C.S. Lewis on Chastity

rachel lindstrom (baubo@primenet.com)
Sun, 16 Jun 1996 10:32:05 -0700

"Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no
getting away from it: the old Christian is, 'Eiterh marriage, with complete
faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.' Now this is so
difficult and so contrary to our instints, that obviously either Christianity
is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the
other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which
has gone wrong.
But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex
is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the
body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want,
it is quite true that most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically
too much. One man might eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for
ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not
enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever
he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years, he
might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and
preposterous excess of its function.
Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a
striptease act -- that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now
suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply
bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the
cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that
it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in
that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would
not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something
equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven, Harcourt Brace & Co, 1984, pp 85-6.