To substitute a condom for virtue
is to perpetuate
the practice of depersonalizing sex.

Human sexuality
and the need for virtue

By Donald DeMarco

n In 1930, the Spanish existentialist, José Ortega y Gasset, wrote a rather provocative book called The Revolt of the Masses (La Rebelión de las Masas) in which he distinguished two classes of men: "those who made great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves."1 The great danger Ortega alluded to at this time was the emergence and domination in society of this latter type, mass-man, who was producing a grotesque inversion of the social order through what Ortega termed the "sovereignty of the unqualified." The masses, according to Ortega, were beginning to usurp the leadership of better qualified, more responsible individuals. As a result of this refusal to improve himself as a human being, mass-man was becoming more and more alienated from his better self. "Lord of all things," Ortega wrote, "he is not lord of himself.... Hence the strange combination of a sense of power and a sense of insecurity which has taken up its abode in the soul of modern man."

The distinction Ortega makes between the two classes of men ultimately plays itself out on the social stage as a clash between two antithetic tendencies-civilization and barbarism. On the one hand, civilization affirms individual life, noble standards, justice, and reason, while barbarism, on the other hand, in Ortega's words, "crushes beneath it everything that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select."2

Sixty-five years later, in 1995, Pope John Paul II produced The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) which, in effect, corroborated the main outline of Ortega's thesis. The Holy Father distinguished between a culture of death and a culture of life. He criticized the widespread and exclusive preoccupation with man's material well-being to the neglect of the more profound dimensions of human existence-the interpersonal, spiritual, and religious. He pointed out that in this context of "practical materialism," suffering, which is not only an inescapable burden of human existence but also a factor in personal growth, is "censored," deemed useless, and regarded, even, as an evil that must always and in every way be avoided. For both Ortega and John Paul, mass-man was producing a culture of death largely because he rejected difficulty and suffering as indispensable factors in the equation of human, and consequently, cultural improvement.

The Pope also pointed out that in the present highly restricted atmosphere of materialism and consumerism, sexuality, too, has become depersonalized and exploited, "from being the sign, place and language of love, that is, of the gift of self and acceptance of another, in all the other's richness as a person, it increasingly becomes the occasion and instrument for self-assertion and the selfish satisfaction of personal desires and instincts."3

Moving toward annihilation

In the sixty-five years that separated The Revolt of the Masses from The Gospel of Life, innumerable social critics have written about the rise of mass-man and its accompanying culture of death. Psychoanalytic humanist Erich Fromm has written extensively on the subject, reiterating that "there is no life of 'the masses.'"4 Perhaps no one has expressed modern man's proclivities to cultural annihilation more strikingly and imaginatively than American literary critic Leslie Fiedler: "... it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that Western man has decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down. Having convinced himself that he is too numerous, he labors with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer, thereby delivering himself the sooner into the hands of his enemies. At last, having educated himself into imbecility and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a weary, battered old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct."5

In order to conform to the masses, mass-man has had to reject his unique, personal destiny. At the same time, he has had to reject those specific character traits which would have enabled him to achieve that destiny. In other words, mass-man has rejected the moral virtue needed in order to make the transformation from an undifferentiated member of mass culture to an authentic and unique person. Nowhere is this rejection more evident than in the area of human sexuality. Chastity, the virtue that binds sexuality to reason and order, is routinely dismissed as either unrealistic, impractical, or unnatural. As Anatole France has remarked, "Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest."

The mind of the masses is nowhere more demonstrably bankrupt than in matters of sexuality. It believes that the procreative potential of sexual intercourse can be nullified by a contraceptive, and its capacity to transmit disease thwarted by a condom, while the lust of a sexual aggressor can be effectively tamed by the utterance of a verbal signal. Thus, the Pill takes away the fear of pregnancy, the condom ensures that sex will be "safe," and the word "No" instantly transforms a potential rapist into a respectful and law-abiding citizen. Virtue is presumed unnecessary as long as one is equipped with the approved arsenal of slogans and armamentaria.

To publicize National Condom Week in England recently, a safe-sex poster depicted Pope John Paul II wearing a hardhat along with the message: "Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Always Wear a Condom." Britain's advertising watchdog, The Advertising Standards Authority, condemned the poster after receiving 1,187 complaints from the British Safety Council. The Council spokesperson, however, defended the ad: "We chose this particular image to emphasize the fact that the Catholic stance on contraception is incompatible with the concept of safe sex."6 This gratuitous reduction of the Church's spacious teaching on human sexuality to its ban of contraception illustrates not only inexcusable ignorance, but a flat refusal either to acknowledge the facts or engage in the most elementary form of thinking on the subject. The Church is not content with sex being safe; it wants it to be virtuous as well. But a spiritually bankrupt secular mind is riveted to a single fear-that sex can spread disease.

