Sacred Energy

Aquinas distinguished between continence, a struggle against desire, and chastity, a settled virtue in which the struggle itself has quieted

Aquinas treats continence as the effortful, still-struggling stage and chastity as the settled result once the underlying desire itself has been reordered.

Summa Theologica II-II, question 155, works through a technical distinction that matters in Aquinas's moral psychology: continence is the condition of a will that successfully resists disordered desire, but only through a real, felt struggle against it, while chastity is a fuller virtue in which right reason has actually reordered the passions themselves, so the pull toward disorder has quieted rather than merely been overpowered. On his Aristotelian model of virtue, continence is praiseworthy but still imperfect, comparable to someone who does the right thing while wanting to do otherwise; chastity is the mature state in which doing right and wanting rightly have come together. The distinction gives the tradition a vocabulary for growth rather than a single pass-or-fail test of celibate life — a person can be authentically continent while still becoming chaste, with the discipline itself understood as the path from one state to the other.

Summa Theologica

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• What the celibate traditions say about envy and comparison

  Aquinas also supplies the one comparison the tradition thinks is useful. Continence is a will that resists desire through real, felt struggle; chastity is the state in which the passions themselves have been reordered and the pull has quieted. The measurement is against your earlier self, and it has two names so you can tell where you stand.