In Defense of Purity

by Dietrich von Hildebrand

  It is impossible here to investigate in detail the distinctive nature of these creative social acts. I must refer my readers to Reinach’s work. But a word must be said as to the distinctive material quality of the vow as compared with the promise, oath, and so on. In the first place, the vow necessarily involves a direct reference to God, which is not the case with the promise. Though a promise may so to speak be given in conspectu Dei, that does not essentially alter its nature as such. The reference to God is most direct when He is invoked as witness to an oath. But such an oath in another respect differs typically from the vow. The subject of a vow is essentially restricted to the future conduct of the vower. I can only vow that I will behave in such and such a fashion. But I can also swear that I have done or omitted something in the past. Indeed, my oath need not relate to any personal conduct of mine, its subject may be some objective fact.

  4. So St. Thomas: “Virginity as a virtue requires the determination sealed by vow to remain a virgin perpetually.” Sum. Theol. II-II, q. 152, a. 11, ad 4.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Nuptial Relationship with Christ Common to All Souls in Grace, and the Special Marriage of the Consecrated Virgin

  VIRGINITY MUST possess a particular quality which, when made fruitful by the special intention involved in consecration to God, establishes a bridal relationship to Jesus of a wholly novel kind. The very language in which Jesus speaks of virginity points to the mysterious depths which it conceals: “He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”1 The passages in which He commends poverty lack this mysterious hint. It enables us to answer the second of the two questions we formulated at the outset and determine that quality of virginity which enables it to constitute a bond with Jesus of so special a character. And at the same time it presents us with the key to the particular objective value and significance of consecrated virginity.

  Like the Church herself, every member of Christ’s mystical body is a bride of Jesus. Jesus is the bridegroom of every soul which is a member of His mystical body. Why, then, is the soul of the consecrated virgin in an entirely new sense His bride?

  To this question also different answers have been returned. According to some, the more strictly a person represents a constituent part of the Church, the more fully is the nuptial relationship between Christ and the Church realized in him. The priest, the religious, the nun, the deaconess of the primitive Church, are constituents of the Church in a stricter sense than the other members of Christ’s mystical body. Therefore the nuptial relationship to Jesus is more strictly realized in them. Since these vocations involve virginity (or celibacy at the least), virgins are brides of Christ in a stricter sense than are other Christians. But this answer only removes the problem a step further. For if the virgin is wedded to Christ only because she belongs in a closer degree to the Church, our question must be repeated in another form. Why does virginity possess this significance for those members of Christ’s mystical body who are in the stricter sense representative of the Church?

  To this question the following answer will perhaps be given. The reason why this significance attaches to virginity is because the Church herself is a virgin. Only those persons can completely display in themselves the holy life of the Church who resemble her in this central point. It is on account of the resemblance and conformity with the virgin Church, Christ’s true Bride, that virginity possesses such a decisive significance for the relation of the individual to Christ. But this answer also merely shifts the problem. It raises the further question. Why is the Church a virgin, and what does her virginal character signify? And it has told us nothing about the nature of the fundamental profound and intrinsic connection between virginity and wedlock with Christ. That was simply taken for granted when the Church was denominated a virgin. However, we must try to discover it in the virginity of the individual, since in this literal virginity the factors here in question, which are also to be found in the Church, are present in a far more accessible and visible form and, from our human standpoint, at first hand. For although the virginity of the Church is no mere poetical metaphor, but a reality in the fullest sense, nevertheless for our understanding the point of insertion into the natural order, that is to say the type which belongs by its visible aspect to nature, is the obvious point of departure. We must therefore have already distinguished more closely the characters of virginity and the relations between them in this more accessible sphere before we can decide whether the proposition implied by the answer just put forward is true—namely, that to create the nuptial relationship with Christ in the more distinctive sense the consecrated virginity of the individual does not suffice by itself, but that the virginity of the Church is, strictly speaking, its foundation.

  When we ask which element in virginity establishes the new and distinctive bond with Christ the usual answer is: The virgin is undivided—indivisus est. This answer appeals to the well-known passage of St. Paul: “He that is unmarried is careful for the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he that is married is careful for the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and is divided. She that is unmarried is careful for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit; but she that is married is careful for the things of the world, how she may please her husband” (1 Cor. 7:32–34). This undividedness may be understood of many elements in virginity, and is therefore capable of different interpretations. Hence the further question arises: Why and in what respect is the virgin undivided in her surrender to God? The explanation given in the passage just quoted is predominantly psychological: “He that is unmarried is careful for the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord.” The division in the aim of a man’s life which normally results from marriage is presented as a division of his surrender to God. But St. Paul’s words do not justify us in concluding that for him this explanation is intended to state the fundamental nature of the undividedness which virginity secures, that for him this psychological effect of celibacy is the ultimate and entire significance of the virgin’s freedom from division. In any case, a closer examination of the nature of virginity reveals further and more profound reasons for the undividedness, which are, we must conclude, also embraced within the Apostle’s scope.

