Chastity:
Reconciliation of the Senses
by erik varden
bloomsbury, 176 pages, $22
In March 2022, the Nordic Bishops’ Conference sent an open letter to the president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg. The Nordic bishops began by mentioning their historic debt of gratitude to the German Church: In Norway, for instance, the nineteenth-century Catholic revival owed much to German missionaries, and to this day the Bonifatiuswerk charity funds Norwegian church buildings. Yet the Nordic bishops wrote that in the “German Synodal Way” they saw the threat of a “capitulation to the Zeitgeist,” rather than an answer to the challenges of the present out of the riches of Scripture and tradition. “True reforms in the Church,” they note, “have set out from Catholic teaching founded on divine Revelation and authentic Tradition, to defend it, expound it, and translate it credibly into lived life.”
One year later, in March 2023, the Nordic Bishops illustrated the point by issuing a pastoral letter on human sexuality. The document is full of sensitivity to the aspirations of those who pursue sexual liberation of various kinds, and of merciful love toward those dissatisfied with their sexual nature, but it challenges those aspirations and dissatisfactions with an attractive presentation of a theological view of our embodied being. Now, one of the letter’s signatories, Erik Varden, bishop of Trondheim and Cistercian of the Strict Observance (Trappist), has written a full-length treatment of the subject.
Bishop Varden’s book acknowledges that the scandal of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests and religious has contributed to a general discrediting of the ideals of celibacy and chastity. He describes the time he walked down a street in Rome and a woman, “with calm deliberation,” spat in his face. The woman presumably associated his monastic habit with the abuse scandal. Varden assures us that his purpose is not to write “an apology for chastity,” but in a certain sense he has done just that. Certainly, Chastity is not a scholastic argument: It does not reason out the nature of the virtue in the mode of Aristotelian epistēmē. Instead, it offers the reader a glimpse of the beauty of chastity, through an imaginative and poetic exploration.
One way of judging rightly about something is by reasoning it out correctly, by abstraction and argument. But another way of coming to right judgment is by a kinship or sympathy with the matter at hand, by what the scholastics call “connaturality.” In explaining this distinction, St. Thomas Aquinas offers the example of those things that pertain to the virtue of chastity. A person who has learned ethics can judge rightly about those things, because he can reason from principles to their conclusions. But a person who has the moral virtue of chastity, who is himself actually chaste, judges correctly about such matters from their kinship and sympathy with what is chaste. The example is aptly chosen. Knowledge by sympathy and kinship seems especially important in regard to chastity. True chastity is a beautiful, a splendid thing, but its beauty and splendor are very easily overlooked by those who lack kinship with it.
Take Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. When Isabella’s brother is condemned to death, Angelo offers him a pardon—if Isabella will yield up her body to Angelo’s lust. She, sure that her brother would also reject such a deal, gives the splendidly spirited answer:
Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die:
More than our brother is our chastity.
Isabella is surely one of Shakespeare’s most attractive heroines. But the beauty of her virtue is lost on her brother, who—contrary to her confident expectation—urges her to submit.
Or, to take another example, consider St. John Henry Newman. In a letter to Richard Holt Hutton in 1870, Newman explains how impossible it would be for him to doubt the divinity of the Church or the truth of its doctrines. It would, he writes, take “a cruel effort which would be as painful to me as a sin of impurity.” I think the beauty of Newman’s soul is manifested in his seeing an impure act as a moral impossibility. But Newman’s purity of soul was quite lost on Charles Kingsley. To Kingsley, whose “muscular Christianity” gave a sort of sacral importance to vehement sexual pleasure, Newman was a sinister figure, his celibacy surely a cloak for dark and twisted desires.
The difficulty in seeing the beauty of chastity is due not only to lack of connaturality on the part of the observer, but also to hypocrisy on the part of those in authority. Angelo in Measure for Measure is an archetype here: He imposes draconian penalties for fornication, while being himself a fornicator. As Varden recognizes, the same goes for clerical abusers.
Varden’s book is an admirable attempt to show the beauty of chastity, and it exhibits a deep understanding of our good but wounded nature as it appears in the light of revelation. Using a wealth of allusions to poetry, literature, dance, and opera, Varden shows that the Christian view of man as a good creature, made for communion and wounded by the Fall, gives convincing answers to the puzzles of our sexual nature. “The essence of becoming chaste,” he writes, “is not a putting-to-death of our nature, but its orientation, enacted through integral reconciliation, towards fullness of life.” If chastity is the proper teleological ordering of sexual desire, consecrated virginity or celibacy is not the sublimation of that desire, but rather the recognition that we have a yet deeper desire of which it is the sign. As the Scottish novelist George Mackay Brown put it in a passage quoted by Varden:
No, but there is love indeed, and God ordained it, and it is a good love and necessary for the world’s weal, and worthy are those who taste of it. But there are souls which cannot eat at that feast, for they serve another and a greater love, which is to these flames and meltings (wherein you suffer) the hard immortal diamond.
Varden is by no means naive about the difficulties of both chaste marriage and chaste celibacy. Toward the end of the book, he turns to the Desert Fathers to show the seriousness of the challenge. But he never loses sight of the goal of such ascesis: The freedom and contemplative joy that a reconciliation of our senses and sense desires can bring. He quotes one Egyptian hermit on the transformation of the human faculties through the divine love: “If you wish, you can become fire entirely.”