A poster can hardly begin to do justice to the mysteries and complexities of human sexuality. It is far more likely to exploit the unwary reader through misinformation and misunderstanding. The unhappy truth of the matter is that the sexual appetite, more than any other human appetite, is most susceptible to manipulation and mis-direction. Moreover, nothing is more perilous, either to the individual or to society, than unvirtuous or disordered sex. The British social anthropologist J. D. Unwin studied the births and deaths of eighty civilizations, and concluded that a society which does not direct its sexual energies to the good of marriage and the family cannot survive for more than one generation.

Human sexuality is, by nature, ordinated to express love and to initiate life. But in a reductively materialistic society which demeans the spiritual verities that human sexuality introduces, sex is re-defined in specifically materialistic terms, although its spiritual essence is not completely overshadowed. Malcolm Muggeridge captured the spirit of this re-definition most aptly when he described it as the "mysticism of materialism." Human beings are inescapably spiritual. Even the most crass materialist has some sense of sex's spiritual dimension. Unfortunately, it is often treated as the only entrance into a world of spiritual values. Hence the paradox of mass-man: although he does not respect sex enough, he nonetheless expects too much from it. Or, as G. K. Chesterton once pointed out, the man who is knocking on the door of a brothel, even if he does not realize it, is really looking for God.

There is a prevailing sense, even among the masses, that sex is wildly and dangerously out of control. The arch-materialists, themselves, are not at peace with their own materialism. Yet, the only cure they can imagine is more technology, which is to say, more of the disease. The root of the sexual problem, being spiritual, remains essentially unaffected by technological interventions.

Canada's foremost communications expert, the late Marshall McLuhan, stated in his first book, The Mechanical Bride, published in 1951, that the interfusion of sex and technology represented one of the most peculiar features of the contemporary world. He saw a twofold root to this strange hybrid: a hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique, and a desire to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way.7 In either case, sex is wrenched from any direct association with love or life. Such an unlikely alliance, according to McLuhan, invites destruction. There is a mysterious link, he warned, between sex, technology, and death.8

A cartoon in the New Yorker illustrates this same fusion of sex and technology. A salesgirl, trying to sell a certain brand of perfume to a young female customer, recommends it by remarking: "It smells like a new sports-car." Erich Fromm found in this vignette an accurate image of Homo mechanicus who is more interested in manipulating machines than in enjoying life. In Fromm's view, the man who becomes indifferent to life and enthralled by the mechanical is "eventually attracted by death and total destruction."9

The distinguished urban philosopher Lewis Mumford, who spent a long and fruitful career studying and criticizing our contemporary machine-oriented society (our "megatechnic civilization"), was well aware of the contemporary mechanization of sex. In his book, The Pentagon of Power, he cites a "Happenning" staged at an American university that exquisitely symbolizes the current fusion of sex and the machine. In this "Happenning," a group of women build a nest, while a group of men erect a tower. Each group then destroys the other's work. The festivities end when all participants surround an automobile covered with strawberry jam and proceed to treat it as a giant ice-cream cone. The evident symbolism is the destruction of traditional sex roles and an erotic involvement with the machine.10

Safe sex is chaste sex

The expression "Safe Sex" carries the inevitable implication that in its natural mode, unwed to technology, sex can be dangerous. Natural sex becomes, in a sense unnatural, just as traditional sex roles also appear to be unnatural. It is argued that the condom helps to ensure that sex does not lead to death. Nevertheless, the reductive, mechanized attitude concerning sex wherein it is removed from the context of love and life, is precisely what established the link between sex and death in the first place. What renders sex safe is love and commitment, not selfishness and expediency. The condom is like the cigarette filter, its presence presupposes a prior danger. Healthy lungs require not the use of a cigarette filter, but the abandonment of cigarette smoking. Safe sex, if the expression has any legitimate meaning at all, requires the abandonment of a promiscuous attitude toward sex. In more positive terms, it requires the presence of virtue. To substitute a condom for virtue is to perpetuate the practice of depersonalizing sex. Virtue must be present in sexual relationships to ensure that the person is present. And the presence of the person ensures that it is the person that is paramount in sexual relationships, not the pleasure.

