The reality of Christian purity
I often wondered about how monks and nuns can stand it. On my way to the answer I’ve learned that it’s not just out of sheer willpower but that the happy chemicals are even more powerful in pious living than they are in fleeting pleasure-seeking.
One trouble with an inability to move from “is” to “ought” is the concomitant denial of any moves from “is” to “ought not”. Innocence is real, and it is more deeply true of us all—even in adulthood—than anything else. We ought to live as if Innocence were real, even when Society uses sophistry to tell us otherwise. As soon as we deny the ethical implications of a teleological worldview, we do what unmoored ships do in a chaotic sea.
There is a movement of our minds in this generation to seek honesty in perversions of truth and to project dishonesty on those who deny those supposed truths. Chief among these claims to honesty regards human sexuality. Ironically, despite the is-ought gap cited whenever we try so ineffectually to hold the line against these incursions of evil, leftist atheists are now swept-up in a movement to say, for example, that children ‘can’ have their sexuality awakened at an earlier and earlier age and, in the name of freedom from stunted growth by arbitrary societal constructions to contain flourishing, that we ought therefore to recognize that truth and freely embrace the sexual expressions of their identities.
The same sort of argument was first made about homosexuality—namely that sexual ‘identity’ is discovered in childhood and ought to be allowed to flourish, come what may. Conservatives are always mocked and derided for seeing any through-line connecting same-sex attraction and pedophilia but look at where we are now—Mignonnes on Netflix—only a few years after ‘realizing’ how ‘natural’ it is to be homosexual, to be polyamorous, and so on. This supposed ‘honesty’ is based on a lie. We plant the seeds of destruction and watch them grow and call that the natural order.
The question beneath this reflection goes beyond such a gross perversion, however. The real question is whether the celibate are interminably miserable. Is it ever good or necessary to resist sexual desire?
Yes, clearly even the most libertine society makes laws to align with a general moral sense. Do the members of every society live with a low-grade frustration of one sort or another that is constant in their lives? Yes. But it is so obvious that the question doesn’t normally arise as to whether laws should be abolished and all sexual desires fulfilled; moreover, we know that all such desires would not in fact be fulfilled in any case because that would require that men and women always get what they want.
In the context of desires frustrated by societal norms, the question doesn’t come up because it derives from an absurd fantasy; insofar as we believed in God’s law as much as societal laws, we’d have an even more dismissive attitude toward the sense of being robbed of the fulfillment of our sexual desires because it would be like defying the laws of physics. There are such things as deeper truths—deeper laws than physical ones—and they’re not just the recurring thoughts that every man or woman wishes they didn’t have but sometimes hopes are only natural (and therefore excused). It isn’t enough to call a thing naturally-occurring in order to describe the deepest and most important truth about it upon which we ought to keep our attention if we want to live in the light of every truth.
All men struggle with temptations but we need to remember that what is projected by a woman through her body language (maybe in response to the man’s own body language) tells a story to which we, as men, are tempted to say “yes” with our eyes because we’re nearly driven mad at the images running through our own mind’s eye. But our mind’s eye (and her own) is bleary with infection. We know that there is a truth about all things beyond the truth of what can be enjoyed from them. Deep-down we all know that this is so; yet tragically, our corrupted imaginations are more powerful than abstract truths.
Sin corrupts the erstwhile innocent imagination. We are quick to forget how sin works on our desires by this particular corruption. What we imagine about anything we love at all in the world is not what it would be in reality—not, anyway, beyond the first moments, hours, days, weeks, months, or even years. Having chosen the wrong object of our highest desire—or rather, having a highest object of desire at all—is what gives away the man-centeredness of our chosen mode of life, which will continue to fracture life.
Of course, after all of this, we may think to ourselves that the above is all just so much impotent rationalization of a lie about what we really want, which, if we’re really honest (so it goes) is fleeting pleasure in a life enjoyed to the maximum only one moment at a time. To say anything more is just to fill space between pleasures with words. To that I’d say that the word itself is powerful enough to cut through our corrupt imagination and lance the festering boil irritating us into making that sort of objection. To see this at work we need only to speak Jesus’s name aloud at the first sign of trouble then watch the revelation, and experience how our desires change.
Here is a thought experiment. Imagine you’re sitting with someone you find attractive. Sit with her (or him) in silence just looking into each other’s eyes for a few seconds, then imagine you let a few minutes pass into hours, days, months, even years. What should you say if you’re only given moments to speak before the end of your lifetimes of sitting motionless before each other? The thought experiment is an exhortation to always challenge yourself to think deeply regardless of your present company. Plumb the depths of your heart and speak from those depths. Share wisdom—don’t withhold it from anyone. Finally, if you are worried about the above, you may have become too physically comfortable. These are not the things that trouble a mind occupied with other physical stresses.