How an Excess of Seminal Fluid Is Checked

For whatever has once been formed in the marrow through an abundance of food must of necessity be discharged and expelled by the very law of nature. Nature does not allow an overflow of any superfluous fluid to remain within it, since it treats this as harmful and contrary to itself. And so our body must always be disciplined by a reasonable and even frugality. Then, if while we live in the flesh we cannot be wholly free of this natural necessity, at least the course of the whole year may find us stained by this impurity rarely, and no more than three times. And even then, let quiet sleep pass it without any itching of desire, and let no deceptive image, a sign of hidden pleasure, draw it out. [a]

This, then, is the moderate and even allowance and measure of abstinence we spoke of, which also has the approval of the fathers’ judgment: that daily hunger should go hand in hand with our daily meals, keeping both body and soul in one and the same condition. It does not let the mind either faint from the weariness of fasting or be weighed down by overeating. For it ends in so sparing a diet that sometimes a man neither notices nor remembers in the evening that he has broken his fast.