In Defense of Purity

by Dietrich von Hildebrand

  The distinction between natural purity and the temperament which we have indicated as its favorable environment consists essentially—and this holds good of all natural virtues and the corresponding temperaments—in the fact that the temperament involves no attitude of the person, still less any perception of value and response to it. The natural virtue of purity, on the contrary, as contrasted with its temperamental counterpart, involves an explicit perception of value. The naturally pure man is sensible in a particular instance of the impurity of a situation, person, book, and so on; moreover, it always presents itself to him as a negative value. And what is even more important than the perception of this negative value, he rejects it and turns away whenever he breathes this tainted air. He feels ill in an impure atmosphere. No one can help seeing that this consciousness and rejection of impurity is radically different from the temperamental shrinking from sex that we sometimes find in tender and highly sensitive men and women. Even the vital shrinking of the virgin from surrendering her virginity, even in marriage, is a temperamental disposition of this kind, which does not constitute purity. It manifests the proud reserve of an untamed nature, which rejects not the negative values incident to sex, but incidental features of neutral value, especially the subordination to another that the sexual surrender involves. Or it may be the violent, exciting quality of sex which is rejected. The naturally pure man, on the contrary, genuinely rejects the negative value of impurity.

  If natural purity is thus distinguished—by its perception of the values, pure and impure, and its rejection of the impure in any given instance—from every merely temperamental disposition that renders purity easier, on the one hand, and, on the other hand by the fashion in which it perceives and responds to these values, it essentially contrasts with the perfect virtue of purity. Nature’s pure men are sensible of the impurity of sex when made an end in itself and its purity when not thus abused; they approve the latter and reject the former. But their perception of values lacks two factors of decisive importance. In the first place it is simply a perception of the particular concrete value, positive or negative, then and there present; it is not a knowledge of the value of purity, a permanent knowledge of the virtue, for which the perception of values in each particular instance is simply a concrete exemplification or realization of a habitual contact with the values in question. Secondly, even the concrete perception of value by the naturally pure is not, strictly speaking, a matter of principle. Their understanding of the value of purity is too superficial to reveal to them its full seriousness, and its self-sufficient majesty; they fail to grasp that surrender and assent are due to it, as such, whatever may be their natural inclination. They are, in short, morally unconscious men, men who have not yet attained ethical maturity, whose attitude, therefore, lacks the sanction of the central personality, the free spiritual self.3 They have not awoken to that freedom which confirms or rejects the judgments of their nature. Even when their attitude is a response to value, they are, as it were, merely voicing their nature. Their perception of value and response to it are still alloyed with an element of chance.

  Moreover, their natural purity consists in assent to a value which differs essentially from that on which the gaze of the man whose purity is a product of the spirit is turned. Whereas in the case of the latter it is the splendor which shines from the countenance of God, the thrice Holy, in the case of the naturally pure it is the free, clear air of nature in contrast to the oppressive, sickly, and poisonous atmosphere of sex, isolated as its own end. People of this sort usually display an antipathy to anything artificial or over-refined, and possess a subconscious feeling of solidarity with nature, with her truth, her simplicity, her clarity.

  Besides the natural purity described above there is also a ritual purity of the natural order which plays an important part in most religions.4 Among many races, sexual continence is regarded as indispensable for religious functions and offices, and a connection of one kind or another is held to exist between purity and ritual holiness. But in contrast to natural purity, this ritual purity has no claim whatever to be considered a virtue. For in this case the subject of the purity is neither the person as such, nor his attitude, behavior, or disposition. Physical continence, as such, the avoidance of actual contact with sex, is for one reason or another regarded as materia consecranda (material to be consecrated). As the sacrificial victim must be unblemished, the gifts offered to God, the vestments and the altar, pure, so must it be with the person consecrated to God. There is thus no essential difference between the purity of a thing to be consecrated to God and this heathen ritual purity of the person. It is further characteristic of this purity that no distinction is made between virginity and purity, although the value of virginity is no better understood than the value of purity.5

  As the principal motives for regarding sexual “inviolacy” as essential for consecration to God we may mention the following. First, the preciousness of the unopened bud. This preciousness, as here conceived, is wholly vital and physiological; it is analogous to the preciousness of youth, something which, even from the standpoint of physical sex, possesses a peculiar charm. The creature which is to be consecrated to the Deity and given over to Him in a special fashion must not lack this excellence.

  Secondly, emancipation from all other ties; being wholly at the disposal of God, completely unused. As the value of every gift is enhanced, if it exists solely for him to whom it is given, fulfills no other purpose, is and remains unused, so the person is here entirely regarded as a thing consecrated to God.6 To make the sexual surrender is to anchor oneself most firmly to the world and to enter into the closest union with one’s fellow creatures. Therefore, it is precisely in this respect that the man who is consecrated to God must be inviolate.

