When I was in the eighth grade, Sister Eugene got fed up with my messy desk, and overturned it with me in it. All the papers stuffed in the desk went flying. Those would include satirical drawings I’d done of my inveterate enemy, Sister Marie Louise — she with her frowning face and scowl, on the body of Billie Jean King on the tennis court, or Gidget on the beach, or Dumbo the flying elephant. I’ll give Sister Eugene credit for this: she pretended not to notice. She did also lay a wager with the whole eighth grade class. I was applying to three diocesan high schools, and she said she’d give the class no homework for a month, for each of the schools I won a scholarship to. Well, I ran the table, a clean sweep — even at Bishop O’Hara, which didn’t award any scholarships at all until my mother told them I’d go to Scranton Prep instead. I ended up choosing O’Hara. But cleanliness really was instilled in us anyway, in those old Catholic schools. That’s partly because of the clothes we wore: for us boys, it meant a jacket and tie, slacks (no jeans, no short pants), and good shoes (no sneakers). We were used to it, and in high school, we tried to look sharp for the girls. They, for their part, wore the school uniforms, so that among them there would be no competition for expensive clothes, and a girl from a poor family would not look any different from a girl from a rich family. It worked.
Our Word of the Week is clean, a powerful word of broad application. It could mean that you don’t have dirt from the backyard on your face. At O’Hara, for the boys, it meant also that you were clean shaven, and if you had stubble, Mr. Buzad the wise dean of students would make you shave in his office, with an old razor and cold water. For me, a cluttered room was one thing, but a cluttered mind was something else entirely. When I was assigned to write papers at Princeton, I worked at them for at least two weeks in advance, mostly by re-reading the material and thinking about it, working the plan in my mind, what points I would make, what points I would counter, what evidence I would bring to bear, and what I wanted for the climax. The actual writing I saved for the last few days, and that had to be perfect. That’s what I thought of as clean. So it irks me when I send an article to a magazine and I see that the editors have altered a word or reorganized a sentence, messing up the thought or the emphasis. An egregious case: I once wrote that a local choir had sung cheesy hymns in “the key of C-minus,” and the editor, missing the joke entirely and rendering my sentence nonsensical, revised it to “C-minor.” They thought they were cleaning up my prose. Dear editors, I already have the soap and the bleach and the scrubber!
Cleanness and moral uprightness — honesty, candor, purity — are associated in every human language and culture I know about. Even when what’s considered unclean seems arbitrary to us, if we look more carefully we’ll find a good reason for it. Swine, under the Mosaic law, were not clean, so the people were forbidden to eat pork — a good thing, perhaps, given the unsanitary conditions in which swine were commonly kept. But the gold of the candlesticks at the altar of God had to be clean gold, that is, pure gold, not debased with dross. The Psalmist and the prophets and the other ancient sages of Israel applied the notion of cleanness and purity to what is inside us, not just to what is on the surface: “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” the Psalmist prays, “and renew a right spirit within me.” That verse is especially powerful, since the verb create, Hebrew bara‘, is predicated of God alone. We can wash our hands, but we can’t wash our souls — God does that.
As I said, the association seems to be universal. Think of the ceremonial precision, the purity and humility, of a Chinese officer who remembers the words of Confucius, that the heart of wisdom is to call things by their right names. He would be ashamed to speak carelessly or foully in front of a noble man, no less than he’d be ashamed if he were stinking of something he’d stepped in. Whatever we may think of the debauched Roman aristocrats in the days of Nero, we ought to remember that the Romans set a special emphasis on cleanness; hence the running water, the sewer systems, the hot baths, and the simplicity of their dress, the bleached white toga. It wasn’t all just for show. Still, nothing can approach the simplicity, the power, and the declarative certainty of Jesus’ statement: “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.” Yes, that’s also translated as pure in heart: the senses are very close. We suppose that dirt or confusion gets in the way of other people’s seeing us — it conceals. It doesn’t occur to us that if we are not clean of heart, we are the ones who will not see. Our understandings will be full of smoke and grime. Jesus walked among the people of Galilee and Judea, and so many of them could not see him. Some were like the Pharisees who complained that Jesus’ disciples did not wash their hands before eating. Hands they could see; hearts, not so much. Others, no doubt, were Jewish zealots or Roman politicians or the time-serving deal-cutting chief priests, who could see in Jesus only someone to be used for political gain, or to be crushed for political policy, as if all the world were made up of hucksters of one sort or another. The pure can see the impure. The converse is not true.
The word comes straight from Old English claene, clean; Old English cleanlic, source of the adjective “cleanly,” now almost obsolete, referred to cleanness in the analogous moral sense: pure, upright. The old verb was cleanse, still active in English; you can clean out your desk, but if you cleanse it, you have to use cleansing agents to rub out the rust, the mold, or anything else that’s grimy or sticky. Thus cleansing, more than cleaning, suggests purging, purifying. Spiritually, cleansing may really sting, but it’s the sharp sting of what we know is good for us, far to be preferred before any merely earthly pleasure. It takes place, I’d say, in the antechamber of bliss.
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