ABSTRACT
The fertility of the soil sustained society as a whole, and the lives of the peasants and their families depended directly on the crops. The fertility of women, in turn, ensured the future of families. In all, by conventional standards, both by counting offspring and by thinking about the continuance of the patrimony, Christian chastity is the most fruitful state. Virginity is a fertile state, bound to yield plentiful fruit and abundant offspring both in the world to come and in this world: Virgins are fruitlessly barren in flesh but fruitfully chaste in spirit. In asceticism, one receives eternal life and grasps immortality. Virginity produces life: in it, death is swallowed up by life, as there are no sorrows of widowhood, orphanhood or loss of children. Children, however, signified not only an abstract continuity for the human race, but also the propagation of kin and immortality for an individual.
