the goal, in approaching the highest chastity, but on the contrary.
Having decided that their task consists in observing external chastity, they either leave the world, avoid women, like the monks on Mount Athos, or make themselves eunuchs and disdain that which is most important, the internal struggle with besetting thoughts in the world, amidst temptations. This is the same as though a soldier should say to himself that he would go to war, but only under the condition that he should be certain to be victorious. Such a soldier will have to avoid real enemies and to fight with imaginary foes. Such a soldier will not learn how to fight and will always be bad.
Besides, this placing before oneself the task of external chastity and the hope, sometimes the certainty, of realizing it, have also this disadvantage, that, striving after it, every temptation to which man is subject, and so much the more the fall, at once destroys everything and makes one doubt the possibility, even the legality, of the struggle. "Consequently it is impossible to be chaste, and I have put a false task before myself." And it is all over, and the man abandons himself completely to lust and sinks in it. It is the same as in the case of a soldier with an amulet, which in his imagination makes him immune against death and wounds. Such a soldier loses his last bit of valour, and runs away at the slightest wound or scratch which he receives.
Only this can be the task: the attainment of the greatest chastity, in conformity with my character, my temperament, and the conditions of my past and present,—not before other men, who do not know what I have to struggle against, but before myself and before God. Then nothing impairs or arrests the motion; then the temptation, even the fall,—everything leads to one aim,—to the departure from the animal and the approach to God.
