Christianity and Self-Love

I would like to respond to a concern that some people have regarding the Christian worldview.  Let me first try to articulate the concern:

Christianity is harmful to a healthy, positive self-image and self-esteem.  It tells us that God is everything and that we are nothing.  We are mere worms in comparison to God.  It tells us that we are all fallen sinners, that God is angry with us and always judging us, that we are so bad we deserve to go to hell for all eternity.  It tells us we are never good enough, that we can never be enough ourselves.  This attitude leads to an unhealthy, negative self-image that harms mental health and keeps people from seeing their true value.  It leads them to despair and depression.  It leads them to see themselves as ugly, as deserving of all the bad things that happen to them.  This hinders people from having the self-love that gives them what they need to be the best they can be.  It causes them to be endlessly introspective and self-doubting, and to feel endlessly and hopelessly defeated.  People with this attitude will be miserable with self-loathing, fearful, and inclined to accept abusive situations, believing they deserve what they get.  What we need instead is to be told that we are enough, that we do have what it takes, that we are doing great, that we are beautiful and valuable and worthy, that we don't have to put up with bad situations in our life because we deserve better.  We need to love ourselves and relax, feeling confident, freed from our neuroses of self-doubt, so we can live our life to the fullest and make the world a better place.

Going along with this, Christianity teaches people to be ashamed of central aspects of their humanity.  It encourages a sense of shame with regard to the body and human sexuality, for example.  It encourages people to see their physicality and their sexuality as shameful, harmful things that must be guarded against, that make them bad people.  Instead, we need to encourage body-positivity and sex-positivity.  We need people to feel, not shame, but pride for their bodies and for their feelings and their nature as human beings.

I want to respond to this concern with a two-pronged response.  I want to acknowledge, first of all, that there is a good deal of legitimacy and validity in the concern.  There is a true need to emphasize a positive attitude towards the self and towards human nature.  And it is true that Christianity has often been presented in a way that harms this positivity and encourages self-loathing, a constant sense of shame, and neurotic attitudes towards self, body, sexuality, etc.  But then I want to go on to claim that Christianity, rightly understood, actually promotes a very positive view of the self, and yet it also teaches that these truths about "positivity" need to be balanced with other truths about humanity and the human condition that rightly encourage within us a proper humility, a recognition of our creaturely finitude, our need for grace, etc.  Christianity, taught in a balanced and full-orbed way, captures both of these sides of the human condition in a way that tells us the full truth about ourselves and gives us the tools we need to understand who we are so we can live most effectively.

Humility and Affirmation

In the Christian view of human nature, both the "positivity" and the "humility" strands run through everything.

There is one God, one Supreme Being, who is the fullness and source of all reality.  God is the Creator of the finite universe.  There is a fundamental dichotomy at the heart of reality - there is the Creator, and there are creatures.  We human beings are creatures.  God is infinite being - unbounded, all-encompassing.  He is infinitely superior in being to all creatures.  Creatures are nothing in comparison to him.  A good way to get at this is to look at the difference between the divine and the creaturely point of view.  God's point of view is all-encompassing.  He sees all in one view.  His conscious experience includes reality as a whole.  Because of this, his consciousness transcends space and time.  On the other hand, as finite beings, our view and experience constitute a mere infinitesimal point in a universe that extends out from us with potential infinity in all directions of space and time.  We see/experience only from one limited vantage point among an infinite number of other possible vantage points.  We are bound within space and time.  God's consciousness and experience constitute the true, ultimate reality, while ours is nothing but an infinitesimal sliver of reality - and our sliver is derived from his fullness.  God is thus the center of reality, and we are infinitely far from it.

