S1E17 – MC B3C5 – “Sexual Morality”

What is the virtue of chastity? Is it unhealthy, impossible or repressive? In today’s episode, Matt and David look at what C.S. Lewis had to say about this, the most unpopular of the virtues…

S1E17: Mere Christianity: “Sexual Morality” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

• Has Matt seen ANY movie?! He hasn’t even seen the classic Disney movie, Dumbo!

Toast

• The Drink-of-the-week was, once again, a scotch. Matt and David were enjoying Johnnie Walker Green Label.

Quote-of-the-Day

Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.

C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Discussion

01. “The Most Misunderstood Virtue”

• Chastity is a virtue, just like those Cardinal Virtues addressed in Episode 14, such as Justice, Fortitude, Prudence and Temperance. Chastity is the virtue by which we order our sexual desires which enables us to love rightly.
• Last week we spoke about our “raw materials” and how they impact our decision-making abilities. In today’s chapter, we look at a very specific application of this teaching with regards to the sexual instinct.
• Jack makes a distinction between Chastity and “modesty” or propriety.

The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of ‘modesty’ (in one sense of that word); i.e. propriety, or decency. The social rule of propriety lays down how much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to, and in what words, according to the customs of a given social circle. Thus, while the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• The following example made his point clearer…

A girl in the Pacific islands wearing hardly any clothes and a Victorian lady completely covered in clothes might both be equally ‘modest’, proper or decent, according to the standards of their own societies: and both, for all we could tell by their dress, might be equally chaste (or equally unchaste).

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

02. “Deprivation or Overindulgence?”

• The world thinks chastity is just crazy. Over the course of this episode Matt and David are aiming to demonstrate that it is not crazy but is, in fact, beautiful. Lewis makes a bold statement about this…

Obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• However, Lewis has other reasons for believing this besides his faith. Logic and necessity provide explanation enough.

One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• Jack discusses the purpose of our appetites. He says that the purpose of the eating instinct is to nourish us and that the purpose of the sex instinct is for biological purposes. This is the passage Matt referred to when discussing Lewis’ views on contraception in the Preface.
• To drive this point home, Lewis describes a country in which a striptease was performed with a piece of bacon.

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act – that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• Someone might respond that such a country must be starved of food. Hence the titivation related to food. In a parallel way, this would explain the presence of strip clubs – they are a result of sexual starvation. However, could one really say that we’re living in an age of sexual starvation?! No, quite the opposite!

Before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the strip tease, we should have to look for evidence that there is in fact more sexual abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like the strip-tease were unknown. But surely there is no such evidence.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• Lewis gives brief mention to the influence of contraception.

Contraceptives have made sexual indulgence far less costly within marriage and far safer outside it than ever before and public opinion is less hostile to illicit unions and even to perversion than it has been since Pagan times.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• There are opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to these things. Deprivation might be one reason for thinking about things, but so is overindulgence.

Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

03. “Cultural Lies”

• How did we get into this poor state? According to Lewis, it’s because we have been taught a steady stream of lies about sex for the last twenty years. And he was writing this in the forties!

You and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• The lie we have been told is that “Sex is nothing to be ashamed of”? There is a kernel of truth here. The sexual act itself is nothing to be ashamed of, but that doesn’t mean that every sexual desire should be acted upon.
• The popular opinion is that Christianity looks down on sex, but Lewis challenges this opinion and argues that Christian is the religion which elevates the body and marriage the most!

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body – which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, or beauty and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• Matt made an analogy to child discipline. If parents love their children, they discipline them and raise them up in the way they should go; not let them run wild.
• It is because Christianity thinks so highly of sex that it cares about its context so much:

Each of these impulses is capable of being perverted. Fire in the hearth is good, but fire in the clothes closet is not. The sex instinct can be distorted into license and perversion. In that case, the other person is really not loved, but is used. One drinks the water; one forgets the glass…

The Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen

04. “Theology of the Body”

• Christianity – particularly Catholicism – has so much to say on the subject of sex. David mentioned The Theology of the Body, which was the corpus(!) of work produced by Pope St. John-Paul II, during 129 of his Wednesday Audiences.
• Gnosticism, the heresy of the Early Church was also mentioned, since Gnostic systems typically thought poorly of the body and of matter in general. They said it was evil. Christianity – and Lewis – says that it is good.

