“PUT
ON THE ARMOR OF LIGHT” Romans 13:12
Christian Purity
In our commentary on the exhortations in the
Letter to the Romans, we have now come to
the passage that says,
The night is far gone, the day
is at hand. Let us then cast off the works
of darkness and put on the armor of light;
let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in
the day, not in reveling and drunkenness,
not in debauchery and licentiousness, not
in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the
Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision
for the flesh, to gratify its desires
(Romans 13:12-14).
St. Augustine in his
Confessions
tells us about the part this passage played
in his conversion. He had now reached an
almost complete commitment to the faith. But
there was one thing holding him back: the
fear of not being able to remain chaste. He
was living, as we know, with a woman without
being married.
In the garden of the home he was visiting,
in the throes of this interior struggle with
tears in his eyes, he heard a voice coming
from the house next door, a young boy’s or
girl’s voice that kept repeating, “
Tolle,
lege! Take up and read, take up and
read.” He interpreted those words as an
invitation from God, and having a book of
St. Paul’s Letters close by, he opened it
randomly and decided to consider the first
thing he read as God’s will for him. The
passage his eyes fell on was precisely the
passage from the Letter to the Romans that
we have just read. A reassuring light (
lux
securitatis) shone forth within him
that made all the darkness of uncertainty
disappear. Now he knew that with God’s help,
he could be chaste.
[1]
The things that the apostle calls “the works
of darkness” in this passage are the same
things he defines elsewhere as “desires, or
works, of the flesh” (see Romans 8:13;
Galatians 5:19), and what he calls ”the
armor of light” refers to the things that he
elsewhere calls “the works of the Spirit,”
or “the fruit of the Spirit” (see Galatians
5:22). Among the works of the flesh, he
highlights sexual dissoluteness with two
words (
koite and
aselgeia)
that are contrasted to the work of light,
which is purity. The apostle does not speak
in great detail here about this aspect of
Christian life. But from the list of vices
at the beginning of the letter (see Romans
1:26ff), we know how much importance it has
in his eyes.
St. Paul establishes a very close link
between purity and holiness and between
purity and the Holy Spirit:
For this is the will of God,
your sanctification: that you abstain from
unchastity; that each one of you know how
to take a wife for himself in holiness and
honor, not in the passion of lust like
heathen who do not know God; that no man
transgress, and wrong his brother in this
matter, because the Lord is an avenger in
all these things... God has not called us
for uncleanness but in holiness. Therefore
whoever disregards this, disregards not
man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to
you. (1 Thessalonians 4:3-8)
Let us, therefore, seek to take up this last
exhortation from the word of God, reflecting
more deeply on this particular fruit of the
Spirit, purity.
Christian
Reasons for Purity
In the Letter to the Galatians St. Paul
writes, “The fruit of the Spirit is love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness, self-control”
(Galatians 5:22-23). The original Greek word
that is translated as “self-control” or
“dominion over oneself” is
enkrateia.
It has a very broad range of meanings. One
can in fact exercise self-control in eating,
in speaking, in restraining anger, etc.
Here, however, as almost always in the New
Testament, it means self-control in a very
specific personal area, the area of
sexuality. We can deduce this from the fact
that just above when he is listing “the
works of the flesh,” the apostle calls
porneia,
impurity, the thing that is opposed to
self-control. (This is the same word from
which we get the word “pornography.”)
In modern translations of the Bible, the
word
porneia has been translated at
times as “prostitution,” at times as “sexual
immorality,” at times as “fornication” or
“adultery,” and at times with other words.
The basic idea of the word, however, is that
of “selling oneself,” of using one’s own
body, and thus of prostituting oneself (
pernemi
in Greek means, “I sell myself”). Using this
a word to indicate virtually all the
manifestations of sexual disorder, the Bible
says that every sin of impurity is, in a
sense, a prostituting of oneself, a selling
of oneself.
The words used by St. Paul tell us, then,
that there are two opposing attitudes toward
one’s body and one’s sexuality. One is a
fruit of the Spirit and the other is a work
of the flesh; one is a virtue the other is a
vice. The first attitude involves
maintaining control over oneself and one’s
body; the second instead involves selling
oneself or using one’s body, that is, using
sexuality for one’s own pleasure, for
utilitarian goals that are different than
those for which it was created. It makes the
sexual act a venal act, even if the gain is
not always monetary as in the case of true
prostitution, and makes selfish pleasure an
end in itself.
