I vividly remember the first time I heard the word chastity.

I was about ten years old. Arriving home after school one day, I walked into the living room where the television was tuned in to an afternoon talk show. That day’s guest was Cher, a singer who made up one half of the popular seventies folk duo Sonny and Cher. She and the show’s host were discussing the couple’s young daughter, whose name was Chastity. I’d never heard that name or word before, but it didn’t strike me as odd—not, that is, until the host asked Cher, with a sly voice, “Have you explained to your daughter what her name means?” Cher laughed, and I realized that the adults seemed to be sharing some kind of a naughty joke. As soon as I had a chance, I looked up chastity in the dictionary and still didn’t get the joke. But I felt sorry for the little girl whose name the adults treated like something dirty.

“THE MOST UNPOPULAR OF THE CHRISTIAN VIRTUES”

Chastity, C. S. Lewis quipped, is “the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.”1 Augustine’s view of chastity was a bit more favorable—but not favorable enough for him to wish it upon himself. “Oh Lord,” he prayed, as the Lord was drawing Augustine to himself, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.”2

Of all the virtues, chastity is one of the most misunderstood. It tends to be idealized—both negatively and positively, either abhorred or idolized. The high esteem in which chastity was held in ancient pagan and Christian cultures, for example, evolved into reverence for perpetual virginity, epitomized by Mary, whose virginity was imitated by those in the church taking vows of celibacy. Such idealization for chastity would not last, however. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the atheistic Romantic poet, gave chastity a backhanded compliment in book 9 of his poem Queen Mab, an epic-length poem setting forth Shelley’s revolutionary philosophy. Calling chastity “dull and selfish,” the poem goes on to describe it dismissively as that “virtue of the cheaply virtuous / Who pride themselves in senselessness and frost.”3 In his novel Eyeless in Gaza, Aldous Huxley refers to chastity as “the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.”4

Sex is, of course, quite natural, as is sexual desire. Human vitality is characterized by our natural desires for self-preservation, reproduction, pleasure, and community. Just as individuals need food to live, the human race depends on human vitality, or the creational impulse, in order to continue. Sexual desire is good because it is part of how God designed human beings. God made the continuation of the human race dependent on communion with and desire for one another.

Temperance disciplines all the human appetites. As a kind of temperance, chastity tempers in particular the part of human vitality related to our desire to reproduce and to experience companionship. Temperance moderates according to the dictates of reason, which is why Augustine calls chastity, or purity, “a virtue of the mind,”5 locating it in desire rather than action.6 Like temperance, chastity demands more than mere suppression or denial for healthy discipline. Chastity is the proper ordering of one good thing (sexual desire) within a hierarchy of other good things.

However, even within the church, the importance of chastity is more often assumed than understood. Chastity is not the same as virginity or celibacy. Within Christianity, it is something both married and single people are called to. The person who is raped is not guilty of being unchaste. On the other hand, the consumer of pornography is. Chastity, most simply, is fidelity.

But beyond a proper definition of this virtue, the greater question is, Why does chastity even matter?

This question has gone so unexamined in the contemporary church that some years ago, Lauren Winner, a thoughtful adult convert to Christianity, had to research and write her own book in order to answer this question. Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity is an insightful exploration of how chastity isn’t just a negation: it’s a positive good.

Chastity is a positive discipline that involves the whole person and affects the whole person. As one philosopher explains, chastity “is a quality of one’s character, evident in all areas of life.” It is a discipline oriented toward “becoming a person with an outlook that allows one to selflessly appreciate good and attractive things—most especially bodies and the pleasures they afford—by keeping those goods ordered to the good of the whole person and his or her vocation to love.”7 If sex “is about persons being bodies together,”8 then chastity is about the right bodies being together at the right time. Chastity, then, is “not the mere absence of sex but an active conforming of one’s body to the arc of the gospel.”9 Properly understood, chastity is not withholding but giving. As G. K. Chesterton enthuses, “Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.”10

Fidelity to another person, particularly in marriage, is more than physical. Sexual unfaithfulness wreaks certain pain and irreparable damage to a relationship. Yet so too does emotional infidelity, as Ethan Frome powerfully shows. This novel tells the story of disordered desires that are allowed to grow in their distortion until a marriage and three lives are ruined—even without the ultimate act of sexual betrayal taking place.

