hermit in a very austere way – praying, fasting, dwelling in a cave –, one day his imagination (no doubt at the instigation of the devil) brought back to his mind a woman he had seen in his father’s house and who was quite a bit older than him. The temptation of impurity became so fierce that the young Benedict was on the verge of giving in and going back to Rome to find that woman. It was then that by divine inspiration he removed his clothes and threw himself into a patch of briars, rolling over and over in them until his entire body was covered with bleeding wounds. The fire of pain put out the fire of lust in his flesh. Why am I telling you this story? Because, it was the sight of a woman he had seen years before that caused such a violent rush of passion that nearly destroyed the young Benedict. Imagine how things would be today if he had succumbed to that temptation. We would never have had the father of western monasticism; there would have been no Benedictine order, no Benedictine saints, no monasteries of monks or nuns, no patron saint of Europe. If anyone tells you that men get used to seeing half-naked women, smile at their nonsense, but set their mind straight on this point: they are in fairy land, in denial of reality. That reality is the volatile frailty of human nature caused by Original Sin and its proneness to evil. 60
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