Scattered Thoughts: On Purity
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10 minutes
Some Scattered Reflections on an Unpopular Virtue
Purity is a virtue, and virtues are personal. Persons are either male or female; there is no androgynous “general person.” I can only write about purity as a man. I don’t know how much of it carries over.
And, anyway, women are a mystery to me, now as much as ever.
Purity as Temperance: If we make use of something intentionally, and according to its proper ends, it tends toward our good, and the good of that thing. Sexuality, used against its ends, is destructive.
First, it destroys a man, since lack of self-control here robs a man of that potency of control – restraint in the use of great power – that is so close to the essence of masculine dignity, and which is so attractive to women. Men admire, and women desire, a man who can – build, break, love, speak well – but who doesn’t always. Who understands restraint. Second, impurity destroys a woman; it reduces her to a thing via the very instrument of intimacy. Finally, impurity destroys sex. There are few things in creation more mysterious, exciting, delightful, and full of implied promises than is sexuality. Yet the misuse of it renders the thing itself hollow, which in turn leads to more dangerous and more risqué aberrations in order to recover the mystery lost. No one who has attended to the collapse of relations between the sexes, of marriages, of families, and of sexual identity itself, can doubt that impurity is the root cause.
Still, I have two disagreements with the reduction of purity to a special case of temperance. First, to speak of virtuous sexuality primarily in terms of utility – “making proper use of sex,” etc., – treats sex as little more than one of the functional and deliberate human acts, such as play, or exercise, in which humans engage. But this seems to exclude charity from the definition of purity, and it fails to address what seems to me to be an eternal or transcendent dimension of sexuality. To say that a man making good use of sex is analogous to a bird only mating during mating season is to reduce human sexuality; to make it inhuman.
Purity as Charity: To love a woman is to will her good; not just what is “due” to her, but her total fulfillment as a person. But something in the male psyche wants to love every woman, and to be admired by every woman. (More on this below.) Yet romance with every woman – with even two – would be vicious (at worst,) or a profound lack of appreciation (at best.) Such a desire may be historically and psychologically common, but it is not for that reason normal. For romantic love images the radical, senseless, and even dangerous fidelity of God toward each soul. Of course, no one can merit it. Yet, in a way, we deserve it. We deserve what we need; and what each of us needs is more than he or she can deserve. Woman, the more refined version of man, tends to understand this more explicitly.
Sex is a sign and instrument of personal, and eminently vulnerable love. Hence it is inherently one-to-one. To spread sexual love around, to divide it, is to deny it to any one woman.
And love gets children – lest we forget – and these thrive on the reality of the union that brought them forth. A marriage is the imperishable love of God on earth. No one who has seen that imperishable thing perish can ever fully recover from the wound. Even if he is no longer sad, he has seen Heaven broken. He has seen evil win. Thus purity is charity toward women and children, present, past, and future. And it goes beyond the demands of mere justice, unless we are going to argue that anyone has ever been perfect enough to deserve – in pure commutative justice – the casting off of all other goods for the sake of one.
But if it is charity, then it is more than just a tool. I think material, sexual love, must partake of the eternal.
Purity as Preparation for the Unspeakable Romance of Heaven: I understand that in Heaven, men and women will no longer marry, and be given in marriage (Matt 22:30.) I also understand that if promiscuity is viscous here, then it would be viscous there. But I also believe that sexuality is too full of a sort of innate transcendental import, and Scripture too full of images of romance as a prophetic sign, to deny there is sexuality in heaven. What that is, or might be, is quite beyond my ken. I only know that there must be some infinite answer to the endless romantic passion of the human heart, and some eternal referent to this pregnant (no pun intended) symbol. Some good, holy, beautiful, and passionate reality which is an answer to the bottomless romance of the human heart, and which is specifically human. Something which perfects, rather than casts off – like some meaningless thing – the human perfections of sex. There must be a higher Eros.
I have no idea what it would be like. I only know that I agree neither with the Darwinists for whom sex is an amoral impulse that serves only functional purposes, nor with a certain kind of Catholic thought which takes almost the same line as a buffer against hedonism and Romanticism. Song of Songs agrees with me; at least I think it does. Purity here is some kind of preparation for that. Whatever the sanctified sexuality of Heaven may be, those who were most chaste in this life – especially, perhaps, those who gave up marriage and family for love of God – will have the greatest capacity for it there.
