, there is here, strictly speaking, no sin, but simply an imperfect general attitude, which roughly corresponds to the general attitude of pride which we find in the majority of men. This impurity involves no conscious surrender to sex, for there is no perception of its presence, no consent to its alluring charm, therefore no profanation of its specific secret. But, on the other hand, such men miss the peculiar freedom of the pure: the unconfined spirituality, the transparence, the radiance which is theirs alone. On the contrary, they are in bondage, their spirit is opaque and transmits no clear light, and they hang about every hole and corner in which sexuality lurks unbeknown. Their life is in fact passed in the conflict provoked by an unsatisfied attraction to sex in its negative aspects as bemusing charm or diabolic lust. Since they have never uprooted and overcome this attraction, nor even struggled against it in open combat, every other department of their life is infected and poisoned by this disposition. They are always unconsciously looking for a substitute, which they find more or less in many other forms by which life expresses itself.

  * * *

  1. We here confine ourselves of set purpose, not only to purity in the narrower sense, but, so understood, to purity as a human virtue. Purity in the wider sense, as also the purity of God and the angels, which indeed is the exemplar of all human purity, is reserved for treatment in later publications.

  2. We cannot therefore assign a “reason,” in the strict sense of the term, why sex when treated as its own end emits this poisonous breath, though later on we shall consider the dangers peculiar to sex from the standpoint of man’s formal structure. We are dealing here with factors which not only are bound up most closely with this distinctive quality of sex, but derive their drastic potency from it.

  3. See further, chap. 3.

  4. See further, chap. 1. See further the argument that for perfect purity a consciousness of God’s express sanction is indispensable.

  5. I am obviously not thinking here of any of those forms of perversion in which the gratification of evil lust is sought by surrender to certain things not in themselves sexual, e.g., cruelty in the case of a sadist. For a perversion of this kind does not represent any essentially new form of impurity over and above those already mentioned. Though some other domain is substituted for sex, it is made the vehicle of the diabolic charm to which the person concerned deliberately yields himself.

  6. The Freudian hypot
hesis to which we have already referred has shed most valuable light on the problem presented by these types. Repressed sex is here the true explanation.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Purity and “Insensuality”

  THE MERE absence of the impurity just described defines only the negative aspect of purity; it tells us nothing of its incomparable positive splendor. Thus, for example, we often meet with men wholly deaf to the appeal of sex, who, to be sure, do not defile themselves with any impurity, but who, nevertheless, cannot be termed pure in the full positive sense of the term. The alternative simply does not apply to them. We must therefore begin by making a sharp distinction between true purity and mere temperamental absence of sexuality, which may indeed involve the absence of positive impurity—though even this is not always the case—but which has nothing whatever to do with the virtue of purity. This cannot be overemphasized. For there are men for whom the lack of sexuality is an ideal and who place the perfection of purity in an entire absence of the “sex instinct.” This is so remote from the truth that we cannot even regard insensibility to sex as an environment particularly favorable to purity.

  To grasp this fully let us first of all consider the sense to be attached to the term sinnlich.1 In ordinary usage the term is steeped in ambiguity. When someone is called sinnlich, the speaker may mean that he is susceptible to sex. But he very often means that all the physiological instincts of the man so described are powerfully developed. In contrast to those delicate ethereal natures whose instincts are mild and who therefore appear preeminently dematerialized and spiritual, although in the true sense this is not necessarily the case, or in contrast to those types which display a listless lack of vitality, we apply the term sinnlich to men richly endowed with fresh and vigorous life, whose vital instincts are powerful. This purely temperamental vigor of instinct can manifest itself in different fields, among them that of sexual passion. By itself it tells us nothing of its possessor’s nature in other respects. For it is nothing more than a quality of temperament which can belong just as well to a spiritually minded person, who gives the first place to the things of the spirit, as to a debauchee. The spiritual man will endeavor to bring these instincts under the control of his will, and will not allow them to rule over him. The possession, therefore, of this temperament is no sign whatever that lust holds sway in the person concerned.

  Nor does the fact that a man’s instincts are powerful inform us in what way sex appeals to his temperament. There are, for example, men whose instincts are strongly developed, and in particular the sex instinct, who nevertheless lack all understanding of the peculiar quality of sex. They are completely blind to its mysterious and extraordinary character. For them its pleasure is as exclusively physical as, for example, the pleasure of eating. That is to say, sex appeals to them by none of the three qualities mentioned above, neither in its mystery and tender intimacy, nor in its seductive charm, nor as diabolic evil lust. Such men of powerful instincts, but with no understanding for the peculiarity of sex, cannot strictly speaking be called sinnlich; they ought rather to be termed fleischlich (fleshly). A “fleshly” temperament of this kind brings its possessor nothing of that sensitiveness and peculiar intensity of response which as purely temperamental factors accompany true sensuality.2 On the contrary, it renders him particularly material, coarse, prosaic. Such a temperament is, properly speaking, alien rather than akin to the disposition we term sinnlich.3