Tbis is a realization, of course, that leads to deep humility.  What Christianity teaches here has been recognized by many human philosophies and religions to varying degrees.  One great example is Buddhism.  The enlightenment of the Buddha came precisely when he recognized that it is an illusion to think of this world, or even of our own selves, as if they are a true, ultimate, substantial reality.  Buddhism goes so far as to view the world as an illusion.  "There is no self" is one of the key ideas of Buddhist philosophy.  As a Christian, I recognize that Buddhism is perceiving the very same thing that I perceive - the utter distance between ultimate, substantial reality and this comparative nothingness we tend to think of as reality.  (Christianity does not tend to refer to the world as an illusion, because, despite its finitude, it does exist in its own sphere - something I think Buddhism would not deny, though they would put it in other terms - but we agree with the truth that this language is pointing to - that, compared to Ultimate Reality, this world is nothing, and to treat it as ultimately substantial is to seek fullness in nothingness and therefore to be utterly miserable.)  Hinduism is another religion that recognizes these realities, as do all religions and philosophies, at least to a degree, that hold to a supreme state of reality beyond this one.

It is here that I would bring into the picture the Christian view of humanity as "fallen".  According to the Christian worldview, our first parents, who were created in a right relationship with God, turned away from that relationship in an effort to declare independence.  They wanted to be their own ultimate principle instead of trusting in God to fill that role.  But God is the fullness and source of all being, goodness, life, power, wisdom, knowledge, and happiness.  To declare independence from God, then, is to plunge oneself into a condition of emptiness, evil, death, weakness, foolishness, ignorance, and misery.  This is what our first parents brought upon themselves, and this condition has been passed on to the whole human race.  We are not blamed for what our first parents did, but we inherit the consequences - cut off from the life of God and experiencing the condition of alienation from him.  This is what Christians mean by speaking of humanity as being in a "fallen" state.  But we should not think that there is any injustice done to us in this situation.  We would have done the same thing had we been in the situation of our first parents, for we, like them, have nothing in our nature that, without God's special gift to us of his own divine life, would keep us from falling away from God.  We fall together as a human race because we all share the same fundamental nature and condition.  The final conclusion of the narrative begun by the Fall is the condition Christians call "hell".  Hell is nothing other than complete alienation from God and all that that entails.  That is the destiny of all of us, and justly and naturally so, unless God chooses to give to us something we cannot deserve - the gift of his divine life.  And that is the gospel - that God has come into the world in Jesus Christ and united himself to our fallen human nature, absorbing our weaknesses, sins, death, and misery, so that he can share with us the power, goodness, and ultimate blessedness and happiness of his divine life.  From him, and not from ourselves, we receive all that we need.

According to Christianity, this is who we really are.  We may react positively or negatively to this account of things.  But I think the first question should not be whether we find this view of things attractive or repulsive, but whether or not it is actually true.  Reality is reality whether we like it or not, and we have a duty to accept it as such.  That is yet another thing true humility teaches us.  Now, I believe that the Christian worldview is ultimately one of supreme beauty once we see it fully for what it is; but if we are used to thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought, it can seem very bitter at first.  It is like the sabra fruit of Israel - prickly and off-putting on the outside, sweet and delightful on the inside.

Now, having addressed the humility required of us as creatures, let's address the other side of the equation - the side of "positivity."

We are creatures of God.  All that we are is derived from God.  And God is the fullness of all that is good, beautiful, and valuable.  Therefore we, too, in our intrinsic nature, are good, beautiful, and valuable, and we should see ourselves as such.  Yes, unlike God, our being comes to us from without.  We cannot be enough on our own.  But we are not on our own.  We are never on our own.  To the extent that we exist, we are like God.  We reflect the divine beauty.  Love of God entails love of creatures and love of ourselves - for our existence is a participation in God's.  In a sense, I can say that I am nothing and God is everything, and this is a central and crucial truth.  And yet, at the same time, I can say that because God is everything, I am something too, and that is also a central and crucial truth.

