Icons, Not Instruments

Chastity Makes Us Real

Dear Friend,

Last time I wrote to you, I laid out why we have sexual ethics at all—that it’s about learning to steward nuclear-level powers without destroying yourself and everyone around you. I told you that chastity is about ordering desire rightly, and meekness is about ordering will rightly, and together they form the basis of your integrity as a real person.

I’ll be honest, I feel torn. I have so much more to say, but I’m truly afraid to say too much.

I held back last time because I didn’t want to overwhelm you with the whole vision before you understood the foundation. The crazy thing is that even though sexual ethics are essential, it’s really easy to forget that they aren’t really even the point.

Chastity doesn’t exist to make you a “good person.” It exists to clear the ground so you can actually begin the real task—the effort and unfolding of becoming fully alive, which is the glory of God.

Listen, I know how that sounds. Maybe you’re thinking: “Great, so now there’s MORE? I’m already struggling to not use porn and you’re telling me that’s just the entry-level stuff?”

Yes. Exactly. Don’t shoot the messenger. Stay with me, because this is where it gets so beautiful.

Photo by Thanuj Mathew on Unsplash

In Turning Venom Into Medicine, I wrote: “Love is ontological. It exists, and desires that we should also exist. It wants us to be real.”

Most of us are not really real. We’re performing—performing gender roles, purity, rebellion against purity, performing the sexual personas we think we’re supposed to have. And that’s just in the sexual aspect of the self. There are so many ways that we hide behind shame or bravado or carefully curated images, managing secrets and maintaining lies—lies we tell others, lies we tell ourselves. Lies we often come to believe.

Sexual chaos keeps you unreal. It has to, because if you were actually present to yourself and to the people you’re using (or being used by), you couldn’t do it. You have to stay in the fantasy, in the performance, in that strange dissociated space where bodies become objects and persons become categories. Chastity—real integrity, not just white-knuckling through temptation—is what happens when you stop performing and start becoming actual.

You just can’t get there while you’re enslaved to the passions. The lies are too thick, the performance too exhausting, the shame or pride or whatever you’re using to manage it all absolutely overwhelming. Chastity is what clears that space within the self. Not by making you good enough or pure enough, but by taking a leaf blower to your heart and then laying the foundation for you to be real.

People who are stuck in sexual chaos are perpetually tired. Not just physically (though that too), but spiritually exhausted. They’re constantly managing—managing urges, managing shame, managing the fallout from their last mistake, managing the fear of being found out. Stuck in reaction, there is no space for the agency of true action.

In Venom I used the metaphor of “the great battery.” When we love God first, with everything we have, we’re connecting to “the great fission/fusion, perpetual motion, infinitely charged battery of love.” And as we grow in love for Him, He enlarges our hearts so our capacity for love grows.

But when you’re enslaved to lust, you’re trying to draw from an empty well. You’re looking for love (or what you think is love, or what feels like it might fill the ache) in all these little tiny puddles—porn, hookups, fantasies, even inappropriate emotional affairs that never quite cross the line into physical intimacy. Even-- this is hardest to see-- through the performance of marriage. And every time you drink from those teeny tiny puddles, you get a little hit that feels like satisfaction, but you’re actually training your brain to crave less and less, to settle for smaller and smaller approximations of the real thing. C.S. Lewis famously used the image of a person choosing to lick the crumbs from the floor rather than sit at the festal table.

It’s like trying to power a city with your wireless phone charger or your Y2K solar radio battery. You’re burning through energy without actually building anything, without actually connecting to the source.

Chastity isn’t about restricting desire. It’s about plugging into the infinite source so your capacity for love can actually expand instead of being constantly drained.

When you’re chaste—when your desires are ordered toward love instead of consumption—suddenly you have energy for other things. You have attention for actual people. You have capacity for the slow, patient work of knowing someone deeply. You’re not constantly distracted by the next potential sexual encounter or the shame from the last one; you can perhaps begin the spiritually salvific work of relationship, which perhaps may include a marital relationship with another real person.

Your heart gets bigger. Not because you’ve suppressed desire, but because you’ve plugged it into the right current and now it can actually grow. You’ll be baffled at how you used to be content with sipping from puddles.

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You may begin to think that love and chastity, then, are really only about personal growth and development. I’m going to give you a third principle now: Spiritual growth, development and maturity is a different process and phenomenon than personality growth, development and maturity. The trouble is that there is significant overlap with these processes, and we frequently encounter people who are pursuing both at the same time, usually at asynchronous levels. This means that just because someone is at a high level of personal development, it does not indicate an equivalent level of spiritual development. It doesn’t mean the person is “bad”-- in fact, personal growth generally leads to all sorts of benevolent behavior. People can become good humans without being spiritual, which is why this principle is essential-- it is a necessary description of how reality works.

