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The two words most often abused today are "freedom" and "sex." Freedom is often used to mean absence of law, and sex is used to justify absence from restraint. Sometimes the two words fuse into the one, "license." Reason, which should be used to justify God's law, is thus invoked to justify human lawlessness and carnality with two spurious arguments. The first is that every person must be self-expressive, that purity is self negation; therefore, it is destructive of freedom and personality. The second argument is that nature has given to every person certain impulses and instincts, and that principal among them is sex. Therefore, one ought to follow these instincts without the taboos and restrictions which religion and custom impose. Consequently, purity is looked upon as negative and cold, or as a remnant of Puritanism, monasticism, and Victorian strait-lacedness, despite the fact that the Lord of the Universe in the first of the Beatitudes said: "Blessed are the clean of heart; they shall see God." (Matt. 5:8)
Purity is as self-expressive as impurity, though in a different way. There are two ways in which a locomotive can be self-expressive: either by keeping its pressure within the limits imposed by the designer and the engineer, or by blowing up and jumping the tracks. The first self-expression is the perfection of the locomotive; the second is its destruction. In like manner, a person may be self-expressive either by obeying the laws of his nature, or by rebelling against them, which rebellion ends in slavery and frustration. Suppose the same argument of self-expression were used in war as is used to justify carnal license. In that case, a soldier at the front who, on hearing screaming shells, dropped his gun and ran to the rear line, would be greeted by a captain full of modern self-expression and told: "I commend you for throwing off Victorian convention and moral scruples. The trouble with the rest of the army is that they are not self-expressive; they overcome their fear and fight. I shall recommend a medal of honor for asserting your personality."
There is no quarreling with those who say, "Be yourself." The point is, which is your true self: is it to be a beast, or to be a child of God? Those who get over the wickedness of licentiousness say: "Thank God, I am myself again." This is real self-expression.
It is true that God gave us a nature equipped with certain impulses. It is also true that He expects us to obey nature. But our nature is not animal but rational. Since it is rational, our impulses ought to be used rationally: that is, for the highest purposes, and not the lowest. Many a man has a hunting instinct and so has a fox, but a man ought not to go hunting mothers-in-law. Everyone has an eating impulse, but no one ought to drink sulfuric acid. These basic impulses are used according to reason, and so should one use the impulses of life. Just as dirt is matter in the wrong place, so lust is physical energy in the wrong place.
Purity at times does appear to be negative because it has to resist so many attacks upon it. Too often those who are its greatest defenders present it to the young as if it were wholly repression. Their purity themes strike two notes: "Avoid what is impure" and "Imitate the Blessed Mother." The first makes the young wonder why their instinct of procreation should be so strong, if it has evil associated with it. The second gives no explanation of how the Blessed Mother is to be imitated. The ideal is so high and abstract as to seem impractical to the young. But as pure water is more than the absence of impurities, as a pure diamond is more than the absence of carbon, and as pure food is more than the absence of poison, so purity is more than the absence of voluptuousness. Because one defends the fortress against the enemy it does not follow that the fortress itself contains no treasure.
Purity is reverence paid to the mystery of sex. In every mystery, there are two elements; one visible, the other invisible. For example, in Baptism, water is the visible element, the regenerating grace of Christ is the invisible element. Sex is a mystery, too, because it has these two characteristics. Sex is something known to everyone, and yet it is something hidden from everyone. The known element is that everyone is either male or female. The invisible, hidden, mysterious element in sex is its capacity for creativeness, a sharing in some way of the creative power by which God made the world and all that is in it. As God's love is the creative principle of the universe, so God willed that the love of man and woman should be the creative principle of the family. This power of human beings to beget one made to their image and likeness is something like God's creative power, inasmuch as it is related to freedom; for God's own creative act was free.
Breathing, digestion, and circulation are to a great extent unconscious and involuntary. These processes go on independently of our wills, but our power to "create" either a poem, a statue, or a child, is free. In that moment when freedom was born, God said: "Creatures, create yourselves." This Divine Commission to "increase and multiply" new life through love is a communication of the power by which God created all life. Not like wanton children, playing recklessly with the levers of the universe, are man and woman sent into this world. Rather, they are intended to see that the torch of life, which God has put into their hands, is to burn controlled unto the purpose and destiny set by reason and reason's God. Purity is reverence paid to the mystery of sex, and the mystery of sex is creativeness.