  We must now attempt to discover all those features to which virginity owes its significance as a special and a closer union with God, proceeding gradually from the more obvious aspects to the more profound. And we shall, of course, devote particular attention to the “undividedness,” which we shall examine at length, with the object of discovering the various factors which produce and represent it.

  Baptism makes us partakers in the Divine Life of the most Holy Trinity, inasmuch as it is the means whereby we are admitted into Christ’s mystical body. In Christ divine and human nature are joined in a union which infinitely exceeds anything to which the name of marriage could be applied. Such a union of both natures in one Person is unique, found only in the God-man Himself. But every baptized person by his membership of Christ’s mystical body shares in this union with the Divine Nature, though in an incomparably less direct fashion. The manner in which the Trinity inhabits the Christian soul by sanctifying grace can be appropriately expressed by comparing it with marriage. But the relation in which Christ stands to every baptized soul, although its mystery obviously transcends all our concepts, can be symbolized with far greater adequacy by this the highest of all human relationships. The relationship between Christ and the soul is therefore termed a marriage.2 But leaving out of account this mysterious objective relationship, which may exist even when there is nothing to reveal its presence, for example, in the baptized infant, we will inquire into the special relationship of the individual soul to Jesus and its attitude toward Him, as experienced by that soul. From this point of view the relationship to Christ possessed by the majority even of the living members of His body is far less intimate than anything to which the term “marriage” could be fittingly applied.

  What is the essence of the nupt
ial relation as opposed to other bonds of love?3 Among all the forms of human love wedded love is the deepest, closest, and most splendid. I am not speaking here of marriage, but of the love between the married or the engaged. The distinctive quality of that love consists first and foremost in the specific correlation of both lovers; in the fact that in this case, to a far higher degree than in the love of parents, children, or friends, the person as such is the exclusive “matter” of the relationship. And this, of course, is bound up closely with the fact that this is a love in which both partners complete each other in a unique fashion, possible only between the two sexes.4 For this completion the distinction between male and female, as a difference of the entire personal type, is of primary importance, and it can be effected even where the very thought of physical union is wanting. In nuptial love—to put our point in another way—both parties live, as it were, for each other, not side by side. It is the noblest of human relationships and the most effective in arousing both partners from the dull callousness which has become man’s second nature; the relationship in which both parties, as it were, stand face to face, looking into each other’s eyes. Each exists for the other. For this love is uniquely directed toward union with the beloved. A friend’s love desires contact with that friend in order to embrace some third object in a common gaze; parents’ love is eager to share in the child’s life; but the bride longs to be united with her lover, to share in his being, an aim which presupposes a distinctive mutual adaptation and the possibility of a fundamental mutual completion.5 The mysterious glory which invests nuptial love and its perfection as the crown of human relationships has nowhere been depicted so vividly as in the Song of Songs: “Come, I said, let me arise and go about the city. In the streets and in the open spaces I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. The watchmen that go about the city found me. [To whom I said] Him whom my soul loveth have ye seen? Hardly had I gone from them, when I found him whom my soul loveth. I laid hold on him and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that bare me. I adjure you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles and by the harts of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awaken love till it please. . . . Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the flashes thereof are flashes of fire, its flames are the flame of lightning. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the rivers drown it: if a man should proffer all the substance of his house for love, he would be utterly despised” (Song of Songs 3: 2–5; 8: 6–7).

  The essential elements of wedded love we have already seen must be present also in our love for Jesus. Abbot Columba Marmion in his Sponsa Verbi (The Bride of the Word) depicts in noble and expressive language the different degrees of relationship to Jesus:

  “We have heard Jesus Christ Himself on more than one occasion compare the kingdom of God to a wedding feast. God in and by His word invites souls to the banquet of divine union.

  “At a banquet several classes of people are present. First the servants. Respectful to the master of the house, they stand upright and carry out the orders given. In return the master pays them the wages on which they have agreed. If they perform their duties well he thinks highly of them. But he does not admit them to his table or to his friendship, nor does he tell them his secrets. They are the type of those Christians whose conduct is habitually inspired by servile fear. Such persons treat God as a Master, a great Lord, whom, like the servants of the Gospel, they occasionally find too ‘hard’; they only do that to which they are strictly obliged, and from fear of punishment. These souls, who still live in a spirit of bondage, in fear are excluded from personal relations with God.

