‘Chastity’: The Case for (Spiritual) Bondage

A review of ‘Chastity’, by Bishop Erik Varden; Bloomsbury, 2023.

So The European Conservative is a fledgling journal of arts and ideas that makes up for its youth with its presentation. I cannot say I agree with everything it publishes (is that ever the case?) but it is really quite beautifully put together. I write the odd literary trifle for them when the mood strikes. And amid its offerings is a little YouTube programme called Symposia ; it is a series hosted by one Sebastian Morello , a Catholic thinker vexed by events in the West and resolved to do his bit to hold back the tide. The format is one hour, one guest, one location pretty enough to distract the viewer from all the seriousness. Its first guest was the polymath Iain McGilchrist; the next was Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress. The third was Bishop Erik Varden.

Wait — who?

It turns out this Bishop Erik Varden is really quite fascinating. He speaks clearly and keeps his balance. He does not come across as a man in a hurry. (Then again, he is a monk, so perhaps that is to be expected.) He seems less interested in piling up the facts than in sitting with them. So contemplative is perhaps a better word than scholarly — though clearly he has done his reading. And the book at the centre of his chat with Sebastian was a small one: Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses. Yes, the subject took me by surprise, too. Chastity, reader. I nearly spilled my Earl Grey. To someone so — how shall I put it? — worldly and so omnivorous, this struck me as just a bit foreign.

But in His Grace’s telling, chastity is no grim vow espoused during fire-and-brimstone sermons, not a cold refusal of pleasure: but a means of becoming free, of attaining self-rule. For chastity aims at the total subjugation of desire which, as the Buddhists helpfully tell us, is the root of our suffering. Left untamed, it snaps at our heels like a hungry mongrel, tearing us away from ourselves. We become slaves to our craving, forever dragged from one glittering diversion to the next, ‘distracted by distraction from distraction’, as T.S. Eliot so memorably put it. Varden would have us stare down our urges — stare down approval, power, wealth, fame, even sex, the best of the lot. To stay just where we are — that, Bishop Varden says, is freedom.

One whose desires are not brought to heel does not truly live for himself.

The book is more reverie than argument. It is more meditation than exploration or discussion or study. Mercifully, it isn’t dripping with clerical bile or pious harangue. No, Varden’s tone is tender — weary, perhaps, but never bitter. It is a thoughtful attempt to untangle the knot of human want, love and the will to live in line with our beliefs. Varden is a Cistercian monk, and writes with the quiet power of one who has wrestled with such matters for some time and arrived at something like peace. He begins, à la Socrates, with a question: What is chastity? And more pointedly, What does it mean to be chaste? The Latin root — castus — means pure, not merely celibate. (A small point: some scholars say the story of the Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth rests on a similar conflation of virtue with virginity.)

He admits, with admirable honesty, that saying no to sex is quite a bit harder than refusing, say, a slice of triple-chocolate gâteau, which speaks to what is the stronger and perhaps truer source of our desire. But this is not about absence, not really. It is about presence. Chastity, Varden argues, is a kind of seeing: a clearing of the fog, as it were, or a stilling of the noise within. It allows the real world to make itself known to us. And in this quiet, he dares to say, we might just hear God. Wordsworth, of course, got a taste of it, or Him, in his Tintern Abbey:

‘… 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.’

Now, let us not be naïve. Some will laugh. Some will sneer. His subject is, after all, one routinely subjected to scorn, suspicion, and mockery. It has been blamed for priestly crimes, shunned as repression in a world that mistakes appetite for authenticity. I admit it: I myself once pitied those monks and nuns, all cloistered away from the world, from wine and what we might coyly call the joys of the flesh. (Well, perhaps not wine.) Varden does touch on chastity as wilful sexual abstinence, but broadens the scope to include us all — even you, reader — taking the typical view of chastity as negation and presenting it as fullness. This is not heterodox. Varden’s chastity is a thinning of the veil — an emptying-out (what the mystics call kenosis) so that something better might take up the space where once our hungers howled to be satisfied. If that all sounds a bit erotic to you, then you should not be surprised. Much Christian literature describes the divine bond in romantic or sexual terms.

This is not heterodox. In Christianity, there is such a notion as kenosis, an emptying-out of the self.

I remain hopelessly drawn to style (it is one of my many vices: the how almost always seduces me more than the what). And Varden writes. Oh, he writes. He writes like he speaks, which is rare, and gives his prose an aura of depth and honesty. (Interestingly, Christopher Hitchens early in his career was told to ‘write how you talk’ by the Guardian writer Simon Hoggart. Hitchens became a master stylist.) If some passages tend toward the theological, well, let the lazy be lost. It is worth roaming through that luxuriant thicket to reach the clearing.

In sum, Chastity is a quiet, curious sort of success. Slim, yes — but with more to say than books five times its size. It slips past your guard, reclaims a virtue spat upon for decades, and suggests, with maddening grace, that to master oneself might be the first — and final — act of freedom. 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 from the the racket and noise of ego.