The Meaning of Chastity

Elder Sophrony (Sakharov) was an Orthodox monk from Mount Athos who founded a monastery in Essex (in England), and who was a disciple and biographer of St Silouan the Athonite (a twentieth century Orthodox saint).

In the following quotation, which I came across here on Aaron Taylor’s excellent Logismoi blog (an Orthodox blog which I would wholeheartedly recommend to Catholic readers), Elder Sophrony meditates on the meaning of the Greek word sophrosyne, which he translates as “chastity”, though the word encompasses a range of meaning which goes beyond the much narrower sense that “chastity” has in modern English:

Chastity—σωφροσύνη—as the word itself shows, signifies integrity or fulness of wisdom. In the Church the conception embodies not only mastery over sexual impulses or the complex of the flesh in general, and, in this sense, ‘victory over nature’, but the acquisition of the combination of perfections proper to wisdom, which will be expressed by a constant dwelling in God ‘with all one’s mind and with all one’s heart’. In its most complete realization the ascetic feat of chastity may restore a man in the spirit to his virginal state.