The Eternal Purity Of Heaven
By JAMES MONTI
God created man to be pure of heart; Adam and Eve came forth from the hand of God with pure hearts. And as they first gazed into each other’s eyes with love as the first husband and wife in human history, they did so with pure and chaste souls. It was their subsequent fall that changed everything; for no sooner had they disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit than the sight of each other no longer brought peace, for “they knew that they were naked” (Gen. 3:7).
This did not go unnoticed by Satan; he knew that he now had a mighty weapon for leading souls to Hell, the temptation to lust. Over the ages that followed, lust was to lead countless souls astray, and even entire cities like Sodom and Gomorrah. Even a man as deeply devoted to God as King David succumbed to this sin for a time before being led to a profound and lasting repentance by the prophet Nathan.The perfect purity of soul and body that Adam and Eve originally possessed before the Fall was a reflection of the perfect and infinite and eternal purity of God Himself. So when in the course of time God the Father sent His Son down from Heaven to redeem the world, God the Son was to bring with Him the remedy for man’s concupiscence by His Incarnation and death on the cross. One could say that when our Lord descended to Earth in the Incarnation He carried down to Earth the eternal purity of Heaven.
All the immediate circumstances surrounding the Incarnation proclaim the value that God places upon purity of heart. He chose to come in a totally unique manner as the Son of a perpetual Virgin, as a Son not only conceived virginally but also born virginally, coming forth from His Mother without the opening of her perpetually virginal womb, that enclosed garden forever sealed as having been the inviolate sanctuary of God Incarnate.
Our Lord was to grow to manhood within a home under the headship of the chaste guardian He had foreordained to be the celibate husband of Mary, St. Joseph, a man who had to have already consented to a life of perpetual continence in betrothing Mary even before the Incarnation; for how else could one explain why our Lady asked the Angel Gabriel, “How can this be. . . ?” (Luke 1:34), when he told her that she would conceive and bear a son?
And even though St. Joseph did not share in our Lady’s unique privilege of being conceived without original sin, we can be sure that by virtue of Mary’s incomparable and overwhelming purity and Joseph’s unique holiness and grace as the chosen spouse of such a woman, the two of them could look into each other’s eyes as husband and wife with that pure and chaste peace that Adam and Eve knew before their fall from grace.
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