MereChristianity: Book III. Christian Behaviour 5. Sexual Morality -C.S.Lewis
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.