THE UNCHASTITY OF ETHAN FROME

Ethan Frome is set near the turn of the twentieth century. We first encounter Ethan through the eyes of the narrator, a visitor to the town who slowly discovers the events of years ago that have formed Ethan as we find him in the present day. The frame narrative is similar to that used in The Great Gatsby. The narrator, who visits the town on business, meets Ethan Frome when Ethan is an old and broken man. Even then, Ethan is “the most striking figure” in rural Starkfield, Massachusetts. At age fifty-two, “stiffened and grizzled,”11 he looks much older, and is “but the ruin of a man.”12 The narrator learns that an accident years ago (the “smash-up”) caused the atrophy of Ethan’s right side and the jeering red scar on his forehead. Beyond these disfigurements, Ethan’s face bears a “pained look,” one that “neither poverty nor physical suffering could have put” there.13 Clearly, Ethan’s suffering is rooted less in the state of his circumstances than in the state of his soul. From the beginning, we see that his physical and spiritual condition contrasts sharply with the vitality of healthy human desire.

Undisciplined sexual desire is lust. Living in a modern culture in which sexual lust is so rampant and its destructiveness so woven into the social fabric, we see this vice a bit differently than earlier Christians did. The desert fathers understood lust more broadly as any excessive desire, not only wanton sexual desire. They viewed lust as “a sin of weakness, not a sin of malice.”14 This is why in The Divine Comedy Dante places those guilty of the sin of lust in the second circle, which is the first circle within hell (limbo being the first circle), reflecting the medieval church’s view that lust is the least deadly of the deadly sins. The punishment for lust is, correspondingly, the lightest within hell: the souls damned for their lust spend eternity bandied about by strong gusts of wind, never able to rest, a fitting symbol of the sin of giving in to their carnal desires.

Ethan Frome’s lust embodies each of the kinds of lust the Bible warns against: “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16). David L. Allen explains that the Greek term for lust that is used in this passage carries the sense of being “hot after something,” and it denotes things sought apart from God. “Lust of the flesh” refers to the worldly desires of our corrupted human nature as opposed to the will of God. The phrase “describes what it means to live life dominated by the senses” and neglectful of spiritual things. “Lust of the eyes” refers to desires for the things we can see—whether material possessions, beautiful persons, or successful status—again, pursued apart from God’s will. It describes the condition of being consumed by outward appearances. Finally, “the pride of life,” Allen explains, “describes the arrogant spirit of self-sufficiency.”15

In sum, lust of the flesh centers on temptations that originate within the body, with our inner appetites (sexual or otherwise), and lust of the eyes on temptations originating externally, with things we perceive and then desire to possess. The pride of life combines the two, appealing to the internal desire to be like God and seeking fulfillment of this through external shows of power. Each of these lusts is at work in Ethan. His story depicts how chastity involves the whole person and, within the context of a marriage, every aspect of the marriage: physical, emotional, and spiritual.

As a young man, Ethan’s formal schooling was cut short by his father’s death, followed by his mother’s illness and eventual death. Ethan bears out the truth of Alexander Pope’s famous line in An Essay on Man that “a little learning’s a dangerous thing,” for his short time at school only “fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.”16 His schooling was just enough to raise his expectations, only to see them go unfulfilled, breeding in him frustration, resentment, and a sense of being ill-suited to those around him. His mind was all dressed up but given no place to go.

Ethan returned home to care for his mother. His cousin Zenobia (Zeena) Pierce (as with Pierce, whose piercing personality turns Ethan cold, the names in this book often resonate with meaningful associations) came to assist in nursing Ethan’s mother, and for a time, Ethan’s oppression lifted. Zeena brought understanding, order, and laughter into Ethan’s life. They married.

But his happiness quickly vanished. Like Ethan’s mother, Zeena “too fell silent.”17 Within a year, Zeena became sick with hypochondria. Their union grew as cold as the snow that blankets the cold New England town for much of the year.

Then Mattie Silver arrived.

