for the sake of the body, that he sings of love for the sake of love? No. He sings of the body and the soul: the soul through the body; the body as the provisional vestment of the soul. And when he sings of love, even of ardent passion, though his thought may turn, like that of any Latin, to the intensity of a moment’s joy, he thinks of the man as husband and father, and of the woman as wife and mother. And in the background of the future he sees the numberless generations of their progeny.
There are those—and Catholicism has known many of them—who refrain from bodily sin, but are tempted and tormented and yield to sin within the life of thought. They are pure in the flesh and impure in the spirit. They defile the life of the spirit. There are others, like Whitman, who live fully and healthily the life of the body without pretense and without asceticism, and thus succeed in giving a spiritual quality even to bodily life. Such men are far nobler than the others. I would set the life of the spirit before all else; but for this very reason I would not have that life too full of scruples, of fears, of subterfuges, with regard to the life of the body. The life of the body is secondary; it must be purified by a purpose which is not corporeal. But it cannot be annihilated, and in consequence it must not be cursed and it must not be hidden. Walt Whitman was the first man who had the daring
