In Defense of Purity

by Dietrich von Hildebrand

  In this connection we often meet with a deplorable prudery and judgments passed in accordance with totally inadequate standards. People fail to recognize the existence of a pseudo-art which is impure through and through, even though its subject matter may have nothing whatever to do with sex. And, on the other hand, works of art which are steeped in that quintessential beauty of which we have spoken are judged impure simply because they represent, for example, a nude figure, or because the existence of sex is in one form or another brought to our notice. But, on the other hand, we must emphatically insist that there is a contemporary pseudo-art that is not entitled to plead, in excuse of its profound impurity, that the sexual danger has been removed by its specifically technical excellence. Its predilection for sexually dangerous subjects proceeds from a genuinely impure attitude. Its nude figures, particularly in “realist” art, produce an “exhibitionist” effect, and this unpleasant character is often artificially emphasized by partial clothing. But this particular pseudo-art, be it remembered, is primarily impure in its spirit, and thus makes its nudes impure; its impurity does not consist in the mere fact that it depicts the nude.8 Art of this kind is still unhealthy and unclean, even when it does not represent the human body—the impurity is due to the absence of any genuine art.

  The campaign, in itself most necessary, against the repulsive immodesty which meets us in every department of contemporary culture may very easily, if it is conducted by the inartistic, be misled into seeing impurity where it does not exist and objecting to the treatment of anything which in any way involves sex. Those who adopt such a canon will condemn as impure even sublime and pure works of art simply because for the inartistic their subject might possess a sexual appeal. But the spirit which inspires a judgment of this kind is wholly uncatholic, particularly when, as is not seldom the case, it is united with prudery. It is diametrically opposed to the breadth, magnanimity, and classical sincerity which distinguish the Church.9 We breathe here a confined moral atmosphere which prevents us seeing things in conspectu Dei (in the sight of God). What is really in accord with the spirit of the Church is most easily discovered from the liturgy, her sublime voice. There we find no insincere attempt to deny the existence of sex, no prudish suppression, no timid cloaking. On the contrary, we find that sincerity which is a fundamental constituent of purity, that clearness of vision which does not deny the existence of sex but openly grapples with it and by so doing remains wholly untainted by its intoxicating breath and raises us above it. What so pure as the voice of the Church? Yet does it not speak plainly and openly on every topic, from the Ave Maria and the Compline hymn to the sublime Gospel of the Annunciation? Indeed, we have only to remember the words of the purest of the pure, the blessed Virgin Mary: “How shall this be, seeing I know not man?”

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  1. Wherein precisely this “forming” consists will appear more clearly when we discuss the specific purity of marriage.

  2. This raises an extremely important question. Which other virtues demand purity as the condition of their existence? What, for example, is the nature of the close connection that exists in the first place between purity in the stricter and purity in the wider sense, in the second place between purity in the wider sense and other virtues? As we have already pointed out, a fuller treatment of this question exceeds the scope of the present work.

  3. See further the section of the author’s “Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis” (English translation, Morality and the Perception of Ethical Values, forthcoming from Hildebrand Press), Jahrbuch für philosophische und phänomenologische Forschung (Halle, 1922), in which the question of fundamental attitudes is treated.

  4. Cf. Joseph Muller, Die Keuschheitsideen (Notions of Chastity).

  5. See further the second part of this work: Virginity.

  6. This presents no analogy to St. Paul’s undividedness, since here the being of the person qua person is completely left out of account—whereas St. Paul’s indivisus est (1 Cor. 7:3 2–34) is wholly concerned with the disposition of the man who decides to give himself to God, that is to say, entirely regards the person as such.

  7. Substantiality, of course, is to be understood here of qualities.

  8. See also the excellent remarks of Franz Walter in his “Der Leib und sein Recht im Christentum” (The Body and Its Rights in Christianity) (Donauwörth, 1910), part 2, chap. 2, especially pp. 49 4–95.

  9. Ibid., part 1, chap. 2, iii, pp. 157-58.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Intrinsic Dangers of Sex

  HOW THEN does the pure man, who possesses purity in that highest form which we have described, behave in the actual exercise of sex? What inner attitude does he adopt which ennobles the act of marriage and outweighs all the dangers incident to this sphere? This is a question with which we are already familiar. But before answering it we must study the dangers inherent in sex as such, and not only in its abuse. Apart from the three aspects which we have already learned to recognize, sex is further distinguished by three factors which involve a special danger for the person as a spiritual being. The sexual act is in a certain sense the central act of the body. It is, in a sense, the awakening of the corporeal nature, otherwise asleep; it represents the most vital and most intense experience of which the body is capable—is, we may say, the sole experience in which it is brought into act as a whole. In it the vital nature lays bare, so to speak, its deepest roots.1 Sex further represents the greatest power within the vital-corporeal sphere, not indeed as an irresistible force like sickness or the need of food, but in its distinctive quality and structural position within the person.

