In Defense of Purity by Dietrich von Hildebrand

Author:Dietrich von Hildebrand [Hildebrand, Dietrich von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939773036
Publisher: Hildebrand Project
Published: 2017-10-30T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Recapitulation: The Ideal of Wedded Purity

AS WE HAVE pointed out already, the specific positive value for whose realization sex in its ultimate significance is ordained is not purity, but the love which gives and sacrifices self in the most profound and mysterious union. If, however, we would remain completely and perfectly pure in the exercise of sex, we must realize in our use of it just these values of self-devoting love and mysterious union. Only so does the act of marriage really become something wholly pure; indeed, a special occasion of exercising the virtue of purity. How then must the truly pure man experience sex, so that he need not depart an instant from the Divine Presence, but may continue to shine with undimmed radiance before God? In asking the question we are primarily enquiring how the nature of wedded purity positively displays itself, and shall study in detail the qualities it manifests. The standpoint which has governed our treatment hitherto—the question, namely, what specific factors are required to compensate for the dangers inherent in the act of marriage—is relegated to the background.

In this connection we must distinguish different degrees of purity. There are men who possess a deep-rooted will to purity but are by nature impure. Not only do they suffer from individual temptations, which, so to speak, assail them from without: the entire bent of their nature is toward sex, the charm of sex isolated as its own end. Nevertheless, their will can firmly choose purity, and they can avoid every deliberate surrender to impurity. But the will has not yet attained that organic supremacy within the entire person which effects a remolding of the nature as a whole. Such a man has not reached the point when his heart is emancipated from the sphere of evil lust, and is, on the contrary, distressed and depressed by anything impure, and when his thoughts dwell in a region remote from the domain of sexual charm loved for its own sake. He has attained only the first degree of purity. His actions are pure and his will is pure, but his nature is not yet pure. The virtue of purity in the strict sense does not yet belong to it. An incomparably higher degree of purity is represented by the man in whose nature the will to purity has become organic. His thoughts and desires are not occupied with the attractions of sex as an independent sphere, neither with the quality of evil lust nor with the specific fascination of sex. In situations which present any danger of this kind he shuns it from the outset; he never seeks it nor rejoices at its presence. To be sure, on occasion he may feel the force of temptation, may, no doubt, be naturally susceptible to the siren melody of isolated sex. But the profound rejection of everything impure has become so much a part of his psychological organization that not only his conduct and his will, but his entire emotional life has become pure.

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