Unvirtuous sex is ruinous of sex. But more significantly, it is ruinous of persons. St. Thomas Aquinas lists eight daughters of unchastity, each of which contributes, in varying degrees, to the incapacitation of the person. They are: blindness of mind, rashness, thoughtlessness, inconstancy, inordinate self-love, hatred of God, excessive love of this world, and abhorrence or despair of a future world.11 He explains that they wreak havoc with the four acts of reason and the twofold orientation of the will. Blindness hinders one's ability to apprehend an object rightly. Rashness interferes with counsel. Thoughtlessness opposes judgment about what is to be done. And inconstancy conflicts with reason's command about what is to be done. Inordinate self-love is contrary to the will's proper end which is God, while hatred of God flows from his forbidding acts of lust. Love of this world is inimical to the means man should will in relation to his end, while despair of a future world results from the distaste of spiritual pleasures brought on by over-indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh.

Shakespeare's Measure for Measure offers a dramatic and compelling image of how unchastity (or lust) can bring about personal disintegration. Angelo offers to spare the life of Isabella's brother, Claudio, who faces death because of sexual misconduct, if she consents to sleep with him. When Isabella, who is a novice in a cloistered order of nuns, discusses the matter with her brother, she is horrified to discover what a despicable rake he has become as a result of his carnal misadventures. "Death is a fearful thing," says Claudio, who has little regard for his sister's chastity. "And shamed life a hateful," replies Isabella. Claudio becomes more earnest in his plea: "Sweet sister, let me live: What sin you do to save a brother's life,/Nature dispenses with the deed so far/That it becomes a virtue." Her response is most emphatic:

O you beast!
O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Is't not a kind of incest, to take life
From thine own sister's shame?

She breaks off any further discussion by exclaiming that for Claudio, fornication was not a lapse but a life-style: "Thy sin's not accident, but a trade,/Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd:/'Tis best that thou diest quickly."12 Claudio's preoccupation with sex, which had become a "trade," or a cold-blooded way of life, poisoned his soul to the degree that his own sister's honor meant nothing to him. In fact, poor Claudio had lost all sense of right and wrong. He loved his own life inordinately and to the exclusion of all else. Lust had taken possession of him.

The words "chastity" and "unchastity" are seldom properly understood. "Chaste is waste," and "Virtue can hurt you," shibboleths of mass-man operating in a culture of death, represent the antithesis of what chastity and its privative really mean. Chastity takes its name from the fact that reason chastises (or castigates) sexual desire which, like a child, needs curbing. Aristotle speaks of the self-indulgent child whose appetite is at variance with reason, exhibiting a "lack of chastisement" (akolasia).13 The word "unchastity" in its Latin root is incestum which literally refers to incest. The Romans used the substantive incestum to signify "incest," "unchastity," or "lewdness." The record of Roman literature shows that Cicero used the adverb incest to mean "sinfully" or "impurely," Virgil employed the verb incesto in the sense of "to defile" or "to pollute," and Horace used the adjective incestus in referring to a "sinful person." It could hardly be argued that Roman pagans opposed unchastity because they were puritanically disposed to sex. They understood, quite sensibly, that the sexual appetite is a powerful force that needs a virtue if it is to be yoked to reason. They may not have been faithful in practicing chastity, but they knew without doubt that chastity was a virtue and its privative, unchastity, was a vice. The atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche, certainly no friend of Christianity, recognized the value of chastity. In Zarathustra, he begins his chapter "Of Chastity" by stating: "I love the forest. It is bad to live in towns: too many of the lustful live there."14

The reason chastity is so decidedly unpopular today is not so much because it is too much to expect a person to harmonize his sexual appetite with reason, but because he is constantly exposed to sexually seductive stimuli. Writing in the 13th century, Aquinas remarked that "There is not much sinning because of natural desires.... But the stimuli of desire which man's cunning has devised are something else, and for the sake of these sins one sins very much."15

Modern man must be a new Ulysses who has prepared himself in advance to deal with the seductive power of the sirens. But he must also be like Perseus who knew better than to look directly into the face of Medusa. We would be wise to emulate him by utilizing the mirror of conscious reflection. As Marshall McLuhan has stated, "Without the mirror of the mind, nobody can live a human life in the face of our present mechanized dream."16

True virtue

Philosophy and understanding are important, perhaps even necessary, in the cultivation of any virtue, especially that of chastity. At the same time, they are insufficient. Virtue is not complete, fully virtuous, unless it is an expression of love. People may be chaste because they disdain sex, are not ready for intimacy, or are fearful of contracting a disease or of becoming pregnant. But in the absence of love, what passes for virtuous behavior is never fully virtuous. This is why Augustine spoke of virtue as the "order of love" (ordo amoris).