Yes, I am nothing without God.  But God has created me, and so I am not nothing.  Yes, without God's grace in Christ, I am a sinner bound for hell.  But I am not without God's grace in Christ.  He has come into the world to give grace to us all.  "Grace" is nothing other than the gift of the divine life.  So what we are given through the redemption of Christ is the gift of sharing truly in the beauty and glory of that life.  This is true even in this current life we live, and it will be infinitely more true when we grow up into the fullness of our redemption and come to partake fully in the glory of God.  This is our destiny.  No, it is not something we have of ourselves apart from God.  But we are not apart from God.  In God, we are legitimate heirs of infinite glory and beauty.  This, also, is who we truly are, and we should see ourselves accordingly.  (We do have free will.  If we choose to reject the divine life offered to us, we are still valued and loved beings participating in God's life, but we will have cut ourselves off from the eternal fruition of this reality and sentenced ourselves to lose it all in the end.  But if we receive what God offers us, we will grow up fully into the glorious identity God has planned for us.)  In the words of C.S. Lewis:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory [HarperOne, 2001], 45-46).

We must recognize that we are creatures and not God - but having recognized that, we should value ourselves as icons of the divine.  We should have great and humble self-love, positivity, and self-esteem.  If we recognize who we really are, we should know that we are enough, by the gift and grace of God.  And we should bask and delight in our beauty and value and in the beauty and value of all our fellow creatures.

A More Balanced Christian View

OK, so having laid this foundation, let's tie up some loose ends.  There are better and worse ways of living out Christianity, just as there are better and worse ways of living out any religion or philosophy.  And Christians haven't always lived and taught in ways that have encouraged the best that Christianity can be.  Let's address some of these areas.

Shame - We should not have an attitude towards ourselves centrally characterized by shame.  Yet there are things it is proper to be ashamed of.  When we fail to live in love towards God, our neighbors, or ourselves, that is something we should not view positively.  And yet these failures don't characterize us.  We are not perfect, but if, by God's grace, we are choosing to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be, even if there are areas where we are not that great at it yet, then our lives are characterized fundamentally not by shame but by beauty.  If we are trying to be good people in this world, that is something we should be proud of!  Sure, it is a gift of grace.  We could not do it on our own.  But that doesn't make it any less ours.  Christianity, rightly applied, encourages a kind of paradoxical "humble pride."  We do not see ourselves as superior to everyone else or as existing independently.  And yet, recognizing our limits and our dependence on God and others, we see the beauty of what God is making out of our lives and we are proud to be that sort of person!  Catholic theology has always emphasized (against those who would advocate an overly pessimistic view of human nature and goodness) that while our merits are pure grace, yet they are, at the same time, our merits.  With God's help, we are not shameful but beautiful beings.  Our sins, failures, mistakes, and weaknesses are things we struggle with, but they do not fundamentally define us.  It is true that Christians have sometimes failed to keep this balance.  But Christianity, properly defined, teaches us to do so.

