Keywords of the Moral Life: Purity
Purity is an Ecosystem, Not a Gate, or Why the Purity Culture Fights Are So Small
Some Housekeeping
Between now, and the end of the month, I am running a deal for all new paid subscriptions. All new annual subscriptions to get one of my last two books, free, and all new monthly subscriptions will be entered into a raffle for one of those same books. I’ll be sending out the link for next month’s subscriber book club next week, on The Imitation of Christ.
The Raging Mind, Fragmented and Flowing
I open the email again for the fifth time this hour. I offer my anxiety in a breath in and out to God. In ten minutes, I will open it again.
I pray the same prayers for patience. My youngest child hems and haws with his workbooks at the kitchen table. I know that today I will be impatient.
The world is one of insecurity and uncertainty, of material and immaterial goods which are sought, lost, and regained again. My opening and closing, my praying and failing: this maelstrom repeats itself daily, and all I can see is how the storm washes out my intentions. Intentions, the act of will given a name and a direction, flap against the side of the house in the storm, not having given way but providing no direction.
The thing we seek here is not necessarily habit or better habits, but that which habits point to and make possible: singularity of life, better put as purity of heart. We seek not just this or that portion of goodness, or this accomplishment, or to have the flag of good intention slapped up against the side of the house, sagging and soaked. We want the whole life to be redone, for all of our existence to be moving in the same direction, that we might see God.
The purity of heart we seek, thus, is ambitious: it requires nothing less than the world.
**
I’ve been reading John Cassian’s The Conferences of Desert Fathers in the morning, a series of staged conversations between ancient monks and an inquirer into the spiritual life. The first one, between Germanus and Moses the Black, concerns purity of heart, without which one cannot see God1. After drawing a distinction between the active and contemplative life, and how the aim of life is to draw near to God, we find very quickly that there is a great deal of activity within the contemplative life. Moses, as he explicates the value of prayer and loving God, spends about half of the first conversation, talking about the role of our thinking and its relation to the primary aim of the Christian life: to love God and be fit body and soul for loving God.
Thinking, in this conversation, is not purely discursive: it is not simply the act of carving ideas out of clay, or doing heavy imaginative work. Moses describes thought as like a mill on the river: the river continually flows, and such it is with thought. Our mind is endlessly at work, taking in sensory experience, drawing connections between one conversation and past conversations, making observations and drawing inferences. The mind is like a mill on a great river, embedded in a cosmos that it is constantly flowing, making use of the water at hand to do its work.
This is an incredibly comforting image, for it rejects the notion that our minds are meant for stillness or emptiness: there is no need to “empty” ourselves, as if that were even possible. To be a creature in the world is to be caught up in the movement of the world, even if one is a monk in the desert. The mind, accordingly, is an endless source of fecundity, or to use a different metaphor, a field, which is producing both wheat and weeds all the time. To return to Moses’s image, the mind is constantly flowing, and the difference between goodness and evil is whether or not that river is being put to use to grind up wheat or barley.
Our thinking, he writes, is a matter of reception, from God, the devil, or ourselves. I will leave aside that which is of God, which leads us to virtue, and that which is of the devil, which corrupts even when coming to us in pleasing or virtuous form. What is most interesting to me in this description is that, is how he describes what comes up from ourselves: that it is ultimately that which is taken in from the outside.
The contemplation of God is gained in a variety of ways. For we not only discover God by admiring His incomprehensible essence, a thing which still lies hid in the hope of promise, but we see Him through the greatness of His creation, and the consideration of His justice, and the aid of His daily providence: when with pure minds we contemplate what He has done with His saints in every generation… (Book 1, Ch. 15)
Our thinking—and our ability to oppose that which might corrupt us—are dependent not on our own will, but on that which comes to us: the gift of the Holy Spirit, observation of the works of God, creation, justice, providence. Moses goes on here, but the point is this: if it is an interior wholeness that we seek, it only comes as a consequence of that which is exterior to us.
