Sexual Ethics in a Secular Age

Is There Still a Virtue of Chastity?

Eric Silverman, Eric J. Silverman

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000371888
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophie
• Thema: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

This collection features essays from top experts in ethics and philosophy of love that offer varying perspectives on the value of a contemporary secular virtue of chastity.

The virtue of chastity has traditionally been portrayed as an excellent personal disposition concerning the ideal ordering of sexual desire such that the person desires that which is actually good for both the self and others affected by his or her sexual desires and actions. Yet, for roughly the past half century chastity has been increasingly portrayed as an unnecessary ideal with few secular benefits that could not be otherwise obtained. Instead, chastity is sometimes portrayed as an odd kind of religious asceticism with few secular benefits. The essays in this volume ask whether there may be advantages to reconsidering a contemporary virtue of chastity. A recovered and reconceptualized concept of chastity can offer partial solutions to problems associated with externalized sexual desire, including sweeping patterns of sexual harassment, the high divorce/relationship-failure rate, and widespread pornography use.

Sexual Ethics in a Secular Age will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in the philosophy of sex and love, virtue ethics, and philosophical accounts of secularity.

Part I
Visions of Contemporary Chastity

1 Chastity and the Well-Lived Life

Jennifer A. Herdt

In what is perhaps the best-known allegorical representation of the virtue of chastity, by the 15th-century Dutch painter Hans Memling, chastity appears as a young woman, modestly dressed, standing serenely, hands clasped, eyes cast down. She is encircled by a moated wall, a ring of jagged rock rising nearly to her shoulders, looking for all the world like a miniature mountain-range, capped by icy peaks. Two winged lions, symbols of watchfulness, offer further protection. The message is clear: chastity is pure, and precious in its purity. Chastity is under threat, under attack. It requires stalwart protection. If the walls are high enough, forbidding enough, it is possible to find peace.

Does this painting really depict a virtue? The woman is serene and beautiful, to be sure. She is also utterly remote. Can any disposition that requires this sort of isolation really be perfective of a person’s character? It should be obvious just how illegible this virtue has become in the late modern Western context. Post-pill and post-sexual revolution, we tend generally to view sexuality as natural and good, and sexual expression as forming a core element in a flourishing life. To refrain from sexual activity is regarded as pathological.

Yet at the same time, a remarkable inarticulacy surrounds sexuality today. We are confronting the pervasive character of sexual harassment, the epidemic of sexual violence on college campuses and of domestic violence in our homes. We have difficulty sustaining durable partnerships, with 40–50% of marriages ending in divorce. We struggle to convey to teens just what is wrong with a hookup culture. Can the virtue of chastity save us?

To approach these challenges through the virtues is to approach them through the lens of the ordering of agency. Is there a good way to be habitually ordered as an agent with regard to sexuality? What perfects our perceptions, desires, responses, judgments, in this realm, assisting us to flourish as human beings? To ask about the virtues in relation to sexuality is precisely not to focus simply on forbidden or prescribed acts. It is to shift from the question of what we should or should not do to the question of what we should or should not be, to the question concerning what sort of person we have reason to aspire to become. This shift is critical not because it is somehow unimportant whether we refrain from committing sexual wrongs but because we cannot even coherently give an account of these wrongs, let alone refrain from committing them, without grasping what a well-lived life looks like, sexually speaking. And we cannot live well as sexual beings without stable dispositions to perceive, respond, desire, will, and act in certain ways.

Now, living well, sexually speaking, requires a host of virtues. Courage is required to end an abusive relationship. Forbearance is required to live with the faults and foibles of one’s partner. Indeed, perhaps there is no virtue that is not at times in play where sexuality is concerned, since sexuality informs our experience in such pervasive ways. But in the present context we are focused on a very particular virtue, that of chastity.

We are focused, further, on chastity as a secular virtue, by which I assume is meant something that can be intelligible as a virtue to someone without any particular religious beliefs or commitments, and so something potentially intelligible in a religiously plural culture. Yet in order to begin to answer this question, we need to know what we are talking about, what chastity means. And there is no way to do this without first considering what chastity has meant, and how it has been understood as helping to constitute human flourishing. We cannot, further, determine whether chastity is a virtue unless we articulate our own understanding of human flourishing, since only then can we determine whether a stable disposition of chastity helps to constitute and promote that flourishing. Only then will we be in a position to consider the extent to which this virtue, if it is one, can be intelligible in a secular, that is, religiously plural context.

Spoiler alert: while I will draw extensively on certain Western Christian conceptions of the virtue of chastity, I will not, finally, defend chastity as a virtue. It is not a virtue at all, neither a Christian virtue nor a secular virtue. It is too bound up with understandings of sex as inherently contaminating, defiling, and shameful in order to be redeemed. Becoming more articulate about what it is to live well as sexual creatures requires that we set such notions aside. I will defend a virtue of sexual temperance, and, much more briefly, a virtue of marital fidelity. Both of these owe something to inherited conceptions of chastity. Both can, I believe, be intelligible both as Christian virtues and as secular virtues.

I Sexuality and Ancient Asceticism

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that chastity is “purity from unlawful sexual intercourse.”¹ The etymology of the word is from the Latin castus, meaning cut off, separated, and by that token, pure. So chastity is a form of purity attained by separation, rather than, say, by filtration, distillation, or crystallization. Memling’s allegorical depiction is apt. I want to underscore that chastity is not merely refraining from unlawful sexual intercourse, but rather purity secured by way of refraining from unlawful sexual intercourse. There are three key elements: purity, law, and sexual intercourse. It is worth noting that refraining from unlawful acts does not ordinarily secure purity. Rather, committing an illegal act makes the agent guilty, not impure. So something special is at play here, contributed by the third element, that of sex—sex as contaminating, tainting, polluting.² And there is, further, the suggestion that an existing legal structure helps to contain the risk of contamination.

