“Chastity,” this chapter begins, “means the attainment of an immaterial nature. Chastity means an enviable home of Christ and an earthly paradise for the heart. Chastity means unnatural denial of human nature; a paradoxical quest of the mortal and fragile body toward the bodiless angels.”
Instead of quietly calling for meekness and self-denial, John sets an almost defiant tone from the start. He doesn’t sugar-coat the message. He is asking for no less than to go against human nature. Christians on a path of ascendance to God are not called to be ordinary—simply fulfilling their job description. We are called to be extraordinary and defy all assumptions about the limitations of human nature.
While the chapter admonishes monks to abstain sexually, it also explores the meaning of chastity beyond sexuality.
“It is not he who kept his body of clay untainted that is considered chaste,” Johns tells us. “He who has achieved perfect chastity is the one who has been able to subjugate the members of his body to the soul”
Chastity is not only physical abstinence in the letter of the law, but the ability to overcome passions and replace them with purity and simplicity. Unlike passions, a life of chastity does not draw us to it because it is exciting, flashy or prestigious. And this is perhaps the toughest part of the challenge—giving up the pursuit of grand goals and the thrill of intense passion and excess for what on the surface seems to be a merely simple life.
John does not let us get by with fantasy, however. He exposes the false “high” of passions by conjuring up a images of lives lived in excess of sex, indulgence, soft living and gluttony that are defiling the soul the way bad food upsets the stomach and can even poison you.
How do you fight passions? We are warned of the danger of seemingly overcoming one passion when, in reality, we are simply replacing it with another. The man who thinks he can overcome fornication by stuffing himself, John tells us, is like “someone who quenches fire with oil.”
Paradoxically, satisfying passions does not quench the thirst. On the contrary, the more we indulge in them, the greater the thirst becomes and hence the higher our need for excess and indulgence. An unchaste life is a life spiraling out of control. As in the case of chemical addictions, denial is one of the greatest dangers. It allows us to relax our vigilance and allow the tiny urges or small indulgences that can flame into all-consuming passions. John is telling us, in essence, what programs like Alcoholics Anonymous have come to understand: the first step is to admit that you are powerless.
Passions arise insidiously, in tiny, gradual steps that are easy to miss. The weapon is vigilance and mourning, coupled with discipline for stopping passions before they grow and dominate.
Readings in Philokalia 