When I was young, I struggled with math mostly because I couldn’t see the deeper purpose of it. It just seemed like hard work toward no end. It took years to understand all the ways my mind was formed by the study of mathematics.  

It was an intellectual exercise drawing out capacities for thought that remain essential to me even if I never do algebra. It was also, as Plato and Augustine taught me, my first encounter with eternal immaterial reality. As such, it was a kind of preamble to encountering God. In math, I was seeing into the Divine Intellect. 

Math might seem an odd place to start when reflecting on chastity, but there is something analogous. For most people, there does not seem much of a point to chastity. It is simply hard work towards no end.  

In the words of Bishop Erik Varden, a Trappist monk before being named to the Diocese of Trondheim, Norway, and author of Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, we often think of it “in negative terms, as not being, not doing.” 

I couldn’t see the purposes, much less the divine purpose in learning mathematics, likewise living out chastity seems arduous with no purpose or end. It appears to just be a no instead of being itself a preamble to encountering God.  

We cannot live our lives in the “not.” We are first and foremost meant to live towards the good. Because of the fall, we must also live away from evil, but our being is and ever will be meant for the good.  

To look to Bishop Varden again, “conversion must be constructed in aspirational terms, not reactive terms; as an option for what is good, not against what is thought bad.” Thus, one should not become a monk primarily to flee the world nor should one marry someone to avoid others. Yes, the monk does not choose the world, and the married person does not choose anyone but their spouse but framing the terms of this decision in the negative can only be a false or inadequate vision. To re-propose chastity in our perverse times means reproposing it as part of our journey into God.  

If chastity is merely about what we cannot do — whether as celibates or those called to the married state — then it is not a real virtue. Virtue is a fulfillment of our capacities, a perfection of who and what we are. Because we are so bewildered in the modern world about what we are, we are bewildered by chastity.  

Part of the prophetic character of Gaudium et Spes was its recognition that the fundamental question of the modern world is: “What is man?” It is in the context of the modern failure to answer the question of man that we can understand the modern failure to understand human sexuality. For we are sexed beings; male and female we have been created. To misunderstand the human is to misunderstand sexuality and vis a versa. We are living through this woeful misunderstanding. 

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “I am made of longing.” Bishop Varden, quoting this line, centers his account of the human person on this idea. For what do we long? Fundamentally, we long for communion with God, a longing which overflows into a longing for each other. But since the fall, we have substituted our longing for objects in the place of our longing for intersubjective communion.  

We fill our lives with things and with people we treat as things. Of course, this leaves our longing scattered. If God is what our hearts are meant to rest in, we cannot rest in anything else. We restlessly scatter ourselves losing the integrity of our being as made for reception and gift. Scattered we know neither ourselves nor others. We collapse into and identify ourselves with our lusts rather than with our integral longing.  

For the great thinkers of the Catholic tradition, “to be human is to exist with the sense of an absence to be filled.” If we do not know the finality of this longing, we are lost. It is, as Bishop Varden writes, “only in light of our human substance’s longing for union with the divine” that our lesser “yearnings make sense.”  

Chastity cannot be understood except in the context of the human orientation to communion with God. Within this context, we learn to love others not as things to plug into, but as persons to be in communion with.  

This living communion with others reintegrates us and our relations. In contrast, lust is a disintegration of the person and of the interpersonal. It disintegrates me and disintegrates the possibility of an us.  

Bishop Varden writes that lust “contrasts with healthy desire inasmuch as it is not directed toward communion through surrender with another.” Instead, the other person “is instrumentalized, not encountered as a person but used as means towards an end.” No longer integrated myself, my desire disintegrates into the lust for many things. We see this in the young today who increasingly turn from real humans to various simulacra on their screens.  

This instrumentalization denies the necessary face-to-face communion of man and woman. Marriage calls for this integrity of two persons shaped by sexual difference and integrated into one flesh. This relation depends on difference and communion.  

For Bishop Varden, “to be fully a man is to be humbly conscious of what one is not, to accept incompletion while passionately seeking wholeness in — and from — a different other.” What gay marriage denies — and gender ideology seeks to destroy — is this integration of real difference. A man is not a woman, and a woman is not a man precisely so that the two can become one, integrating their fundamental compatibility.  

Chasity further integrates those called to the celibate state. Chastity schools our loves. We learn in and through it that “in love, we find ourselves by giving ourselves.” Lust disintegrates us so that we can neither give nor receive. This giving and receiving is at the heart of both marriage and consecrated life because it is a matter of gift and, as the bishop writes, “the living water gushing up within us is made to be outpoured, not to be damned up.” We live in a contraceptive culture that damns up any form of self-gift leaving us with sterile selves.  

We must reorient ourselves entirely if we are to rediscover the gift of chastity in whatever state of life we are called to. For most, marriage is the school in which these lessons are learned” whereas some learn this “in consecrated solitude.” Reorientation is fundamentally conversion towards Divine Love. Chasity can only truly be understood in this context though it will be lived out in different ways. 

While recent secular books such as Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex have offered a moderate and secular defense of chastity, Catholics will need to offer a richer and more fundamentally theocentric account of chastity.  

Recovering chastity requires we recover the Christocentric anthropology that Gaudium et Spes teaches, and that which Bishop Varden elaborates on. As Bishop Varden writes “an individual becomes a person when engaged in an ecstatic relationship.” This ecstatic relationship is most fundamentally towards and into God.  

Just as marriage and monastic life offer a unity in and through difference, so to they prepare us to our unity in difference with God in the heavenly city.  

Chastity is thus an expression of the reality that we are pilgrim people walking towards God. This is not just hard work towards no purpose, not math grudgingly worked through, not chastity reduced to negation. It is the work of love that makes marriage, celibacy, and communion with God not just something longed for but lived into.