  “Then there are the guests, the friends. The King has invited them to His table, has spoken to them in language which supposes mutual goodwill, shares with them his food and wine. But there are different degrees of this friendship. They are the type of Christians who love God without having given Him everything. When they are with the King He shows them His favors, but they are not always in His company. They leave Him for their own business, and show their friendship only at intervals.

  “When the friends have left, the children remain. They belong to the house; are at home and stay there. Bearing their father’s name, they are the heirs of his possessions; their life is devoted to knowing their father, obeying and loving him, and in return he entrusts them with confidences from which the friends are excluded. They represent those faithful souls who live and behave as God’s children, who realize perfectly St. Paul’s description: ‘Ye are no more strangers or sojourners, but ye are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God’ whose delight it is to practice the virtues which distinguish a child of God—faith, hope, and love—virtues whose perfect exercise is a total abandonment for their heavenly Father’s good pleasure. ‘Whosoever are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.’ To these child souls God communicates Himself as the sovereign Good in which all their desires find fulfillment. Finally there is the Bride. From her the Bridegroom has no secrets; she shares with Him the closest intimacy in the tenderest love; no union is more perfect than hers. The union between husband and wife far surpasses that between parents and children. ‘A man,’ our Lord tells us, ‘should forsake father and mother and cleave to his wife.’ No union exceeds this for intimacy, tenderness, and fruitfulness.”

  This supreme and most intimate bond between the soul and Jesus, this nuptial love and union with the Incarnate Word, is, as such, confined to no special vocation. Every baptized person can attain it with the help of grace, for this kind of love and union with Christ is the mark of the saint. And as there can be saints in every walk of life, and kings may be saints as well as hermits, married women as well as virgins, laymen as well as priests, so there is no station or vocation which can exclude a soul from this supreme relation to Jesus, because the ultimate vocation of every man is not the exercise of the profession in which he happens to be, but the most perfect conscious realization of that sublime union with Christ, objectively created by baptism.6 A bride’s love for Christ and her supremely close intimacy with Him belonged as much to St. Elizabeth or St. Catherine of Genoa7 as to St. Catherine of Siena or St. Teresa, to St. Louis as much as to St. Francis. Nevertheless, there is a state of life that may be termed the state of perfection and which stands in a special relation to wedlock with Christ. It is, we may say, a form of life that is the external expression of this marriage which is its special aim. It is the life of poverty, chastity, and obedience chosen for Jesus’s sake, or life in accordance with the evangelical counsels.

  We shall now examine in detail to the best of our ability the relationship between this state of perfection and the interior marriage with Christ, and what are the grounds of the special correspondence between this form of life and the soul’s nuptials with Him. We shall thus acquaint ourselves with the various respects in which virginity and wedlock with Christ are united, and finally catch a glimpse of that profound and mysterious aspect of virginity in virtue of which consecrated virginity, and it alone, constitutes an objective marriage with Jesus.

  * * *

  1. The words “he that can receive it, let him receive it” are usually so understood that “receive” (—capere) is explained, not as “understand,” but as “embrace.” Let him who is called to virginity, accept it—that is to say the man in whom the ground has been prepared for this vocation, as contrasted with the man who may indeed understand and grasp the significance of virginity, but for whom its beauty involves no personal call. Whichever interpretation be correct, in any case the language here used of consecrated virginity is peculiarly solemn and mysterious. On any interpretation the characteristic contrast remains with other passages which speak of poverty.

  2. “Whatever the position of a man in other respects, whatever the relationships which bind him to the earth, from the moment his soul is in the grace of God, it is the br
ide of Christ.” Charles Gay, De la vie et des vertus chrétiennes, Vol. II, x, de la Chasteté.

  3. We are not concerned here with that specifically tender quality, so full of promise, which distinguishes the love of the engaged as opposed to the love of the wedded, but of that fundamental category of love represented alike by the love of the engaged and the wedded as contrasted with other categories, for example, love of parents or love of children.

  4. We must, however, be very careful not to understand this unique mutual completion in a pantheistic sense, as though man and woman did not by themselves constitute a complete nature and the perfect human being was only brought into existence by their union—a view to be met with in German idealism and in romantic literature. Nor is nuptial love fundamentally a selfish desire for completion, but a response to value of which a desire for union is the consequence. The quality of completion is but a secondary feature of this love.

  5. See further my observations upon the intentio unitiva, which is indeed an element in every love, but attains its fullest development in nuptial love.