I had a chance encounter with a nun a couple of mornings ago. She was in front of me at the pharmacy. I believe she was from the Dominican Order that lives in community nearby. Afterwards I thought about her solemn vow of chastity. In A History of Celibacy, Elizabeth Abbott writes, “Chastity was the fundament of the nun’s vocation, the most crucial of her vows.” Her denial of sex defines her identity. Her veil, “the outward sign of inward chastity,” in Penelope Johnson’s words, hides her hair, long a symbol of female sexuality. “The nun’s chief aim was to preserve her soul by preserving her chastity, the virtue into which all others more or less collapsed,” Nancy Bradley Warren concluded about medieval nuns.
How does she do it?
Her sexual self-mastery is a reproach. I experience primal sexual desire as an irresistible force that demands urgent satisfaction. Is she simply, by nature or self-discipline, asexual? Does she sublimate these urges into spiritual aspiration? Or does she simply grit her teeth and resist temptation? Perhaps she secretly wears sexy lingerie under her habit for a thrill.
The Council of Trent pronounced an anathema on those who disputed that virginity and celibacy are superior to conjugual relations. Alcuin insisted that chastity is angelic. Others have not been so sure. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus compares a nun to a rose “withering on the virgin thorn.” Luther thought the nun’s vow of chastity wholly unnatural: “Only one woman in thousands has the God-given gift to maintain pure chastity.” The biological imperative was too strong. “Nature wants to get out. It wants to cast its seed and multiply.” The skepticism of the Reformers was amplified by modern secular critics. In La Religieuse, Diderot asks, “Can these vows, which run counter to our natural inclinations, ever be properly observed except by a few abnormal creatures in whom the seeds of passion are dried up, and whom we should rightly classify as freaks of nature?”
The contours of this reflection are shaped by personal experience. My college girlfriend later converted to Catholicism and entered religious life. Her virginal aura was one of her attractions to me, and I’m quite certain her virginity is intact. Does she experience the absence of compulsive sexuality as freedom? Or is she deprived of an essential human experience?
The same fascination does not extend to priests, despite shared vows. “They’re just guys,” Southern Comfort told me of priests. She would have been one to know. She claimed that she slept with a couple of them, including one serving at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (I’m reminded of a scene in The Young Pope when a glamorous call girl claimed to “have clients who insist I am proof of the existence of God.”)
For reasons that would interest a psychoanalyst, I’ve developed a definite nun kink. There’s a scene in a movie in which a young novice serving in Africa, played by Chloe Sevigny, surrenders her chastity to a plantation owner in exchange for assistance to AIDS victims. As she slowly lifts up her white habit and her panties are pulled down, her rosary beads dangle against her bare skin. There is an irresistible erotic charge to the imminent violation of her solemn vows. I find the violation of this particular taboo especially arousing.
Lutheran Guilt 