A Fuller Understanding of Chastity: Whole-Mindedness

"If one does not reduce this term, as is so often and erroneously done, only to its sexual connotations, it is understood as the postitive counterpart of sloth. The exact and full translation of the Greek sofrosini and the Russian tselomudryie ought to be whole-mindedness. Sloth is, first of all, dissipation, the brokenness of our vision and energy, the inability to see the whole. Its opposite then is precisely wholeness. If we usually mean by chastity the virtue opposed to sexual depravity, it is because the broken character of our existence is nowhere better manifested than in sexual lust—the alienation of the body from the life and control of the spirit."

 

–Fr. Alexander Schmemann in The Winter Pascha, p. 36