Scrupulosity - It is true that many Christians live a life full of what Catholics call "scrupulosity" - a neurotic, obsessive focus on fearing to do the wrong thing, feeling guilty, feeling ashamed, wondering if we are in a right relationship with God or if God is angry with us, feeling useless, ugly, and defeated.  There is a sense in which Christianity, as such, can even be "blamed" for this tendency.  Christianity teaches us to take goodness very seriously, and whenever we take something seriously some of us are going to be prone to excessive introspection, obsessive doubt, a sense of shame and despair for failures, etc.  I would say that this is one of many examples of a case where a true and good thing naturally brings along with it unique, specific dangers.  (For another example, notice that conflicts and wars happen because people care about things.  A society full of completely apathetic people who value nothing would never fight, but would that be a good thing?  It is better to care and therefore to have to take extra precaution to control our immoderate tendency towards conflict.)  But Christianity does not truly recommend this excessive scrupulosity.  In fact, the Catholic tradition warns us away from it, giving it a label ("scrupulosity") and addressing it explicitly as a problem for our spiritual lives.  God is not following us around, looking for minor infractions so that he can zap us!  Remember, as God's creatures, we bear his image and divine beauty.  He loves and delights in us.  He wants to give us good gifts and make us happy, and to help us in every way.  He is looking out for our good.  As I said earlier, we do have free will, and we can fundamentally reject him and turn away from him and persist in this to the end of our lives.  But if we do so, we have to do it "against the wind," as it were, of all of God's pleadings, warnings, encouragements, helps, graces, and opportunities to turn around.  And if we do choose, fundamentally, to pursue the path of goodness, that is what matters in the end.  Sure, we are not perfect, but our imperfections do not characterize us.  God does not look on us with shame and disgust, but with love and delight.  If we don't do something perfectly, if we mess something up - well, we recognize the fact, acknowledge it, ask for forgiveness if necessary, try to fix our mistakes, and move on.  We do not, we should not, continue to dwell on our mistakes.  This is something many Catholics find delightful about the Sacrament of Confession.  If you've committed a sin, you don't go into despair and fear.  You go to Confession, admit your mistake, receive forgiveness, and leave it behind.  All God asks of us is that we pursue goodness.  Sure, that takes effort and diligence.  But obsessiveness does not further our goal but rather hinders it, for it stops us from seeing clearly and objectively.  Rather, we should approach our pursuit of goodness and efforts towards personal growth and improvement with common sense.  Don't be lazy and apathetic about doing the right thing, but don't be neurotic and obsessive either.  (And, of course, if you struggle with neurosis, or scrupulosity, or any other such thing, don't obsess about that either!  It's not something to feel shame over.  These things are a part of our human condition in this life.  We do the best we can in our own particular circumstances.  None of us, in this life, have arrived at our destination.  We're on the journey, struggling with our own peculiar trials and difficulties.  There's nothing wrong with that - it's the way it should be.  We should give ourselves a break, and make sure to give each other a break as well!)

I addressed the problem of scrupulosity in an earlier article, and I'd like to copy here some of what I said there:

As Aristotle famously pointed out, a lot of times error and vice are found in the extremes, and virtue is found in the mean between the extremes.  One set of extremes that is often a pitfall for those seeking to live a holy life involves, one the one hand, laziness and carelessness with regard to sin and bad habits, and, on the other hand, an excessive fear, obsession, or even paranoia about these things.  Those inclined towards the former extreme need to be reminded that sin is a serious matter.  The fundamental nature of sin is opposition to God and the moral law, and this attitude is the essence of all wickedness and the fount of all misery (because God is the Supreme Good).  We need to take God with the utmost seriousness, and therefore sin needs to be our mortal enemy.  This is why the Bible is always telling us to "fear" God--that is, to have a proper recognition of the gravity of who God is and to fear being against him as the greatest of all calamities.  To be righteous is to love God above all things, so our ultimate goal in life should be to please him and enjoy him perfectly and eliminate all sin and all tendencies to wickedness in our life.  The more virtuous a person becomes, the less such a person will come to tolerate even venial sin, for the clearer our vision is of the greatness and beauty of God, the more repulsive all sin will seem to us.  This should be the chief aim of our entire life.

But the other extreme--obsessive fear and obsession about sin--can also be a serious problem, especially for those particularly inclined towards it.  Such people need to be reminded that what really matters is the fundamental choice of our life--are we choosing God as our chief good, or are we ejecting him out of that place in order to put something else there?  Is God the one we choose above all else?  This is not a matter of feelings or the strength of feelings, but of the will.  What do we choose to put supreme value on?  If we choose to follow God as our chief goal, and we orient our lives towards seeking him as our greatest value and ultimate end, then we can be sure that we are in a right relationship with him, a state of grace, and everything will come out fundamentally right in the end.  The only thing that can put us out of the reach of God's salvation is mortal sin--and mortal sin doesn't mean all sin; it doesn't even mean all serious sin (objectively speaking).  Mortal sin involves a deliberate, fully-informed, fully-aware, intentional choice to adopt an attitude or pursue a course of action which involves rejecting God as our supreme value and end in life, choosing instead to break from him fundamentally and go our own way.  Mortal sin is defined by being incompatible with "charity"--that is, with supreme love to God as the choice of our will.  Mortal sin is not the ways in which we regularly slip up and act inconsistently with our chief goal, the bad habits we have that tend to draw us into foolish and sinful actions, the difficulties we face in developing virtuous habits, how many times we tend to slide back into sinful tendencies, etc.  These are all natural and ordinary parts of life in a state of grace as we pursue holiness in this fallen world.  When we understand this, it will help us to relax a bit, to let go of obsessive fear.  We will remember that "there is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear: because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love" (1 John 4:18).  To "fear" God in the biblical sense is not to be obsessively afraid of him, but to recognize his supreme value and importance and therefore to take holiness with the utmost seriousness.  If we love God, and trust God, we need not live in obsessive fear, but can rest confidently in the help of his grace as we grow in holiness.  If we fall into sin from time to time, well, that is to be expected of fallen creatures struggling to be holy.  The Council of Trent actually condemns as false doctrine the idea that people can avoid all sins throughout their entire life.  "If any one saith . . . that he is able, during his whole life, to avoid all sins, even those that are venial,-except by a special privilege from God, as the Church holds in regard of the Blessed Virgin; let him be anathema" (Sixth Session, Canon 23).  When we sin, we don't need to dwell on it.  We can learn what we need to learn from it, get back up, repent, go to confession if appropriate, and then move on--like a gymnast who doesn't fall into despair every time she falls onto the mat, but just keeps getting back up and resuming her practice.  (In fact, overly obsessing about sin often has the effect of making it worse rather than better.  There's hardly a better way to ensure that something will have a strong presence in one's mind than to continually be worrying about how strong a presence it has.)

Another practical tip to make our path to holiness smoother is to recognize the difference between concupiscence and sin.  Concupiscence is the Catholic theological term for our fallen, disordered desires that have a tendency to lead us into sin.  But concupiscence, while it tends towards sin, is not itself personal sin.  Acts of sin involve the consent of the will.  Insofar as our desires happen to us without such consent, they are not sin.  So stop feeling guilty for having such desires.  You can't just banish them away with some strong act of the will.  We will all struggle against concupiscence throughout our entire lives, for that struggle is the pathway to holiness.  Holiness isn't only about avoiding sinful acts of will; it is also about developing virtuous habits and unlearning vicious (that is, un-virtuous) ones.  We are trying to learn not only to avoid individual sinful acts of will in particular cases, but also to develop habits such that we will become more and more naturally inclined towards virtuous attitudes and actions in general and away from vicious or sinful ones.  So even when you are avoiding particular acts of sin, you will still have plenty to work on in terms of building habits of virtue.  Don't be paranoid about that, but just go forward, like the gymnast I mentioned in the previous paragraph.  Keep practicing.  Don't worry if you mess up, or you haven't got a particular skill down yet very well.  Just keep going forward.  You'll keep getting better (but don't get paranoid about your rate of progress!).  You won't get fully where you want to be until after this life, though, so don't be impatient.  Be diligent, but also be tolerant of yourself and where you are.

Just briefly, before moving on, I want to mention for the sake of non-Christian readers that, in the Catholic view, being in a right relationship with God is not a matter of passing a theology exam.  It is about the fundamental orientation of our will towards the Supreme Good.  A person can have proper theology but be, in spirit, very far from God and even against him, while another person might have very bad (from the Catholic point of view) theology and yet, in spirit, in terms of the orientation of the will, that person might be very close to God and in a right relationship with him.  This is not to say that correct doctrine is not important.  It is just to say that there is a complex interplay in our lives between the intellectual, volitional, emotional, and spiritual components of our souls.  God is the Supreme Good, but the Catholic Church recognizes (see, for example, Lumen Gentium #16) that people are in different places in terms of how well (from a Catholic point of view) they consciously realize or can articulate this reality.  It is the orientation of the will towards the Good, as that is understood with greater or lesser clarity, that is of central importance in terms of a person's moral character.

The Body and Sex

Now let's look a bit at the Christian view of the body and sex.

