Welcome back! Good to see you! Today, we're going to talk about chastity and lust, and how Christians have a problem with both.
Of all the hang ups a modern has about traditional Christianity, this is a big one. It’s not a secret that Catholics and Orthodox have epic levels of prudishness about sex and desiring it. It’s also not a secret Protestantism has poisoned us even further against any positive sexual concepts that traditional Christianity had to begin with. Investigating the Fathers, a bunch of overwhelmingly celibate dudes having to struggle with the fact they had no healthy sexual possibilities at all… yeah. Most married Catholics and Orthodox have asked themselves, at least once, if they got the raw end of the deal, if somehow they're less than celibates, which reinforces the popular perception to an ironclad scandal in the classical sense of the word. It ain’t a good look.
Academic nerds pushing their glasses back with an “AkCShuALly” can kindly keep it to themselves. Pretending Christianity hasn't struggled with prudishness on a cultural level isn’t honest. It's a meme for a reason.
Let’s do some course correcting today. Or try to.
The Root
The first thing to do is return to the primitive sources. Is the root bad?
We begin with Paul, who claims we struggle against the powers and principalities of the world. The people around us are involved in a larger, invisible conflict between God and “the” Satan, or Accuser. Paul is heavily influenced by the Book of Job, where God loves His creation, the Satan (also known as Leviathan at the end of the book) hates it, and demands to try those God loves… which is everyone. Now, to God this isn’t a case of Him wanting to torture people so much as His biggest and most fearsome pet, the equivalent of a freaking large German shepherd, is highstrung. God made Him for a purpose. When God is questioned by Job about what that purpose this attack dog on steroids is doing, God says His Leviathan is doing what it ultimately should, and Job really can’t understand what that purpose is.
Those of you who take issue with that, yeah I get it, it’s called theodicy, known as the problem of evil. Somehow the Satan’s rampagings are serving a much larger good. We have some guesses, but they’re ultimately guesses. Job somehow comes to peace at the end of his book. No pretense is made that we understand what that peace consists of. Paul is saying we are all Job. The Satan hates all of us for really petty reasons, and we are a part of a conversation between God and His angels and the Satan with his demons. To God it’s a conversation. He has it under control. What His goal is we can’t guess, but somehow it will all work out. He who hopes till the end will be alright.
The Desert Fathers
The first truly systematic exploration of sin we have come from a group called the Desert Fathers. Unlike the Mothers, who by and large were a rural group of monastics (who lived their lives in service of the poor), the male monastics just… left. They couldn’t stay in the cities or near others. The idea of the Fathers being superhumans who did all the important stuff is blatantly false. It is not good man should be alone. They didn’t leave because they were strong, but because they were weak and accepted this fact radically.
From these weakest came teachings that enriched the rest of us! Turns out if you have to put your humanity together, piece by piece, you learn a few foundational facts about existence that the simply healthy simply cannot learn. In their spiritual brawls to be human, the Desert Fathers discovered that not only were Job and Paul correct, but they began to be able to articulate why. Their oral teachings eventually became collected in more than a few volumes.
Evagrius and Talking Back
Pound for pound, the most impactful Desert Father book is “Talking Back”, by Evagrius of Pontus. It is the water that Christian morality swims in: mostly invisible and unnoticed, but of such vital importance! The book begins with Evagrius continuing Job’s thesis: man sits between God with His angels and the Satan with his demons.
God wants mankind to join Him in Heaven, which the Gospel of Matthew says we’re all predestined for. The Satan wants us to forsake our gloriously predestined home and join him in Hell, the place where you can’t enjoy God’s love.
For Those of You Skimming No, You Can’t Skip This
God wants mankind to join Him in Heaven, which the Gospel of Matthew says we’re all predestined for. The Satan wants us to forsake our gloriously predestined home and join him in Hell, the place where you can’t enjoy God’s love.
Christianity, the real thing, is ultimately about letting go of those who hold us back and going Home. That’s it. Anyone who disagrees with this statement isn’t Christian, no matter how many crosses they have in their home or how many people they alienate because they’re relentless assholes.
Or, to quote the very first paragraph of the Catholic Catechism:
God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Saviour. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.
Your Perception Determines Your Reality
The central game of all this comes down to the perceptions of the human being. If a human keeps God in mind constantly and acts in accordance with the love God has given him, he will do good, grow in peace and joy, and go on to enjoy God for eternity.
If he can’t perceive God, that small still voice Who speaks of genuine peace, all his actions will inevitably lead to ruination and Hell.
The goal of all sin is to keep you from seeing God. Period. Mankind, as eternal beings, are actively being harassed by demons to forsake the goodness promised them.
It is essential to understand that mankind, while fallen and messed up, isn't trying to damn itself. The Catholic West has a very hard time with the fact that Evagrius openly claims this, to the point to where the first Latin translation of Talking Back literally supposes, interposes that the book is just as much against mankind's "violent nature" as it is against our demonic interlopers. There isn't any textual support for the translational betrayal, but as Westerners it is important to understand that this inherent mistrust of human nature isn't in the original text. At the root, Christian morality ascribes evil to demonic influence.
Read it again: the basis for Christian morality very openly, very deliberately, does not say that humans try to damn themselves.
But our minds can wander. And they're mostly empty.
"It's Self-Sustaining Now"
Evagrius suggests that while demons "suggest" thoughts (logismoi), they eventually don't have to work that hard. We do the heavy lifting for them. Once a perception is skewed—once we see a person as an object, or a pleasure as a god—the machine runs on its own.
This is where the "prudishness" of the Church actually comes from: a trauma response. We became so afraid of the "machine" of desire running away with us that we decided the best way to see God was to close our eyes entirely. We mistook the distraction for the evil.
The Grand Reframe
If the goal of sin is simply to "keep you from seeing God," then sex—and the desire for it—isn't a dark stain on your soul.
It's a focusing lens that got smudged.
The Desert Fathers weren't celibate because sex was "gross" or "lesser." They will tell you that, sure, but that's like a semi truck saying unleaded gas isn't good for it: they literally couldn't use the marital bed to see God, and therefore... well really who cares what they think what their opinion is on that?
Also, our services on marriage simply do not agree with them, and liturgics always. Comes. First. The Fathers were celibate because they were specialized athletes training for a specific type of perception. But for the rest of us, the "raw deal" isn't the marriage bed; it’s the guilt we’ve been told to feel about the single
If you are a married Catholic or Orthodox person, your sexual union isn't a "concession" to your weakness. According to the original logic of the Fathers, regardless of their screeching, it is meant to be a theophany—a place where you see the self-giving love of God in the flesh. Tradition is about being in the present moment, whatever it is, and finding God in it.
Getting Our Eyes Back
We have to stop letting "prudishness" be the face of Christianity. It is a betrayal of the root. If we spend all our time obsessing over the "wickedness" of our desires, the Satan has already won because we are looking at our feet instead of at the Father.
The goal isn't to be "pure" in the sense of being sterilized and boring.
The goal is to be clear-eyed.
When we realize that our humanity—including our desires—was created by a God who wants us to share in His "blessed life," the prudishness starts to look like what it actually is: a petty distraction from the Accuser. It’s time to stop acting like God is disgusted by the people He’s currently inviting to dinner.
Let’s stop being "clean" and start being alive.
It is here that we pause. If I do not see you next week, I do not blame you. It is not easy road.
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