especially joyous; and if it does appear so it is an illusion of sensuality, very covert, but still an illusion of sensuality. *****
... You ask what aids there are for struggling with passion. Amongst the minor measures such as labor, fasting, the most effective is poverty, the absence of money, the external appearance of destitution; a position in which, it is evident, one cannot be attractive to any woman. But the chief and best means I know of is incessant struggle, the consciousness that the struggle is not an incidental temporary state, but a constant, unalterable condition of life. *****
... You ask me that the Skoptsi2: As to whether the opinion that they are bad men is just, and whether they understand rightly the 19th Chapter of Matthew when they mutilate themselves and others on the authority of the 12th verse of that chapter. My answer to the first question is that there are no "bad men," and that all men are the children of one father, all brothers, all equal, neither better nor worse one than another. And judging by what I have heard about the Skoptsi, they live a moral and laborious life. As to the second question, whether they correctly understand the Gospel when they commit this mutilation on its authority, I answer with the fullest assurance that they understand the Gospel wrongly, and that by mutilating themselves and especially others they act in direct opposition to true Christianity. Christ preaches chastity, but chastity, like every other virtue, is of worth when it is attained by an exertion of the will, supported by faith, but not when it is attained through the impossibility of sinning. It is the same thing when a man in order not 2
A sect of Russian peasants who practice self-mutilation to attain chastity. -Trans.
