Serenus Asks About Our Thoughts

This man, then, in his prayers by day and night, and in fasting and keeping watch, tirelessly begged for inward chastity of heart and soul. He saw that he had obtained what he wished and prayed for, and that all the passions of fleshly desire in his heart were dead. Then, roused as it were by the sweetest taste of purity, and set on fire by his zeal for chastity with a still more burning desire, he began to give himself to stricter fasts and prayers. He wanted the putting to death of this passion, which God’s grace had granted to his inner man, to be extended to outward purity as well, so far that he would no longer be affected by any simple and natural stirring, such as happens even in children and infants. From his experience of the gift he had received, which he knew he had won by no merit of his own labors but by the grace of God, he was spurred on all the more eagerly to obtain this too in the same way. He believed that God could much more easily tear up by the roots this stirring of the flesh, which even human art and skill sometimes destroy with potions and remedies or with the knife, since God had of his own free gift given him that purity of spirit which is a still greater thing and cannot be gained by human effort and exertion. [a]

And as he kept on tirelessly with the petition he had begun, with unceasing prayers and tears, an angel came to him in a vision by night. The angel seemed to open his belly, take from his bowels a kind of fiery fleshly humor, throw it away, and put everything back in its place as before. And he said: “See, the stirrings of your flesh are removed. You may be sure that today you have obtained the lasting purity of body that you have faithfully asked for.” It will be enough to have told this much, briefly, of the grace of God given in a special way to this famous man. I think it unnecessary to say anything of the virtues he shared with other good men, for fear that an account of them given under this man’s name might seem to take from others what is mentioned of him in particular.

Since we were on fire with the greatest eagerness to confer with him and be taught by him, we arranged to visit him in Lent. He asked us very quietly about the character of our thoughts and the state of our inner man, and what help toward its purity we had gained from our long stay in the desert. We came to him with these complaints: