During the General Audience on 10 December in the Paul VI Hall, the Holy Father gave the following address.

1. The analysis of purity is an indispensable completion of the words spoken by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, on which the cycle of our present reflections is centred. When Christ, explaining the correct meaning of the commandment "You shall not commit adultery", appealed to the interior man, he specified at the same time the fundamental dimension of purity that marks the mutual relations between man and woman both in marriage and outside it. The words: "But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Mt 5:27-28), express what is opposed to purity. At the same time, these words demand the purity which, in the Sermon on the Mount, is included in the list of the beatitudes: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Mt 5:8). In this way Christ makes an appeal to the human heart: he calls upon it, he does not accuse it, as we have already clarified previously.

Ritual ablutions

2. Christ sees in the heart, in man's inner self, the source of purity—but also of moral impurity—in the fundamental and most generic sense of the word. That is confirmed, for example, by the answer given to the Pharisees, who were scandalized by the fact that his disciples "transgress the tradition of the elders. For they do not wash their hands when they eat" (Mt 15: 2). Jesus then said to those present: "Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man" (Mt 15:11). To his disciples, on the other hand, answering Peter's question, he explained these words as follows: "... what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man" (cf. Mt 15:18-20; also Mk 7:20-23).

When we say "purity", "pure", in the first meaning of these words, we indicate what is in contrast with dirty. "To dirty" means "to make filthy", "to pollute". That refers to the various spheres of the physical world. We talk, for example, of a "dirty road", a "dirty room", we talk also of "polluted air". In the same way also man can be "filthy", when his body is not clean. To remove the dirt of the body, it must be washed.

In the Old Testament tradition, great importance was attributed to ritual ablutions, e.g., to wash one's hands before eating, of which the above-mentioned text speaks. Numerous and detailed prescriptions concerned the ablutions of the body in relation to sexual impurity, understood in the exclusively physiological sense, to which we have referred previously (cf. Lev 15). According to the state of the medical science of the time, the various ablutions may have corresponded to hygienic prescriptions. Since they were imposed in God's name and contained in the Sacred Books of the Old Testament legislation, observance of them acquired, indirectly, a religious meaning; they were ritual ablutions and, in the life of the man of the Old Covenant, they served ritual "purity".

Purity in the moral sense

3. In relation to the aforesaid juridico?religious tradition of the Old Covenant, there developed an erroneous way of understanding moral purity (1). It was often taken in the exclusively exterior and "material" sense. In any case, an explicit tendency to this interpretation spread. Christ opposes it radically: nothing "from outside" makes man filthy, no "material" dirt makes man impure in the moral, that is, interior sense. No ablution, not even of a ritual nature, is capable in itself of producing moral purity. This has its exclusive source within man: it comes from the heart.

It is probable that the respective prescriptions in the Old Testament (those, for example, that are found in Leviticus 15:16-24; 18:1 ff., or 12:1-5) served, in addition to hygienic purposes, also to attribute a certain dimension of interiority to what is corporeal and sexual in the human person. In any case Christ took good care not to connect purity in the moral (ethical) sense with physiology and its organic processes.  In the light of the words of Matthew 15:18-20, quoted above, none of the aspects of sexual "dirtiness", in the strictly bodily, biophysiological sense, falls by itself into the definition of purity or impurity in the moral (ethical) sense.

A general concept

4. The aforesaid assertion (Mt 15:18-20) is important above all for semantic reasons. Speaking of purity in the moral sense, that is, of the virtue of purity, we make use of an analogy, according to which moral evil is compared precisely to uncleanness. Certainly this analogy has been a part of the sphere of ethical concepts from the most remote times. Christ takes it up again and confirms it in all its extension: "What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man". Here Christ speaks of all moral evil, of all sin, that is, of transgressions of the various
commandments, and he enumerates "evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander", without confining himself to a specific kind of sin. It follows that the concept of "purity" and "impurity" in the moral sense is in the first place a general concept, not a specific one: so that all moral good is a manifestation of purity, and all moral evil is a manifestation of impurity.

The statement of Matthew 15:18-20 does not limit purity to one area of morality, namely, to the one connected with the commandment "You shall not commit adultery" and "Do not covet your neighbour's wife", that is, to the one that concerns the mutual relations between man and woman, linked to the body and to the relative concupiscence. Similarly we can also understand the beatitude of the Sermon on the Mount, addressed to "the pure in heart", both in the general and in the more specific sense. Only the actual context will make it possible to delimit and clarify this meaning.

The flesh and the Spirit

5. The wider and more general meaning of purity is present also in St Paul's letters, in which we shall gradually pick out the contexts which explicitly limit the meaning of purity to the "bodily" and "sexual" sphere, that is, to that meaning which we can grasp from the words of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount on lust, which is already expressed in "looking at a woman", and is regarded as equivalent to "committing adultery in one's heart" (cf. Mt 5:27-28).

It is not St Paul who is the author of the words about the three forms of lust. They occur, as we know, in the First Letter of John. It can be said, however, that similarly to what is for John (1 Jn 2:16-17) the opposition within man between God and the world (between what comes "from the Father" and what comes "from the world")—an opposition which is born in the heart and penetrates into man's actions as "the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life"—St Paul points out another contradiction in the Christian. It is the opposition and at the same time the tension between the "flesh" and the "Spirit" (written with a capital letter, that is, the Holy Spirit): "But I say, walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would" (Gal 5:16-17). It follows that life "according to the flesh"  is in opposition to life "according to the Spirit". "For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit" (Rom 8:5).

In subsequent analyses we shall seek to show that purity—the purity of heart of which Christ spoke in the Sermon on the Mount—is realized precisely in life "according to the Spirit".

NOTE

1) Alongside a complex system of prescriptions concerning ritual purity, on which legal casuistry was based, there existed, however, in the Old Testament the concept of moral purity. It was handed down by means of two channels.

The Prophets demanded behaviour in conformity with God's will, which presupposes conversion of heart, interior obedience and complete uprightness before Him (cf. for example Is 1:10-20; Jer 4:14; 24:7; Ez 36:25 ff.). A similar attitude is required also by the Psalmist:

"Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord..." / He who has clean hands and a pure heart... / will receive blessing from the Lord" (Ps 24/23:3-5).

According to the priestly tradition, man is aware of his deep sinfulness and, not being able to purify himself by his own power, he beseeches God to bring about this change of heart, which can only be the work of a creative act of His:

"Create in me a clean heart, O God.../ wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow... / a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise" (Ps 51/50:10, 7, 17).

Both Old Testament channels meet in the beatitude of the "pure in heart" (Mt 5:8), even if its verbal formulation seems to be closer to Psalm 24. (Cf. J. Dupont, Les B¾atitudes, vol. III; Les Evang¾listes, Paris 1973, Gabalda, pp. 603-604).