When we speak of purity and impurity in
simple lists of virtue or vice, without
examining the matter more deeply, the
language of the New Testament does not
differ very much from the language of pagan
moralists. Pagan moralists also, Stoics and
Epicureans, praise self-control, the
enkrateia,
but only as applied to interior quiet, to
impassibility (
apatheia) and to
self-mastery. Purity is governed, according
to them, by the principle of “right reason.”
In reality, however, within these two
ancient pagan words, there is now a
completely new content that arises, as
always, from the kerygma. This is already
evident in our passage where sexual
dissolution is set in significant opposition
to, as its contrary, the idea of “putting on
the Lord Jesus Christ.” The early Christians
were able to grasp this new content because
it was already a topic of specific
catechesis in other contexts.
Let us now examine one of these specific
teachings on purity to discover its true
content and the true Christian reasons for
this virtue, which come from Christ’s
paschal mystery. It is found in 1
Corinthians 6:12-20. It seems that the
Corinthians—–perhaps misinterpreting a
statement by the apostle—advanced the
principle that “all things are lawful for
me” to justify even sins of impurity. The
apostle’s response contains an absolutely
new motive for purity that derives from the
mystery of Christ. It is not permitted, he
says, to give oneself to impurity (
porneia).
It is not permitted to sell oneself or to
use oneself just for one’s own pleasure for
the simple reason that we no longer belong
to ourselves; we are not our own but
Christ’s. We cannot decide how to use
something that does not belong to us: “Do
you not know that your bodies are members of
Christ? ... You are not your own” (1
Corinthians 12:15, 19).
The pagan motive is, in a certain sense,
turned upside down; the supreme value to
safeguard is no longer dominion over self
but “non-dominion over self”: “The body is
not meant for immorality, but for the Lord,
and the Lord for the body” (1 Corinthians
6:13). The ultimate motive for purity is,
therefore, that “Jesus is Lord!” Christian
purity, in other words, does not consist in
establishing the dominion of reason over our
instincts so much as it is establishing the
dominion of Christ over the whole person,
including a person’s reason and instincts.
This Christological motive for purity is
made more compelling by what St. Paul adds
in the same passage: we are not just
generically “of” Christ, like his property
or something that belongs to him, we are the
very body of Christ, his members! This makes
everything immensely more subtle because it
means that when I commit an impure act, I am
prostituting the body of Christ, I am
performing a kind of horrible sacrilege. I
am committing violence against the body of
the Son of God. The apostle asks, “Shall I,
therefore, take the members of Christ and
make them members of a prostitute?” (1
Corinthians 6:15).
He quickly adds to this Christological
motive the pneumatological one which
concerns the Holy Spirit: “Do you not know
that your body is a temple of the Holy
Spirit within you?” (1 Corinthians 6:19). To
abuse one’s own body is thus to desecrate
the temple of God. But if someone destroys
the temple of God, God will destroy him (see
1 Corintians 3:17). To commit impurity is to
“grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Ephesians
4:30).
Alongside the Christological and
pneumatological reasons, the apostle also
mentions an eschatological one that refers
to the ultimate destiny of a human being:
“And God raised the Lord and will also raise
us up by his power” (1 Corinthians 6:14).
Our body is destined for resurrection. It is
destined one day to participate in the
beatitude and the glory of the soul.
Christian purity is not based on disdain for
the body; on the contrary, it is based on
the great esteem for its dignity. The
Fathers of the Church, in combatting
Gnostics, used to say the gospel does not
proclaim salvation “from” the flesh but
salvation “of” the flesh. Those who consider
the body as “an outer garment” destined to
be abandoned here below do not have the
reason a Christian does to keep it
unspoiled.
The apostle concludes his teaching on purity
with an impassioned invitation: “So glorify
God in your body!” (1 Corinthians 6:20). The
human body, then, is for the glory of God
and expresses that glory when a person lives
out his or her sexuality and all of physical
life in loving obedience to God’s will,
which is like saying in obedience to the
very meaning of sexuality, to its intrinsic
and original nature which is not a selling
of oneself but a giving of oneself. Such
glorification of God through one’s body does
not necessarily require renouncing the
exercise of one’s sexuality. In the chapter
that immediately follows, 1 Corinthians 7,
St. Paul explains in fact that such
glorification of God expresses itself in two
ways and through two different charisms:
either through marriage or through
virginity. The virgin and the celibate
glorify God in their bodies, but the one who
marries also glorifies him provided that
each one lives the requirements of his or
her own state.
