Sexual temptation is not new. What is new is how difficult it has become to escape.

We carry the means of temptation in our pockets. Explicit images can appear without invitation on phones, televisions and computers. Pornography is available within seconds. Sexualised advertising, entertainment and social media surround us almost constantly. What earlier generations often had to seek deliberately can now enter the home, the workplace and even the most ordinary moments of the day. For countless Christians-men and women alike-the struggle for purity has become one of the most persistent battles of the spiritual life.

Yet the Church has faced this battle before.

Some of the greatest saints in Christian history knew the force of disordered sexual desire. Augustine experienced the humiliation of a divided will and years of postponing surrender. Mary of Egypt carried the memories and appetites of her former life into the desert and fought them for years after her conversion. Margaret of Cortona had to disentangle genuine affection from a relationship that could not be made right merely because it was deeply felt. Jerome and Benedict discovered that serious sexual temptation could return even after a life had been deliberately given to God. Ignatius learned that the imagination itself had to be reclaimed. Others knew shame, scandal, bodily temptation, severe ascetical struggle-and even the terrible temptation to believe that a fall had placed them beyond return.

They were not born free from the passions.

They became free.

How the Saints Fought Lust is not another collection of modern tips, tricks or productivity techniques for avoiding sexual sin. It goes instead to the men and women who fought this battle before us and asks a more searching question: What did they actually do? How did grace expose the lies they had believed? What did they renounce? How did they deal with memory, imagination, habit, temptation and the body? Why did some forms of discipline help while others had to be corrected? What role did confession, the Eucharist, prayer, fasting, spiritual direction and concrete acts of obedience play in their freedom? And what happened when the battle continued long after conversion-or when someone actually fell?

Their lives reveal no magical formula. They reveal something better: a recognisable path by which grace can reclaim desire, heal a divided will and teach the human person to love without being ruled by appetite.

If grace could make saints from men and women who knew this battle from the inside, then the struggle is not hopeless.

Follow their fight.

Learn from their victories.

And discover how they became free.