  We shall see this most plainly if we consider not those men whose fleshly temperament is held in subjection by a strong will, but those whose entire nature is dominated by this kind of appetite. Such men completely surrender themselves to their appetite both with their will and their entire emotional life. It rules them with undisputed sway. Such are those bestial men for whom life essentially consists in eating, drinking, sleep, and bodily pleasures of every description, and who are also immersed in sexual lust. Their entire being breathes a dull, fleshly atmosphere, proclaims a sluggish immersion in matter, a coarse insensibility. Everybody knows these unfortunate people, who are baser than the animals. They represent a type entirely different from those sinners who surrender to sex as the vehicle of a peculiar charm unlike anything else or of a diabolic evil lust, so that, strictly speaking, they should not be called temperamentally sinnlich.4 They abuse sex, not by perverting its distinctive quality to evil, but because they utterly fail to perceive it; but, like the animals, they “make use” of sex. There is Sinnlichkeit in the strict sense only where there is a temperamental susceptibility to sex in its distinctive quality and as something extraordinary. This susceptibility always covers the entire field of sex and embraces everything connected with its secret; therefore, not only its immediate and purely physical sensations, but its psychophysical attraction. The man who is sensible to the peculiarity of sex in general, and in whom it is consciously or unconsciously operative as a simple disposition, derives from it at the same time a certain warmth and liveliness. As a pure disposition it is the counterpart in the vital sphere of temperamental alertness of intellect. In contrast to a sluggish, phlegmatic temperament, it is accompanied by a lively susceptibility to impressions and ideas of every kind, by sensitiveness and alertness; above all, by intensity and delicacy of response. But this temperamental alertness only accompanies what is termed Sinnlichkeit when the word is used in its most definite sense, as the equivalent of “sexual.” So far as this alertness is concerned, the question whether or not a man possesses a strong or weak instinctive life in general is irrelevant. But according to the character of the rest of the personality this sensual-sensuous or sexual (sinnlich) temperament assumes an entirely different aspect. Everything here depends on the question which of the three qualities of sex described above appeals to that particular person and what attitude he adopts in each instance to those qualities.

  Corresponding to the different meanings of sinnlich are the many senses in which its opposite, Unsinnlichkeit,5 may be understood. The term may denote the absence of strong instincts, as, for example, in the case of the ethereal type whose tender and at the same time sensitive nature gives us the impression that he is to a certain extent dematerialized. Here, however, we have to do simply with the temperamental opposite of Sinnlichkeit which cannot properly be called unsinnlich. In susceptibility to sex the preeminently sensual sphere is by no means necessarily involved. We might, however, use Unsinnlichkeit (insensuality) to denote a specific want of understanding for the peculiarity of sex such as we found it in the fleshly man, but which can exist equally well in men whose instincts are weak. And finally, the term might denote the absence of any susceptibility to sex, which in turn always involves a physical insensibility. This last case obviously excludes also a temperamental understanding of the peculiarity of sex. It does not, however, make it impossible to understand the positive and negative values attaching to the sexual sphere. An insensible person of this type is indeed deaf to the voice of sex, and the language in which its values are conveyed is not directly intelligible. But only this understanding of the language is immediately dependent on temperament. Such a person can quite well understand the sense of the words, and the value-qualities “pure” and “impure,” though for the most part only indirectly and with the aid of the generic values of which these are species. For the understanding of these positive and negative values as such is dependent upon the general moral attitude. Unsinnlichkeit in this final sense, “insensibility to sex,” which is what most people would understand by the term, is by no means to be identified with purity; on the contrary, as we have already hinted, it does not even present a particularly favorable environment for that virtue.

  The strongest proof that purity and sexual insensibility (Unsinnlichkeit) are qualities which must be sharply distinguished is the specific spirituality which attaches to the pure, and is by no means a concomitant of insensibility, as such. (On the contrary, sexual insensibility in itself is the temperamental predisposition to an even greater “unspirituality” in a man’s attitude t
oward sex. There are, for example, men of powerful and coarse instincts who are at the same time totally insensible to sex, and therefore a fortiori to its peculiar quality, men who live for eating, drinking, and sleep. They are too lazy and sluggish to be sexually responsive, too sleepy to possess the alertness which susceptibility to the peculiar quality of sex demands.)

  But in any case the absence of a sexual temperament in no way connotes a particularly high degree of spirituality, any more than, mutatis mutandis, actual poverty connotes an interior independence of possessions. The pure man, on the contrary, is always characterized by a spirituality of a distinctive kind, which not only controls the vital and physical aspects of his being, but actually penetrates and spiritualizes them. In his case the spirit illuminates the entire man, his nature proclaims the triumph of the spirit over the flesh. The pure man is specifically spiritual, his nature displays not only the appearance of something ethereal and dematerialized, as is the case with the man whose passions are weak, but a genuine transcendence of matter, whereby he is made free of the realm of spirit. This, as we have seen, is not the case with the merely insensible, who may indeed be particularly material. Moreover, a distinctively prosaic atmosphere attaches to the latter. So long as he is merely insensitive to sex and not also pure, he is marked by a humdrum, prosaic drabness which is even legible in his face, and for the most part is entirely devoid of poetry or charm.