The mystery of creativeness is surrounded with awe. A special reverence does envelop the power to be co-creators with God in the making of human life. It is this hidden element which in a special way belongs to God, as does the grace of God in the Sacraments. Those who speak of sex alone concentrate on the physical or visible element, forgetting the spiritual or invisible mystery of creativeness Humans in the Sacraments supply the act, the bread, the water, and the words; God supplies the grace, the mystery In the sacred act of creating life, man and woman supply the unity of the flesh; God supplies the soul and the mystery. Such is the mystery of sex.
In youth, this awesomeness before the mystery manifests itself in a woman's timidity, which makes her shrink from a precocious or too ready surrender of her secret. In a man, the mystery is revealed in chivalry to women, not because he believes that woman is physically weaker, but because of the awe he feels in the presence of mystery. Because, too, of the reverence which envelops this mysterious power which came from God, mankind has always felt that it is to be used only by a special sanction from God and under certain relationships. That is why, traditionally, marriage has been associated with religious rites, to bear witness to the fact that the power of sex, which comes from God, should have its use approved by God because it is destined to fulfill His creative designs.
Certain powers may be used only in certain relationships. What is lawful in one relationship is not lawful in another. A man can kill another man in a just war, but not in his private capacity as a citizen. A policeman can arrest someone as a duly appointed guardian of the law fortified with a warrant, but not outside of that relationship. So, too, the "creativeness" of man and woman is lawful under certain relationships sanctioned by God, but not apart from that mysterious relationship called marriage.
Purity is now seen not as something negative, but positive Purity is such a reverence for the mystery of creativeness that it will suffer no schism between the use of the power to beget and its divinely ordained purpose. The pure would no more think of isolating the capacity to share in God's creativeness than they would think of using a knife apart from its humanly ordained purpose, for example, to stab a neighbor. Those things which God has joined together, the pure would never separate. Never would they use the material sign to dishonor the holy inner mystery, as they would not use the Bread of the altar, consecrated to God, to nourish the body alone.
Purity, then, is not mere physical intactness. In the woman, it is a firm resolve never to use the power until God shall send her a husband. In the man, it is a steadfast desire to wait upon God's will that he have a wife, for the use of God's purpose. In this sense, true marriages are made in heaven, for when heaven makes them, body and soul never pull in opposite directions. The physical aspect, which is known to everybody as sex, is never alienated from the invisible, mysterious aspect which is hidden from everyone except the one willed by God to share in God's creativeness, in God's own good time. The pure in heart shall see God, because they always do His Will. Purity does not begin in the body, but in the will. From there it flows outwards, cleansing thought, imagination, and, finally, the body. Bodily purity is a repercussion or echo of the will. Life is impure only when the will is impure.
Experience bears out the definition of purity as reverence for mystery. No one is scandalized at seeing people eat in public, or read in buses, or listen to music on the street, but they are shocked at dirty shows, foul books, or undue manifestations of affection in public. It is not because we are prudes, nor because we were educated in Catholic schools, nor because we have not yet come under the liberating influence of a Freud, but because these things involve aspects of a mystery so deep, so personal, so incommunicable, that we do not want to see it vulgarized or made common. We like to see the American flag flying over a neighbor's head, but we do not want to see it under his feet. There is a mystery in that flag; it is more than cloth; it stands for the unseen, the spiritual, for love and devotion to country. The pure are shocked at the impure because of the prostitution of the sacred; it makes the reverent irreverent. The essence of obscenity is the turning of the inner mystery into a jest. Given a hidden presence of a God-gift in every person, as there is a hidden Divine Presence in the Bread of the altar, each person becomes a kind of unconsecrated host. As one discerns the Bread of Angels under the sign of bread, so one discerns a soul and potential co-partnership with God's creativeness under a body. As the Catholic craves the embrace of Christ in the Sacrament because he first learned to love Him as a Person, so he reveres the body because he first learned to revere the soul. This is adoration in the first instance, and purity in the second.
Educators who hope to make sex "nice and natural" will end in confusion worse confounded because, while sex is natural, it is vet a mystery. It is not body wholeness but body holiness, and to be holy means to live in correspondence with God's creative purpose. Educators who assume that purity is ignorance of life are like those who think that temperance is ignorance of drunkenness.