**
The email calls again, and I answer. The response is absent, and anxiety floods in. We will repeat this dance all day. I will go to sleep tired, and no less certain.
As I write, my children work on their math, more loudly than math requires. My patience wears down. I breathe deep. I chastise myself for impatience. I dig in until the next workbook instruction requires my mediation.
Such is the work of having a mind in the world, and such is the challenge of being ordered toward purity of heart: we are dependent upon a larger stream, one which God speaks into, that we might be drawn through the water into the Word. And such is the challenge of being people of integrity: the world speaks so many different things, with our thinking dependent always on what we receive.
These things—the checking of email, anxiety, patience—are all features of what the integrated life requires. And so are the features of life through which they come—job conditions, implicit pressures of the economy, Internet pornography, my childrens’ psychology. And so, it all matters, for if purity is anything, then it is everything.
The Small Vision of the Purity Culture Fights
There is no shortage of dissenters to what has been named purity culture. I have to confess that frequently these critiques are a moving target, but mostly have to do with whether or not our sexual desires are being repressed, and whether or not the culture around this repression is one-sided. There’s no shortage of online articles about its origins and cultural markers, and what it might mean to have a more expansive vision of purity.2
That fights around the nature of purity have centered around sex is no surprise, for the world is drowning in sex: good, bad, and indifferent. Because the supposition of the world is that sex matters and matters supremely, the supposition of the purity culture fights that not only is sex the most important thing that we do, but the most important aspect of our holiness. This fight is one that I find hopelessly boring, for no other reason than the following: sex is part of what it is to be a creature in the world who is concerned with wholeness, but sex is so very little of what sexed creatures do.
Consequently, when “purity” becomes linked exclusively to this single aspect of our ongoing behavior as creatures, we have missed the mark in two major ways:
Sex becomes the marker of the reconciled human identity. Linking visions of wholeness to sex is to truncate the entire project of human wholeness. Saying that purity is equated with refraining from sexual activity misses it, but the converse position—that wholeness means a wholehearted embrace of one’s authentically-derived sexual identity—misses the mark in the same way. Our sexed-identities as humans are integral features to a wider, and much more interesting panoply of what it is to be human, and what it is to be a human within the even larger ecosystem of existence itself. That education, politics, economics, and government have taken sexed-ness as the definitive feature of our humanity, and thus, of what it is for us to be whole, is a consequence of “sex” and “purity” becoming linked in this way.
The emergence of the self is no longer linked to the broader cosmos which gives us our selves. To link purity primarily to sexual behavior (while one of the things which purity is after!) is to say that purity is a matter of internal agency. But what we see with Moses is that, if purity is anything, it is a matter of doing well toward God with that which we have received from beyond ourselves. Being the creatures that we are is, as Moses knew, a matter beyond our own hands: we have a hand dealt to us by God that passes through the providence of God, and it is in and through that hand that God moves us toward wholeness. To attend to the self, then, is to attend to the way that we become our selves: by God, through the world.
Purity, as the first of the Conferences shows us, is a matter of taking up that which comes to the mind through the world, and turning it back around toward God with that which God has given us: justice, providence, the Scriptures, virtue. The diverse gifts which God gives for our purity correspond to the nature of purity itself: that all of what we are might be made whole, joined to God, that not only our lives might be as one, but it all might ordered toward the one thing that is to be willed: God.
Matthew 5:8. When you read most things from the patristic era, one of the things which immediately strikes you is how much of their work is mostly just talking about Scripture. Basil the Great’s On Christian Ethics is mostly just a catalog of Scriptural injunctions; the great debates over the natures of Christ, or Trinitarian theology, are hermeneutical debates over how to read Scripture well. The Conferences are a great case in point: they’re wise and koan-like, but ultimately the fruit of having sat with Scripture for a very long time.
When I say in my bio that I don’t do culture war stuff, this is exactly why: the stakes are usually so miniscule and so dumb that it’s not worth your time to think about, or my time to write about.