C.S. Lewis on Sexual Morality
How to remain chaste in an unchaste world...
“Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
Let it never be said that Clive Staples Lewis shied away from the most confronting topics.
Indeed during the Second World War, C.S. Lewis was a regular voice on BBC Radio, broadcasting a series of ten to fifteen minute talks on questions of morality and faith to wartime Britain. The talks proved enormously popular, and would later be adapted into one of his most important works outside of the Chronicles of Narnia — Mere Christianity.
As part of this series, on the 11th October 1942 Lewis spoke on the specific topic of Sexual Morality, in which he presented a remarkably frank case for chastity, and why the modern world has made it even more important to pursue this seemingly archaic virtue.
So today, we explore what C.S. Lewis can teach you about how to remain chaste in an unchaste world, and why you should…
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Chastity or Modesty?
As Lewis states, "Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues”. It flies so completely in the face of what modern Western society promotes that it has made even ostensibly devout Christians feel vulnerable when championing it. It is for this very reason however that it is crucial to stop surrendering this ground, which simply leaves a vacuum that malign actors have already begun occupying.
Lewis begins however by reminding us that while Christian chastity and social modesty are often conflated, they are not the same thing. One is a fixed virtue, and the other is contextual, and confusion over this has needlessly muddied the moral waters. Chastity, after all, is tied to a single specific act. There is no fudging the issue. Modesty, however, is generally tied to mutable perceptions of language and dress, which vary according to era, culture and climate. Lewis asserts that a person’s modesty, therefore, can only really be judged by their intent:
“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”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
Consequently, the problem is not when somebody carelessly leaves a button undone, but when somebody purposefully breaks societal rules simply for shock value, to make others uncomfortable or to “excite lust”. In other words, when it is intentional over accidental sin. Being excessively prudish over the latter needlessly undermines the prosecution of the former.
Since chastity is a personal choice of wholly personal responsibility, while modesty is largely dependent on external factors, Lewis advises us to be charitable in judging somebody who may only be passively rather than actively immodest:
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
Ultimately, conflating modesty with chastity is unhelpful as it distracts us from the actual virtue of the latter, and what really corrupts it…
The Purpose of Sexuality
Arguably the most contested frontline in the war for the Western soul, especially since the 1960’s, is the question of whether life is sacred. Directly connected to this is its obvious continuation — is the act of creating life sacred too?
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
One of the great virtues of C.S. Lewis, which propelled him into one of the most respected voices in Christianity of the last century, was his ability to translate theology into endearing and everyday language, with highly relatable examples. On sexual morality, he was no different, comparing the sexual appetite to that of food:
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
Even leaving any theological considerations aside, and looking at the matter with basic practical honesty, “This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function”. Like all appetites, it shifts in scope in response to our conscious decisions and actions:
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
Again like all appetites, when it is fed beyond what its original purpose calls for, the returns diminish, and the damage spirals. Yet while the glutton’s vice is plainly visible in his physical build, that of the unchaste is not made less serious simply by its concealment to the eye:
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
Which brings us to core of Lewis’s broadcast — addressing the encroaching societal lies that are currently corrupting sexuality, and how chastity can both counter them and make you stronger…
The Lies That Corrupt Sexuality
In unusually direct words, Lewis explains why it is essential to talk about this:
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
84 years have passed since Lewis spoke these words, and the wisdom behind them has only grown. So too, alas, has the vigour with which sexual immorality has been promoted, which all began with the seemingly innocuous idea that ‘liberalising’ sexuality — and therefore indulging an appetite that struggles to limit itself — would make for a more contented society. But this line of thinking in itself became an appetite, as Lewis describes:
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
The more ‘liberalised’ sexuality has become, the more ‘sexual inflation’ has risen. With every decade that has passed, the more mainstream media has resembled the pornography of yesteryear, as if the philosophy were ‘things are out of control, so the solution is to further slacken controls’. This, of course, is charitably assuming that the liberalisation of sexuality has been promoted by political, civic and media pressure out of good intentions, and not out of a deliberate desire by third party actors to corrupt and fragment society.
Lewis, therefore, is invoking G. K. Chesterton’s proverbial fence — the idea that a social norm or custom should never be abolished until the reasons why that custom existed in the first place are properly understood. Pre-world war society did not frown upon unchecked sexuality because it ‘didn’t understand it’. It did so off the back of generations of accumulated understanding of how destructive to both individuals and society unleashed animal instinct could be.
Regardless of the reasons why this is really happening, however, Lewis brings the discussion back to us as individuals:
“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”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
A moral lapse risks a cascade. A man who stumbles in sin will almost certainly drown in it without exceptional personal will, or a highly supportive community ready and eager to help. As Lewis points out, an entire moneyed industry is out there ready to pounce on any who have stumbled, and whose business model profits directly from their drowning.
Once again, we do not even need to enter deep theology. On a purely practical and earthly level, succumbing to such pressures as these will make you vulnerable to worse ones, as your appetites spiral into costly addiction.
So how can we ourselves course-correct, and raise a shield against this widening panorama of temptation?
