Article — Vermeersch, On Chastity
Article II. The Christian Estimation of Chastity
With how many kinds of benefits Christ has affected chastity.
95. - A general view of the matter. Amid the very darkness of paganism, not all honor was denied to chastity and virginity; and among the heathen there were devotees of religion who were not only admirers but also followers of the chaste life. Nevertheless, men, when left to themselves, cast themselves down into such corruption; but Christ, in turn, fortified and adorned chastity with such protection and such grace that, before and outside the Catholic faith, there must be said to have been and to be only shadows of chastity.
Therefore, just as the practice of perfect chastity without the aid of Christian grace is shown to be inaccessible to man, so also a perfect understanding of chastity is sought in vain without the light of Christian revelation.
Moreover, the benefits which Christ by His revelation brought to the cause of chastity, or to human morals, can be assigned to two kinds. Some supply a more universal, fuller, and firmer knowledge of the natural duties of chastity; others, which affect the intellect and the will, contain, together with teachings inaccessible to natural reason, supernatural incitements by which the cultivation of every kind of chastity is rendered more evident.
What Christ furnished to chastity so that natural knowledge might be fuller.
96. - On the illumination of natural chastity. The moral impotence under which man, left to himself, labors in attaining even the natural law is especially perceived in this difficult matter.
Revelation having been made, the sound eye of the mind indeed perceives, as if by intuition, that the precepts and counsels of morals as proposed by the Catholic religion are true and praiseworthy. Often, however, there remains the difficulty of finding, or even grasping, the strict reasoning by which it may be demonstrated dialectically that those same things are true.
For the benefit of the faithful.
Therefore, by the benefit of revelation it happens: a) That the faithful, even if little instructed, may learn the natural laws of honorable morals as the Church proposes them and, their soul being naturally Christian, or by the sound eye of the mind, may approve those same laws without hesitation. And the world ought to refer it to the credit of the Christian religion that a human society has existed which openly professed and sanctioned a complete doctrine of salutary purity. If many sins were committed in the more barbarous age of the Middle Ages, and even enormous crimes appeared, nevertheless there was no departure from right principles; and in them there was preserved a certain hope of amendment toward the better and of continued progress.
For the benefit of all.
b) That by the benefit of the same Christian society, even many non-Catholics - at least those who have not renounced the sense of honesty and are solicitous for human dignity - may hold and protect right principles of morals, and that throughout the whole world a certain severity of morals may prevail which the cultivated pagan world did not know.
Whence the skepticism of certain persons.
Yet, in turn, because of the difficulty and subtlety of the reasonings, it also happens that others, more averse to the Christian religion, often untrained in philosophy and devoted to a gloomy or "pessimistic" skepticism, begin to call the sacred laws of morals doubtful and vain, and to disregard and disdain them as empty inventions, or inventions of priests, or arbitrary agreements.
What Christ furnished to chastity as the author of supernatural faith.
97. - On the aids brought by supernatural faith. We think that the aid which the Christian faith, insofar as it is supernatural, brings to the honor and cultivation of chastity can be presented briefly as follows.
The Christian faith illuminates the excellence of chastity and promotes its cultivation:
By preaching the inviolable sanctity of moral obligation.
1. By its explanation of the present economy. By reason itself there is known that principal law of every human action by which satisfaction is subordinated to duty, and pleasure or convenience or utility to every kind of moral rectitude, and must serve it. Yet this sanctity of duty introduces the necessity of no slight immolations or sacrifices, on account of which its laborious observance is shunned and excessive rigor is imputed to our sensuality. Indeed, as the audacity of men increases, the modern school of Epicureanism has begun to construct an altogether different foundation for human actions, while it celebrates a right to present happiness and allows nothing to be inviolable in order that this right may be exercised. "For the means, so at least they think in practice, are rendered honorable by the end; but beyond the happiness possible today, no end can now be assigned except a chimerical one." How well, therefore, does the Catholic Church merit of the human race when it preaches and inculcates to all the absolute necessity of every duty! But at the same time, so that her preaching may be more efficacious, in the plan of the present life - where the order by which happiness is joined to virtue indeed has a beginning, but suffers many apparent or true exceptions per accidens - she shows a certain stage of probation, which a more magnificent restoration of order, prepared by the disturbances of today, will follow. Nor is the Christian faith content merely to propose this economy as just and reasonable, but by the example of the Passion and Cross of Christ it impels us efficaciously to embrace it with the greatest love.
By our revealed dignity.
2. By the dignity with which the Christian faith shows the human race, the Christian community, and the body of the faithful person to have been increased.
a) For through the mystery of the Incarnation, by which we have been made brothers of Christ and sons of God, the human race, in which purity is to be cultivated, has been affected with an ineffable honor: this supreme nobility demands and commends a noble manner of acting. Therefore, when it preaches our adoption, the Catholic faith inculcates care for chastity.
b) According to the Catholic faith, we come together into the sacred unity of a community whose reputation and honor require that we have holy morals. Wherefore the Apostle, indignantly enduring the scandal, lamented: "Fornication is altogether heard of among you" (1 Corinthians 5:1).
c) The Catholic faith shows that the body, which is the remote object of chastity, is holy, insofar as our bodies are members of Christ 1 and the temple of the Holy Spirit 2, who bought us at the great price 3 of the blood of Christ, so that we are no longer our own 4, but ought to bear God in our body in a manner which brings glory to God. Compare 1 Corinthians 6:20.
