Mere Christianity - Book Three - Sexual Morality

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book Three

 

CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOUR

 

 

 

5. Sexual Morality

     We must now consider Christian morality as regards sex, what Christians
call the virtue  of  chastity.  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. 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). Some  of the language which chaste women used
in Shakespeare's time would have been used in the nineteenth century only by
a  woman completely  abandoned.  When  people  break the rule  of  propriety
current in their own time and place, if they  do so in order to excite  lust
in themselves  or  others, then they are offending  against chastity. But if
they break it through ignorance or carelessness they  are guilty only of bad
manners. When, as often happens, they break  it defiantly in  order to shock
or embarrass others,  they  are not necessarily being unchaste, but they are
being uncharitable: for it is  uncharitable to take pleasure in making other
people uncomfortable. I do not think that a very strict or fussy standard of
propriety is any proof of chastity or any help to it, and I therefore regard
the great relaxation and simplifying of the rule which has taken place in my
own  lifetime as a  good  thing.  At its present stage, however, it has this
inconvenience, that people of different ages  and different types do not all
acknowledge the  same standard,  and we hardly know where we are. While this
confusion  lasts I  think that old, or old-fashioned,  people should be very
careful  not  to  assume  that  young  or  "emancipated"  people are corrupt
whenever they are (by the old standard) improper; and, in return, that young
people  should not call their elders  prudes or puritans because they do not
easily adopt the new standard. A real desire to believe all the good you can
of  others and to make others as comfortable as  you can  will solve most of
the problems.

     Chastity is the  most unpopular of  the Christian  virtues. There is no
getting  away  from  it: the old  Christian rule is,  "Either marriage, with
complete  faithfulness to your partner,  or else total abstinence." Now this
is so  difficult  and  so  contrary to our instincts, that  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.

     But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex
is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body.
Now  if we eat whenever we feel inclined  and just as much as we want, it is
quite true that most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much.
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.

     Or  take it  another  way. 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 came 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?

     one  critic said  that if he  found a  country in which such striptease
acts  with  food  were  popular,  he would conclude that the people  of that
country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the
strip-tease  act  resulted  not  from  sexual  corruption  but  from  sexual
starvation. I agree with him that if,  in  some strange land, we found  that
similar  acts  with  mutton  chops  were   popular,  one   of  the  possible
explanations  which would  occur to me  would  be famine. But the  next step
would be to  test our hypothesis by finding out  whether,  in fact,  much or
little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed  that
a good deal was being eaten, then of  course we  should  have to abandon the
hypothesis  of starvation and try to think of another one. In the same  way,
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. 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. Nor is the hypothesis
of "starvation" the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that  the sexual
appetite, like our 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.

     Here is a third  point. You find very few people who want to eat things
that  really are not food or  to do other things with food instead of eating
it.  In  other  words,  perversions  of  the food  appetite  are  rare.  But
perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful. I
am sorry to have to go into all these details, but I must. The reason why  I
must is  that 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. It is not  true. The
moment you look at the facts, and away  from the propaganda, you see that it
is not.

     They tell you sex  has become a  mess because it was hushed up. But for
the last twenty years it has not been hushed up. It has been chattered about
all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of
the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it
is  the other way  round. I think  the  human race originally  hushed it  up
because it had become such a mess.  Modern people are always saying, "Sex is
nothing to be ashamed of." They may mean two things. They may mean "There is
nothing to be ashamed of in  the fact  that the human race reproduces itself
in a  certain way, nor  in the  fact that it  gives pleasure." If they  mean
that, they are right. Christianity  says the same. It  is not the thing, nor
the pleasure, that is the trouble. The old Christian teachers  said  that if
man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now,
would actually have been greater. I  know some muddle-headed Christians have
talked as if Christianity thought that sex,  or the body,  or pleasure, were
bad in themselves. But they were wrong. 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,  our 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. If anyone
says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But,
of course, 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 food the
main  interest  of  their lives and spent their time looking at  pictures of
food  and dribbling and  smacking their lips.  I do not say  you  and I  are
individually  responsible  for the  present  situation. Our  ancestors  have
handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up
surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There  are people who want
to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because,
of  course,  a  man  with  an  obsession  is  a  man  who  has  very  little
sales-resistance. God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had
no difficulties to  overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance
of our will to overcome them.

