About sensual dreams and nocturnal emission, by John Cassian: THEREFORE, this is the goal of integrity and its perfect proof: that no movement of the flesh creeps up on us while asleep, and that while unconscious we have no impure emissions [except those?] to which nature is subject. While it is beyond nature to avoid these completely and definitively, it is proper to exalted virtue to restrict them to the least frequent and naturally inevitable cases, which for a monk would occur every two months. But we have stated this according to our own experience and not according to the teaching of the elders, who judge that the periods of cessation stated here are still too short. We are afraid that if we expound this as we heard it from them, we might be thought, by those who have experienced a lesser purity due to negligence and less effort, to have described the impossible and the incredible.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 03:08:19 +0000
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