The specific difficulties of sexual vice, with John Cassian.
On the Omission of an Embedded Vice
Since beginning reading John Cassian, I’ve been using an inexpensive version of his works by Aeterna Press: the older translations are more expensive, though better formatted, and thrift is a virtue. But in the middle of the volume, after the treatment of gluttony, a curious thing happened:
This immediately sent me looking for the version tucked away in our school library, translated and edited by Boniface Ramsey, the Dominican priest known best for his manifold translations of Augustine and other early church figures.
But why omit an entire chapter? Why translate and then not include an entire section of this work? There are, as we’ll see, some understandings of sexual temptation (and some remedies) which are a bit peculiar—medieval even—but on the whole I can’t quite understand the omission. One possibility is that this chapter is far more earthy: if the first several chapters of Cassian’s Institutes have to do with Psalms, daily practices of devotion, and the monkish life, it’s a bit jarring to have a whole chapter devoted to lust, fasting, and frank talk that accompanies discussing the vice of fornication.
For starters, however, what is meant here is not what it sound like, in that there’s no indication that the monks were somehow not celibate. To our ears, “fornication” sounds more like an act than a vice, which is part of the point: before gluttony, for example, is a habit, it begins as an appetite, an endless void that opens up inside a person for pleasure and for the senses. Thus, too, fornication does not mean monk brothels, but opposing a spirit which arises from within even the cloistered:
Our second struggle, according to the tradition of the fathers, is against the spirit of fornication. This savage war is longer than the others and of greater duration, and its completely won by only a few because, although it begins its battles against humankind from the first onset of puberty, it is not terminated until the other vices have been overcome….For the corrective to this vice comes principally from the perfection of the heart; it is there, according to the Lord’s words, that the poison of this malady is produced.
Fornication, in other words, is younger than other vices, having to do with what men are, and outlasts them because it arises from within the ordinary bodily mechanisms that come with having hormones. In other words, it comes part and parcel with being a living male, and endures accordingly.
None of this quite answers the question of why the Aeterna Press omits the entire section. Leaving it out doesn’t help align this with the so-called “seven deadly sins”, because one of the capital sins is lust. And skipping this one actually misses some important contrasts that Cassian makes between how fornication works, and other vices work. Maybe the translation was terrible? Maybe they ran short on time? My suspicion is that it’s omitted simply because the discussion can get too frank, and sully the image of monks.
But isn’t that the point? As Rowan Williams writes1, the catalog of passions that Cassian is dealing with are entirely natural impulses before they are vices: they are God-given desires which go to seed2. Gluttony, before it becomes a bottomless pit of desire, is an appreciation for the senses and for beautiful things. And here, too, before fornication is fornication, it’s the emergence of hormones in the body, part of the ordinary maturation process of a male.
That which is given by God for our flourishing as a human—including the desire for women—is harder to account for in the cloister, in that there’s not an easy way to address it. With gluttony, you can fast and eat modestly. But to be a monk is to have no constructive way of life to amend an excess of hormones, like marriage. And yet, the monks remain irreducibly male, and thus, subject to temptation for life on this count. No point in denying it.
There is, in this one, more to it than just mental images gone awry:
The other vices are usually purged away by contact with and by the daily discipline of human beings, and to a certain extend they are cured by disgust….But this diseases requires solitude and distance, along with affliction of body and contrition of heart, so that once the dangerous fever of seething emotions has passed, a state of integral health may be acquired. For just as it is often beneficial for those who are suffering from a particular illness not to even see harmful foods lest the conceive a deadly desire from the sight of them, so stillness and solitude are particularly helpful in driving out this disease3.
Fornication is so destructive of human fellowship that the only way to overcome it is to lean into the destruction and be away from people. The stakes here are quite visceral. One can imagine a combat zone as you read this, of the spiritual life as a true struggle, and an exhausting one at that.
The Stakes of the Struggle: Day and Night
Cassian goes on, in describing the scope of the struggle to say that it includes not only purity of the body, but also care for what happens even when one is not in concious control of the body. Lead sheets are proscribed to cover the crotch while sleeping, in order to inhibit nocturnal emissions4. This, apparently, was a not a peculiarity which Cassian wrote about, but raises an important question about the nature of a vice: is a vice more than that which I am conscious of?
