ARTICLE I: ON CHASTITY

482. Definition. Chastity (from chastising), broadly taken, is a general virtue inclining man to keep himself immune from every inordinate love and delectation of creatures; properly taken, it is a special virtue inclining man to restrain inordinate appetites and the use of venereal things according to the prescription of right reason.

Division. A threefold chastity is distinguished:

1° Conjugal, which, while it abstains from illicit pleasures of the flesh, uses licit ones according to right reason in Matrimony.

2° Widowly, which, Matrimony having been dissolved, abstains from every venereal delectation.

3° Virginal, which proposes to abstain perpetually from all delectations of this sort. - Virginity, according to St. Thomas,² is a special virtue, having itself toward chastity as magnificence toward liberality, because it conquers a special difficulty, and indeed the greatest one; and it consists: formally in the purpose of abstaining from every venereal pleasure; but materially in immunity from every experience of venereal delectation, and in a certain integrity of the flesh.³

Principles. I. - Conjugal chastity is good, widowly continence better, but virginal perfection best. - Thus Ven. Bede and all Catholics. - Hence St. Jerome¹ writes: "We assign the hundredfold fruit to virgins, the sixtyfold to widows, the thirtyfold to chaste Matrimony." The reason is ready at hand from the definitions above.

Indeed it must be held by divine faith that the state of virginity and celibacy chosen for the sake of God is to be preferred to marriage. This is clear from the words of the Apostle,³ and from Trent:⁴ "If anyone says that the conjugal state is to be placed before the state of virginity or celibacy, and that it is not better and more blessed to remain in virginity or celibacy than to be joined in Matrimony, let him be anathema." - Reason supports this; since the use of matrimony makes man like the beasts, virginity like the angels. Hence St. Bernard: "Nuptials fill the earth; virginity, Paradise."

II. Decorum or spiritual beauty, although it is in every virtue, nevertheless most excellently belongs to chastity. Thus the common sense; and it is clear: 1° From Sacred Scripture: How beautiful is a chaste generation with brightness; for the memory of it is immortal, since it is known with God and with men.⁵ 2° By reason, for a virtue is the more beautiful as the vice opposed to it is the more base. But to chastity there is opposed what is most base and most indecent to man, namely carnal and brute pleasure. - Hence St. Alphonsus⁶ says with St. Cyprian: "virginity is the queen of virtues, the possession of all goods," and with St. Ephrem: "If you love this, you will prosper in all things from the Lord."

Note. - 1° Through rape altogether violent or through involuntary pollution, for example in sleep, neither the prerogative of virginity is taken away, nor the aureola lost. Hence St. Lucy to the tyrant: "if you command that I be violated unwillingly, chastity will be doubled for me unto a crown."

2° Those who have sinned against chastity in mind will be able, through penance, with the will of abstaining in the future resumed, to recover virginity and its aureola; not likewise those who, through an external libidinous act (or one of itself resolutive of semen), have voluntarily lost the incorruption of the flesh, and this more truly even if pollution does not follow by accident.¹