On the positive side, purity is the sacristan of love, the reverence paid to the sanctity of personality, the tribute paid to a mystery. It is not the abjuration of desire, it is the culture of the desire to love; it refuses to allow material signs and symbols to be prostituted of the holy content and meaning with which God had endowed them. Purity is a vision, the seeing of the soul in the body, a holy purpose in the flesh. Virginity among pagans meant a bodily condition, a physical intactness, a preserved isolation, to which there was nothing corresponding in the man. Hence, pagans never glorified the virgin man, but only the virgin maid. But with Christianity, virginity ceased to mean physical intactness, but unity. It meant not separation but relationship, not with the will of another person alone, but also with the Will of God.
The Holy Word of God tells us: "It is not well that man should be without companionship." (Genesis 2:18) Happiness was born a twin. There can be no love without otherness. Purity, too, has its relationship, namely, to the Will of God, whence flows the sacredness of personality. Not even the most pure ever understood purity as isolation, negation, or detachment. And here we touch on the way the Blessed Mother is the example of purity. The Blessed Mother consecrated her virginity to God, for she was in love not with the lovable, but with Love. Her first love was the last love, which is the Love of God. When the Angel announced to her that she was to become the Mother of God through the power of the Holy Spirit, her purity of intention remained absolutely unchanged, for by the Will of God, a virgin could now be a mother. Whatever the Will of God decreed, would be to her a loving command. Her virginity was finding a new expression, namely, in bearing a Son, rather than in bearing none.
What the modern world calls "sex" has two sides: it is personal, and it is social. God has associated personal pleasure with the two acts essential for life: eating and procreation. The first is necessary for individual existence; the second is necessary for society. Now, God never intended that the personal pleasure of either should be differentiated from its purpose. It would be wrong to eat, and then tickle one's throat in order to disgorge what one had eaten, because eating has an individual function, the preservation of life. In like manner, it would be wrong to say that "sex" is purely personal, when it is primarily social. Its function is obviously social, unless distorted by the perverse will of man. Personal pleasure of husband and wife is the "sweet snare" of God to complete His creation.
In the case of Mary, the personal element of pleasure was absent, the social was present. She asked of motherhood none of its enticements, allurements, or pleasures. The only love she wished was the love of God. It is not uncommon to find generous souls who willingly surrender all personal advantages for the sake of the betterment of their fellowman. Mary is the supreme instance of one assuming the social responsibilities of marriage without asking God for the recompense of personal love.
Because she is both Virgin and Mother, she becomes the Model of Purity, not only for consecrated virgins but also for those whose love is sacramentalized in marriage. What makes her purity imitable to all, in varying degrees, is the fact that she kept her purity for God's Will. At first, she thought it would always be serving God in the temple, but after the visit of the angel, she learned it would be by bearing the Messias. So the watchword of her purity was: "Be it done unto me according to thy Word." Purity is the guardian of love until God's Will manifests itself. Mary's purity to man and maid means that each will keep his or her mystery sacred, until God's Holy Will determines the one to whom it is to be revealed. The preservation of innocence is not due to prudery, to fear, to love of isolation, but to a passionate desire to preserve a secret until God gives the one to whom it can be whispered.
There is, therefore, no such thing as an "old maid" or a "bachelor" from the Christian point of view. These terms apply only to those unhappy ones who have found no will to share, no purpose to fulfill either in heaven or earth. To find no ear in heaven or on earth to listen to "I love you," or "I surrender," or "Be it done unto me according to thy word," must indeed be of all human existences, the most tragic. But to keep the secret for God, until God calls to another in time, is the greatest happiness given to hearts in this vale of tears.
It may very well be that, with God's special grace, the secret in some will be kept forever, because of the desire that no other shall know it but God Himself. Such is in brief the religious life of consecrated souls: the pursuit of God through purity. Although many minds are willing to concede that the real goal of the human heart is God, they are not willing to admit that one should seek it directly. Hence, they raise a protest against the young men and women who, in the full bloom and blossom of life, embrace the Cross. They can understand why a human heart should weave the tendrils of its affection around a passing love, but they cannot understand why those tendrils should twine about a Cross on which hangs Eternal Love. They can understand why youth should love the lovely, but they cannot understand why it should love Love. They quickly comprehend why affection should be directed toward an object which age corrodes and death separates, but they cannot grasp the meaning of an affection which death makes more intimate and present.