A poor relation of Zeena’s, Mattie is introduced to the reader through Ethan’s perspective years before the narrative begins as he waits for her outside the church where she is attending a dance. He watches her through the window, a flimsy barrier against the lust of his eyes. He searches the crowd inside “for a glimpse of the dark head under the cherry-colored scarf” and is jealous at spotting Mattie dancing a reel with a handsome, lively partner. The scene is rich with the sensory detail Ethan’s eyes take in as he seeks, is tempted, and finally consumed by his carnal desires: “As she passed down the line, her light figure swinging from hand to hand in circles of increasing swiftness, the scarf flew off her head and stood out behind her shoulders, and Frome, at each turn, caught sight of her laughing panting lips, the cloud of dark hair about her forehead, and the dark eyes which seemed the only fixed points in a maze of flying lines.”18

At first, Ethan’s desire is not solely, or even primarily, sexual. It is, rather, materialistic, possessive, and covetous: the lust of the eyes. What Ethan wants at this point is less Mattie herself than for him to be in the scene he now observes as an outsider looking in: “The dancers were going faster and faster, and the musicians, to keep up with them, belabored their instruments like jockeys lashing their mounts on the home-stretch; yet it seemed to the young man at the window that the reel would never end. Now and then he turned his eyes from the girl’s face to that of her partner, which, in the exhilaration of the dance, had taken on a look of almost impudent ownership.”19

The envy Ethan feels of Mattie’s dance partner—a suitable match for Mattie—fuels his illicit desire for her. When the dance ends, Mattie has to choose whether to accompany her dance partner or Ethan home; she chooses Ethan. This walk is like countless others they’ve taken, filled with sensory experiences that knit together their emotions, exquisite sensations: “. . . the cold red of sunset behind winter hills, the flight of cloud-flocks over slopes of golden stubble, or the intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow. When she said to him once: ‘It looks just as if it was painted!’ it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret soul.”20 When they arrive home from the dance, Ethan feels through “his tingling veins” that just “one sensation throbbed: the warmth of Mattie’s shoulder against his.”21

Lust of the eyes—desire for things external to oneself, prompted by any of the sense organs—is connected to lust of the flesh—desire rooted in needs from deep within. Ethan’s sexual desire for Mattie is connected to deeper desires for the intimacy of friendship and companionship, which he lacks, even with his wife. Ethan is “more sensitive than the people about him.” He feels isolated and lonely, not knowing “whether any one else in the world felt as he did.” With Mattie he feels he has found someone who shares in his appreciation for beauty and wonder, and he relishes the opportunity to gaze at the stars with her or stand “entranced before a ledge of granite thrusting up through the fern.”22 Mattie’s attentiveness to Ethan and her admiration for him also feed his malnourished ego.

The novel paints a sympathetic picture of Ethan. He is a sensitive man whose desires, although not rightly ordered, are good: he values companionship, nature, knowledge, and beauty. He has been self-sacrificing in his care for his parents and acted honorably by marrying Zeena after she came to help. In his desires for beauty, friendship, affirmation, and respect, Ethan is like all of us. His situation is hard. He is a man born into hard conditions, with untapped potential, exposed to just enough of life beyond the narrow constraints of the life he inherited so as to dream, only to see those dreams frustrated. Even so, he epitomizes the definition of “lust of the flesh,” desire rooted in one’s fallen human nature, in inner needs he seeks to fulfill apart from the will of God.23

Ethan’s lust of the flesh arises from seeing in others qualities he lacks and, in seeing this lack, desires. He is naturally awkward and is intensely aware of this. He admires “recklessness and gaiety in others” and feels pleasure from the sociability that does not come easily to him. The contrast “between his outer situation and his inner needs,” the narrator observes, is “poignant.”24 But Mattie’s arrival brought “a bit of hopeful young life” that was “like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth.”25

THE WIFE OF HIS YOUTH

It is, ironically, at Zeena’s request that Ethan accompanies Mattie to and from social events in town on her occasional nights off. The practice becomes a ritual that brings him increasing anticipation and delight, and the “fact that he had no right to show his feelings” only heightens his pleasure more.26 By the time Ethan and Mattie face an unexpected opportunity to be alone for an extended time, their desires have been whetted, and temptation proves to be more than they are willing to resist.