When you allow these processes to be separate, suddenly we can understand how remarkably individual, brilliant, lovely human beings can be completely blind to the spiritual world, and also how a simple, nondescript, nameless monk can shine with uncreated light. These are obviously edge cases, but perhaps they will help you to paint a mental picture. This model can also help explain how therapeutic relationships can be helpful until all of a sudden they aren’t; good therapy may help with personal development, but as a discipline is generally ill-equipped for spiritual direction.

I suspect that when we think of maturity, growth and development, we tend to think of it in terms of personal development. This would be having to do with incarnating ourselves as a particular, unique thoughts of God, in developing a personality and living out the unique circumstances of a particular life. This process has generally observable cause and effect-- you can put in a specific kind of effort, and see some kind of change happen.

Growth, development, and maturity is the spiritual life is much harder to pin down. What even is the goal of the spiritual life? Well, to directly experience God. And this is tricky because this process is not as dependent on cause and effect as we’d like-- hence we have all sorts of spiritual writings on both showers of grace and dark nights of the soul. I suspect this is a big source of frustration we have with relationships with other people-- being spiritual creatures, with relationships that dip into the spiritual world to a greater or lesser extent, we do not experience cause and effect in relationships the way we would choose to. Individuals, I’ve found, are unpredictable!

One of the core arguments I make throughout my work is what I call “the fallacy of the group”—treating statistical generalizations about populations as if they tell you something meaningful about the particular human standing in front of you.

Sexual objectification is the ultimate fallacy of the group.

When you look at porn, you’re not seeing persons—you’re seeing bodies sorted into categories. Types. Genres. The particular human being who was photographed or filmed is completely irrelevant except insofar as they fit the fantasy. You’ve reduced them to a demographic, a use-case, a means to your orgasm.

And it doesn’t just happen with porn. It happens in how we scan rooms for “hotness.” It happens in how we evaluate potential partners based on whether they check boxes. It happens in marriages when spouses stop seeing each other as particular people and start seeing “husband” or “wife” as a role to be performed or as a debt to be paid.

It can get even murkier than this, though, when we objectify someone else spiritually. Charles Williams, for example, believed that the lover must use his beloved as a rung on a ladder to climb up to God, much as Dante spoke about Beatrice. This is one of the major flaws in his romantic theology, because another person is used as a means to an end. Chastity protects against instrumentalizing even spiritual experiences. The beloved isn’t a ladder to God, and the marriage relationship is not a tool you use for your spiritual life. The beloved is a person you learn to love as God loves them, which requires you to be mature enough not to objectify and consume them.

But Charles Williams didn’t get it all wrong with his romantic theology, and it’s worth looking at where he got it right to understand why it’s so compelling, especially in how it relates to our cultural fantasy of medieval courtly love.¹

Williams believed that when you fall in love with someone, you’re given a vision of them as God sees them—glorified, perfected, not yet marred by sin. That moment of falling in love isn’t delusion or hormones (though it’s certainly those things, too, as reality is always multilayered)—it’s a genuine gift of grace, a window into the reality of who this person is meant to be. I think he’s right-- when we look at our beloved and see them as beautiful, as worthy of devotion, as somehow containing all the meaning in the universe—we’re not crazy. We’re seeing a new layer of reality, perhaps for the first time. We’re seeing them as icons, as windows into the divine.

But Williams went catastrophically wrong: He believed the lover should use the beloved as a rung on a ladder to climb up to God. The logic goes like this: “If this person is so beautiful, then God who made them must be even more beautiful, so I’ll use my experience of loving them to reach God.”

Do you see the problem? He turned the beloved into a means to an end.

And this vision of love reveals itself as far too small. Williams didn’t just theorize romantic theology, he practiced it. He conducted what he called “spiritual exercises” with female students that involved physical contact and the deliberate cultivation of spiritualized erotic energy. He was using them. Not just their bodies (though there was physical contact), but their persons—using their particularity, their vulnerability, their desire to serve God, as fuel for his own spiritual ambitions.

This is the exact opposite of chastity, dressed up in beautiful, romantic language. No wonder we’ve all been so confused-- the waters are getting muddied from every angle.

It’s true that when you see someone truly, when you’re given that vision of their glory, you’re encountering something real and sacred. But you can’t use a revelation. You can only receive it, venerate it, participate in it. Or, as Lisa and I like to say: Attend, relate and incarnate.