  And lastly there is an obscure sense of the danger of sex. Its power to destroy, disintegrate, and devour is dimly felt, that baneful potency with which it is charged when, as is necessarily the case here, it is viewed apart from the antidotes and sublimations that Christian ethics alone can supply. The man consecrated to God must avoid this danger. But here also this avoidance is simply a matter of external conduct, not of interior disposition. It is, therefore, impossible to regard it as even a natural, let alone a spirit-begotten virtue.

  The natural virtue of purity is thus sharply distinguished from purity in the strictest sense, the virtue which is a product of spirit. But we have already pointed out that the perfect spirit-created virtue of purity demands a supernatural foundation. This becomes evident when we consider that the morally conscious man who without a religious motive keeps himself pure solely in response to an ethical value, no doubt far transcends the purely natural sphere and adopts an attitude which is the product of spirit, but is not therefore the possessor of purity as a substantial virtue. Whereas the purity of the pure-natured—though not, indeed, the product of spirit—is a substantial property of the person, with clearly marked features, the value-response that is unmotivated by religion (as exemplified by the attitude of a conscientious and morally earnest man who regrets the isolation of sex as its own end and the abuse of sex) is no substantial virtue of purity, no quality that really belongs to his being. We cannot describe a morally earnest man (for example, Wilhelm Meister, in his later development, who deliberately combats temptations), nor yet a young man who takes morality seriously (for instance, Tamino in The Magic Flute), as possessing the virtue of purity in its strictest sense—the creation of spirit—as we can a Rose of Lima, a Curé d’Ars, or a Stanislaus Kostka. This is a point of the utmost importance for ethics and for psychology also, if we would understand the structure of the spiritual person. The person’s conscious spiritual intention is not sufficient in the case of every virtue to construct, as nature can construct, of its own strength a substantial property of his being, with an analogous fullness of content. The properties of the person that are not produced by spirit possess a fullness of content and a substantiality, as characteristics of the entire being which no delibera
te moral volition, however victorious, can effect. Purity is, with benevolence, and so on, a marked instance of this. It is only the supernatural union with God and surrender to Him that can give the will of the human spirit power to construct these virtues with a fullness of content, a substantiality, that is not merely analogous, as in the case of the natural virtues, but substantial in a sense incomparably more strict—and as genuine virtues, that is to say, habits. In short, only the supernatural reference is sufficient in the case of these virtues to effect a real union between production by the spirit and sub-stantiality.7

  For the defective substantiality of the former purity cannot be explained as due solely to its incomplete organic possession of the person. Even in the case of a supernaturally motived choice of purity we can distinguish different degrees to which the person is possessed by the virtue. But in the case of the mere idealist a double impotence attaches in principle to the will. In the first place it can never, however successful it may be, effect a substantial transformation of the person in this respect. In the second place, it can never produce the specific quality displayed by the purity of a saint. It is, to be sure, a sufficient foundation for the absence of impurity, and for the qualities of depth, seriousness, and idealism; but purity with its mysterious radiance requires something more, and, as we have already seen, this impotence is sufficiently explained by the fact that the objective value that corresponds to purity, which the pure man has constantly in view, lies beyond its sphere. The value-qualities which the idealist wills in the domain of purity are as remote from the objective value which corresponds to genuine purity as are those which the naturally pure has in view. In this case, no doubt, the fashion in which the value is apprehended and the response given, the quality to which the response is made, is different. The idealist wills before anything else the positive values of which sex may be the subject (in so far as they are intelligible from his naturalist standpoint). He rejects every abuse of sex and wills purity itself as freedom from the corrupting poison of isolated sex, as a certain inviolacy of his spirit’s orientation to the ideal, the guarantee that his idealism may take her upward flight unhampered by matter. It is obvious how wide is the gulf which separates purity of this kind from that described above, and still more how the objective correlate of genuine purity represents in contrast something completely new.

  The complete spirit-produced virtue of purity is only possible as an element of Christian morality, and, even psychologically, presupposes as its objective correlate the new world revealed to us in the countenance of Jesus. Everyone who has an eye for the entirely novel quality of the morality which the saint displays in its splendor will also understand that holiness in every form “radiates” from Jesus the God-man. He will recognize that this morality differs in kind from any merely natural moral perfection, displays an incomparable luster and an incomparable depth, and wins victories no other ethic could achieve. He will see clearly what a gulf divides a noble, temperate, prudent, just, and sincere pagan, a Seneca, for example, or a Socrates, and the Christian in whom baptismal grace has produced its full effect, that is to say, the saint—a St. Paul, for example, or a St. Ambrose. He will understand how the humility which is happy to confess its own nothingness in the presence of God’s glory, and will owe nothing to itself, everything to God; the gentleness of the man who, when smitten on the left cheek, turns the right; the love that “supporteth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things,” and which in unreserved self-surrender embraces the meanest, basest, pettiest, most sinful, as the image of God and a soul redeemed for eternal bliss by the merits of Christ’s blood and loved by Jesus with an everlasting love; the purity which is the reflected splendor of God’s light shining on the soul—how all these are the fruits of an entirely new life in the soul, of kindred essence with the life which beats in the divine-human Heart of Jesus, in whom is the fullness of divine beauty.