In contrast to Ethan, Zeena is painted most unsympathetically, rousing our compassion for Ethan’s situation all the more. Zeena is full of complaints, which she delivers in a “flat whine.” She is rigid in both body and personality. She has false teeth and lashless eyelids. During one dinner she tells repugnant stories of the “intestinal disturbances among her friends and relatives.”27 Ethan and Zeena are two people who seem to bring out the worst in each other. Sadly, we all know couples like this. He feels he must “wear out all his years at the side of a bitter querulous woman,” and she becomes “a hundred times bitterer and more discontented than when he had married her.”28

It’s important, however, to note that early in their relationship, Ethan and Zeena experienced laughter and hope. The illnesses that began to plague Zeena a year after their marriage changed that. But the dynamics of a relationship are determined by two people, not one. The rudder that turns the ship of a relationship in the way that will either bring it safely home or send it straight into the deathly glacier need not be large to direct it one way or the other. As Mattie says to Ethan just before the two of them later sail down the snow bank to their tragedy, “It takes two to coax it round the corner.”29

The marital relationship is singular in the way each partner shapes and forms the other. The good habits practiced by one partner contribute to the positive formation of the other. The same is true of bad habits. This mutuality doubles the effects of one person’s habits, whether positively or negatively. Thus, to reject the partner you once chose, as Ethan does, is, in a way, a kind of rejection of oneself. This is the idea expressed in Ephesians 5 when it says that “husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body” (vv. 28–29). Caring for one’s spouse as one would care for oneself makes it possible to fulfill the purpose of marriage, described earlier in this same chapter of Ephesians, which is to love your wife “just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (vv. 26–27).

While Zeena bears responsibility for the habits that have made her difficult to love, Ethan too has contributed to her character formation. If a husband’s care for his wife helps in her sanctification, then the reverse is true, as well. The mutuality that is part of every relationship is magnified in the marital relationship, in which two bodies become one flesh. Marriage to Ethan has made Zeena worse, not better. Whatever else might have been the cause for this, Ethan surely has a part. His response to the problem is to pursue lust.

Ethan’s lack of chastity begins with giving Mattie time and attention that he should not give: “At first she was so awkward that he could not help laughing at her; but she laughed with him and that made them better friends. He did his best to supplement her unskilled efforts, getting up earlier than usual to light the kitchen fire, carrying in the wood overnight, and neglecting the mill for the farm that he might help her about the house during the day.”30 Early on, he develops habits of attentiveness toward her that he did not for his wife. This internal orientation is manifested outwardly by as small—and as significant—a habit as beginning after Mattie’s arrival to shave every day. He makes a garden for her. He imagines what a good wife she might become to someone someday. Eventually, he cannot imagine her being that for anyone other than him. These efforts of fondness toward Mattie shift his orientation away from Zeena. It’s the age-old story, the paradox of the extramarital affair, confirmed by research: had the time, attention, and emotion spent on the affair been invested in the marriage instead, the affair might never have occurred.31 Zeena is not blind to these attentions. Once, after Ethan cleaned the kitchen floor in one of many efforts to cover for Mattie’s inadequate work, Zeena “surprised him at the churn and had turned away silently, with one of her queer looks.”32

Primed by the shorter moments he and Mattie share together, when Zeena announces unexpectedly that she will be gone for an entire day to see a new doctor out of town, Ethan envisions what extended time alone with Mattie might be like. He imagines their evening meal unhindered by Zeena’s presence. The connection between the appetite for food and the appetite for sex is one that the desert fathers recognized.33 The romantic meal Ethan and Mattie share proves to be both the height and the pit of their illicit love, a reminder that “sin entered the world through the bodily act of eating.”34

Their evening together is as idyllic as Ethan hopes it will be. Even their mutual shyness enhances its honeymoon quality. Ethan attributes his feelings of awkwardness not to his wrongdoing but to his natural reserve. Yet his sexual lust is outweighed by his lust of the flesh: that little voice inside him that tells him he is inferior and must, therefore, prove himself to himself.

The evening is marred by just one small incident. In preparing the dinner table, Mattie uses Zeena’s special pickle dish kept on the top shelf of the china closet. Zeena’s cat—who has been a lingering reminder of her owner throughout the evening—knocks it over, breaking the dish into pieces. The broken dish not only precipitates the tragic outcome of the plot but is laden with symbolism. It is red, the color of the scarf Mattie wore in her hair at the dance, and the color of blood and harlotry. It was a wedding gift to the Fromes, one so special to Zeena that she never used it (suggestive of another kind of marital “disuse” that characterizes their marriage). The smashing of the dish is a stark symbol of Ethan’s breaking of his marriage vows and foreshadows the greater “smash-up” to come, one that will forever change and define the relationship of these three people.