To a Thomist reader like me, there are times when Varden’s account seems too vague and imprecise. His reading of the Fall, for example, obscures the distinction between what Adam and Eve had by nature and what they had by grace. Varden takes “nature” simply in the sense of what Adam and Eve had from the beginning, including the “robe of glory” with which God clothed them. But this makes the effects of the Fall much less intelligible than a precise account would. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were not in a state of pure nature, but in a state of nature elevated by divine gifts. Death, for example, is in a way natural to a being made of flesh and blood, but Adam and Eve would have been spared from it by preternatural gift. It is this preternatural gift that is lost through the Fall, and in this sense death entered the world “through sin.”
But as I have already hinted, Varden’s intention is not to write a work of precise theological science. Rather, he wants to help those who have little connaturality with the ideal of chastity arrive at some imaginative sympathy with it, a sympathy that might spark a desire for that goodness in their hearts.
Reading Varden, I found myself often contrasting his approach with that of the influential German moral theologian Eberhard Schockenhoff. Just as Varden was a key influence on the Nordic Bishops’ “Letter on Human Sexuality,” so Schockenhoff was a key influence on the German Synodal Way’s proposed document “Life in succeeding relationships—Living love in sexuality and partnership.” That document was anticipated by a speech Schockenhoff had delivered to the German Bishops in 2019, in which he proposed a far-reaching revision of Catholic moral theology on sexuality, with a new evaluation of such matters as contraception, masturbation, and homosexual intercourse. The next year, he died in a freak accident, when he fell down the stairs in his apartment. But his 2019 speech, and his book Die Kunst zu lieben: Unterwegs zu einer neuen Sexualethik (The Art of Loving: On the Way to a New Sexual Ethics), posthumously published in 2021, were the most important influences on the synodal document.
To me, Schockenhoff is by far the most subtle and intelligent of revisionist moral theologians. His knowledge of traditional arguments is extensive, and his objections are clever and couched in traditional theological language. Many German bishops were convinced that he had found a way of revising sexual ethics that was not a contradiction but a development of previous teaching. In fact, many think that if Schockenhoff had lived, the Synodal Way’s proposed document “Life in succeeding relationships” would have received the requisite two-thirds majority of the votes of German bishops for approval. As it was, the document narrowly failed.
I believe that Schockenhoff’s arguments are finally insufficient. My student Josef Brand has shown that Schockenhoff subtly misrepresents some of the key premises of the traditional arguments he attacks. In particular, he shifts the focus at key moments from the natural teleology of faculties of the soul (on which scholastic moral philosophy is based) to the teleology of the organs employed by those faculties. I hardly think that those convinced by Schockenhoff, and invested in his vision of a Church more in tune with modern German society, will be swayed by such arguments. But those not already committed to that project may be intrigued by Varden’s more interesting vision.
What explains the contrast between Norway and Germany? The two churches are historically close, and the Norwegians owe so much to the Germans. Why are their theological visions so different?
One important factor is the way academic theology developed in Germany. As Karl-Heinz Menke has argued, one key event was the seizure of large Catholic territories by Protestant Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars. The Prussian state established faculties of Catholic theology alongside Protestant faculties at state universities. All candidates for the priesthood were to study at these state-sponsored faculties. Many Catholic professors, part of a cultural minority considered backward by Enlightenment-influenced Protestants, envied the prestige of their Protestant colleagues, who were developing a new liberal theology that interpreted Christianity through the lens of German idealism. They also envied the better relations Protestant professors often had with the officials who made university appointments. Many Catholic theologians hoped to develop a form of Catholic theology that would be as in tune with the ideals of Prussian society as liberal Protestantism was. For example, Georg Hermes (1775–1831), a professor at Bonn in the Prussian-ruled Catholic Rhineland, developed an influential theological system informed by the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
After Hermes’s death, a controversy broke out between his followers and the archbishop of Cologne, Clemens August, Baron von Droste zu Vischering, that exemplified the divisions within German Catholicism in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. Droste zu Vischering was an ultramontane bishop whom historian Eduard Hegel called “the first modern integralist” because of his high view of the superiority of spiritual to temporal authority. By contrast, the Hermesians were practically Erastians: They wanted the Church to submit to state authority—and they wanted state-sponsored Catholic faculties of theology to help Catholics integrate into Prussian society. Droste zu Vischering bitterly opposed the Hermesian professors in Bonn and forbade his seminarians from attending their lectures, which led to his persecution and eventual imprisonment by the Prussian authorities.
On the one hand, then, were the liberal theologians and the priests they formed at state faculties. On the other hand were the ultramontane integralists in the tradition of Droste zu Vischering, often backed by the common faithful. After Vatican II, however, the ultramontane party more or less collapsed, since the council was widely interpreted as confirming the program of the liberals. The way was clear for the triumph of the liberal theologians, who had sought assimilation to German society all along.
Today, German Catholicism seems in nearly irreversible decline: The most recent figures, for 2022, showed that 522,821 Germans had left the Church in a single year. In Norway, meanwhile, a much, much smaller Church is slowly growing—partly through immigration, and partly through a small stream of native Norwegian converts. Though no one expects a mass conversion of Norwegian society, the atmosphere among Catholics is hopeful. A second spring seems to be in the air.
Norway, of course, never had a large Catholic population for the state to integrate: Post-Reformation Norway had very few Catholics indeed, and the Catholic hierarchy was restored only in 1953. As a result, Norway’s Catholic theologians have never relied on the patronage and influence of liberal Protestantism. Paradoxically, one could say that the Church in Norway is healthier than Germany’s in 2024 because, in Norway, the Reformation was more successful.
Edmund Waldstein, O. Cist., is a monk of Stift Heiligenkreuz.
Image by Picryl, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