  And this life—which can derive but from one source, sanctifying grace, not only is in its quality a reflection of Jesus, but presupposes as its objective correlate that picture of God which has been revealed to us in Jesus’s teaching, and still more in His being and countenance. For here alone the distinctive quality of this morality is manifest in its original source, and it is here, therefore, that our spirit must make contact with it, if it is to be admitted into its sphere. Only the new light which shines here into our spiritual eyes can so reform our nature as to give birth to the perfect virtue of purity. Though there are, no doubt, virtues—justice, for example, truthfulness, and loyalty—which can arise even on the purely natural plane as substantially realized and therefore products of spirit, there rises far above them that glorious world of spirit-born virtues which, in their substantial content and distinctive quality, are possible only as the reflection of the glory which shines upon us from the face of God—the God of whom Jesus said, “Philip, he who hath seen Me hath seen the Father.”

  ( d) Note on the attitude of the pure to art

  We may take this opportunity of saying a little about the attitude of the pure man to art and on the question what in art must be regarded as objectively pure or impure. The pure man rejects everything impure, accepts everything pure. But he will have nothing whatever to do with the prudery which scents impurity everywhere. Here, too, it is a matter of discerning the narrow path trodden by those who combine a healthy mistrust of their own nature with freedom of spirit. Just as the right attitude of man on his earthly pilgrimage combines life in fear and trembling with serving the Lord with joy, so here also freedom of spirit and constant watchfulness against everything unclean must go hand in hand.

  It is obviously impossible within the limits of this work to discuss the nature of art. We must content ourselves with pointing out as a first principle the peculiar connection which exists between purity and art that is essentially profound—the art whose beauty is a reflection of the Godhead. In itself all genuine beauty is, as a genuine objective value, in the widest sense of the term pure. But with its beauty it may combine a sexual appeal. In every department of art there are genuine works of art which possess genuine beauty, but which are at the same time sexually stimulating. This does not necessarily condemn them as impure. At least they are not tainted by sexuality isolated as the object of evil lust, but on the other hand they cannot be termed pure in the strict sense. They are steeped in the dangerous charm of sex and may be a source of temptation. The attitude of the pure man toward works of art of this kind will vary; if he has to struggle against temptation it will be different from what it will be if he is deaf to the siren melody of isolated sex; but above all it will depend on his sensibility to art as such. Either he will see in such works of art only the artistic beauty, and the other aspects will leave him unaffected—though even then his attitude toward them will be marked by a certain distance, and he will never surrender himself to them unreservedly; or he will be conscious of the heated breath of sexual lust in them as a personal danger, in which case he will naturally, as far as possible, avoid all contact with them. But we have in view here, and the point is important, only those works of art in which the sexual appeal is essentially bound up with their artistic quality. The case is entirely different with those works of art which are vehicles of an ultimate transcendent loveliness and greatness, which pours down upon this lower world like the light of the sun: works of art that breathe a sublime beauty which seems to open to us the gate of heaven. Such beauty is at the opposite pole to everything paltry and impure. Not only is it pure in itself like the Beauty of which it is the reflection; it is also specifically purifying, and contributes more than almost any other agent to free the heart from the intoxicating poison of sex isolated as its own end. It raises a man above this sphere, touches and expands the soul, arouses a longing for its heavenly home, emancipates it and guides it into the deepest region of its own interior, and enkindles in our heart a burning desire for God, the everlasting Beauty, and Jesus, “fairest of the sons of men.”

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nbsp; Wherever this beauty speaks to us from a work of art the fact that the mere subject matter contains something which in itself might be a cause of temptation, for example, the naked body, is of no significance whatever. This beauty silences the siren strain which otherwise might proceed from the purely material factor, the subject treated. Such works of art can never be dangerous to men capable of appreciating art. The pure man, if only he is sensitive to art, will never find in them anything which could harm him or forbid him to surrender himself to their beauty. This, of course, is not to deny that to an inartistic man even these sublime works of art, in themselves specifically pure, might prove dangerous, if he were at the same time particularly susceptible to temptations of this kind. But in this sense even Holy Scripture can be dangerous, since it speaks frankly about many things which might prove the occasion of temptations to a reader whose attitude was mistaken.

  In view of these dangers we are obliged, no doubt, to take practical measures, especially in the field of education, but we are in no way justified in condemning as impure any product of this essentially sincere and sublime art merely because sex enters into its subject matter.