Book Review of A Plea for Purity by Johann Christoph Arnold
Lofty precepts often give me a feeling of oxygen deprivation and vertigo. Purity? Lovely: but how long can you breathe in an atmosphere so thin? Self-control? The triumph of dead principle over living passion? Who can live that way? Who would want to?
But surely the opposite of unchastity isn't self-control merely, but passion, a passion for goodness. The antidote for lust is a burning love. And that is the underlying assumption which makes Arnold's writings so appealing. He doesn't just tell us how we might be chaste. He reminds us why we'd want to be.
This is a simple book. Johann Arnold takes all the vexed and knotted sexual issues right down the line, and unknots them simply. Purity of heart and mind. The un-lovingness of fantasy and masturbation. Singleness, virginity, continence. Marriage as sacred mystery. Welcoming children. The perverseness of contraception. The prohibition against divorce and remarriage. The need of homosexually-tempted persons for abundant chaste friendship and love.
Simple--- yes, it is simple. But that doesn't mean it's easy.
This is where Johann Christoph Arnold's writing makes sense in the context of his community. Arnold is a leader of the Bruderhof, an Anabaptist community; he carried forward the teaching tradition of his grandfather and his father, Eberhard and J. Heinrich Arnold. Because of the way the Bruderhof live, in day-to-day contact and accountability with other disciples--- married people and singles, adults and children---who are committed to following Christ, the Bruderhof have earned the power to interest us. We see them walk the walk; that's why we are willing to "let" them talk the talk.
And this is the most difficult kind of talk there is. Who can uphold radical sexual purity without feeling half-a-hypocrite? I want to sound forth the clear bell-like tone of a tapped crystal goblet; I'm afraid instead I'll "plunk" like the cracked and mended plate I am. Or are there any among us who have not sinned?
But it's not that Arnold as a man or the Bruderhof as a group are super-strong, sinless. It's that, weak as they are, they recognize that the radical demands of the Kingdom can best be lived out in a community which lives together for the sake of love: the love of Christ and brother and sister.
I am fascinated by the convergence of Catholic and Anabaptist thought I find here. The Catholics have clear teachings on sexual issues; but the Bruderhof have a practical way of building lay communities which--- in the words of Peter Maurin--- make it "easier to be good."
It may be a waste of time and breath to preach against sexual sin to lonely rootless singletons (and isolated married couples, for that matter) who do not benefit from communities of mutual support.
If this be so, then we need in every city a counter-cultural Catholic village, a neighborhood of inviting households where singles will not live solitary, where there is some degree of sharing of property and houses and work and child-minding and prayer, families hand-fast with families. We need in every countryside married monastics, Third Order Papist Anabaptists. Eberhard et Franciscus, orate pro nobis. Bring on the Catholic Bruderhofs!
