In the ancient world, the pseudo sciences of alchemy, astrology and magic prevailed in backgrounds of secrecy and darkness. To produce the magical elixir that transforms base metal into gold or to read the constellations to foretell the future were suspicious activities associated with criminal or underground operations—fraud in some covert form, a type of “forbidden” pleasure. They were unnatural, immoral and dangerous pursuits. Whereas mining and minting gold were legitimate pursuits of honest labor and astronomy was a bona fide science based on nature’s laws, alchemy attempted to hide the distinction between real gold and base metal and astrology confounded the distinction between the scientific knowledge of nature’s laws and the dark secrets of hidden magic. These pseudo sciences belonged to the category of the “forbidden” that man must not trespass lest he imagine himself God and endanger his soul. Despite man’s natural desire to know, moral law and human conscience warned against the sin of curiosity, the sin that tempted Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge and experience firsthand the sordidness of evil. Unlike the virtue of studiosity that seeks with temperance the truth knowable to human reason, forbidden knowledge pursues secrets through curiosity, the disordered quest for knowledge with no limits. The forbidden fruits of pleasure always bring tragedy and suffering, not the happiness they promise. Not all areas of knowledge or experience were intended for human exploration because of their “forbidden” or deadly potential.
Modernity, however, has eradicated this natural boundary by ripping the veil that protects man from all the dangers of the forbidden that lead to the loss of a sense of the sacred. God, marriage, family, children—all embodiments of the sacred—have all been desecrated and made profane, emptied of their divine content. One of the most ancient moral categories that distinguishes between good and evil, the sacred and the profane separate the city of God from the city of man. To step into a temple or church is to cross a threshold and enter into a sacred space separate from the secular world. Likewise, to enter into one’s home, another kind of inner sanctum, also marks a separation between the sanctity of the household and the vulgarity of the mundane. This intuitive sense of the holy creates a universal awareness of the reality of the sacred as an essential dimension of human experience. The distinction between the spiritual and the worldly evokes a sense of awe at the transcendence of a supernatural reality that is otherworldly and separate from the natural world and human society. The moral sense honors the holy with prayer, sacrifices, and worship and acknowledges the mystery of the inviolable. The Holy of Holies deserves to be hidden, veiled, and safeguarded from the impure or unqualified. Yet nothing in the modern world remains veiled in modesty or cherished for its inviolable purity, whether it is God’s commandments, the sanctity of nuptial love, the dignity of persons, the innocence of children, or the miracle of life. Divine law turns into religious opinion, the marital bond an arbitrary arrangement, human beings disposable material, children into sexualized beings, and the child in the womb as fetal tissue.
The distinction between sacred and profane and human and forbidden knowledge classifies pleasures into rational enjoyments, carnal pleasures, and forbidden fruit. All rational enjoyments possess a moral dimension that accords with the dignity of a human being; all carnal pleasures like lust, gluttony, and avarice reduce and dehumanize man by robbing the experience of its spiritual aspect; all forbidden pleasures blur the distinction between the moral and immoral—what God allows and what God prohibits by divine law. All forbidden pleasures elicit the vice of curiosity, an unnatural fascination with the perverse, the diabolical, or the glamour of evil. Wherever holiness is violated or divinity loses its reverence, the worship of the body, the cult of pleasure, or the cry for absolute freedom compete with the holiness of religion and the sacredness of the divine law. The vice of curiosity rips the veil from mystery of the pure and plunges the mind into destructive pleasures. Secular sex education programs thrust the innocent and the pure into the maelstrom of sexual vice and all its tragic sufferings and transmitted diseases in the name of “knowledge” or “health.”
Where Christianity teaches the sacredness of life and the inviolability of the dignity of the person, the cult of the forbidden attacks, violates, and dishonors human life in contraception, abortion, and euthanasia. Where Christianity teaches the sacredness of the marital relationship as the indissoluble union of man and woman instituted by God’s command, the profane world holds no respect for the defense of traditional marriage, undoing it by no fault divorce or reinventing it to include members of the same sex. The profane allows no distinction between the inviolable and the worldly. The forbidden, the illicit, and the disordered are put on the same plane as the normative, the moral, and the holy: sacred matrimony and same-sex unions are the same. Where Christianity respects the innocence of children and the beauty of purity, the profane world creates a popular culture that violates their modesty and removes the veil that protects young from prurient interest in sexuality. The sins that St. Paul refers to as unmentionable because of their filth, the profane world flaunts before the whole world and even the young as commonplace.
Forbidden pleasures have lost their stigma and assumed a glamour and fashion that titillate the curiosity. Cohabitation assumes the euphemism of “living together” instead of the condemnation of scandal. Divorce loses its stigma of shame and receives the blessing of law to give it legitimacy and credibility. The sanctity of the family loses its aura of sacred space as pornography enters through the media that invade the home to make it as crass as the profane world outside the confines of the domestic realm. The profanity of death conducts its ugly business as the solution to all problems from unwanted children to population control to the suffering of the terminally ill. The unthinkable is now taught, propagated, popularized, and legalized. The forbidden pleasures have been exalted as the highest pleasures, the most liberating experiences, and the most novel and progressive of developments. Alchemy, astrology, and magic with new names continue to make the same promises and use the same lures, always promising man what he will gain but never revealing what he will lose, offering the short cut to the instant gratification of pleasure instead of the virtue of moral effort to reach a high ideal, and regarding man as devoid of conscience and guilt instead of viewing him as the image of God with an immortal soul aware of the natural distinctions between the sacred and the profane, the holy and the forbidden, and the luminous truths discovered by reason and the dark knowledge experienced by curiosity.