Purity,
Beauty, and Love of One’s Neighbor
In the new light deriving from the paschal
mystery and illustrated for us up to this
point by St. Paul, the ideal of purity holds
a privileged place in every summary of
morality in the New Testament. One could say
there is no letter by St. Paul in which he
does not dedicate space to purity when he is
describing the new life in the Spirit (see,
for example, Ephesians 4:17-5:33; Colossians
3:5-12). The basic requirements of purity
are specified, from time to time, according
to the diverse states of life for
Christians. The Pastoral Letters explain how
purity needs to be configured in young
people, in women, in spouses, in the
elderly, in widows, in presbyters, and in
bishops. These letters present purity in its
various facets of chastity, conjugal
fidelity, sobriety, continence, virginity,
and modesty.
Taken as whole, this aspect of Christian
life determines what the New Testament—and
the Pastoral Letters in a special way—call
the “beauty” or the “beautiful” character of
the Christian vocation that, joined with the
other characteristics of goodness, form the
unique ideal of “good beauty” or “ beautiful
goodness” (in Greek,
kalokagathia).
Christian tradition, calling purity the
“beautiful virtue,” has grasped this
biblical vision that—despite the abuses and
the often one-sided emphases that have
occurred—expresses something profoundly
true. Purity is in fact Beauty!
This kind of purity is a lifestyle more than
it is an individual virtue. It has a range
of manifestations that go beyond the
specifically sexual sphere. There is a
purity of the body, but there is also a
purity of the soul that rejects not only
acts but also “evil” desires and thoughts
(see Matthew 5:8, 27-28). There is a purity
of speech that consists, negatively, in
refraining from obscene language, vulgarity,
and silly or suggestive talk (see Ephesians
5:4; Colossians 3:8) and consists positively
in sincere and straightforward speech, that
is, in saying “yes, yes,” and “no, no” in
imitation of the spotless Lamb in whom “no
guile was found on his lips” (1 Peter 2:22).
Finally, there is a purity or
clear-sightedness of the eyes and of one’s
gaze. “The eye,” Jesus said, “is the lamp of
the body” (see Matthew 6:22ff; Luke 11:34).
St. Paul uses a very suggestive image to
indicate the manner of this new life: he
says Christians, born from the Passover of
Christ, should be characterized by “the
unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1
Corinthians 5:8). The word the apostle uses
here,
eilikrineia, (from
eile,
splendor of the sun, and
krino, to
discern) contains in itself the image of a
“solar transparency.” In the passage we
began with in Romans he speaks of purity as
“the armor of light.”
Every day people tend to contrast sins
against purity with sins against a neighbor
and to consider just the sin against a
neighbor a real sin. Sometimes people mock
the excessive value accorded in the past to
the “beautiful virtue.” This attitude is
somewhat understandable: in the past
morality emphasized the sins of the flesh so
unilaterally that it led to real neuroses at
times, to the detriment of concern for the
duties toward our neighbor and to the
detriment of the virtue of purity itself.
Because of that, this virtue became
impoverished and reduced to something that
was almost only negative, the virtue of
being able to say “no.”
However, we have gone to the opposite
extreme, and people tend to minimize sins
against purity in the interest of concern
(often only verbal) for one’s neighbor. The
basic error here is in putting these two
virtues against each other. The word of God,
far from setting purity against charity,
instead links them closely
together. We only have to read
the continuation of the passage from the
First the Letter to the Thessalonians that I
cited at the beginning to realize how these
two virtues are interdependent according to
the apostle (see 1 Thessalonians 4:3-12).
The single goal of both purity and charity
is to be able to conduct a life “full of
dignity,” that is, integrated in all its
relationships whether with oneself or with
others. In our passage, the apostle
summarizes all this in saying, “let us
conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day”
(Rom 13:13).
Purity and love of neighbor represent
dominion over self and the gift of self to
others. How can I give myself if I do not
possess myself but am a slave to my
passions? It is an illusion to think that we
can combine genuine service to brothers and
sisters, which always calls for sacrifice,
altruism, forgetting ourselves, and
generosity, with a life that is personally
disordered, all aimed at pleasing oneself
and satisfying one’s passions. It inevitably
ends in using brothers and sisters, just as
one uses one’s body. Those who cannot say
“no” to themselves cannot say “yes” to
brothers and sisters.