We cannot, I think, make sense of this association of sex with contamination without adverting, however briefly, to understandings of sexuality in early Christianity, against the backdrop of ancient pagan asceticism. The story of early Christian attitudes to sexuality is a complex one. Early Christian attitudes toward sexuality and marriage were inevitably shaped by the eschatological expectations of the first generation, which provided the original context for Paul’s reluctant affirmation of marriage as a remedy for lust. In the first several centuries of the Church, continence was “a postmarital matter for the middle-aged.”³ Peter Brown has shown in rich detail how Christian asceticism diverged in significant ways from pagan asceticism from the middle of the 3rd century onwards.⁴ Pagan asceticism, strongly influenced by Neoplatonism, envisioned the spiritual ascent of a few select individuals, those capable of extracting their souls from entanglement in the heavy material realm to rise through ecstatic contemplation of the spiritual realm. These few could savor their freedom and escape the clutches of matter, but they did not regard themselves as thereby transforming either society or the cosmos, which would proceed in its regular rounds of birth and death.

From Origen onwards, Christians aspired not merely to the disciplined regulation of sexuality, but to virginity; sex was increasingly seen not simply as a distraction from higher pursuits but as a dangerous source of defilement. Those capable of transcending sexuality altogether could mediate between heaven and earth, could anticipate the defeat of the spiritual forces of evil and the eschatological transformation of the entire cosmos. The stakes had been raised, and because of this, sexual asceticism was no longer a matter of remote detachment but rather of spiritual warfare, against an enemy that became ever more threatening and powerful with each skirmish.⁵

Sexual asceticism, in both its pagan and Christian flavors, can be contrasted with another, more positive strand of ancient thought on sexuality, one centered around the ideal of moderation and reflected in Aristotle.⁶ Aristotle took temperance to be a virtue that is concerned with the mean in bodily pleasures concerned with touch and taste, those having to do with food and sex. We have these pleasures “in so far as we are animals, not in so far as we are human beings.”⁷ To enjoy these pleasures is merely animal. Hence Aristotle is ambivalent; these pleasures are natural, and it would be inhuman not to find them pleasant.⁸ Yet enjoying them is animal-like; it threatens human exceptionalism, simply insofar as they are bodily pleasures. His solution is temperance, the virtue that finds the mean, an intermediate state with regard to these bodily pleasures, one that takes pleasure in the right things, and to the right degree. With regard to food, it seems possible to define a quantity that is appropriate for sustaining life and health. Where sex is concerned, however, defining what constitutes the mean is more difficult, and Aristotle offers no further guidance; moderation is a matter of desiring in a moderate way pleasures that conduce to, or are no obstacle to, health and fitness, and aligned with what is fine. It was against the contrasting backdrop of this ideal of moderation that both ancient and Christian forms of sexual asceticism took their point of departure.

II Medieval Puzzles over Marital Chastity

In Thomas Aquinas’s account of the virtue of chastity we witness a valiant, but not wholly successful, effort to harmonize the Aristotelian ideal of moderation with the monastic ideal of virginal asceticism, heavily influenced by Neo-Platonism. This was an enterprise bound up with Aquinas’s broader effort to respond to the challenges posed by a newly retrieved full Aristotelian corpus to a Christian tradition that had always regarded a severely truncated Aristotle as an authority. Aquinas sees chastity (castitas, in Latin) as etymologically related to chastisement.⁹ And this is not all wrong, since castigare, to chasten, is to reprove or punish, but literally to make pure; the root of both chastity and chastise is purity. However, where chastity maintains purity by way of separation, chastisement is remedial; it seeks to restore purity by way of punishment. Here we begin to discern a clash of psychological assumptions at work under the surface of Thomas’s account. Aquinas thinks that the desire for sex will increase in force if it is consented to, becoming increasingly resistant to the rule of reason. Hence, the safest course is not to indulge this desire at all. For this reason, virginity is a special virtue related to, but above, chastity (S.T. II-II.152.3 ad 5). Of course, the idealization of virginity appears to fly in the face of the notion that sex, like food, is natural and good, essential to sustaining and furthering life. But since it is proper for bodily goods to be directed to goods of the soul, and active goods to contemplative goods, it accords with reason to refrain from sexual activity entirely, argues Aquinas, “in order more freely to have leisure for Divine contemplation” (II-II.152.2).¹⁰

Cohabiting uneasily here are two distinct understandings of sex. The first is indebted to Aristotle. It regards sexual desire and activity as natural and good but unruly, in need of being shaped so as to conform to reason’s grasp of the good. Like Aristotle, Aquinas emphasizes that the desire of pleasures of touch is natural to human beings. Insofar as this is a desire for things that maintain nature, it is intelligible and good that food and sex be pleasurable (S.T. II-II 151 ad 2, 151.3). The fact that the act of reason is interrupted by the “exceeding pleasure” of orgasm does not render sex sinful or contrary to reason, so long as sex is fittingly ordered to a good end (S.T. II-II 153.2). The problem with these desires is that rather than following reason, desiring and enjoying these pleasures in accordance with reason’s grasp of ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Visions of Contemporary Chastity
• Part II The Limits and Dangers of Chastity
• Part III Culturally Contextualized Expressions of Chastity
• Part IV Chastity and Objectification
• Part V Specific Applications of Chastity
• Notes on Contributors
• Index