Man and Woman by Dietrich von Hildebrand

Author:Dietrich von Hildebrand [Hildebrand, Dietrich von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sophia Press
Published: 2012-10-02T01:17:09+00:00

Isolated sexuality threatens love

While stressing that it is a grave error to see the sexual sphere and the sexual act as something evil as such, we also acknowledge that isolation of the sexual sphere is not only a theoretical error but a widespread tendency of our fallen nature. When isolated and separated from spousal love and the mutual self-donation in marriage, the sexual sphere has an enormous attractive power. The danger of being caught and seduced by this aspect of the sexual sphere is indeed a great one and it lurks in the greater part of mankind. My book In Defense of Purity deals at length with this powerful fascination. Wherever anyone gives in to it and undertakes to satisfy an isolated sexual desire, we are confronted with the grave sin of impurity, an outgrowth of evil concupiscence and a desecration. This sin includes a mysterious betrayal of our spiritual nature. But this in no way entitles us to look at the act of bodily union as something evil. It becomes evil through its isolation.

Precisely because it is something noble, deep, and mysterious in its God-ordained relation to two becoming one flesh in the sublime love union of marriage, its abuse is a terrible desecration. To conclude that something is evil as such because its abuse constitutes a terrible sin and because in our fallen nature the tendency for such abuse is great, is obviously completely illogical. Should we look on intellectual work and scholarship as something evil in itself, because it certainly produces in many persons a proud attitude, because it fosters pride? Is St. Peter Damian right when claiming that the devil is the father of grammar because he taught us to decline God in the plural: Eritis sicut dii? Should we extend to all men the ban laid by St. Francis on scholarship for his fratres minores because, indeed, there lurks in it a danger of pride? Or should we see in reason something evil because of the danger of rationalism?

No! Great and terrible as is the danger of impurity, true as it is that in our nature there lurks the tendency to respond to the appeal of the isolation of sex, this in no way alters the fact that the valid, real meaning of this sphere is to be a field of fulfillment for spousal love and that the original, valid aspect of the marital act is its function as a mutual self-donation in the sacred bond of marriage, the constitution of an irrevocable union, and that it is thus as such not something evil, but on the contrary, something great, noble, and pure.

Thus, instead of saying that the sinful satisfaction of sexual desire becomes legitimate through marriage, we should say that the sexual act, because it is destined to be the consummation of this sublime union and fulfillment of spousal love, becomes sinful when desecrated by isolation.

This does not contradict St. Paul when he mentions marriage also as a remedy for concupiscence. Given the fact

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