One of the “excuses” that contributes the
most to justify the sin of impurity in
people’s minds and to relieve them of all
responsibility is that it does not hurt
anyone else, it does not violate the rights
and freedom of anyone unless they say, it
involves sexual abuse. But apart from the
fact that this approach violates God’s
fundamental right to give his creatures a
law, this “excuse” is also disingenuous in
regard to neighbors. It is not true that the
sin of impurity ends with the person who
commits it. There is a solidarity among all
sins. Every sin, wherever and whoever
commits it, infects and defiles the moral
atmosphere for human beings. Jesus calls
this infection “scandal” and condemns it
with some of the most horrific words in the
whole gospel (see Matthew 18:6ff; Mark
9:42ff; Luke 17:1ff). Even evil thoughts
that linger in our hearts, according to
Jesus, defile a person and thus the world:
“Out of the heart come evil thoughts,
murder, adultery, fornication... These are
what defile a man” (Matthew. 15:19-20).
Every sin erodes values and all of them
together create what Paul defines as “the
law of sin” whose power over all human
beings he illustrates (see Romans 7:14ff).
In the Jewish Talmud, we can read a parable
that illustrates well the solidarity between
sin and the harm that all sin, even personal
sin, causes for others. “Some people were on
board a boat. One of them took a drill and
began to drill a hole under his seat. The
other passengers, watching him, asked, ‘What
are you doing?’ He answered, ‘What business
is that of yours? Am I not drilling a hole
under my own seat?’ But they reply, ‘Yes,
but water will come in the boat and will
drown all of us!’” Nature itself has begun
to send us ominous protest warnings against
certain modern abuses and excesses in the
area of sexuality.
Purity
and Renewal
In studying the history of the origins of
Christianity, one can clearly see that there
were two principal instruments by which the
Church succeeded in transforming the pagan
world of that time. The first was the
proclamation of the gospel, the kerygma, and
the second was the testimony of Christians’
lives, their witness. And one can see how,
in the area of life testimony, there were
again two things that most amazed and
converted the pagans: brotherly love and the
purity of the Christians’ morals. The First
Letter of Peter already mentions the
amazement of the pagan world before the
standard of life that was different among
the Christians. He writes,
Let the time that is past
suffice for doing what the Gentiles like
to do, living in licentiousness, passions,
drunkenness, revels, carousing and lawless
idolatry. They are surprised that you do
not now join them in the same wild
profligacy, and they abuse you. (1 Peter
4:3-4)
The Apologists, the Christian writers who
wrote in defense of the faith in the first
centuries of the Church, attest that the
pure and chaste manner of life of the
Christians was, for the pagans, something
“extraordinary and incredible.” In
particular, the restoration of the family
had an extraordinary impact on pagan
society, which the authorities at the time
had wanted to reform, but they had been
powerless to slow down its disintegration.
One of the arguments on which St. Justin
Martyr based his
Apology addressed
to the emperor Antoninus Pius was this:
Roman emperors are concerned about improving
morals and the family, and they are
attempting to promulgate laws for that goal.
However, these laws have been shown to be
insufficient. Well, why not recognize what
Christian laws have been capable of
achieving for those who live by them and
acknowledge the help they can also give to
civil society?
This does not mean that the Christian
community was completely free of sexual
disorders and sins. St. Paul even had to
deal with a case of incest in the Corinthian
community. But such sins were clearly
recognized as sins, denounced, and
corrected. It was not required to be without
sin in this area, as in other areas, but to
fight against sin.
Now let us move from early Christianity to
today. What is the situation in the world
today regarding purity? It is the same if
not worse than the ancient situation! We
live in a society, in terms of morals, that
has fallen back into full-blown paganism and
full-blown idolatry of sex. The terrible
denunciation that St. Paul makes of the
pagan world at the beginning of the Letter
to the Romans applies, point by point, to
today’s world, especially to the so-called
affluent society (see Romans 1:26-27, 32).
Today as well, these things and other worse
things are being done, but people try to
justify them, to justify every moral license
and every sexual perversion provided, they
say, it does not harm others and does not
infringe on the freedom of others. Whole
families are being destroyed and people
still say, where’s the harm in it? It is
undeniable that certain judgments about
traditional sexual morality are being
revised and that modern sciences about human
beings have contributed to shedding light on
certain inner workings and conditionings of
the human psyche that remove or diminish
moral responsibility for certain behaviors
that were considered sinful at one time.