  The orgasm in its violence, its fury, its convulsion, has a tendency to overpower the spirit. In the sexual act the spirit is exposed as on no other occasion to the danger of being “swamped” by the vital nature, and that for a double reason. In the first place because, as a result of the close and profound union between the body and the spiritual soul, this physical experience, the most profound of all except death,2 tends to drag the spirit wholly into its domain. If on the one hand the spirit soars above the corporeal nature, on the other hand it is at the same time in a special fashion sunk in the body and enveloped by it. The sexual experience strives, as it were, to pull the spirit down from its eminence and make it the complete prisoner of the body. This is, of course, only a tendency which physically can never attain its goal. For the sovereignty of the immortal soul over the corporeal-vital nature cannot be substantially destroyed by any behavior of the spiritual person. But a moral absorption is always involved in the sexual act, unless the spirit is at the same time brought into action in a fashion correspondingly profound, and the due proportion thus restored between the spiritual and the vital-corporeal natures, a proportion which of course implies the supremacy of the former. From this point of view, therefore, sex is something which is not dangerous only when abused, but involves for fallen man an intrinsic danger which must be compensated by a particular attitude of the spirit. We shall see a little later in what alone this compensation can consist.

  But from yet another point of view the spiritual person is in danger of being “swamped” by the orgasm. There is a peculiar giving up of one’s self-possession which may occur in the most diverse departments of the emotional life. Let us consider first the more general form of self-loss. A man is suddenly seized with panic, and flies, mad with terror. He has, as we say, “lost his head.” An experience of this kind is, in fact, an avulsion, in which a man loses control of himself, and is passively borne away by the current of his emotion. Even that moral self-possession which enters into every action fully deserving the name is for the moment lost. Strictly speaking, there is no longer any choice. The subject cannot be truly said to assent to his action. Every passion which overpowers me and carries me away or washes me overboard—as contrasted with my conduct when I deliberately throw myself into it—represents such a loss of self, that I am passively drawn under by the waves. It is the exact opposite of the case when a man su
rrenders to a value which takes possession of him—for instance, when he is profoundly affected by the consideration of God’s goodness or is seized with an overpowering sorrow for his sins. For this experience of being seized, taken possession of, which is preeminently characteristic of religious experiences and, above all, of mystical states in which the person is raised out of and above himself, is distinguished precisely by the assent of the central spiritual self which it implies. There is, therefore, in spite of the apparent analogy between the two kinds of experience, no loss of self-possession. On the contrary, it is in these experiences which involve the profoundest depths of our personality that we are most our own, because we belong more to God, “who is more present to us than we are to ourselves.” The assent which in ordinary circumstances we must expressly give to an experience is here given by the Object which possesses us—it is implicit in our possession by It. Thus the specifically unsanctioned loss of self, the being carried away, and the implicitly sanctioned possession are the greatest conceivable opposites.

  There is, however, a giving up of our self-possession which answers even more fully to the description, when a man is not simply carried away by a passion in spite of his reason, but, so to speak, flings himself away. For example, a man flies into a violent passion. But he still keeps control of himself. Suddenly his rage takes such hold of him that he, as it were, throws the reins to it, and places himself unreservedly at its disposal. In an act of insane presumption he stakes everything on one throw and casts himself away as a whole. This psychological state at its purest finds formal expression in the attitude of the man who curses from rage, in the unsanctioned oath—the curse in the strict and original meaning of the word. “If I cannot have this, I will be lost forever”—is the verbal utterance of what here passes in the soul. This flinging oneself away represents a specific attitude which our ancestors understood far better than we. We have but to remember the legend of the Flying Dutchman, in which a typical flinging oneself away of the kind we are describing meets with so terrible a punishment, or of the cases in which a man delivered his soul to the devil simply in order to obtain a particular thing he wanted there and then. This giving oneself away as a whole, which, be it only for a moment, subverts the entire order inherent in the constitution of our nature and the objective hierarchy of goods and values, above all destroys our life for and in the presence of God, admits, of course, differences of degree. Something of this kind may happen inwardly without involving such an explicit self-abandonment at one decisive point. But in that case the offender feels later an unmistakable sense of guilt, feels that though his act was not fully conscious he has wantonly broken loose from the order established by God, and the self-possession which that order demanded has yielded to a self-abandonment. He has, so he feels, in a certain sense, flung away his existence and must have fallen irretrievably into the abyss, if God’s mercy, operative already in the possibility of retracing his steps, had not held him back.

  It is already evident that the peculiar hubris that this universal flinging away of self under the influence of some passion implies, represents something completely new and distinctive, as compared with that self-loss of which we have already spoken, which is involved when we are carried away illegitimately. It can assume the most varied guises. But something of the kind is in a distinctive fashion contained objectively in the full realization of sex. That experience involves an abandonment of the entire person, which always constitutes a casting away of oneself in the sense explained above, a departure from the divinely established order, if it is not expressly introduced into that inner order by a spiritual experience even more potent and, moreover, wholly anchored in God, which transforms it into a legitimately sanctioned expression.3 The realization of sex is always a flinging away of self, when it is not a divinely sanctioned surrender of self. Hence this second factor also requires a particular spiritual attitude to counterbalance it, in virtue of which this casting away of the self becomes a legitimate possession which in no way disturbs the inner order.

