Throne and Altar

I’m afraid I’m going to have to break the rule I just made, the one about how one shouldn’t talk about, you know, certain things.  Unfortunately, it is necessary.  A prominent politician, a Miss Christine O’Donnell, is being widely and viciously attacked for having once stated that masturbation is immoral.  Journalists are openly calling such a belief “odd” or even “insane”.  How did we get to the point that acceptance of the solitary vice has become a prerequisite for public acceptability?  When did the imperious “we” of public concensus decide that onanism may not be criticized?  It was when journalist and Hollywood degenerates started pushing for this, and nobody pushed back.  Chaste people don’t like to talk about such things, but a gauntlet has been thrown.  A challenge must be answered.

Until quite recently, the consensus of the Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist worlds was that the carnal pleasures of sex should never be separated from the donation of self and openness to new life implied by this act.  Modern people, indoctrinated in utilitarianism from birth, may find this prohibition mysterious.  Why not?  Who does it hurt?  Wouldn’t unrestricted, consequence-free orgasms for everyone increase the world’s happiness?  To people of saner times, however, satisfying peoples’ carnal desires was not the primary consideration.  The main consideration was to make sure that sacred things don’t lose their meaning.

Let’s consider an example from another part of life.  In common speech, when a man says, “I want to feel that I’m taking good care of my children”, he means the same thing as if he’d said, “I want take good care of my children”.  A philosopher might point out that the two are technically different, that the first is a selfish desire for a certain feeling, while the second is an other-directed desire for a certain objective state of affairs.  This philosopher would be entirely misunderstanding what the man is saying.  If he’s a normal person, the feeling of satisfaction in knowing that his children are well cared-for is inseparable in his mind from the fact of them being well cared-for.  An example a bit closer to the case at hand would be that, for a normal person, to say “I want to feel loved” means the same thing as “I want to be loved”.

Now suppose someone invents a drug that, when ingested, gives a man the feeling of satisfaction that he would get from being a good father to his chidren, even if objectively-speaking, he is completely neglecting them.  Suppose another drug gives a woman the feeling of being loved, even though objectively no one in the world gives her any concern at all.  Should one take such a pill?  The very idea is repulsive.  Even if everyone was made happier by such pills, even if men continued to care for their children out of duty and with no connection to the natural joys of fatherhood, we would still find such a thing repellant.  Why is that?

We feel that for a man to take pills to feel accomplished or to feel loved would be degrading.  It separates things that should not be separated:  an objective good (healthy children, being loved) from the accompanying subjective pleasure.  The pleasure is dignified by its inseparability from an objective good:  no one would call a man who pursues the satisfaction of a job well done a hedonist, because he never pursues the pleasure alone, but rather the good and the pleasure considered as a single thing.  To pursue the pleasure alone would be degrading.  If a person would be content with feelings and impressions of objective goods (being loved, being useful, etc), he would be choosing to live in an illusion, and that is contemptible. 

Now for our specific case:  the pleasure of sex and the good of conjugal union.  God says to Eve, “Your desire shall be for your husband,”  and this is as it should be.  If Eve becomes sexually aroused, her understanding of it should be “I want Adam.”  The object of the desire is thought to be a particular person.  In this way, her sexual cravings are experienced as the bodily part of an integrated drive towards communion with her husband.  Bodily union, spiritual love, and the happiness of common life are seen as three aspects of one good, and the desire for any one is seen as organically connected to desire for the other two.

If Eve falls into impurity, she may separate the distinct pleasures and lose sight of their single object.  When she becomes aroused, she may think, “I desire sex”.  Now Adam is reduced to a means; he is one instantiation of a class of beings who can give her the satisfaction she desires.  She may degrade herself yet further.  She may interpret her cravings as follows: “I desire the pleasure that comes when my genitals are stimulated through certain pressures.”  Now it is not even a person she wants, but rather one of his organs, or anything else that serves the same function.

