Varden, a Norwegian monk and bishop, wonders about chastity, a virtue seen as old-fashioned and of low value in the West. He says "my purpose here is not to make an apology for chastity", he intends to analyze the concept of chastity, also of purity, in Western history. To do so, he starts from the creation of humankind and the tensions surrounding his life since the exclusion from paradise. Immersed in dichotomies, not always well understood or resolved, order and disorder, body and soul, man and woman, eros and death, marriage and celibacy, freedom and asceticism, he concludes that "the principle of a chaste life in the world is to see it as it is, with reverence, desiring to find what I see, but freed from the need to possess it". For Varden, chastity is a countercultural attitude, living detached and "liberated from the will to dominate."