‘Chastity’: An Argument for Freedom
A review of ‘Chastity’, by Bishop Erik Varden; Bloomsbury, 2023.
The European Conservative is a newish journal of conservative arts and ideas, and one for which I write literary essays from time to time. It presents a documentary series on YouTube called Symposia. Hosted by Sebastian Morello, the Catholic philosopher and writer, it is, basically, an hour-long interview. Sebastian will go to the Isle of Skye, say, or the French Alps, to speak with a thinker about his ideas. In the first episode, he spoke to the great polymath Iain McGilchrist, which is how I came across the journal; in another he chatted to Mary Harrington, reactionary feminist and author of Feminism Against Progress. And the most recent episode, he spoke to Bishop Erik Varden.
Wait — who?
Bishop Erik Varden, as it turns out, is a fantastically eloquent, self-possessed thinker of the old school. Not one who seeks greedily to consume as much knowledge as possible, in much the same way that one hungers after money or likes on Instagram, he exudes a genuine and humane and patient curiosity about the nature of our existence. His conversation with Sebastian was fascinating. And it introduced me to a book and a subject to which, I have to say, I am far too worldly ever to have thought about, let alone had an interest in: chastity. For His Grace our friend Bishop Erik wrote a slim volume of that name, subtitled Reconciliation of the Senses, in which he advances, very beautifully and compellingly, the argument that chastity aims at the total subjugation of desire which, as the Buddhists helpfully tell us, is the root of suffering. One whose desires are not brought to heel does not truly live for himself, the Bishop says, for he is ceaselessly pulled this way and that, ‘distracted by distraction from distraction’, as T.S. Eliot put it. To look approval, power, wealth, fame, sex — the best one of the lot — in the face, as it were, and to say precisely where we are — that, Bishop Varden says, is freedom.
One whose desires are not brought to heel does not truly live for himself.
There is no strong narrative thread that runs through Chastity. The book is more a meditation than an exploration or discussion or study. Certainly it is not a moralistic, fire-and-brimstone kind of tract, nor even an exhortation to give up on desire. It is a thoughtful attempt to untangle the knot of human desire, love and the will to live in harmony with our beliefs. Varden, who is a Cistercian monk, writes with the quiet authority one who has wrestled with such matters for some time and arrived at something like reconciliation. He starts, in Socratic style, by asking the question what chastity is, and what it means to be chaste. We know that the root word of chastity is the Latin castus, and that it means not ‘celibate’ but ‘pure’. (Interestingly, some scholars have suggested the story of the Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth rests on a similar conflation of purity with sexual abstinence or inexperience.) Varden argues that there is a physical dimension to chastity, and that the denial of sex as opposed to, say, triple-chocolate gâteaux reflects the strength of desire bound up with the former. But he has more to say about — and I have alluded to this — chastity-as-freedom.
Chastity is not a harsh or joyless imposition, Varden says, but a means of gaining clarity of purpose and of forming bonds whose material is love, not possession. Only when we subjugate desire to our will do we truly begin to engage with others deeply, as equals, and, indeed, with the world itself, in which that presence believers call God is interfused, and through which He rolls. In his ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth writes:
‘… And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’
Varden argues that this — chastity — removes the din of selfish need, quiets the inner voice, and creates the space out of which the raw stuff of a real, authentic relation with the world can arise.
Of course, Varden will not persuade some. His subject is one widely subjected to scorn, suspicion, and mockery. It has been blamed for the filthy crimes of paedophile priests. I myself used to find myself pitying monks and nuns and other clergy, whose lives, it seemed to me, were lacking so much of what made life fun and interesting and rich. Although Varden does touch on chastity as wilful sexual abstinence, he broadens the scope to include us all, taking the conventional view of chastity as absence and presenting it as fullness. This is not heterodox. In Christianity, there is such a notion as kenosis, an emptying-out of the self so that Christ can, as it were, enter. If that sounds ironically sexual to you, reader, then you are not alone. Much Christian literature describes the divine relation in romantic or sexual terms, and it does strikes us as odd and even quite embarrassing on first reading (or, at least, that was my reaction).
This is not heterodox. In Christianity, there is such a notion as kenosis, an emptying-out of the self.
I have always been perhaps overly concerned with style in writing, being incurably superficial and convinced that the question ‘how’ in life is as important and often more important than the ‘what’. I think Bishop Varden is a stunningly good writer and a wonderfully good speaker, too. He has that very rare skill of writing how he talks, which gives his prose an aura of depth and authenticity. (Interestingly, Christopher Hitchens early in his career was advised to ‘write how you talk’ by the Guardian writer Simon Hoggart. Hitchens would go on to become a master stylist of non-fiction writing.) Some readers will be put off by the more densely theological passages, but in my view these reward close attention and a bit of patience.
Chastity is a curious little book. It is immensely readable, yet deals with something I never thought I would find remotely interesting. It reconsiders and reframes a virtue that has long been understood simplistically and scornfully. By the time the curtain, as it were, comes down, we have the impression that chastity, in its broadest definition, communicates something noble, something admirable, something freeing and — ironically — something desirable. We are, in other words, persuaded by the author’s argument, which is subtle but insistent, clothed in the language of reflection and meditation: for it is an argument for a life lived on our own terms, liberated by the racket and noise of ego.