Splitting the pleasure of sex from its interpersonal meaning, as onanism does, corrupts an entire sphere of existence.  You can no longer say to your spouse “I want you” as you once could.  Before, this communion with “you” was a unitary object, including sex, company, affection, and children all together.  Now, this unity is lost.  These are seen as separate objects.  Once a man has given himself to impurity, he must ask himself which of these multiple objects he’s seeking through intercourse with his wife.   Is it a pleasure and release qualitatively no different from that he could just as well have provided for himself?  Is he seeking a more spiritual union?  Sex no longer has anything to do with that in his mind.  He has mentally split that atom.  Even if he desires both bodily and spiritual union, the two are now independent in his mind, neither having anything to do with the other, and both poorer for their isolation.

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Dress is an important part of modesty, but it is by far not the most important part.  Far more important to our virtue is modesty of speech, a chaste reticence towards the conjugal act.  An analogous case holds in religious matters:  it is bad to dress sloppily for church, but it is far worse to discuss holy matters in a flippant or blasphemous way.

For the chaste couple, matters of the marriage bed are discussed–or rather alluded to–with the greatest delicacy, even in private.  Even for the husband or wife to ask for his or her marital right is a delicate matter.  One would not go to his or her partner in private and say, “I want sex”.  The very thought is dreadful.  The couple develops a sort of code, something to respect their delicacy.  Some of these expressions have gone public, such as when we say that a couple are “going to bed together”, “sleeping together”, “making love”, etc.  These expressions have become so widespread that couples must come up with allusions even more indirect.  Modesty certainly restricts a couple from discussing their sexual acts in too much detail.  Clinically precise descriptions of bodily positions and physiological responses seem a sort of desecration.  Ironically, there are acts that a man may morally do with his wife but that it would be morally perilous to speak to her about.

One of the great campaigns of the sexual revolution has been to destroy this holy reticence.  Things should be “out in the open”, it is said.  Couples shouldn’t be ashamed to express their desires plainly.  They should stop “being ashamed”, etc.  The word “shame” is the revolutionary’s biggest weapon.  After all, if you don’t want to talk about something, that means you must be ashamed of it, right?  Wrong.

Modesty of speech reflects a sound and healthy instinct.  It recognizes the physical union of husband and wife as a sacred thing, a thing to be set apart from the profane world.  It is a holy mystery, a thing that cannot be captured by words, and which words falsify by their inadequacy.  It is a profoundly personal act; as von Hildebrand says, in sex we share our “secret” with another person.  Imagine a sports announcer delivering a play-by-play description of every physical action and physical response in one of your marital acts.  Would not the very words be a desecration?  If you heard them, wound you not think, “That’s not how it was at all.  It doesn’t capture the intimacy, the interpersonal communion.  It reduces us to flesh in mechanical performance.  The uniqueness of my spouse, I, and our love is stripped away.”  We realize that it’s just as much a violation if you yourself deliver the play-by-play.

Sex is private.  Language, as Wittgenstein argued, is inherently public.  If I say “it sure was grand, my dear, when we copulated in position X last night”, I reduce a personal act to a page in a sex manual.  I create an impersonal simulacrum of the act, a shadow of what really happened with the unique I and Thou removed.  “We performed position X” is a public statement.  The fact that the rest of the world doesn’t have access to it is a mere accident; I could advertise the fact to the whole world and nothing more would be lost in translation.  The depersonalization, the objectification, was already complete when I opened my mouth and spoke of things of which I should not speak.

Such is the case for the holy union of husband and wife.  The chaste man’s reaction to fornication or adultery is entirely different.  Here he knows that delicacy of this sort is a sentimentalism that only encourages sin.  For vile things we should use crude words.  I refuse to say that a married man “makes love” to his mistress, not when I can come up with a coarser word to describe it.  The crude words and slang do have their proper uses.  They are also legitimately used to describe (or at least think about) one’s own lustful tendencies, a useful precaution lest adolescent boys come to identify every stirring in their loins with “love”.

Such, then, is modesty of speech.  In my whole life, I’ve never heard anyone defend it, but it must be defended.

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