The fantasy ends when Zeena returns. And with a new medical diagnosis, she has the perfect excuse to put Mattie out in order to make room in the house for a more helpful boarder. “I never bargained to take her for life!” Zeena tells Ethan when he protests.35 This is, of course, exactly what Ethan pledged in his marriage vows to Zeena—to take her for life. He is the one violating a vow, not Zeena.

Ethan is a man lacking even a healthy sense of control over his life. Yet he overlooks the very thing he can exert control over: his treatment of Zeena. Failing that, his sense of his lack of control over his life spirals out in the ensuing hours to its crisis point.

He and Mattie rashly determine to exert ultimate control over their lives by sledding down a hill and into a great tree at the bottom, thus ending their lives. Their decision is the inevitable culmination of unchastity: the pride of life that is the “arrogant spirit of self-sufficiency.” But even this is out of their control, and it all goes wrong. Ethan and Mattie are left alive but gravely and permanently injured. Their foolish, romantic vision of dying together gloriously is met by harsh reality.

It could have turned out so much differently if Ethan had loved—purely, faithfully, and chastely—both his wife and Mattie. Although easy to miss amid all the misery portrayed, small details in the story suggest that Ethan and Zeena’s marriage might have been brighter.

Ethan had married Zeena, seven years his elder, out of a sense of obligation, and she recognized this. A bad beginning worsened over time: “Perhaps it was the inevitable effect of life on the farm, or perhaps, as she sometimes said, it was because Ethan ‘never listened.’ The charge was not wholly unfounded. When she spoke it was only to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to remedy; and to check a tendency to impatient retort he had first formed the habit of not answering her, and finally of thinking of other things while she talked.”36

The night of his dinner with Mattie, after Zeena returns from the new doctor and shares the dismal diagnosis with Ethan, he experiences a rare moment of compassion for her. He notices, looking at her, she “looked so hard and lonely, sitting there in the darkness with such thoughts.”37 Not long afterward he tells her, regretfully but defensively, “You’re a poor man’s wife, Zeena; but I’ll do the best I can for you.”38 Yet this is a lie. He is not, and has not been, doing the best for her.

But what if he had?

Oh, their marriage would not have been perfect. It likely would always have been hard. Neither a good marriage nor a bad marriage is, in most cases, owing to just one thing, but to an accumulation of things that reach a tipping point that tilts toward better or worse. But at some point in the modern age, people were led to think that while some things might be hard and so must be worked at—things like work, school, raising children, maintaining health, even life itself—a marriage that is hard must be quit.

What a sharp contrast is painted by the biblical vision of marriage, rooted in love that is patient, kind, protective, and selfless. Recognizing the natural temptation to let time take its toll, Proverbs 5:18 exhorts a man to “rejoice in the wife of [his] youth.” No exemptions are given for a wife who is sick, cranky, petulant, or needy. In fact, in Malachi 2:14, unfaithfulness to the wife of one’s youth is one reason given for the Lord’s rejection of the sacrifice offered to him. Whatever it was that was good enough in a woman to make a man want her in youth, these verses seem to imply, ought to be good enough in old age.

The virtue of chastity is both a recognition of this relational reality and a safeguard. Ethan and Mattie never have sex with one another. But they do not practice true chastity. Chastity is less about control of oneself than about love of the other. Ethan’s love, both for his wife and for Mattie, falls short. If he had loved and not merely lusted for Mattie, and if he had sought for her good, he would have wanted what was good and right for her—the chance for a lawful husband, not an illicit lover. This understanding is reflected in the words of Pope John Paul II: “Only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love.”39 Zeena too, it might be argued, in the treatment of her husband has not been chaste because, in its broadest sense, chaste means “morally pure.”40 Love seeks the good of the other. Lust does not.

