Translation:Cassian Conferences XXII/Chapter 2

by John Cassian

This, if I am not mistaken, is the essence of your question: why when we are more relaxed about pleasures are we often tempted by lighter stings of this flesh, while when we are more strictly abstaining, our bodies suffering and exhausted, are we sometimes provoked by sharper goads, such that, as your acknowledgment has revealed, we can find ourselves on waking spattered with the voiding of natural fluids.