     Before we can be cured we must want to be cured.  Those who really wish
for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult.
It is easy to think that  we want something when we do not really want it. A
famous Christian long ago  told us  that when he was a  young man  he prayed
constantly for chastity; but years later he 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."  This may  happen in  prayers for  other
virtues too; but there are three  reasons why  it is now specially difficult
for us to desire-let alone to achieve-complete chastity.

     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. Poster after poster,
film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual  indulgence
with the ideas of health, normality, youth,  frankness, and good humour. Now
this  association  is  a  lie.  Like all  powerful  lies, it is  based  on a
truth-the  truth,  acknowledged  above, that  sex in  itself (apart from the
excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is "normal" and "healthy,"
and all the rest of it. The lie  consists in  the suggestion that any sexual
act to which you are tempted at the moment  is also healthy  and normal. Now
this, on  any conceivable  view, and quite apart from Christianity, must  be
nonsense.  Surrender  to  all our  desires  obviously  leads  to  impotence,
disease,  jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that  is the reverse
of  health, good  humour,  and frankness. For any happiness,  even  in  this
world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so  the claim made
by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for
nothing.  Every sane  and civilised man must have some  set of principles by
which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to permit others. one man
does  this on  Christian principles, another on hygienic principles, another
on sociological principles.  The real  conflict is not between  Christianity
and "nature," but between  Christian principle and other  principles in  the
control of "nature." For "nature" (in the sense of natural desire) will have
to be  controlled anyway, unless you are going to  ruin your whole life. The
Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others;  but then we
think you will get help towards obeying them which you will  not get towards
obeying the others.

     In the second place, many people are deterred from seriously attempting
Christian chastity because they think (before trying) that it is impossible.
But when a thing has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility
or impossibility.  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. Not  only in examinations  but  in  war,  in  mountain  climbing,  in
learning to skate, or  swim, or ride a bicycle,  even  in fastening a  stiff
collar  with  cold  fingers, people  quite often do what  seemed  impossible
before they did it. It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.

     We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity-like perfect charity-will
not  be attained by  any merely human efforts. You must ask for God's  help.
Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help,
or less help than you need, is being  given. Never mind. 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. For however important chastity (or  courage, or truthfulness,
or any other virtue) may be, 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. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust
ourselves  even  in our best moments, and, on  the  other, that we  need not
despair even in  our  worst, for our failures are  forgiven. The  only fatal
thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.

     Thirdly,  people often  misunderstand  what  psychology  teaches  about
"repressions."  It  teaches  us  that  "repressed"  sex  is  dangerous.  But
"repressed" is here a technical term: it  does not mean "suppressed" in  the
sense of "denied" or  "resisted." A repressed desire or thought is one which
has been thrust  into the subconscious (usually at a very early age) and can
now  come  before  the mind  only in  a disguised  and unrecognisable  form.
Repressed sexuality  does not appear to the patient to be sexuality  at all.
When an adolescent or  an adult is engaged in  resisting a conscious desire,
he  is  not dealing with  a  repression nor  is he  in  the  least danger of
creating a repression. on  the contrary, 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.

     Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to
make it as clear as  I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is
not here. 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: the
pleasure of  putting other  people  in the wrong, of bossing and patronising
and spoiling  sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. 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  regularly  to church  may  be  far  nearer  to hell  than a
prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A discussion of the Christian virtue known as chastity.

