Chastity 3. double life? chastity and psychological life
Danger of a wrong interpretation of the vow of chastity: the double way
Today, together with the extraordinary example of so many men and women committed to their consecration, we may find somebody having a wrong interpretation of the vow of chastity. This is possible when we focus only on some aspects of it, while neglecting the global picture and the foundations of the vow itself. This happens when we separate the vow from the consecration and from the fellowship of Christ. The error can be in two different ways.
Some may stress too much on the aspect of not getting married. This can become the reason for rejecting every possible relationship (communication) with people of the opposite sex. This attitude hides some serious psychological problems.
Some other, instead, considering not to get married, solely a rule to be practiced literally, they avoid marriage but allow themselves secretly everything else. This double life of commitment on the outside and of lust on the inside, denotes moral problems. The secret life will become more and more demanding and will bring the person to compromise in all the other aspects, starting from poverty, then community life and eventually the same apostolate. Double life will never bring happiness and sense of fulfilment to the person, but uneasiness and guilt.
Chastity and the three levels of human life
In the introduction we have seen the three levels of human life and said that that is the place where we make all our decisions. We have been created by Love (God) and for love. Love is our very nature so we will respond to the needs of the three levels with love. Since the vow of chastity is nothing else but the right use of love, then it will be very important for a mature dealing with the three levels.
As we have seen in the chapter on sexuality, love can be defined using three words: Eros, Philia, Agape. According to Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical letter “Deus Charitas est” these three are not different kinds of love but the same love in three different stages. Here is exactly where the three levels of human maturity influence our capacity of loving and where love influences our capacity of living.
The first level tries to satisfy the physiological and material needs. In this level Eros is very strong. We desire something and try to get what can satisfy such desire. The vow of chastity teaches us that such desires should not be satisfied but controlled. Pope Benedict says that in itself Eros is not bad and has a positive function of pushing us to start relationships, but we should not allow it to dominate such relationships. This is the function of the vow of chastity with its strong redeeming power for Eros.
At the second level we have the relational and social needs: the need of belonging, of having support from others. This is the realm of Philia. Here we have friendship. Such love is good because opens us up to the relationships but still lacks the spiritual level. If in the first level the attraction is mainly sexual, here it may be more social but still is a tendency to satisfy our needs, which means to put ourselves at the centre. The vow of chastity teaches us to overcome this temptation and try for a more pure oblative level of love.
The real love, the love of pure donation can be achieved only at the third level. Here we are in the full consciousness of what is going on around us. We intrinsically need something more than material things, we need to be able to think, to judge. We need something that can endure. This capacity to transcend the physical reality is something possible only to human beings, and is possible only at this level. The intelligence helps us to evaluate properly the situations and to find lines of action which are not necessarily guided by what is good for us, and the spirituality gives us the courage to make the sacrifice of ourselves in order to achieve such oblation. Here love reaches the level of Agape and chastity can be lived in its fullness as a way to reach out to our body or to the others, to redeem our bonds. This love can be called “mad love” because it can go out of the passion of flesh and of simple mutuality.