Go West, young couples?
A robust account of the positive value of purity—an account which was, in my opinion, even better than the luminous Theology of the Body audiences of which it was the precursor—is given in Dietrich von Hildebrand’s classic work In Defense of Purity.
After his death, Dietrich’s beloved wife, Alice von Hildebrand, having thoroughly absorbed this understanding of purity as a positive value, expressed serious alarm about the efforts of Christopher West to “popularize” John Paul II’s Theology of the Body audiences, which West framed as the final renunciation of puritanism. West saw puritanism as a great evil but thought of sexual licentiousness as simply misguided—indulging, so to say, in the wrong context. And the greatest evil of puritanism, as West saw it, was that it discouraged speaking frankly and objectively about sex; it was a topic stifled by unhealthy shame and bashfulness.
Alice von Hildebrand disagreed; though she hated puritanism, she thought genuine puritanism was hardly a formidable social force by the early 2000s. She argued that the “bashfulness” that West took as a vestige of puritanism was, on the whole, something healthy: a proper sense of shame, pudeur. And she was deeply alarmed that West, in his fervor to “complete what the sexual revolution began,” was co-opting the positive vision of sexuality that her husband and John Paul II had put forward, but stripping it of all affective reverence and bashfulness:
Key to my concerns is West’s hyper-sexualized approach to the Theology of the Body. The French have a wonderful word to capture the veiling of one’s intimate feelings, out of a proper sense of shame: pudeur, a holy bashfulness, so to speak. Seized as he is by what he regards as his calling to evangelize a new generation with this theology in modern ways they can supposedly better understand, West practically ignores the importance of pudeur, and, by his imprudence, winds up undermining his own message.1
One critical difference—perhaps the difference between West and the von Hildebrands—was that the von Hildebrands saw the sexual sphere as deeply personal, involving the intimate mystery of each person. For this reason, they argued, it presents powerful opportunities for love, tenderness, and the affirmation of embodied goodness. It is a way of saying both to the beloved person and to the whole created order, as Josef Pieper puts it, “how good that you exist!”—and this is, of course, wrapped up with the openness to new existence. But because of how intimately connected it is with the person, it presents serious dangers. Because it is deep, it threatens to balloon into an intoxicating cosmos all of its own; because of its intimacy it provides opportunities to debase the self and harm other persons in profoundly vicious ways. It is a sphere that can be appreciated and spoken about tactfully, but a casual, objective “neutrality” is impossible in its regard.
West’s contention was that the lion’s share of the dangers and difficulties of the sexual sphere would largely go away once we got rid of all the shame about it, once we banished our puritan ideas. Whereas the von Hildebrands thought that the only right response to the sexual sphere was a certain reverence and bashfulness which respected the logos of the thing, West took this sort of reverence as the enemy of common sense and dedicated himself wholeheartedly to doing away with it. His mission was what C.S. Lewis called “ventilation” in an illuminating passage from Mere Christianity written long before the rise of Christopher West:
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.2
The von Hildebrands might push back slightly on Lewis here and point out that the sexual sphere is quite different from the sphere of other natural appetites, like those for food and drink, and so, even healthy sexuality has an element of bashfulness that is proper to it, but not proper to other physical “appetites.”
To put it very succinctly, West thought that we ought to be objective and neutral about sexuality, through a frank and honest approach, through proper ventilation. He thought that such neutrality was possible and healthy. The von Hildebrands did not; they saw that as totally opposed to the logos of the sexual sphere.
This is a battle that, by most readings of history, Alice von Hildebrand lost and Christopher West won. She is beloved by a few, but her critique did relatively little to stem the tide of a thoroughly popularized Theology of the Body, which has met the public in classes and podcasts.3
When extremes meet
Neither has this re-reading of Catholic sexual ethics been confined to “liberals.” The editor-in-chief of Evie magazine, which describes itself as a “Conservative Cosmo,” attends the Latin Mass. Her magazine is known for selling salacious “milkmaid” sundresses, parodies of traditional feminine dress designed with those standards of craftsmanship, modesty, and devotion to tradition which one usually expects from Spirit Halloween. Their latest print publication is an explicit 200-page-long coffee table magazine of sex tips and boudoir photos. I cannot help but be reminded of the now-notorious interview on ABC Nightline in which Christopher West favorably compared John Paul II and Hugh Hefner. Though he later claimed he was taken out of context, if the success of Evie magazine is any indication, this dreamy postmodern fusion of Catholicism with Playboy is well underway.