  And, finally, we must call attention to the fact that certain features of sex, independently of its three possible aspects, possess from the purely external standpoint an ugliness which represents in this domain the fault which runs through every stratum of fallen humanity. Like the corruption of the body after death, there are many things in life which are visible effects of the Fall. From these sex and the marriage act are not exempt. A certain nucleus of vital brutality which in some way conflicts with the excellence and nobility of the spirit is objectively bound up with certain features of sex. When the marriage act is performed in the highest and purest fashion these features are suppressed. Love then dominates the situation so completely that they are totally unable to find expression. But they are merely unexpressed, not objectively transformed into something else, as are all those other features which we have just discussed. Here the compensation consists in complete repression. The moment the sexual act is not viewed from within, in its divinely ordained function, but appears in its external aspect, the stark vital brutality, the ugliness of certain features, makes itself powerfully felt. It is, moreover, this aspect of sex which inspires a peculiar shrinking from it, a certain withdrawal of the spirit from the brutality of the vital sphere, which, in its external aspect, contains an element of animality.4 This shrinking from the brutal aspects of sex, which, moreover, is an essential factor of modesty, is legitimately set aside only when we are, so to speak, conscious of a vocation to enter this domain, whether in wedded love, which, as we have already pointed out, causes the external aspect to disappear automatically, or in nursing the sick, in which the external aspect of sex is deprived of ugliness by love of our neighbor, and the entire situation transformed by its background of sickness, or, again, as a doctor, when the external aspect not only remains, but is emphasized so exclusively that it is neutralized by a completely detached scientific attitude. We must, however, insist that this shrinking from the brutal is totally different from the reverent awe which shrinks from violating the mystery and the intimacy of sex. This reverent awe constitutes the far nobler, more important and more spiritual factor in the feeling of modesty.

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  1. This phenomenon naturally stands in close organic connection with the extraordinariness of sex on the one hand, and on the other with the fact that the act of marriage produces new life. In speaking of the sleep and awakening of the corporeal nature we have in mind, not its disappearance from or emergence into consciousness, but a metaphysical characteristic which it displays by comparison with the spiritual nature—whereas the material nature must be pronounced in its turn asleep in comparison with the vital-corporeal. The orgasm is the actuation of the vital-corporeal nature in which it attains the maximum intensity of which it is capable, and in the mere quality of its being approaches the spiritual most closely. Obviously the term “actuation” is not used here in the strict sense of the term, but in an analogous and more qualitative sense.

  2. Death is the greatest disactuation of the body—therefore, in one respect the opposite of the orgasm. On the other hand, the exposure of the roots and the “depth” of the corporeal event common, though in a totally different fashion, to both (as also to very great physical suffering, for example, the pangs of childbirth), constitutes a certain affinity between them.

  3. To yield to any sexual temptation, be it simply by admitting a sinful thought, is to be carried away. But only the complete realization of sex, that is to say, the orgasm, involves this flinging away of one’s self which, moreover, is objectively present in the psychological aspect of the event. It is no question here of the failure to resist temptation, the typical case of being borne away by the current. On the contrary, the objective bodily event as such, altogether apart from the spiritual attitude of the subject, involves a complete self-abandonment of the person, a casting away of self as a whole, which simply on that account stands in need of a deliberate act of the spirit to transform it. There is a factor at work her
e which is not brought into being by any sinful attitude of the soul, but is objectively present in the sexual act as such, and always comes into operation, if it is not checked by a special attitude of the soul which counterbalances it.

  4. Hence, every form of sexual instruction that reveals sex too nakedly and treats it too objectively offends our sense of modesty because it takes no account of this shyness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Reformation of Sex Effected by Wedded Love

  WHAT ATTITUDE, what act, then, possesses the power to unite sex organically with the spiritual person, transform it, and take from it everything which could dim the clear shining of the soul before God? Love alone can thus ennoble sex. And, further, not love of any kind, but love of an altogether distinctive quality, a love that bears the formally affixed seal of the lovers’ assent, and which issues in a special act of a social character. In its quality this love must be wedded love. The intentio unitiva (purpose of uniting) contained in all love acquires in the love peculiar to marriage an entirely new function, unitive in the fullest sense; it becomes the leitmotif of this relationship. In contrast to the typical friendship, in which the pursuit of a common object, community of tastes, views, and so on, constitutes the leitmotif, the other person is here strictly speaking the object. Each is wholly for the other, and mutual love the burden of the song. Thus the intentio unitiva inherent in every love attains a wholly different significance. Either party seeks to share in the being of the other, not simply in his or her life and thoughts. There is, further, the specific mutual completion which this unitive tendency effects in the case of man and wife. And, finally, there is the special way of “being in love,” in the noblest sense of that expression, which puts a specific stamp upon wedded love, that peculiar and most intense receptivity for which the entire charm of the other nature, in its unique individuality, not only unfolds itself to our delighted vision, but, in a fashion elsewhere unparalleled, holds us captive.