In Plutarch's book on womanly virtues (Mulierum Virtutes), he tells the story of Chiomara. As a prisoner of war, she had been sexually violated by a soldier. After being sold by her assailant, she had one of her men decapitate him. Upon throwing the severed head at her husband's feet, she declared: "It is a nobler thing that only one man be alive who has been intimate with me."17 For Plutarch, Chiomara displayed great virtue. But her vindictive and murderous act, no matter how reprehensible the actions of her attacker, is not fully virtuous because it is not motivated by love. Her claim to chastity and her boast that her husband is the only living person who has known her sexually, therefore, is counterfeit.

The Christian understands that true virtue must be both compatible with reason and motivated by love. It cannot be mere calculation or enforced good behavior. It must be a reasonable expression of personal love.

The secular world believes that sex education requires nothing more than the dispensation of information. But it is love that binds people together sexually, not the sex organs themselves. Information alone may improve technique, but of itself has nothing to do with love. Moreover, information may be used in conjunction with immoral or unreasonable ends. The essential value reason plays in virtue is to direct human actions to real goods. In this regard, reason is realistic, directing the virtuous person toward reality. The absence of chastity allows lust to take over the personality, directing it away from a world of real goods to one of fantasy. Lust, therefore, cannot be a primary passion. It is a joyless, fictitious passion because it is directed toward something that is not real. Lust replaces love, which is ontological in its significance and uniquely capable of providing personal satisfaction. Whereas love is directed to being, lust centers itself in non-being. Thomistic philosopher Joseph Pieper has expressed this idea in the following way: "Unchaste abandon and the self-surrender of the soul to the world of sensuality paralyzes the primordial powers of the moral person: the ability to perceive in silence the call of reality and to make, in the retreat of this silence, the decision appropriate to the concrete situation of concrete action."18

Because lust is linked with unreality, it is not likely that one could rely on a lustful person to tell the truth. The secular world is loathe to recognize this point. While it insists that it is realistic to expect that people will be unchaste, it is equally insistent that it is realistic to expect them not to be untruthful when it comes to disclosing the state of their sexual health to their intended sexual partner. It is only too well known, needless to say, that a sexually inflamed male will often say anything if he thinks it will help him to have his way. "I love you," is now being said across the land with deadly insincerity. Or, in the words of the immortal Bard: "I do know, when the blood burns, how the prodigal soul lends the tongue vows."

The acceptance of unchastity makes it difficult for people to tell the truth about sex even when they are not sexually aroused. The glib talk about the condom making sex safe flies in the face of the medical evidence. The Journal of the American Medical Association (December 18, 1987) reported that 30% of previously uninfected spouses of AIDS-infected individuals seroconverted (became infected with the HIV virus) after an average of one year of using condoms with their infected partners. Other studies report similar results.

Chastity operates on two levels. There is the specific virtue of chastity that regulates sexual desires and actions so that they are in accord with reason. Then there is chastity in the metaphorical sense which allows the mind to be united with the natural and even the Divine order of things. It gives the soul a certain transparency. "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God" (Matt. 5:8). In this sense, Aquinas writes, "the essence of chastity consists principally in charity and the other theological virtues, whereby the human mind is united to God."20

We need chastity in both senses if we are to have chastity at all. Chastity begins and ends in love. The world hungers for love but does not know how to find it. But it does know about information and technique, and believes, consequently, that they are realistically attainable whereas chastity is not. Nonetheless, neither information nor technique can enrich life or give it meaning. Love alone can achieve that. But even love must not be pursued apart from faith and hope. Chastity is not unrealistic, it is too realistic, involving much more of ourselves than we understand. And if we are sometimes discouraged, we might find comfort and encouragement in these words of C. S. Lewis: "At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in." n

1 José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Mentor Books, 1950), p. 10.

2 Ibid., pp. 31-32, 12.

3 John Paul II, The Gospel of Life (Sherbrooke, Quebec: Médiaspaul, 1995), pp. 41-42.

4 Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 63.

5 Leslie Fiedler, quoted in Trousered Apes by Duncan Williams.

6 "Condom ad's too cheeky," The Toronto Sun, Sept. 7, 1995, p. 43.

7 Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 94.

8 Ibid., p. 101.

9 Fromm, p. 65.

10 Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Jovanovich, Inc., 1970), p. 365.

11 Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, 153, 5.

12 Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, III, i.

13 Aristotle, Ethics, III, 12.

14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 81.

15 Joseph Pieper, "Chastity and Unchastity," The Four Cardinal Virtues (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 173.

16 McLuhan, p. 97.

17 Plutarch's Moralia, tr. by F. C. Babbitt (London: William Heinmann Ltd., 1960), p. 557.

18 Pieper, p. 160.

19 Shakespeare, Hamlet I, 3, 116.

20 Aquinas, 151, 2.