The Hunt for Purity

As a Roman Catholic in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Maryland, I receive the weekly newspaper The Catholic Review. In a recent edition there appeared a "From Time to Time" article by our Archbishop, Cardinal William Keeler. (I'd like to include a hotlink to it, but can't figure out how. Go to the website, click on Electronic Edition in the upper right corner, select "Th 2/24/2005" from the appropriate drop-down menu, then use another drop-down menu to select "Page 7." You can then click on the image of the article to read its text.)

The thrust of the article is that an interfaith "Religious Alliance Against Pornography" has been formed, with (I understand) Cardinal Keeler as its co-chair. Its mission: to fight "the evil of pornography," today "a multi-billion dollar business, now ubiquitous because of the internet and other new technologies."

I personally doubt — let me say this right up front — that Jesus had pornography in mind, or any aspect of human sexuality, when he said, “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” This, though, is the phrase with which Cardinal Keeler closes his essay.

What does Cardinal Keeler have so against pornography that he co-chairs this alliance?

Firstly, a matter of sex education worries him: Today's youngsters are learning "about the facts of human sexuality from peers and from the media, with little religious content. Only a few [are] instructed by their parents."

Secondly, worries over a growing lack of chastity: "Objective moral principles are rejected while a very subjective philosophy of instant gratification is put in their place."

Thirdly, the decadence issue: "What happened long ago in the Roman Empire, as it lurched toward collapse, is occurring now in our own culture."

I'd say that all three rationales for opposing pornography can be subsumed into one: a hunt for purity in a world of doubt.

Purity equates to the kind of intelligibility which Plato said could alone make the world lucid and knowable — and which ultimately fails to exist in this material world, only being existent in higher, metaphysical Forms or Ideas. We can truly know only that which is wholly A — where A is some quality such as roundness or goodness — and therefore to no extent not A. And that which we cannot truly know, because it's impure in its qualities, is not truly real.

Take Plato's ultimate ideal, the Form of the Good, make it a (metaphysical) person, and you have God.

Take God as commanding us to purify the world of the Bad which pollutes the Good and compromises the world's knowability — threatening its very reality — and you have a rationale for going to the mat over pornography.

That's what I think is happening here — and I doubt that it's necessary.

Oh, I think it would be a good idea for parents to take better charge of their children's sex education. Nothing wrong with that. (And if in the education process they want to use materials some would call pornographic, fine. There once was a time, I am told, when the way a father educated his son about the birds and the bees was to take him to the local house of ill repute and seek the ministrations of a professional expert.)

But I don't see that the Cardinal's decadence issue is real. Where is the evidence that we are heading the way of the Roman Empire? What I see around me is a vigorous, thriving culture that has somehow defied all the doomsayers for decades now, if not centuries.

As for the chastity issue ... here I think the Cardinal is right! We do have, more and more, a culture of instant gratification and (as the Catholic priest Ronald Rolheiser puts it in The Shattered Lantern) of "unbridled restlessness." All the time in today's world, it's "me me me," and it's also "now now now." Impatience is one term for it. Another is "lack of chastity."

That's not just chastity as in too much casual sex. It's chastity in this sense (from p. 47): "To be chaste means to experience things, all things, respectfully and to drink them in only when we are ready for them. ... Unbridled restlessness makes us unhealthily impatient for experience ... Greed and impatience push us toward irresponsible experience."

Yes, I agree. It's very important to learn pace and patience and the contentment they bring. The Taoist, though from a radically different tradition, would concur. Chapter 44 of the Tao te ching or Lao-tzu reads, in part:

Know contentment
And you will suffer no disgrace;
Know when to stop
And you will meet with no danger.
You can then endure.

But there's a big difference between the personal, individual, and voluntarily undertaken cultivation of chastity — the grace of "knowing when to stop" — and going so far as to try to impose purity on the world at large.