But this progress has nothing to do with the
pansexualism of certain pseudo-scientific
and permissive theories that tend to negate
every objective norm about sexual morality,
reducing everything to a spontaneous
evolution of morality, that is, a cultural
matter. If we closely examine what is being
called the sexual revolution of our day, we
realize with shock that it is not simply a
revolution against the past but is also
often a revolution against God and at times
even against human nature.
Pure
in Heart!
But I do not want to linger for too long on
describing the situation around us today
that all of us already know so well.
Instead, I would like to discover and
transmit what God wants of us Christians in
such a situation as this. God is calling us
to the same task to which he called our
first brothers and sisters in the faith, to
“stand against this wild profligacy.” He is
calling us to make the “beauty” of Christian
life shine again before the eyes of the
whole world. He is calling us to fight for
purity, to fight with persistence and
humility—not necessarily to be immediately
perfect.
Today the Holy Spirit is asking us to do
something new: he is asking us to bear
witness to the world to the original
innocence of creatures and things. The world
has sunk very low, someone has written that
sex has gone to our brains. We need
something very strong to break this kind of
narcosis and intoxication with sex. We need
to reawaken in human beings a nostalgia for
the innocence and simplicity that they long
for in their hearts, even if those hearts
are quite often covered with sludge. I am
not referring to the innocence of creation
that no longer exists but the innocence of
redemption that Christ restored to us and
offers us in the sacraments and in the word
of God. This is what St. Paul has in mind
when he writes to the Philippians “that you
may be blameless and innocent, children of
God without blemish in the midst of a
crooked and perverse generation, among whom
you shine as lights in the world, holding
fast the word of life” (Philippians
2:15-16). This describes what Paul calls in
our passage “putting on the armor of light.”
It is no longer enough to have a purity
based on fear, taboos, prohibitions, and men
and women avoiding each other as if the
other is always necessarily a snare and a
potential enemy rather than a “help.” In the
past purity was at times reduced, at least
in practice, precisely to this combination
of taboos, prohibitions, and fears as if
this virtue needed to be ashamed in front of
the vice instead of the vice being ashamed
in front of the virtue. We need to aspire,
thanks to the presence of the Spirit in us,
to a purity that is stronger than its
opposite vice—a positive purity, not just a
negative one, that is able to make us
experience the truth of this word from the
apostle, “To the pure all things are pure”
(Titus 1:15), and of this other word from
Scripture, “He who is in you is greater than
he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).
We need to begin with healing the root,
which is the “heart,” because everything
that defiles a person’s life comes from the
heart (Matthew 15:18). Jesus said, “Blessed
are the pure in heart, for they shall see
God!” (Matthew 5:8). They will truly see,
they will have new eyes to see the world and
God, clear-sighted eyes that know how to
discern what is beautiful and what is
hideous, what is truth and what is a lie,
what brings life and what brings death—eyes,
in brief, like Jesus’ eyes. How free Jesus
was to talk about everything: children,
women, pregnancy, childbirth ... Eyes like
Mary’s eyes. Purity no longer consists,
then, in saying, “no” to creatures but in
saying “yes” to them—insofar as they are
creatures of God who have been and remain
“very good.”
Let us not deceive ourselves. To be able to
say this “yes,” we need to go through the
cross because after sin, our gaze on
creatures has become clouded; concupiscence
has been unleashed in us; sexuality is no
longer peaceful and has become an ambiguous
and threatening force that drags us away
from the law of God against our will. The
daily news of abuses and scandals in this
field, included among members of the clergy
and religious people, are there to remember
us of this bitter reality. In the first
meditation for this Lent, we emphasized one
aspect that is particularly relevant and
necessary for mortification: the
mortification of the eyes. A healthy fast
from images is more important today than
fasting from food and drink.
Let us conclude by recalling the experience
of St. Augustine mentioned at the beginning.
After that experience of deliverance, he
started praying for chastity in a new way:
“Lord, he said, you command me to be chaste.
Give me what you ask me for and then ask me
whatever you will”. A prayer we can make our
own, knowing that in this as in any other
field by ourselves we can do nothing.
___________________________
[1] St. Augustine, The
Confessions of St. Augustine, 8,
11-12, trans. John K. Ryan (New York:
Image Books, 1960), pp. 199-202.
Translated
from Italian by Marsha Daigle-Williamson
Source:
https://zenit.org/articles/father-cantalamessa-put-on-the-armor-of-light/
