Celibacy as service and as self-development

Some people worry about sexual abstinence as a matter of personal moral purity, but it is a different matter to cast it in the light of a form of service to others. James Hinton wrote: "The man who separated the thought of chastity from Service and made it revolve round Self betrayed the human race." Raquel Isabelle de Alderete wrote, "Instead of worrying about people's 'purity' and how it defines them as a person, worry instead about how you can protect other people's emotions." Relationships – particularly marriage and child-rearing – take a lot of time. Rabbi Ben-Asai, second century CE, explaining why he shouldn't have to marry and procreate, said: "What can I do? My soul clings to the Torah. The world can be maintained by other people." But the people who do that form of world-maintenance will develop knowledge and skills about relationships that can only be imagined by those who do not personally participate in their own instance of such a relationship. In other words, lifelong celibates are not ideally positioned to dole out marriage and family advice. Uta Ranke-Heinemann wrote: "If only the Church's celibates would stop using the confessional to meddle in matters that don't concern them..." The nature of the service enabled by celibacy is to be defined.

Then again, there is a way of understanding celibacy as a focus on the self without having it be narcissistic. Celibacy can be an intentional part of personal development. Barbara Feldon wrote: "Lovers may leave us, husbands and wives may die, friends can move away, but creativity is faithfully ours if we honor our solitude by diving to realms that are deeper, freer and more complete than our surface lives. Once we know the way we can home to it anytime we wish – if we make the first mark." Sometimes that solitude is needed, not to demonstrate superiority to oneself or to others, but simply to grow.

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Sources

James Hinton, unpublished manuscript. Quoted in Havelock Ellis. On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue. Two Volumes in One. New York: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc. 1937. (Formerly Little Essays of Love and Virtue, 1921, and More Essays of Love and Virtue, 1931.) Vol. 1, p. 45.

R.I.D (Raquel Isabelle de Alderete). We Don't Have a Compass but I'm Sure We'll Find Home: A Collection of Poems. 2015.

Rabbi Ben-Asai, quoted in the Talmud, bYabmuth 63b, quoted by Uta Ranke-Heinemann. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church. Trans. Peter Heinegg. New York: Doubleday, 1990. p 45.

Uta Ranke-Heinemann. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church. Translated by Peter Heinegg. New York: Doubleday, 1990. p 198.

Barbara Feldon. Living Alone and Loving It: A Guide to Relishing the Single Life. New York: Fireside, 2003. p. 159.

Literary references to low sexual libido

Some people (and fictional characters) admit to lack of sexual interest.

Andrei Platonov's fictional character Zakhar Pavlovich said, and the character Alexander reacted:

"every man has an entire imperialism down there, in the lower place...."

Alexander could not feel the imperialism within his own body, even though he deliberately imagined himself naked.

The mathematician Paul Erdos said:

Actually, I have an abnormality. I can't stand sexual pleasure. It's a curious abnormality. It's almost unique.

Nina FitzPatrick wrote a fictional character of a priest who initially does not feel sexual but then finds himself attracted to a woman:

Father Francis had never got an erection while listening to a beautiful woman. Or a man for that matter. It dawned on him, not for the first time, that he was born to indifference the way cuckoos are born to neglect their young.

* * *

It was odd to hear her addressing him as Francis rather than Father Francis. He felt it defrocked and re-penised him.

Alternatively, some people begin life with a strong sexual interest that wanes over time for various reasons. Evans D. Hopkins wrote:

Have I become a prude, in prison, you may ask? I don't think so. Rather, I have chosen celibacy as an exercise, as a means of withdrawing from the immediacy of the visceral world, in order to see things with greater clarity. Standing at some remove is almost a prerequisite for sanity in prison; the immediate world is one of clanking bars, piercing announcements, echoing shouts. The discipline of celibacy is a means of escape, of transcendence, of maintaining self-control. So no, I am hardly a prude. Sometimes I want a woman so bad I ache – longing not just for sex but for the feminine voice, the gentle touch or just the image of someone who cares for me to hang on my wall. But I have come to understand that human sexuality is a precious and powerful force that affects us both in its presence and its absence. ... The desire for sex, I have concluded, is often a guise of the broader need for human joy, and sex doesn't always satisfy that need. At the risk of sounding square, I think I have learned to satisfy my deepest needs through writing; I feel I've been able to call upon that emotional quality referred to by early philosophers as agape – love of truth, justice, beauty and humanity. I believe that my period of celibacy has helped me ground myself for this greater purpose. I no longer feel in danger of losing moral focus, or relying upon a relationship to define myself. I am by myself beneath these trees and great sky, but I am not alone. I turn to a fresh page from my notebook, and begin to draft an ad for the personals: Single Black Male, seeking special lady who wants something real this time...

Sources

Andrei Platonov. Chevengur. Translated by Anthony Olcott. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978 (written 1928). p 48.

Paul Erdos, interviewed in a 1993 documentary

Nina FitzPatrick. Daimons. Boston: Justin, Charles & Co, 2003. pp. 48-49, 143.

"Sex and the (Somewhat) Celibate Prisoner." Evans D. Hopkins. ©1997 Evans Hopkins and Nerve.com