In these words, whose exact meaning can easily escape most of the faithful, we nevertheless all perceive that which is most efficacious for moving us: that the body must be treated holily, in a manner worthy of God, since it is something of Christ, something acquired for God by the blood of Christ. For our purpose, it is sufficient to have noted this.
This brief rationale of the words of St. Paul can be given. We are members of Christ because Christ suffuses our whole selves, and therefore also our body, with His life; He finds in us, as it were, an instrument of His action, and renders us associates of His glory. On account of this life and participation in divine glory, we are also, especially after we shall have obtained glorification, under another aspect, the temple of God.
But the greater the dignity of the body is, the more the necessity of treating it reverently is increased.
What of the fact that we sacramentally partake of the Body and Soul of Christ; that, as often as we are refreshed by the sacred banquet, a title to eternal, incorrupt life is placed in us? This glorious immunity from corruption ought to engender in us a greater flight from moral stain and a stronger hatred of it.
To this necessary honor of our body there is also added, so that we may be moved all the more to treat the body holily, the right acquired for God through the blood of Christ: we, who have no life except a redeemed life, can no longer be our own right, but are legitimately possessed by God. And when St. Paul assigns this possession to the Holy Spirit, by the very name of the Divine Person to whom he appropriates it he seems to emphasize more strongly the necessity of holiness.
By the addition of motives for cultivating chastity.
3. By the motives which the Catholic faith draws for us from history and from proposed examples for cultivating and loving chastity.
a) From the historical teachings of faith we know that the insolence of the flesh began after sin and opposes God's first designs for us; wherefore we ought to abhor it as contrary to the will of God.
Moreover, according to the testimony of Sacred Scripture, original sin was manifested by the rebellion of the flesh, and the two rationales are joined by so intimate a bond that some Fathers seemed to place in concupiscence itself, as it were, the essence, or at least a material part of the essence, of original sin. But if, in this rebellion, we bear as it were a permanent sign and symbol of ruin and sin, in the taming of the flesh we can seek and love a special symbol of victory and justice. Hence glory, hence honor.
b) The Catholic faith directs perfect chastity toward the imitation of the angels and of the Blessed Virgin; conjugal chastity toward the imitation of the mutual fidelity of Christ and the Church. Compare also the things below concerning these matters.
Subjectively, by the aid of grace.
4. Subjectively, by the aid of supernatural grace. We are taught by the Catholic faith that supernatural grace is present to us in fulfilling the duties of chastity and in attaining every praise of chastity. The force of this aid not only exerts itself immediately, according to its proper rationale, but also assists us naturally in addition, insofar as it instills in us a greater persuasion of our power. In actual fact, as experience testifies, we are more able to do that which we think ourselves able to do. "They can, because they think themselves able," Virgil already sang.
Therefore, in every way, the Catholic faith confers a new splendor upon the virtue of chastity, and gives men courage and strength to exercise the virtue thus rendered more excellent.
The objection that the Catholic faith has despised women.
98. Nevertheless, this reproach is brought against the Catholic cultivation of chastity, that it has despised the female sex too greatly. And the adversaries allege certain passages from approved ecclesiastical writers which women could hear only with displeased ears; nor are there lacking those who, with little learning, still repeat the calumny as though the Church, at the Second Council of Mâcon (Mâcon, A.D. 585), had doubted the human soul of a woman.
The reply concerning harsh words.
It cannot be denied that these harsh words occur, but they must be explained by the circumstances either of the writer, who by his condition was obliged to lead a life apart from every association with women, or of the hearers or readers, who had to be turned away from approaching dangerous occasions. But the true and genuine tradition of the Church, to which attention ought rather to be given than to the words of individual writers who, although they were holy, were not immune from every error of expression, is found in the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the praises of virgins, in the passages in which the Apostle made the man and wife of equal right as regards the mutual possession of the body 5, and commended to men that they love their wives as Christ loved the Church 6.
Wherefore, an equitable judge praises the Church because she vindicated and restored the honor and dignity of the female sex. Moreover, it is sufficient to consider what place women had in paganism and what place they have in non-Christian societies, in order that you may understand how well the Church has merited of the female sex.
Concerning the doubt about the woman's soul.
To overthrow the calumny to which the Council of Mâcon gave occasion, it is sufficient to report the very words of Gregory of Tours which supplied the occasion for the calumny. "There was also present in this synod a certain one of the bishops who said that a woman could not be called homo, a human being. But, after accepting the reasoning of the bishops, he fell silent.... Our Lord Jesus Christ is for this reason called the Son of Man, because He is the son of the Virgin, that is, of a woman" 7. Therefore the matter concerned not the reality, but only the use of the Latin word homo, concerning which one man doubted whether or not it applied to both sexes.
7 Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, vol. 1, Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, book 8, chapter 20.