I have a single friend who, years ago, became infatuated with a male coworker who was in a difficult marriage. The two had a natural rapport and shared commitment to their work, which was meaningful to both of them. Because they were both committed Christians, the prospect of an affair seemed, ultimately, unlikely to my friend, but for a time she struggled. She was sure the attraction she felt was mutual. Many Christian leaders and authorities advise believers to run from such situations (even shunning opposite-sex friendships altogether to avoid them), and my friend seriously considered giving up a job she loved in order to flee temptation. But, as she worked through her feelings of desire, she came to realize that she did, in fact, love this man. She loved him as a Christian brother and wanted the best for him. She loved him enough to vow that no matter how strong her feelings grew, she would not harm her brother by entangling him in sin. And she didn’t. By the time her coworker moved away for another job, her lust for him had subsided. But her pure love remained.

It’s a common observation that over time married people begin to look like one another. One theory for this phenomenon is that shared emotions produce similar facial patterns that become etched into both faces over the years, making them resemble each other more.41 Ethan Frome offers an ironic twist on this truth. The injuries Mattie receives in the smash-up render her forever dependent on the woman she and Ethan betrayed. At the story’s end, she has grown so similar to Zeena in appearance and demeanor that when the narrator enters the Frome house for the first time many years later, he is uncertain at first which one is Ethan’s wife and which his near mistress. Slowly, it becomes clear that the more crippled, complaining one is Mattie, who is now under Zeena’s care. Ethan now lives not with one whiny, querulous woman but with two.

The description of the last scene that takes place in the Frome house—in the kitchen—is filled with things that are rough, soiled, and broken. Echoing Zeena’s words earlier in the novel, Ethan tells a visitor, apologetically, “My, it’s cold here! The fire must be ’most out.”42 Coldness permeates the Fromes’ marriage, kitchen, house, town, and community. The place is as wrong for them as they are for one another.

CHASTITY AND COMMUNITY

Just as marriage takes place before and is upheld within community, so too does chastity, whether that of a married person or a single one. Thus the novel’s setting is a significant element of the story.

Ethan and Zeena’s alienation from one another is rooted in the alienation that characterizes life in Starkfield (another of the novel’s resonant names). Starkfield is a cold place, both geographically and emotionally. Its citizens uphold the real-life stereotype of New Englanders: rigidly stoic, intensely private, and exceedingly independent. (I hail from New England. I know my people well.) Besides the chill of winter and snow, Starkfield is characterized by silence. The silence freezes Ethan’s spirit even more than does the weather or his wife, who goes silent on Ethan after they marry. When they first married, Ethan fancied that having Zeena as his wife would help him find his place in the world, but it didn’t. She, on the other hand, was disappointed in life on an isolated farm.43 In marriage, they find themselves alone together.

While chastity is formed in and sustained in community, lust “thrives in privacy and alienation, and lustful people often feel alone.”44 Alienation is the opposite sense of knowing another and being known. Frederick Buechner explains that “the hunger to know someone sexually is the hunger to know and be known by that person humanly.”45 Lust derives from a feeling of lack, and nothing feels more lacking than a sense of isolation. It is probably not coincidental that the technology that makes pornography omnipresent is the very technology that is isolating human beings from one another more and more and generating greater loneliness.46 Ethan’s lusts are rooted in his loneliness.

Tellingly, the closest he comes to changing course and remaining chaste occurs because of a rare moment of compassion from a neighbor when Ethan makes a desperate appeal to her. “It was a long time since any one had spoken to him as kindly. . . . Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried without repining the burden of three crippled lives. But Mrs. Hale had said, ‘You’ve had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome,’ and he felt less alone with his misery.” This unexpected, uncommon kindness deters Ethan from his plan to request a loan under false pretenses. For the moment, Ethan sees his situation clearly and chooses to accept it rather than do wrong: “With the sudden perception of the point to which his madness had carried him, the madness fell and he saw his life before him as it was. He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.”47 If Ethan had kept this resolve, he might have found his way to some fulfillment. But this rare experience of community is not enough.

Lauren Winner explains, “The community is not so much cop as it is storyteller, telling and retelling the foundational stories that make sense of the community’s norms.”48 Marriage is not only about mutual companionship and romantic love, but it is the institution “out of which cultures and societies are formed.”49 Marriage “is about children, and household economy, and stability. And marriage is also about God.”50 Marriage forms a little society. And the health of that little society depends to some degree on the health of the larger surrounding society.

Unlike abstention, an act of an individual, chastity is a form of community, and chastity depends on community. We can’t always choose where we place our roots, but when we can, it’s important to choose well. The ancient monastics took their vows of chastity within a community. Whether or not we realize it, we do as well.