Body Positivity - Remember, we are creatures of God.  Our bodies come from God as well.  Therefore they are intrinsically good.  They are to be celebrated and delighted in!  We should not be ashamed of our bodies.  We can recognize their weaknesses and oddities in an affectionate way (we remember St. Francis, who called his body "Brother Ass"), but we should acknowledge the body's intrinsic goodness and beauty.  And that means all bodies.  Our culture tends to put forward such unrealistic standards of beauty, and so many people are ashamed of their bodies because they don't match up with these standards.  But it's all fake.  Real human bodies come in lots of shapes and sizes.  They all have their unique beauty.  Just as each of us should celebrate the uniqueness of our individual personalities (quirkiness and all!), so each of us should celebrate the uniqueness of our individual bodies.

In some circles, body positivity is expressed in an openness to public nudity.  The Christian virtue of modesty is sometimes characterized as a kind of shameful embarrassment we are supposed to feel towards our bodies, and that is why we are supposed to keep them covered up.  And it must be said that, particularly in some circles, Christians have sometimes twisted modesty into this kind of attitude of shame.  But this is not what Christianity, properly understood, truly points us to.  Modesty is about recognizing and valuing the dignity of a human person as a human person.  The body is not to be treated as an object for another's use or personal pleasure, detached from respect for the entire person.  Before the Fall, humanity is portrayed in Scripture as naked.  This is because, in that unfallen condition, when the grace of God was still ruling human attitudes and behavior, the human body could be expressed in all its beauty without being reduced to an impersonal object (objectified).  After the Fall, the parts of the body most prone to abuse and objectification should ordinarily be covered as an expression of respect for the dignity of the body and for the safeguarding of that dignity - just as a person's private thoughts should ordinarily not be expressed entirely without any guard, as that also tends to lead to abuse and objectification.  The body is so worthy of value and respect that it should not be promiscuously exposed without guard in a fallen world.  That is the moral reason for clothing - not because the body is shameful, but actually quite the opposite!  There are particular circumstances, however, where nudity can be appropriate - when there is a situation established where the body can be seen with a proper understanding of its dignity as part of a person who deserves our respect as a person.  In marriage, for example, assuming the marriage relationship is healthy, there is a mutual giving and sharing of selves in a uniquely deep and profound way, and that involves the sharing of bodies.  That sharing is recognized as the gift of something of great dignity and value and is received in that attitude, and the body is not divorced from the person and made an object for another person's personal use or pleasure.  There is a special relationship of trust established there.  Another context would be the arts, when they are governed by proper values - where the body is appreciated in an artistic fashion and there is a recognition of its dignity and value and its context as part of a whole person, where objectification is absent by agreed consent and understanding.  In the Catholic view, then, nudity is normally avoided but occasionally allowed, not because the body is shameful, but precisely because it is recognized as something that deserves special protection and respect.

Sex Positivity - Some people believe that the Christian view of sex is that it is a bad thing, or at least a shameful and negative thing, and that is why there are so many sexual taboos in Christian teaching.  But, as with the body, the truth is very different.  However, it is true that many Christians have indeed twisted Christian teaching into this kind of overly-negative attitude, and that has done a lot of harm.  As with the body, sex is part of God's creation from the beginning and is essentially good.  In the Catholic view, sex was created by God for the enjoyment and bonding of spouses and for the procreation of children.

Everything I said above about scrupulosity applies here in particular.  It is true that Christians, at some times and places in history, have tended to promote or model a kind of morbid, overly introspective and obsessive, and fearful attitude towards sex.  Sex is a powerful thing.  It is easy for human beings to become enslaved to sexual desires or to fall into immoderate and overly-indulgent sexual habits.  Aware of this, Christians have often approached sex with great wariness, warning of the dangers that accompany sex.  As I said above, when people take something very seriously or are acutely aware of its dangers, an inevitable side effect is that some, at least, will tend to fall into an overly scrupulous attitude.  Such an imbalanced attitude has definitely been a real issue at various times and places in Christian history.  And yet the Church has never fundamentally lost sight of the essential goodness of sex.  She even recognizes marriage (with its ordinarily essential component of sexuality) as one of the seven sacraments - a high status that is pretty hard to beat!  A well-adjusted Christian moral approach, true to a balanced appreciation of the whole of the Christian worldview, opposes scrupulosity in sexual matters as much as it does in any other matter.  As in all things, so in sex:  We must guard against the extreme of over-indulgence and moral laziness on the one hand, and the extreme of obsessive fear and "puritanism" (in the worst sense, unfair to historic Puritans by the way!) on the other.