1. How is Christian chastity different than social rules of modesty?
2. Lewis uses an analogy with food to prove that our sexual instinct has gone wrong. Describe the food analogy.
3. In regards to sex, does Christian philosophy contradict the following statement: "There is nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure."?
4. Do you think that our sexual instinct has been corrupted?
5. Do you think that Christian chastity is impossible? According to Lewis, what is the most fatal thing we can do when faced with this seeming impossibility?
6. Is unchastity the supreme Christian vice? If not, what is?

 

 

 

 

 

• The Christian rule/virtue of chastity must not be confused with the societal rule of 'modesty.'
  • Modesty simply sets the rules for how much skin should be shown in different situations, and what topics are allowed in conversations.
  • the rules of modesty are different at different times and in different places and for different groups of people, even different situations.
  • chastity is always the same at all times for all Christians
  • Christian chastity is "Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence."
• Analogy of strip-tease act with food... This would lead you to the conclusion that the society that craved these displays was either a nation of starving people, or, if they are not starving, a people seriously corrupted in regards to food.
• We've been told for 70 years, "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. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not."

They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess. Modern people are always saying, 'Sex is nothing to be ashamed of.' They may mean two things. They may mean `There is nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure.' If they mean that, they are right. Christianity says the same. It is not the thing, nor the pleasure, that is the trouble. The old Christian teachers said that if man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would actually have been greater. I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves. But they were wrong. 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, our 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. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But, of course, 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'.

• Lewis makes the very good point that there are people who want to keep us enslaved to our sexual desires in order to make money off of us.... it is more true now than it was in his day.
• There is no cure until we decide we want to be cured.
• Lewis quotes St. Augustin (of Hippo), "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet" [da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo] (Conf., VIII. vii (17)).

• Satan and his devils play on our warped nature with the lie that the desires we are resisting are only natural," and "healthy."

Like all powerful lies, it is based on a truth --the truth, acknowledged above, that sex in itself apart from the excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is 'normal' and 'healthy,' and all the rest of it. The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act of which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense. Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse of health, good humour, and frankness.

The real conflict is not between Christianity and 'nature,' but between Christian principles and other principles in the control of 'nature'. For `nature' (in the sense of natural desire) will have to be controlled anyway, unless you are going to ruin your whole life. The Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards obeying the others.

• Many people will pass over the attempt at Christian chastity on the assumption that it's impossible.... without ever having tried it.... Everything is impossible that is never tried.

We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity-like perfect charity-will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. 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. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, 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. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.

• People confuse suppression with the psychological term, 'repression.'
  • 'repression' means burying something so deeply that it is pushed into the subconscious. Repressed sexuality does not even appear to the patient to be sexuality at all.
  • resisting sexuality is not repression. It is becoming familiar with the desires and dealing with them for what they are, not 'repression.'

Lewis closes by making the very good point that chastity is not the center of Christian morality. He then makes the shocking statement that "The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins."

Interestingly enough, Paul says, in 1 Corinthians 6:16-20:

NLT
15 Don’t you realize that your bodies are actually parts of Christ? Should a man take his body, which is part of Christ, and join it to a prostitute? Never! 16 And don’t you realize that if a man joins himself to a prostitute, he becomes one body with her? For the Scriptures say, “The two are united into one.”[d] 17 But the person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him. 18 Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body. 19 Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, 20 for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.

The Message
There's more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. As written in Scripture, "The two become one." Since we want to become spiritually one with the Master, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever—the kind of sex that can never "become one." There is a sense in which sexual sins are different from all others. In sexual sin we violate the sacredness of our own bodies, these bodies that were made for God-given and God-modeled love, for "becoming one" with another. Or didn't you realize that your body is a sacred place, the place of the Holy Spirit? Don't you see that you can't live however you please, squandering what God paid such a high price for? The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you. God owns the whole works. So let people see God in and through your body.

So, I would disagree that they are the 'least bad of all sins,' but I do agree with his point that they are not the worst.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt 

http://www.opendiscipleship.org/Mere_Christianity_leaders_notes

http://www.gordy-stith.com/Mere%20Christianity/mere_christianity_study_guide.htm