That a person could be culpable, and vexed morally, by that which happens beyond one’s own conciousness is foreign to our way of thinking. We assign guilt or blame to that which has intent, and sometimes, not even to that—if we can argue that we didn’t intend something bad, but that the bad thing was an unintended effect, the principle of double-effect comes into play. But Cassian is reading an older magic: that sin is that which operates in our bodies even without us knowing about it.
As such, sexual purity is that which must do battle with “the hidden places of our heart”. The psychological language of neuroses and hidden dispositions comes to mind, that we might be moved by things we are not even aware remain in us. But for Cassian, it’s not simply an unconscious desire, but the work of demons, tempting us such that—because they are attached to what a man is biologically—the vice will emerge in all kinds of ways.
The unconcious seeds are present such that one cannot hope for “spiritual knowledge without integral chastity.”5 All of this raises an important point: how can this be possible, if, as Cassian writes a) it vexes a man so long as they have hormones going, and b) it can be operative even when one is not conscious of it? Cassian writes that it requires one to maintain “a moderate and regular fast”, but more importantly, that if this is linked to other vices, that the solution to fornication may be not by attending to the vice itself, but to how we learn excessive desire all the way around.
The Fast and Fornication
Multiple times, when addressing the vexing nature of fornication, Cassian points us back to fasting:
When a person is caught in the grip of the immoderation he will certainly fall away from the very balanced state of tranquility, and at one time he will be in want from too great an emptiness, while at another, he will be swelled up with an abundance of food. For with a change in our eating habits there is inevtiably a change in the nature of our purity as well6.
The interconnection between food and lust points us back to an important point: that the somatic connection between vice and the body is one which we cannot avoid. In the same way that he connects fornication to the emergence of hormones, so he connects fornication’s restraint to food. For even if there are no women passing through, memory remains a bodily function, one which operates on and with other aspects of our bodily life: food, sleep, discipline, companionship. All of this works while we are awake and asleep, resting and vigilant. There is no other possibility for us other than to have our bodies, and the possibilities and limits that come with them. And fornication, for Cassian, is one of those costs. That it is an irreducible cost is one which requires more attention.
That the way forward is not only patterns of contemplation—a refocusing of the mind—but a recognition that the body produces its own temptations is an important insight. For it is in and through this same body that the Spirit works for our redemption. The weakness is thus exposed: temptation does not belong to something which is ultimately alien to us as humans, but that which is proper to us, and so too is the cure. For grace, too, is not alien to us: it is that which we are born into as creatures.
Grace precedes the weakness, and as such, welcomes the emergence of the weakness in pubescence as a doorman welcomes a new visitor: they are a rightful inhabitant, but even inhabitants have to play by the rules of the building. As such, fornication is not an invitation to abandon the very human impulse of desire, of admiration of the opposite sex, but to treat it as an unruly child who needs attention. Come sit next to me in my prayers, and learn what it is to desire. Come listen to the Song of Songs and let the soul find its true desire. For Cassian, one cannot abolish desire, for it appears day and night, conscious and unconscious.
But that doesn’t mean that you have to feed it the kind of food it wants.
Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul. It’s wonderful.
Williams speculates here that perhaps the vexation of the demons—the agents which attempt to move us toward vicious lives—, which Cassian frequently describes, are part of God’s purgative work to perfect these natural desires in us. This fits well with the Orthodox notion of the life of virtue as one of struggle, not of endlessly ease in ascent.
“The Spirit of Fornication”, III.
“Spirit”, VII. Pliny the Younger, as well as Clement of Alexandria both describe this practice being used by athletes, as a way of preventing athletes from losing their vigor to accidental nocturnal emissions. Apparently the cold lead was supposed to chill things out. Augustine famously wrote that one of the signs of the fall was the fact that erections could happen involuntarily. We’ll get to this in a moment, but the point here is that attending to a vice didn’t just mean attending to one’s conscious behaviors.
Ibid., XVIII
Ibid., XXIII.
A while back I ordered a new copy of St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life because my old one was falling apart, and as I was reading it, it felt like something was missing. So, I checked it against the old copy, and it was the section where he talks about chaste sexual love among married couples. It had been edited out in that edition, which was based on a late 19th or early 20th century British edition. So, I think there was an excessive prudery about that topic in that era, even when they are talking about it in the context of virtue!
What a bizarre and ostensible betrayal of some publishing principle to which I am not privy but of which I feel intuitively. Preface the chapter if they must with some kind of warning, but let the man speak. Otherwise I the reader am being infantilized. Arcane as some of his perceptions might be, I find the connection between the impulses concerning food and fornication timelessly sound. Thanks for composing the post.