The beloved isn’t a ladder. The beloved is an icon—and you don’t climb icons. You stand before them in reverence. You let them make God present to you not by stepping on them to reach higher, but by honoring the image of God in them. Thinking of marriage as a ‘thing’ or ‘state’ that is merely instrumental to the spiritual life misses this point entirely.

This is why chastity matters so desperately in romantic love. Because the alternative to chastity isn’t just having sex with the wrong person at the wrong time or breaking the rules and making God mad.² The alternative is treating persons as instruments—even spiritual instruments, even with what look like good intentions.

Williams thought he was pursuing holiness. He genuinely believed his “romantic theology” was elevating eros to its proper spiritual height. But he was doing the exact thing I warned about in the last letter—he was wielding immature power. His desiderative power (eros) and his incensive power (will) were both oriented toward his own spiritual advancement, and everyone else was material for that project.

Ultimately, that’s not love at all. It’s consumption dressed up in religious language.

Christ in His Church has a completely different vision. When you encounter the beloved as icon, you don’t use them to reach God. Instead, you discover that loving them well is itself participation in the divine life. Not “loving them to get to God,” but loving them because God is love, and when you love truly—which requires chastity and meekness, which requires that you order your desires and your will—you’re participating in what God is doing.

The beloved doesn’t point beyond themselves to something higher. The beloved, loved well, becomes a place where you encounter God directly—because God is everywhere present and fills all things, and He’s especially present in the exchange of self-giving love between persons.

This is why marriage is a sacrament. Not because the wedding ceremony has magic words, but because the lifelong practice of loving one particular person—with all their frustrating particularity, all their resistance to being used for your purposes—becomes the training ground where you learn what love actually is.

And this love, in its fullness? It’s Trinitarian. It’s Father, Son, and Holy Spirit giving themselves to each other eternally, perfectly, without consumption or instrumentalization or false hierarchy or any of the distortions we bring to it.

I keep coming back to Williams not to trash him (though his practices were genuinely harmful), but because his error is our error, just in more obviously problematic form.

We do this all the time. We use our spouses to make us feel valuable. We use sexual partners (even ones we’re married to) to medicate loneliness. We use our own bodies as tools for stress relief. We use fantasies about people to avoid the difficulty of actual relationship (hello, internet as fairyland). We use the appearance of a good marriage to gain social benefits.

We’re constantly turning persons— including ourselves — into means to ends.

The path out is the same for all of us: Acquire chastity, order our desires so they serve love instead of objectification and consumption, and see persons as icons instead of instruments. Prepare ourselves to participate in Trinitarian love instead of trying to use love as a ladder to reach something else. It’s slow work. It takes a lifetime, and then longer.

And unlike Williams’s spiritual exercises or marriage misunderstood, it actually leads somewhere real—not to your own glorification, but to the mutual glorification of distinct persons learning to give themselves to each other without dissolving, without consuming, without using.

This is communion; this is theosis. That’s what you’re being freed for.

Let’s stop there for now.

In Christ,

Laura

P.S. — Remember, reading something intriguing on the internet isn’t a substitute for embodied practice of the spiritual life in the context of a real world sacramental community. I know it feels hard to find the spiritual fathers and mothers we crave, but Jesus has not abandoned us: “Lo, I am with you always, to the very end of the age”! Pray, and wait with the attention of young Samuel: “Speak, O Lord! Your servant is listening!”

P.P.S — Here’s a list of related essays in the series!

1. Beyond Divine Masculinity — and the essay that inspired it, The Most Harmful Spiritual Myth: Gendered Energy, by Alex at Left Brained Mystic

2. On Reading Lewis Mythically: Fiction, Theology, and the Lewis Question

3. The Scaffolding and the Cathedral: A Letter on Paradigm Shifts, Young Earth Creationism, and Gender Theology

4. Walking Around With Nuclear Codes: What Nuclear Energy and Eros Have in Common

5. Icons, Not Instruments: Chastity Makes Us Real

6. This is Not a Love Story: Lolita and the Corruption of Everything

7. Beyond Eye Bouncing: How Christians are Missing the Point on Pornography Recovery : A stand-alone piece I wrote a while ago explaining that how many people try to manage sexual temptation is based on flawed premises.

1. That Lewis himself explored scholastically in The Allegory of Love. But again, we’ve got to be careful not to mix genres in reading Lewis. Just because he wrote an academic treatise on courtly love, it does not follow that he was implying that we read the work with theological implications.

2. I originally had the typo, “Having sex with the wrong persona” and I just had to leave this here as a slip worth meditating upon...