The Chastity of Abbot Serenus

We want to introduce Abbot Serenus to earnest minds. He was a man of the greatest holiness and self-control, whose character mirrored his name, and we admired him above all others with a special reverence. We think that in trying to include his conferences in our book we are simply carrying out that wish. Beyond all his other virtues, which shone out not only in his actions and manners but, by God’s grace, in his very face as well, this man was granted by a special blessing the gift of bodily self-control, so that he never felt himself disturbed by the natural stirrings of the body, not even in sleep. How he reached such wonderful purity of the flesh, which seems to lie beyond the conditions of human nature, by the help of God’s grace, I think I ought to explain first of all. [a]