Purity as a Practical Skill: Women are beautiful. They are far too beautiful for any man, and far too numerous a problem to be ignored. Historically, men, – even basically honest men – have dealt with the problem of women by keeping them “in their place.” In some present human cultures, women are rewarded for the crime of being what they are by some form of permanent masking. They are punished for the danger they pose men by being bundled up, and made less visibly dangerous. This sort of “religious” prudery is the opposite of the virtue of purity. Purity makes men (and women) free. Purity is strong. To clothe women in bags, and hide their dangerous faces – even, sometimes, their eyes – in order to avoid sin (and general trouble) is not the virtue of purity. It is abominable sloth, and a sign of deep, untreated lust. Lesser forms of this can also qualify, sometimes, as pseudo-purity, but it gets complicated. (More on that later.)
No, it is not a woman’s fault that you are bestial. It is not a woman’s responsibility to dress only in the way that will make things easy on the lowest common denominator of male virtue. When I see this notion of modesty, I am reminded of Chesterton’s parable of vice and virtue. He describes the human race as children playing on a field at the top of a cliff, protected by a thin, high wall around the edge of it. When the wall comes down, the children begin to fall off. Later, they may be found far from the edge of the cliff, huddled together, perhaps in a great pile. Virtue is the thin, strong wall. But when it has been pulled apart, everyone huddles in the middle of the field out of terror. I would only add that at the bottom of the pile, you will often find women. At the top, crushing the life out of them “for goodness’ sake,” the men (who picked the wall apart.)
A Case Study — Ronald Laroo: I am not always surprised when I hear that someone who speaks loudly and constantly about women’s lack of modesty falls very hard, or worse, is revealed to have always been a scoundrel. There is a peculiar kind of virtuous fakery that is found only among the pseudo-religious (which, by the way, includes the Twitter-ideologue type as well, but I digress.) In my college days, a fellow called “Ronald” exemplified these traits. Vain, loud, and (on my Catholic campus) oh-so spiritual and religious, he was also plainly a cad. Every man of substance could see this. Naturally, his numerous admiring female groupies could not. I had my eye on this fellow as someone to be wary of even before I happened to be in his dorm as part of my campus job, and stumbled upon the thing I stumbled upon (no; I won’t get any more specific than that.)
As it happened, one day my future wife, wearing an ankle length Leave-Me-Alone-I’m-Studying skirt, sat down by herself in the hallway between classes. Who should stroll by then, but “Ronald.” Now you have to understand that there was no particular dress code at this school, but, if there were, my girlfriend’s clothing that day would have put her in gold star territory. Let’s just say she was not about to go clubbing. Along comes Ronald the Rat, and, seeing that about an inch of her ankle was exposed to the air, he knelt down and whispered in her ear to “warn her” that he could “see under her dress.” He was just warning her, you see, about immodesty; trying to do his part in the universal struggle for holiness! My future wife, mortified and horrified, saw me as I came around the corner. The Rat had only just scuttled off, and so I was given the rare and satisfying opportunity to loudly light him up in front of all of his groupies, exposing the rodent for what he was. He scurried off. They do that.
For this and other reasons, I am fairly sympathetic to feminists. Yes, they annoy me, and, no, I don’t think you can ever really make them happy. But then, there have been entire civilizations of men who needed to be called out the way Ronald the Rat was called out. And most men say nothing.
Purity the Never Fully Possessed: In the ideal case, the virtue of purity enables a man to be in the presence of women, to experience their unavoidable beauty, while behaving (and, especially, thinking) justly toward them – you know, like real people. But a couple things here. 1) There are a range of male strengths in this area, just as there are a range of liquor tolerances. Some men, or men at certain life-stages, need more caution. If it’s a choice between looking suave and avoiding evil, running away might be the best worst strategy. Different sentiments about modesty are going to reflect this range of strengths. Still, this is not a case for making women subject to the lowest standards of male virtue. If you are weak, don’t blame the victim. 2) Having purity is not like having the ability to read, or ride a bike. It’s different from other skills, and even virtues, in that it ebbs and flows. One cannot take for granted that he is past the stage of caution. There are times when, even if it’s a temporary aberration, a man recognizes that he’s drifting, and that he needs to push the power button — literally or figuratively — and give himself a hard reset. It can happen out of the blue, and to anyone. Who knows why, but the ordinary armor just isn’t there. We human creatures are arcane, complicated things; like bombs. “Anyone who thinks he stands should take care lest he fall.”