Despite the failure of many to understand the call of God's love, there are always some hearts, like Saint Agnes, who could say before her martyrdom, when an earthly love was presented to her: "The kingdom of the world and every ornament thereof have I scorned for the love of Jesus Christ, my Lord, Whom I have seen and loved, in Whom I have believed, and Who is my Love's choice"! Young men and women are constantly putting their whole selves at the disposal of God, knowing that the value of every gift is enhanced when it exists solely for the one to whom it is given, fulfills no other purpose, and remains unshared. It is only natural that hearts which are so much in love with God should build walls around themselves--not to keep themselves in, but to keep the world out.
To those awaiting marriage, purity is the same in essence: the keeping of the seed in the granary until God sends the springtime. No one would plant flowers in a wintry December. He would wait on God's Will for the season, however great his impatience. Purity is love awaiting fecundation, understood as the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit of Love. The Blessed Mother at the Annunciation is a perfect picture of purity awaiting God's time for fecundation, although to her surprise it was to be done not through man, but through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.
Purity is not something which is peculiar to the unmarried alone but to the married, in the sense that both hold themselves in readiness to do God's Will and to fulfill His mystery. The purity in each differs to the extent that the Will of God is fulfilled either directly or indirectly through the intermediary of another human. Purity is the merging of a great desire and passion into a cosmology. It never isolates the passion from the Divine Plan for the entire universe. Purity in the young destined for marriage begins by being universal, and develops by being particular. It is first on the periphery of the circle, and then at the center. It begins by awaiting God's Will in general, and then through acquaintance and courtship sees that Will focused on one individual. Once it is brought to great centrality in the union of two in the one flesh, it then pays back creation by expanding from the center to the circumference, from the particular to the universal, by the begetting of the family. But in souls consecrated to God, purity is never focused on a particular person but is a constant tendency to universality, by loving and praying for all men as children of God.
Impurity is the concentration on the individual without regard for the universal. It is the isolation of love from otherness; the utilization of tenderness for selfish ends; the turning in upon oneself of that which by its nature was meant to be outgoing. Impurity is introversion, as the miser is an introvert when he hoards his gold; it is the use of pleasure for the sake of excitation alone, and not as an exhilaration to reach the summits of life; it is the man seeing love as male, and the woman seeing love as female, in the sense that love is directed only to self-enjoyment. Impurity is a distraction from the cosmic and the universal, the affirmation of the non-eternal, the isolation of one part of self from the totality of life, and hence it is a deformation of life.
Sang Shakespeare:
Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love
And sets a blister there, makes marriage vows
As false as dicers' oaths; O! such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words. . .
Purity is first psychical before it is physical. It is first in the mind and heart, and then overflows to the body. In this it differs from hygiene. Hygiene is concerned with a fait accompli; purity, with an attitude before the act. Our Lord said: "But I tell you that he who casts his eyes on a woman so as to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (Matt. 5:28) Our Savior did not wait until the thought became the deed but entered into a conscience to brand even a thought impure. If the rivers that pour into the sea are clean, the sea itself will be clean. If it is wrong to do a certain thing, it is wrong to think about that thing. Purity is reverent inwardness, not biological intactness. It is not something private, but rather something secret which is not to be "told" until it is God-approved.
Purity is a consciousness that each possesses a gift which can be given only once, and can be received only once. In the unity of flesh he makes her a woman; she makes him a man. They may enjoy the gift many times, but once given it can never be taken back, either in man or in woman. It is not just a physiological experience, but the unraveling of a mystery. As one can pass just once from ignorance to knowledge of a given point, for example, the principle of contradiction, so one can pass just once from incompleteness to the full knowledge of self which the partner brings. Once that border line is crossed, neither belongs wholly to self. Their reciprocity has created dependence; the riddle has been solved, the mystery has been revealed; the dual have become a unity, either sanctioned by God or in defiance of His Will.
