Category: TEMPTATION & LUST & VIRGINITY

  • “If a man has no sense of meaning, he will numb himself with pleasure.”

    — Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
    (via Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy by Donald Miller)

  • The demons generally produce in us the opposite of what has just been said. For when they take possession of the soul and extinguish the light of the mind, then there is no longer in us poor wretches either sobriety, or discernment, or self-knowledge or shame; but there is indifference, lack of perception, want of discernment and blindness. 

    What has just been said is known very vividly by those who have subdued their lust in order to become chaste, who have curbed their freedom of speech and have changed from shamelessness to modesty. They know how after the sobering of the mind, after the ending of its blindness, or rather its maiming, they are inwardly ashamed of themselves for what they said and did before when they were living in blindness.

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • People, who wish to discipline the sexual organs should avoid drinking those artificial concoctions which are called ‘aperitifs’ – presumably because they open a way to the stomach for the vast meal which is to follow. Not only are they harmful to our bodies, but their fraudulent and artificial character greatly offends the conscience wherein God dwells. For what does wine lack that we should sap its healthy vigor by adulterating it with a variety of condiments? 

    —St. Diadochos of Photiki

  • The Bible tells us not to indulge in lusts of the flesh, because God knows how difficult it will be for us to recognize the truth about life if we do.  When people in the Land of Flesh look around, they see nothing but death.  But when people in the Land of the Spirit look around, they see only life—nothing ever dies in the Land of the Spirit.  Then what a foolish thing it is, really, to debate about whether unnecessary physical indulgences are harmful—to wonder whether a little marijuana will do any damage, or whether regular smoking and a little drinking binge now and then is going to matter much.  Every physical indulgence we add to ourselves—and especially the ones that serve mostly to calm our nerves or lift our spirits (things that should never be done by anything material, but only by God)—will just root us all the more inescapably in the Land of Flesh, where there is no life, no kingdom of heaven, no hope in God.

    —Dee Pennock,Who is God? Who Am I? Who Are You?

  • Damage (1992)

  • Parthenope (2024)

  • He who honors celibacy and virginity must keep his loins girded and his lamp burning (cf. Luke 12:35). He keeps his loins girded through self-control, and his lamp burning through prayer, contemplation and spiritual love.

    —St. Maximos the Confessor, Four Hundred Texts on Love

  • 56. When the body is urged by the senses to indulge its own desires and pleasures, the corrupted intellect readily succumbs and assents to its impassioned fantasies and impulses. But the regenerated intellect exercises self-control and withholds itself from them. Moreover, as a true philosopher it studies how to rectify such impulses.

    —St. Maximos the Confessor, Four Hundred Texts on Love

  • 167. When images of some sensual pleasure arise in you, watch yourself so as not to be carried away by it. Pause a little, think about death, and reflect how much better it is consciously to overcome this illusory pleasure. 

    Anthony the Great: On the Character of Men and on the Virtuous Life: One Hundred and Seventy Texts
    Philokalia