Purity in youth is a combination of praying, running from passions so strong they seem hell-bent, and fighting to humanize the women around us. That last part will help us to avoid a notion of purity or modesty which makes women scapegoats for our weaknesses. Young manhood is not always a fun time to be alive; at least, not if one is trying to be a good man. A young man needs to see the women around him in terms of their humanity, and in terms of his ultimate mission. Mission is something a man innately understands. He is the protector of all women. A future husband and father. He is training for war. He is training, even, for sex; that is to say, he is training for a time when he can indeed lie naked without shame. And this youthful fire won’t last forever. It’s a forging fire.
Purity in middle-age is, I think, a whole different animal. Passions cool. The imperious siren song of the female form does not haunt and oppress the man of forty as it did the man of twenty. But impurity comes at a man from two primary angles: physical and psychological. Through pleasure and pride. The other side of a woman’s interest is that it greatly affirms a man’s self-worth. It makes him feel absolutely wonderful. The only thing that can possibly vie with this ego-shot is the admiration of one’s fellow men, justly given, on the basis of earned merit. But, first of all, such acclaim is rarely enjoyed and hard to come by. Second, precisely because it’s earned through skill or effort, it’s hard to compare with the admiration of interest, an admiration that implies that there is something inherently desirable about me, enough so that that angelic creature wants it. And middle age is the time when a man begins to feel set in stone. He feels, for the first time, that he is fixed on a track from which he’s unlikely to ever really escape. He looks back over the short years behind, wondering how he arrived so quickly where he is, and wondering how things might have gone differently. This is absolutely terrifying for a man. In such a state of mind, it is no wonder that men of a certain age are particularly vulnerable to infidelity. In both cases, youth and middle age, sustained purity has a lot to do with clear vision.
Impurity as Blindness: The old adage that impurity makes a man blind is absolutely true. A man in the grip of impurity cannot see the big picture, nor the full implications of his actions. The youth, whose vision is fore-shortened and warped anyway, has difficulty even imagining what this calm, collected, strong purity looks like, and may think of purity largely in terms of holding on a little bit longer. And if he has already fallen under the sway of habitual impurity, he may simply regard purity as impossible; a cruel and unrealizable expectation. Or he may see it as possible in principle, but regard his own falls as placing him beyond recovery. Either way, he sees purity as a kind of required bitterness, and not as the virtuous and happy command of his sexuality.
In principle, things ought to be easier for the middle-aged or older man. He does not suffer under the same regime of youthful passion, and he has clear evidence – in his marriage, in his children – of all that is at stake should he be unfaithful. But he has also, by this time, suffered a thousand ordinary slights, most of them probably unintended. If he has allowed these to grow and fester, if he has permitted himself the deadly habit of holding a grudge against his wife, and has failed to set his eyes on the eternal marriage with God (because he failed to face squarely that the greatest human love was never going to be perfect,) then he will be more vulnerable to a fall. He may even begin to convince himself that it’s better for both of them – the children too, though they’re too young to appreciate it – if Mommy and Daddy get a restart. He will reason that if the parents don’t have a healthy marriage, then they cannot be their best selves for their children. This is true, but the solution was to work on the marriage all along, at all costs, for the children’s sake. In short, if has been unfaithful in his mind, heart, or body, then he will begin to lose his vision.
There is another way that carnality blinds. A carnal man becomes insensible to immaterial truths. There is something about purity of body that directly contributes to that “purity of heart” which enables man to see God (Matt 5:8.) Without it, one becomes blind to spiritual, moral, and even ontological truths. I don’t think it’s coincidence that so many of the twentieth century’s great intellectual materialists were also sexually promiscuous. Something about carnality grinds down intellectual vision, and mechanizes the human intellect. It turns an intelligent man into a devilishly clever man. Anything that cannot be touched, possessed, utilized, or calculated becomes unreal. Principle loses its meaning. Morality becomes vague. The forms of things are imperceptible. The rainbow is un-weaved. This is hard to put into words, but it is true.
And if purity permits a clear vision of women, and of life, then impurity, in the end, is murder…
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