“You can’t prevent malicious thoughts from coming, but it’s up to you to resist them.”
—Abba Pimen
Category: TEMPTATION & LUST & VIRGINITY
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Struggle with your flesh until it is humbled. Once it is used to this modest and rough environment, it will become your mute slave. Humility of the flesh will be granted at last. You should always keep this in sight and strive for it as a reward for your labors. Physical podvigs [spiritual struggles] foster physical virtues: solitude, silence, endurance, vigilance, labor, patience in deprivations, purity, and virginity.
You should remember that this friend of yours will end up in the grave. They say: Do not trust the flesh—it is deceitful. When you come to believe it is humbled, you relax, and it immediately grabs you and conquers you. This war with it continues to the grave, but it is much harder at first. Later it gets easier and easier until finally there remains only attention to its behavior with occasional light sensations of fleshly upsurge.
—St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation
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Even if a thought does not represent anything bad in and of itself or in its consequences, do not immediately incline towards it, but be patient for a time, so as not to do anything rash. Some have waited five years before carrying out a thought.
—St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation
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“For nine years a brother was assailed by the temptation to leave his community. Every day he got ready to go and picked up the cloak in which he used to wrap himself at night. At evening he would say, ‘I will go away tomorrow.’ At dawn he would think, ‘I ought to stay here and bear this temptation just today for the Lord’s sake.’ He did this every day for nine years, until the Lord took the temptation away.”
The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks
by Benedicta Ward -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
You will find, if you look carefully into any human’s heart, that he is haunted by at least two imaginary women a terrestrial and an infernal Venus, and that his desire differs qualitatively according to its object. There is one type for which his desire is such as to be naturally amenable to the Enemy readily mixed with charity, readily obedient to marriage, coloured all through with that golden light of reverence and naturalness which we detest; there is another type which he desires brutally, and desires to desire brutally, a type best used to draw him away from marriage altogether but which, even within marriage, he would tend to treat as a slave, an idol, or an accomplice. His love for the first might involve what the Enemy calls evil, but only accidentally; the man would wish that she was not someone else’s wife and be sorry that he could not love her lawfully. But in the second type, the felt evil is what he wants; it is that ‘tang’ in the flavour which he is after. In the face, it is the visible animality, or sulkiness, or craft, or cruelty which he likes, and in the body, something quite different from what he ordinarily calls Beauty, something he may even, in a sane hour, describe as ugliness, but which, by our art, can be made to play on the raw nerve of his private obsession.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
As regards the male taste we have varied a good deal. At one time we have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men’s vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, we have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present we are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and we now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female’s chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
I suppose you’ve tried persuading him that chastity is unhealthy?
…for if we can’t use his sexuality to make him unchaste we must try to use it for the promotion of a desirable marriage.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
I note with great displeasure that the Enemy has, for the time being, put a forcible end to your direct attacks on the patient’s chastity. You ought to have known that He always does in the end,
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
Instil into him an overweening asceticism and then, when you have separated his sexuality from all that might human-is it, weigh in on him with it in some much more brutal and cynical form. If, on the other hand, he is an emotional, gullible man, feed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that ‘Love’ is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, ‘noble’, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis
SO GOOD QUOTES 