Those who say that purity is ignorance of "the facts of life" are like those who think that knowledge is ignorance of illiteracy. Our Blessed Mother was not ignorant of the mystery of life's begetting, for when the angel appeared to her, she asked: "How can that be, since I have no knowledge of man?" (Luke 1:35) She had consecrated her virginity to God, hence, her problem was how to fulfill that consecration with God's presently revealed will for her to become a mother. But she was not ignorant of life or its purposes. The very vow she had taken implied that she knew what she was giving up. What followed reveals that purity is not something negative, or coldness, but basically a desire, a love for God's intent in relation to a mystery. It is passionless only to those who think that love is bodily passion, and if this were so, how could God be love? If purity were absence of love, how could the Blessed Virgin have become the Mother of Our Lord? It is absolutely impossible to have creativeness without love. God could not beget an Eternal Son without Love; God could not make the earth and the fullness thereof without Love; Mary could not conceive in her womb without Love. She did conceive without human love, but not without Divine Love. Though fragmentary human passion was lacking, Divine Love was not, for the angel said to her: "The Holy Spirit will come upon thee, and the power of the most High will overshadow thee." (Luke 1:35) Since purity is reverence for the mystery of creativeness, who was more pure than the woman who bore the Creator of Creativeness and who in the ecstasy of that love could say to the world in the language of G. K. Chesterton: "In thy house lust without love shall die. In my house love without lust shall live"?
Because purity is reverence for the mystery of creativeness, it has its range from the child to the youth, from the altar to the home, from the widowed to the consecrated, differing in degrees but not in the sublime consciousness that there must be a Divine permission to lift the veil of the mystery. Because purity is the guardian of love, the Church bids all her children look to Mary as their protectress and model. Mary is the abstraction of love from Love; the soft halo of the love of Jesus; the hearth of His Flame; the Ark of His Life. Because she kept her secret until the fullness of her time had come with the Angel's announcement, she became the hope of those who are tempted to premature exploitation of the mystery. There is no class or condition of souls she does not teach that bodily purity is the echo of the will.
From a purely human point of view, there is something incomplete about virginity, something unshared, and something kept back. On the other hand, there is something lost in motherhood, something surrendered, something irrevocable. But in Mary alone, the Virgin and Mother, there is nothing incomplete, nothing lost. She is a kind of springtime harvest, an October in May, wherein the incompleteness of Virginity is complemented by the fullness of her motherhood, and where the surrender of her motherhood is forestalled by the preservation of her innocence. Virgin and Mother, she is the common denominator of all because of her sovereign surrender to Divine Will. She is a Virgin because she sought God's Will directly; she is a Mother for exactly the same reason. To man and maid who marry to do God's Will through one another, to man and maid who do God's Will directly, she is their helper, their guide, their virgin, their mother. She reveals that it is possible to have love without lust, or what Thompson calls "a passionless passion. a wild tranquillity." To those who have surrendered the mystery of life without reference to its creative purpose, Mary is still the hope, for it was she who chose as a companion beneath the Cross that wounded thing the world knows as Magdalen. When Mary stoops down to the broken flowers of humanity in the dark swamps of eroticism, she puts them not in the vase of humanity but bears them upward, as she did Magdalen, to the very altar of God.
To the married, too, Mary is the model, for Sacred Scripture mentions her before her Son as being present at the marriage feast of Cana. In no better way could she reveal the necessity of sacrifice for happy married love than by gently provoking her Son to work His first miracle and thus prepare His Hour of sacrifice on the Cross. By implication the married couple were to love by sacrificing themselves for one another, as she surrendered her Son for the love of the world.
A tremendous impetus to purity is given by the Church in holding up the example of Our Blessed Mother as a model for the young. There is hardly a young man or woman who has not, at one time, heard from his own mother these words, "Never do anything of which your mother would be ashamed." She means that the basic reason for being good is the consecration of self to something higher than self. When a mother makes her appeal to a higher love than love of the child, she is trying to make her children see that they should aim to care for another person rather than having the other person care for them. But to do this, they must have a love higher than their own will and pleasure. Since there is another life beyond the natural, and higher love than the human, what was more natural than for Our Blessed Lord to say to us all from the Cross: "Behold thy Mother!" It was the Divine way of saying: "Never do anything of which your Heavenly Mother would be ashamed."
Francis Thompson wrote:
But Thou, who knowest the hidden thing
Thou hast instructed me to sing,
Teach Love the way to be
A new Virginity.
Do Thou with Thy protecting hand
Shelter the flame thy breath has fanned;
Let my heart's reddened glow
Be but as sun flushed snow.
And if they say that snow is cold,
O Chastity, must they be told
The hand that's chafed with snow
Takes a redoubled glow?--
That extreme cold like heat doth sear?
O to the heart of love draw near,
And feel how scorching rise
Its white cold purities.
But Thou, sweet Lady Chastity,
Thou, and Thy brother Love with thee,
Upon her lap may'st still
Sustain me, if you will.
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