Purity, Holiness and the New Evangelization

A sine qua non for the new evangelization is purity and holiness of faithful Christians.  The reason for this is that Christian disciples must be authentic witnesses of Jesus Christ in every aspect of their lives, witnesses of the One Who is pure and holy.

Catholics must also live "in the world" while not being "of the world."  We must be able to engage with those who have become "of the world" in such a way as to develop relationships and bring them to a fruitful knowledge of Jesus Christ.  Oftentimes, this means going to places where Christians can be subjected to the temptations of the world.  This is a danger, but one that we too often overlook.  As society accepts as common place, increasingly disordered ways of thinking, speaking, and acting in the public sphere there are fewer areas of public life that Catholics who are seeking purity and holiness can go without encountering temptations against these virtues. 

Moreover, as faithful disciples Catholics also must be present in these media that are increasingly antithetical to the faith; that is, to authentic human goods.  The question is to what degree may Catholics legitimately engage in the ways of the world in order to wake up the lost to the disorder in which they find themselves.  As an example of Catholics who have taken up this challenge, we can point to two widely lauded Catholic novelists of the 20th century.  They both employed similar approaches in order present the folly of the many disordered ways of thinking into which they saw society descending.  Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy are often heralded as models for effectively helping their audiences to engage the world with a Catholic worldview.  They were often effective because they struck a cord with some people.  They were able to strike a cord, because they were not obviously didactic; they did not explicitly moralize.

Both authors employed language, situations, and themes that were often impure.  They often presented in their characters, intentions that were sinful.  Nevertheless, their goal was to show the vacuousness of such lives.  They wanted to show the despair inherent in many contemporary ways of thinking and living.  And for some, they were very effective.  

Yet, the question remains as to what degree one may employ methods that bring both author and reader into contact with sinfulness?  One daring soul has recently attempted to address this question, particularly of Flannery O'Connor's work.  Daring, because O'Connor and her word are held is such high regard by the Catholic literary academy. Of course, we may not judge the liceity of their methods by their effectiveness, anymore than we can attempt to justify the liceity of torture or of slavery by their effectiveness.  The end never justifies the means.  Nor can we justify their methods based upon their literary merit, just as one cannot use the cinematographic excellence of the movie Bareback Mountain to justify support for it.  No, if these methods are to be justified, they must not be objectively evil and the good they do must greatly outweigh the unintentional cooperation in evil present in them.  It is not possible to completely treat of this question here.  What can be done is to look at the risks of such methods by examining more closely the virtues of purity and holiness.

Few Christians would argue against the need for purity and holiness.  However, not all agree how best to reach them.  This is partly because the definition of the terms is not well understood.  For example, some will not be able to distinguish between purity and puritanism.  Others will not be able to differentiate between somberness and holiness.  

So what is purity?  It is a single minded commitment of the will to be in accord with God and therefore to look upon other human beings in the way that God created them. In other words, purity recognizes that each human person is made in the image of God and created for his own sake.  Purity is not solely a sexual virtue but because sex is one of the most effective ways for temptations to draw us away from selfless thought and action towards others, sexual purity often is the most discussed.  On the other hand, puritanism is a false attribution of evil to the created good (e.g. the body, sex, etc.).  Actions of a puritan may superficially correspond with those of a pure person, but they are not the same thing.  We must guard against the presumption of the motivation of those who would be pure.

What then do we mean by holiness?  Holiness is nothing other than the full actualization of love for God and other persons.  Holiness requires purity of heart, it requires self possession and self gift.  One is holy to the degree he wills and acts for the good of the other person for his own sake; in other words, disinterested love.  

Self possession is necessary because one cannot give what he does not first possess.  Any aspect of himself that he fails to possess because he is attached (or even addicted) to any created thing whether it be food, drink, drugs, sloth or any other sort of pleasure, he cannot give to God and others.  The effect of such attachment is a disordered selfishness that leaves one open to temptations to continued acts of selfishness.  Therefore, one must practice the virtues habitually, particularly the virtue of temperance.   Purity falls under the virtue of temperance as it deals with using goods rightly.  The good of other persons as complete persons must especially be guarded because the temptation to reduce others to various aspects of their value (often the sexual value) is an ever present temptation, this we call concupiscence.

Developing temperance, in this case in terms of purity of thought and intention, demands one be ever present to what he is thinking and doing.  One must habituate himself to become immediately aware of the temptation to reduce other persons in the variety of ways that Satan tempts us.  This is particularly true in terms of the reduction of the opposite sex to their sexual value.  Purity resists temptation to such reductions by immediately recognizing and turning away from them.  Satan knows how to deal with those who attempt such resistance.  If he cannot tempt you with the bad, he will move on to the good.  He will initially allow one to progress in willing and acting for the good of others.  Eventually, he will attempt to separate the object of the action from the intention, continuing to allow his target to keep a good intention while leading him to justify untoward objective actions to be employed for the good intention. 

Let us examine how such a tactic might be employed in our topic of literature.  Let us say that our Christian author wishes to show the folly of sexual promiscuity through his character's negative experiences of engaging in such.  However, in attempting to be "authentic" (let us leave aside the precision that all authenticity derives from its origin in God but now is often misused to refer to sinful dispositions and/or actions) he determines to attempt to be adequately descriptive.  Let us say that the author also does his best to avoid a prurient description. Nevertheless, the author and his readers necessarily become implicated in objectively evil acts.  While there is a certain distance, in order to understand the character and the plot, the illicit intention of the character must be taken up and considered by both author and reader.  

To the degree both are able to avoid consenting to the character's actions they may avoid sinning and diminishing their virtue (but keep in mind that consent can range in a continuum from minimal up to full consent).  Nevertheless, in order to consider the character's position, both author and reader is compelled to neglect for at least a moment, the necessary aspect of temperance which involves continence.  Continence is the immediate  turning away from the immoderate use of goods, in this case from the illicit use of sex.  For Satan, this delay is the critical aspect of his tactic.  

Let us set aside the likelihood that such material can later become fodder for temptation.  The delay itself begins to erode one's attentiveness to, one's vigilance against the reduction of another person.  That is, one's commitment to purity already begins to be undermined.  The more one becomes habituated to considering impurity, the longer one will delay in becoming aware of what is transpiring.  This delay permits the appetites to become active and move one toward consent.  Once the appetites are engaged, some level of consent becomes almost assured.   This is the manner in which Satan attempts to undo a virtue, a good habit.  The more one exposes himself to such impurity, regardless of purpose or good intention, the more likely this delay will lead to consent, to venial sin and if the process of degradation continues, eventually it could even lead to mortal sin.  Regardless, it undermines the virtue of purity, and so it also diminishes one's holiness.

For authentic Christian discipleship and so for the New Evangelization, one must not mistake the nature of the universal vocation to holiness and the manner in which purity plays a part.  It is likewise important, not to mistake the virtue of purity for puritanism, to allow objective evils to be used for a good cause, nor to be ignorant of the phenomenology for acquiring and keeping virtues.  One of the biggest mistakes is to make the logical error of assuming that because one is accidentally exposed to such impurity in society, that it is therefore harmless to purposefully expose oneself (or others) to it.  This is often justified with a trope such as "I am an adult."  Because of concupiscence, purposefully exposing oneself to temptations is not only ill advised, it is also possibly sinful.

We have not drawn any conclusion about the specifics of Flannery O'Connor's or Walker Percy's methods.  That would entail an analysis of each's work and the consideration of a variety of factors, including what we have discussed here.   As committed disciples we must be aware of the demands of the call to holiness and the attendant pitfalls in trying to live out this discipleship.