Purity is tied up with the ugly history of Puritanism. Without going into this history, we can try to unbundle the virtues of purity. There’s another aspect to also be careful of that might be tied up with the ugly historical developments. That is the basicness or primitivity of purity in our moral thinking. Recent evolutionary morality traces our moral reasoning to basic instincts or intuitions that are sensitive to notions of purity. The adaptive component is related to disease prevention, but the same mechanism leads to repugnant social norms, like homophobia. In any case, a look at Christian purity as a virtue must be informed by these distractions and traps.

Corruption can be understood as the antithesis of purity. There is a really broad way of looking at purity: anything that is sin. But that is too broad to be useful. Still, we can make some broad observations before diving into a more focused look into specific topics. C.S. Lewis locates all sin as originating in pride. Applied to purity, pride is a corruption of purity. We might look to the allegory of the Garden of Eden. It was a pure state that was corrupted by the sin of pride of disobedience and self-reliance on knowledge independent of God. The impurity of sin is introduced. Something went wrong and there is no longer perfection. This impurity distances us from the pureness of God’s nature.

How do these abstract stories and conceptualizations relate to the virtue of pureness? Purity is aspirational in that it seeks to return to a sinless state. To this end, the virtues of purity are associated with an increased sensitivity to sin and a striving to eliminate it entirely. Sin takes diverse forms, so, large or small, this virtue aims to capture it all. It strives for a perspective matching God’s nature that is incongruent with sin; it is the Archimedean point from assessing the entirety of actions and our spiritual self; it is an unconditional commitment that gives meaning to every step in our life and continually strives to inch closer to God.

I want to move now to specific topics, with no particular regard for importance other than that it relates to my own struggles and the struggles of modernity. To begin, let’s focus on a manifestation of pride in psychological terms: narcissism. Narcissism is so common in the technological era of being bombarded with grand narratives and main character syndromes, the constant reminder of inadequacy and comparisons leading to envy, and the self-absorbed naval gazing that results.

I want to suggest that this is a particularly devastating problem for our ages. In the age of technology and instant gratification, we have an issue with wanting a thrill, lusting after that dopamine hit. We cannot stay still with our own thoughts. We need to be a part of the constant stream of the technological network and be a part of that community. Missing out, or the fear of missing out leaves us gnawing to get back.

The gnawing feeling can be thought of as an addiction, but we can simply understand it in terms of gluttony. We have an informational gluttony for constant updates. Every desire to take away our internal monologue can be satisfied by picking up the phone. We are fed a constant stream of other thoughts and information which takes us away from our own. The escapism from whatever plagues us, whatever our mind urges us to tend to, and the real issues confronting us are taken away by the ether of our technology.

What is the remedy? We have to correct our desires and control our thoughts. We have to shape our will to develop the ability to desire correctly. Simply put, we need the habit of focusing on the silence instead of the buzz of technology. The difficulty in this is that there is no person to be accountable to, and transparency in our actions is hard to come by in the privacy of our relationship with technology.