Chastity
M. C. STEENBERG
Chastity is a condition of spiritual and bodily purity in which the Christian person retains control over his or her impulses and desires, presenting a life to God that reflects and realizes the condition of humanity’s first innocent formation. It refers, most often, to the restraining of the specifically sexual appetites of the body, reflecting the word’s Latin root, castus (“pure”), which also has from ancient times retained a meaning of abstinence from sexual and other sensual activities. St. Paul employs the term in this context of sexual purity, which yet goes beyond simple sexuality, in his exhortation to the Corinthians: “I have betrothed you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ” (2Cor. 11.2).
With respect to sexual purity, chastity may refer in practical terms either to a complete abstention from all sexual activity (as in the case of monastics, or as the Orthodox Church expects of all persons prior to marriage), or to the right ordering and sacred engagement of the sexual appetites within the sacramental bond of married life. But chastity as a notion is often employed in relation to the whole spiritual and bodily demeanor of purity before God, and is not simply referring to the sexual appetites. The curbing of any and all passionate impulses may be enjoined under the call to chastity (which is why, for example, it is included as the first positive petition in the famous prayer attributed to St. Ephrem and used throughout the Great Fast); thus chastity may relate to a right practice of patience, godly conversation, the fostering of right social attitudes and activities, the refraining from gossip and slander, etc. Such was certainly what St. John of the Ladder had in mind when he wrote that “chastity is the name common to all the virtues” (Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15).
Fundamental to the Christian call to chastity is the scriptural assertion that the human body is the dwelling place of God, and should be accorded due honor and respect (so 1Cor. 6.19, 20). This is also made explicit in a saying attributed to
St. Ephrem of Syria: “Everyone who loves purity and chastity becomes the temple of God”; a saying that draws attention to the relationship between purity and the living out of creation as the making of dwelling places for the Creator. Chastity may therefore be seen as the overarching virtue of rightly ordering one’s life and activities, bodily as well as spiritually, so that the other virtues might be realized and God’s temple, the human person, made a fitting home for its King.
SEE ALSO: Ethics; Fasting; Repentance; Sexual Ethics; Virgins; Widows
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Evdokimov, P. (1985) The Sacrament of Love.
Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Harakas, S. (1983) Toward Transfigured Life: The Theoria of Eastern Orthodox Ethics. Minneapolis: Light and Life.