Chastity

Chastity:

Along the way to defining 'right drinking,' Scruton imagines what he calls "true chastity" for an analogy. This is a concept worth considering entirely separately from the concept of right drinking, though (perhaps because of my own continued 'chastity' from both drink and other things, occasioned by General Order #1) the analogy between a temporary abstinence from sex and from drink seems reasonable to me.

What he argues is that chastity is best taught (to those who are not priests) as a way of whetting the appetite, so that you may enjoy the deepest and fullest experience of the thing when the time is right. Sex is not something to be avoided, but rather, something that is best when it is joined to love and to commitment.

That is what true chastity consists in, and it provides one of the deep arguments in favour of marriage or, at least, in favour of the constraint upon sexual appetite that is offered by love, that it makes sexual enjoyment into a personally fulfilling habit.

Chastity in this light becomes, not an avoidance of something that is pleasurable, but a means of deepening the experience. In this way it is placed in the realm appealing to those who want to "live best, and love deepest" -- in a word, it becomes romantic.

That suggests Scruton has hit the truth of the thing.