Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

by Richard Beck

Specifically, and this is somewhat understandable, the psychotherapeutic community has tended to fetishize the notion of boundaries. And in this fetishization of boundaries, the psychotherapeutic community has, perhaps unwittingly for Christian therapists, incorporated some of the most toxic aspects of modernity into their views of mental and spiritual health. Specifically, many of these modern notions of selfhood are difficult to reconcile with Trinitarian notions regarding Christian community, love, and salvation.

Modernity will, thus, use economic metaphors to help us track the “inflow” versus “outflow” across the boundary of the self. Healthy love in modernity is making sure our “love bank” gets enough “deposits” to offset the relational “investments” we make in others. But it is very difficult to see how this modern version of “love”—exchange across the boundaries of autonomous egos—bears any resemblance to the triune love of God and Christian agape. And it is not hard to see why. The modern notion of the buffered self is simply a manifestation of what Martin Luther called incurvatus in se, the self “curved inward” upon itself.

True people of welcome will attempt to penetrate this darkness within themselves. But the self-deceit inherent in introspection means that much within our hearts will remain dark and impenetrable. This darkness will continue to unconsciously influence our emotions, judgments, and behavior. In short, the only way forward for people of hospitality will be the assumption that they are psychologically compromised in various ways even when they don’t feel compromised! This skeptical stance toward the self may be the most important insight produced by our psychological approach.

That is the root lesson of Matthew 9: No conversation about sin, purity, or holiness can begin until human dignity has been secured beyond all question or doubt. Discussions of purity and sin cannot be primary discussions. For when the “will to purity” trumps the “will to embrace” (when sacrifice precedes mercy), the gears of sociomoral disgust begin to turn, poisoning the well of hospitality by activating the emotions of otherness. In the desire to secure purity the faith community will begin to turn inward. The moral circle shrinks. The church begins to define its spiritual mission as the regulation of purity boundaries within the membership and between outsiders. Walls—ritual, physical, and psychological—are erected to protect and quarantine the faith community. It is the communal manifestation of incurvatus in se. The community has become curved in on itself.

Events or stimuli that highlight the weakness, decay, or vulnerability of the body often activate disgust responses. For example, people often feel disgusted when they encounter the handicapped, the elderly, poor hygiene, body fluids, deformity, corpses, gore (blood or viscera), or animals. Although many of these stimuli are implicated as legitimate disease vectors, there seems to be more going on than a simple adaptive impulse to avoid eating something harmful.

Our body-related disgust is not simply about cleanliness. Rather, disgust seems to be fending off some deeper anxieties and ambivalences, many of which cluster about the body and bodily functions. Something about the body seems improper, illicit, pornographic, degrading, and disgusting.

Consider how many Christians react to the implications of Darwinian evolution. Evolution, by highlighting our connection with animals, is felt to be humiliating and degrading, an attack on human dignity.

Evidence in support of this notion is observed in an interesting exception to disgust responses regarding bodily fluids. Specifically, all bodily fluids, except one, are reliable disgust stimuli. Blood, vomit, urine, semen, sweat, and puss, all are found, generally speaking, to be disgusting. The one exception is the bodily fluid that seems quintessentially human and spiritual: tears.12

Luther had his great insight, this theological thunderbolt, while defecating in the tower privy. In the years to follow, many Lutheran historians worked to “clean up” this image. It seemed scandalous that the great insight of the Protestant faith had occurred during a bowel movement.

As a result, until we fully come to grips with our feelings surrounding the illicit and taboo, we may, in our effort to sanitize our spiritual lives, refuse God full access to the world. We become “too spiritual” and deny the truth of the Incarnation. For if God cannot be at work in the privy, then where else has God been banished? What other dirty, disgusting places are quarantined off from the divine?

In sum, sex is no simple death reminder. The dual nature of sex implies that some aspects of sex are elevating while others are degrading and disgusting. Sex is existentially complicated.

Sex can remind us of our bodies and their associated needs and vulnerabilities. Sex isn’t just “wrong”: there is something “unclean” and often disgusting about the activity. Sex isn’t just “naughty,” it can also be “dirty.”

So it seems clear that profanity and vulgarity are associated with animals (“barnyard speech”), degradation (“gutter speech”), and the scandal of anality (“bathroom speech”). But does profanity function, as we observed in the case of sex, as a mortality reminder? Even if the f-word picks out the body and banishes the spirit, does the f-word remind us of death?