If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• In contrast to sex itself, the current state of our sexual instinct IS something to be ashamed of!

When people say, ‘Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,’ they may mean ‘the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of’.

If they mean that, I think they are wrong. I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made good the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

05. “The Cure”

• Given the current state of affairs with sex, can we be cured? Well, Lewis says that before we can be cured, but we must WANT to be cured. To illustrate this, he quotes St. Augustine:

A famous Christian long ago told us that when he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later her realised that while his lips had been saying, ‘Oh Lord, make me chaste,’ his heart had been secretly adding, ‘But please don’t do it just yet.’

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• Here is the full quote from The Confessions of St. Augustine:

But I wretched, most wretched, in the very commencement of my early youth, had begged chastity of Thee, and said, “Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.” For I feared lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and soon cure me of the disease of concupiscence, which I wished to have satisfied, rather than extinguished. And I had wandered through crooked ways in a sacrilegious superstition, not indeed assured thereof, but as preferring it to the others which I did not seek religiously, but opposed maliciously.

St. Augustine, The Confessions, Book VIII

06. “Unhealthy”

• There are three reasons why desiring chastity is difficult:
• A common argument against chastity is that it goes against our nature. Our warped human natures, the contemporary propaganda against chastity, as well as the Enemy are at work here. They combine to tell us that chastity is something unnatural because sex is perfectly natural. This twists the truth. Sex is natural! However, not all expressions of sex are and neither are all contexts the same!

In the first place our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural’, so ‘healthy’, and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• Eating is a good thing, but not all kinds of eating. David mentioned a condition where a pregnant woman might gnaw on strange things, such as coal. The condition is called Pica and he first heard this mentioned in a talk by Matt Fradd.

07. “Impossible”

• Many believe that chastity is impossible. But if you ever want to overcome something, the first thing to do is to believe that it’s even possible!

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

G. K. Chesterton

• Matt gives the excellent example of the four-minute mile. For the longest time, it was thought that it was not physiologically possible for a human to run that fast. However, as soon as it was broken, suddenly many more people broke it because they had been shown that it was actually possible! The Art of Manliness podcast recently had an episode on this subject if you would like to learn more about the breaking of this world record.
• Lewis also gives his own example.

Faced with an optional question in an examination paper, one considers whether one can do it or not: faced with a compulsory question, one must do the best one can. You may get some marks for a very imperfect answer: you will certainly get none for leaving the question alone.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• David told the story of making it past an overhang on a climbing wall purely because the person belaying him wouldn’t let him down until he had done it!
• Matt reminded us that chastity isn’t just a sheer act of the will, it requires God’s grace.
• It is important to know what to do when you falter or fail. This reminded David of Mike Tyson:

Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth.

Mike Tyson

• What happens when we fail to live chastely? Lewis gives us very brief advice:

After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• This, in turn, reminded Matt of the following words at Pope Francis first Angelus:

The problem is that we ourselves tire, we do not want to ask, we grow weary of asking for forgiveness. He never tires of forgiving, but at times we get tired of asking for forgiveness.

Let us never tire, let us never tire! He is the loving Father who always pardons, who has that heart of mercy for us all. And let us too learn to be merciful to everyone. Let us invoke the intercession of Our Lady who held in her arms the Mercy of God made man.

Pope Francis, Angelus, March 17th, 2013

This process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God … The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• When we fail in any virtue, God can use that moment to help us grow in the ability to pick ourselves back up and try again. This is something which is articulated very clearly in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

08. “Repressive”

• The third lie is that chastity is repressive. However, people who say that chastity is repressive don’t really know what true repression is! Repression is when you push something into the subconscious, it is not simply when you say “No” to an impulse or emotion. Repressed sexuality will rarely manifest itself sexually.
• Those who attempt chastity are MORE conscious and MORE aware of their sexuality and their impulses.

Those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue – even attempted virtue – brings light; indulgence brings fog.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

• Matt brought up the example of Chesterton’s fence once again. Paradoxically, boundaries allow us to be more free.

09. “Animal and Diabolical Selves”

• Sex is not at the centre of Christian morality, although you may get that impression from Christians. The real centre lies elsewhere and will be looked at in a future episode.
• Within us we have our true self, our animal self and our diabolical self. The sins of the animal flesh are bad, but the diabolical spiritual sins are worse.

If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual … For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

• The outline for today’s chapter is available here.

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