Chastity’s Free and Lasting Love

Diana or Artemis Lucifera. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples. Farnese Collection (inv. 6280). Parian marble, 2nd century CE. No known findspot. Photo by Stephen Chappell.

Erik Varden is a monk and a Catholic bishop who hopes that we can all learn to enjoy the freedom and power of chaste love once again. Lamenting that his own pursuit of chastity was, for too long, nothing but an endeavor of “sheer mortification,” he exclaims:

If only I had thought of reading Cicero! He could have let me discover that, in the ancient world, the goddess of chastity, Diana, was known not only as lucifera, ‘light-bearing’, but as omnivaga, ‘roaming everywhere’, so sovereign and free.

Obviously, we don’t associate chastity with glorious attraction and uncontainable freedom. Varden, however, wants to rekindle these connections. He is inviting us to learn to love again in his book Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses (Bloomsbury 2023). We are created to behold and to be beheld—to be present, vulnerable, and mutually supportive with each other as persons within our shared and fallen world. This capacity to love everyone with a lifelong fervor, however, requires that we continually learn to desire the good and the beautiful without possessiveness and with a more and more focused harmony of our desires.