How to Embrace Chastity
“Before we are cured, we must want to be cured”, Lewis reminds us. It is not going to happen if you simply sit back and hope things get better. We cannot know how long the wider war will continue. Decades of worsening societal conditioning could still be ahead of us. So for us individually, it has to begin now, with a conscious decision.
It must of course be a serious decision. Here Lewis invokes one of the grandest examples in history of a wayward man who went on to embrace a life of chastity — Saint Augustine of Hippo. Later in his life, the saint reflected upon his failed attempts to escape temptation in youth, realising that had failed because they were half-hearted, encapsulated by the infamous yet relatable words:
“Grant me chastity and continency, but not yet.”
Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, VIII.7
Three things had stood between Augustine and chastity. As Lewis explains, the same three things stand between us and chastity too:
1 - Reject the Normalisation of Vice
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
As suggested above, the proliferation of messaging, teaching and imagery corrosive to sexual virtue in the Western world — which Lewis was already noticing in 1942 — has now continued for so long and to such an extent that it is no longer tenable to simply write it off as innocent, accidental or experimental.
However, it is critical to understand that the primary aim of this propaganda is not to convince you that perversions are right, but that they are normal. The greatest deception of Satan, it is said, lies in convincing the world he does not exist. So too is convincing you, through decades of demoralisation propaganda, that what you are seeing is natural, forcing your animal subconscious to therefore view it as desirable.
The way it works, of course, lies in glamorising the act, yet grafting onto it a false consequence. ‘Find yourself’, it says, encouraging you to share your body with many others. ‘You can settle down later’, it reassures you, quietly muffling the damage this will all do to your ability to effectively pair bond, or ever find contentment with the lone spouse you will need to raise your children.
Understand, therefore, that what is happening is being purposefully guided, and view the sources of it no differently than you would a fraudster trying to clone your credit card. What is being promoted is not normal, and the illusion of normality persists only because the majority, who are in truth as repulsed as you, fear censure for saying it publicly. When the darkness does eventually lift, you will be surprised at how many others had remained awake all along too.
In order to be chaste therefore, you must first stop allowing societal forces which do not have your best interests at heart to tell you what kind of being you are…
2 - Stop Pretending Chastity is Impossible
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
Along with the glorification of vice, virtue is either ridiculed or dismissed as unachievable, to further sell the deception that vice is natural and that it is futile to resist it. Many are the metaphors for this, and that of Lewis — of leaving a difficult exam question blank instead of trying and potentially getting it right — is fabulously quaint.
It should be emphasised again that chastity does not and has never meant total abstinence from sex. It means the moderation of it and the practice of it within an environment that closes off the possibility of long term damage to either the parties directly involved or the broader community, while ensuring only the positive consequences remain. This of course, is perfectly possible — it has been the default lifestyle for much of the arc of our civilisation.
Of course our ancestors sinned. Fornication and infidelity occurred even at the highest strata of society. But it was recognised at the time as scandalous, invited public condemnation, and was never celebrated as a viable life choice. Invariably, it also carried consequence, either in legal or social repercussions.
Our ancestors were tempted, but they married young, and thus their instinct had already been channelled into healthy outlets by the age at which many today begin their years of temptation. The age at which marriage occurs, and the expense it incurs, are social and economic factors, not religious ones. It is precisely the culture of liberalised sexuality that has fed its own appetite, prolonging and deepening temptation by encouraging people to put off marriage.
Practising chastity may be challenging. But as Lewis emphasises, just because something is challenging does not make it impossible, especially if artificial obstacles are inflating the actual difficulty:
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
3 - Know that Self Control is Not Repression
It is often argued that chastity is a form of ‘unhealthy suppression’. The final recognition therefore is that you do not, in fact, have to accept a binary choice between absolute denial or wanton profligacy.
As Lewis has already pointed out, sexuality is an appetite, and both starvation and gluttony are equally damaging. The chaste man, therefore, has succeeded in balancing the equation by bringing his desire under control instead of allowing his desire to control him:
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
To embrace chastity, therefore, is not a ‘self-punishment’. It is an investment in your person to prevent your desires from experiencing runaway inflation.
The Centre of Moral Gravity?
With all of this said, Lewis concludes his talk with a reassuring note. That despite the tremendous stigmas that surround discussion of sexuality, and the false presentation of Christianity as an overly stern policeman on the matter:
“The centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
As before, we must be careful not to judge a man for sins he can yet redeem, especially if our own are in fact more serious. We as humans are defined by the ‘Animal’ and the ‘Diabolical’ selves. A stumble of chastity is an ‘animal’ sin, and a Christian should always be ready to forgive a stumble that is earnestly admitted. Intentional cruelty, spite and arrogance however are ‘diabolical’, and are unambiguously worse, though this does not let the animal sins off the hook:
“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.”
C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5
Chastity, therefore, is both desirable and obtainable, and it is never too late to take back control of yourself…
Precioso artículo. Desde hace tiempo estoy sintiendo curiosidad por la obra de Lewis. Saber que ha tocado un tema tan controversial y vigente como la moral sexual me hace querer adentrarme, aún más, en su obra. ¡Muchas gracias por compartir!