For example, I mentioned above that Catholic moral teaching cautions against a promiscuous public nudity that does not adequately guard the precious gift of the human body.  OK, there is a value here that needs to be protected, from the Catholic view.  We do well to challenge forms of "naturism" that would make public nudity a near-universal and unguarded norm.  However, we do not need to go to the other extreme of being obsessive or fearful about nudity.  Obsessive fear of something is not only an imbalanced attitude in itself, but it actually tends to strengthen the very thing it is fearful of!  There's hardly a better way to ensure that something will have a strong presence in one's mind than to continually be worrying about how strong a presence it has.  We need to avoid a kind of over-mystification of the nude human body that is a result of an obsessive attitude towards nudity and sex.  There is a kind of "taboo" mentality we can fall into.  We need to remember that, in a sense, nudity is really not a big deal!  What I mean is that we all know what the human body looks like.  Why, then, put so much mystique into seeing it like it's some astonishing or fearful thing?  Why do we need to be so obsessively fearful of being naked?  Why do we need to feel like we've been polluted or damaged somehow if we should see nudity?  Making such a big deal out of nudity actually tends to inflame immoderate desire  We all know that there is hardly anything more appealing to our human nature than something that has been forbidden to us and that has been placed in the special category of "taboo" and "off limits."  Pandora just had to open her box.  If we are going to follow Christian moral teaching more holistically, we need a more balanced attitude.  The human body is not some mysterious and forbidden object.  Experiencing nudity is not, in itself, a big deal.  Modesty in clothing is not the upholding of a "taboo" but merely a practice that is born of an attempt to protect something that is of great dignity and value that we don't want to be treated less respectfully than it deserves to be treated.  The naturist movement and the body-positivity movement have done a great service in challenging the "taboo" approach to nudity and encouraging a more healthy and less neurotic acceptance of our physical nature.

We can say the same thing about sex.  It should not be approached as if we are in the realm of some mysterious and forbidden taboo subject.  It should be approached with openness and realism and accepted as a normal part of human life.  It does have to be protected, because it exists for a particular purpose and belongs in a particular context and should not be taken out of that context.  In the Catholic view, sex is for spousal enjoyment and bonding and for procreation.  If it's used outside of that context, it's misused.  So we need to preserve the ethical use of sex, but there is no need for this to lead us to an obsessive attitude towards it.  Again, the more "sexually liberal" components of our modern society deserve our gratitude for challenging the unhealthy neuroticism about sex that, unfortunately, has been common in a lot of "conservative" and Christian circles in recent times.

Another concern/objection some people will have which I should deal with while we're on the subject is that there is an inherent problem with the actual Catholic teaching with regard to sex, even interpreted in the best and most balanced way possible, because it still forbids sex outside of the marriage of a man and a woman.  The concern is that this is contrary to basic human nature which is "designed" to allow sex to happen in a broader context.  Since the Christian position is out of accord with human nature, it naturally leads to frustration, guilt, despair, and mental health issues.  This is a big topic, and I can't do it justice in this brief context.  I will say two things, though, for now:

1. The first question we have to ask when we come across any idea, whether we like it or not, is Is this idea really true or not?  Just because something is very hard for us, contrary to our deep desires, and leads to all sorts of practical problems, that doesn't in itself necessarily prove that it is not real.  Reality has no obligation to make things easy for us, and, as we all know, it all too often cashes in on that lack of obligation.  In the Christian view, we live in a fallen world and are in a fallen state.  Instead of being the harmonious and peaceful world God made in the beginning, the world is now chaotic and divided.  Everything is at odds with everything else.  Unfortunately, it is often the case that ethics is in conflict with the tendencies of human nature.  That's why ethics is notoriously hard.  We are all often called to do very difficult and painful things.  Some of us are called to extreme forms of this - like being ethically bound to stand up for justice even to the point of enduring the physical or psychological torture of persecutors.  Some are called to be martyrs.  In this fallen state of the world, our desires are often at odds (and deeply and seriously so) with the values we should seek and how we should live.  This is a very unfortunate state of affairs, but does that prove it is not the actual state of affairs?  Personally, I find the evidence for the truth of Catholic Christianity compelling, and that gives me a reason to embrace Catholic moral teaching.  As much as I empathize with those who feel the weight of difficulty Catholic moral teaching can bring sometimes - and as much as I myself often feel that burden personally in various ways - I do not find in this a convincing argument against the truth of the Catholic worldview.  So I must follow where I think the evidence leads, as we all must.

2. Sometimes, we simply can't do it.  There are those who break down - physically, mentally, emotionally - under the weight of what happens to them in life, whether that comes to them unavoidably or through their own choice to do the right thing.  This is not a failure; it is simply a reality.  We are only expected to do the best we can.  But, oftentimes, we find that we are more resilient than we previously thought.  People can find ways to survive and even thrive under seriously adverse circumstances and while pursuing extremely difficult and painful courses of action.  Perhaps sometimes we paint certain conditions as impossible when they are not always so.  Once we accept reality and decide to learn how to live within it, sometimes - sometimes - we find that things are brighter than we thought they could be.  Sometimes there are compensations for our pain that we didn't anticipate.  This also is something important to bear in mind.

As I mentioned earlier, Christianity can sometimes be like the sabra fruit.  It can be very, very prickly on the outside, but it is full of great sweetness on the inside.  Following Christian morality can be very hard.  But it also brings with it much reward in this life.  And, at the end of our lives, when we finish the race, Christianity tells us that we shall reap a fruit that is beautiful, glorious, and satisfying beyond our wildest ability to imagine.  If we follow the Good, we will reap it in full in the end.  We will find God, the fullness and source of all Being and all Good, and in him all creaturely goods fulfilled and summed up and embraced.  Once again, I find myself wanting to quote C.S. Lewis:

Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity [New York: Touchstone, 1996], 190-191).

There is that fundamental paradox again.  Because of who we are and who God is, the only way to truly find and affirm ourselves is to give up our lives conceived of as our own apart from God, to give ourselves wholly to God, and to find ourselves restored and grounded in him.  But at any rate, this topic moves us into fundamental questions about the nature of reality and therefore goes beyond the scope of what can be done in this article.  However, whether we agree with Christian sexual morality or not - understood in its best form - we can at least distinguish it from the obsessive, scrupulous, fearful attitude that has often been associated with it but which is actually contrary to its best practice.

For more on the topics of sex and the human body, I will refer you to Pope St. John Paul II's famous Theology of the Body, which sums up modern Catholic moral teaching in these areas to a great degree.  You can read a (very) long summary of John Paul's teaching here (it's summarizing a very long collection of lectures given over a series of five years by the Pope).  Despairing of finding a reasonably short summary of the teaching, I once again took up exploring the potentialities of AI (ChatGPT) and asked it to summarize the Pope's teaching overall and in a few specific areas.  I think it did a pretty good job, though it didn't capture every aspect or every nuance.  You can read those (much shorter) summaries here.  And here is an article I wrote up on this subject a couple of years ago.  You can also read more from the Catechism of the Catholic Church on this topic here.

Conclusion

In conclusion, then, Christian morality, rightly understood and in its best form, promotes a nuanced view of the self and of human nature.  It critiques both those who would idolize the self and those who would denigrate it.  It challenges those who believe we are good enough by ourselves without God's grace and also those who would say we are not good enough even with God's grace.  It warns us against licentiousness and moral laziness, but also cautions us against excessive scrupulosity.  It promotes a positive and celebratory view of the human body and sex but also reminds us to be wary of how both of these can be abused without proper protections and safeguards.