The Conferences

In the desert of Scetis, where the most approved fathers of the monks dwelt and all perfection had its home, I sought out Abba Moses, who among those outstanding flowers gave off the sweetest fragrance, not only in practical but also in contemplative virtue, wishing to be grounded by his instruction. I went together with the holy Abba Germanus, with whom, from the very beginning and first rudiments of spiritual warfare, I had shared so inseparable a companionship both in the coenobium and in the desert that everyone, to express the sameness of our fellowship and purpose, would say that we were one mind and one soul in two bodies. Together we asked the same abba with tears for a word of edification (for we knew very well the strictness of his mind: he would by no means consent to open the door of perfection except to those who desired it faithfully and sought it with all contrition of heart, lest, if he displayed it indiscriminately to those who did not want it or thirsted for it only lukewarmly, he should seem, by laying open necessary things, which ought to be known only to those who long for perfection, to the unworthy and to those who received them with disdain, to incur either the vice of boasting or the crime of betrayal). At last, worn down by our entreaties, he began thus.

“All arts and disciplines,” he said, “have a certain skopos, that is, a goal, and a telos, that is, an end proper to them. Looking to it, the diligent pursuer of any art bears all labors, dangers, and losses calmly and gladly. The farmer, shrinking neither from the scorching rays of the sun nor from frost and ice, tirelessly cleaves the earth and subdues the untamed clods of the field with frequent ploughing, while he keeps his goal in view: to clear it of all briars, free it of every weed, and break it up by working it until it is like loose sand. He is confident that he will not otherwise attain his end, that is, the gathering of plentiful crops and an abundant harvest, by which he may afterwards either live free from care or increase his property. He even gladly empties his well-stocked barns of grain and entrusts it with pressing labor to the crumbling furrows, not feeling the present loss because he contemplates the harvests to come. Those too who carry on trade do not fear the uncertain chances of the sea and shrink from no dangers, while they are spurred on by swift hope toward their end, which is profit. So also those who are fired with the ambition of worldly service, while they look ahead to the end of honor and power, do not feel the ruin and dangers of travel, nor are they broken by present hardships and wars, while they long to obtain the end of rank they have set before themselves. Our profession, then, also has its own goal and its end, for which we spend all our labors not only tirelessly but even gladly. For its sake the hunger of fasting does not weary us, the fatigue of vigils delights us, continual reading and meditation on the Scriptures do not sate us, and unceasing labor, nakedness, the lack of all things, and even the horror of this vast solitude do not deter us. For its sake you yourselves, no doubt, spurned the affection of your parents, and despised your native land and the delights of the world, passing through so many regions to reach us, rustic and unlearned men living in the squalor of this desert. Therefore,” he said, “answer me: what is your goal, or your end, which spurs us to bear all these things most gladly?”

When he insisted on drawing out our opinion on this question, we answered that all these things are endured for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

To this he said: “Good; you have spoken shrewdly about the end. But what our goal ought to be, that is, the aim to which we must cling constantly in order to reach the end, you ought to know before all else.” When we had simply confessed that we did not know, he added: “In every art and discipline, as I said, there goes before a certain skopos, that is, an aim of the soul or unceasing intention of the mind. Unless one keeps it with all zeal and perseverance, he will not be able to reach the end of the fruit he desires. For, as I said, the farmer, whose end is to live securely and plentifully on the yield of fruitful crops, has as his goal, that is, his aim, to clear his field of all briars and empty it of every unfruitful weed; and he is not confident that he will attain the abundance of the restful end unless he first possesses, by a kind of plan of work and hope, what he desires to enjoy in use. The merchant, too, does not lay aside the desire of acquiring goods by which he may gather riches more profitably, because he would long for gain in vain if he had not chosen the way by which to pursue it. And those who desire to be honored with particular ranks in this world first decide to what office or order they must commit themselves, so that by the lawful path of hope they may reach the end of the rank they desire. So too the end of our way is the kingdom of God. But what the goal is must be diligently asked; for if it is not likewise known to us, we shall wear ourselves out striving in vain, because for those who travel without a road there is the labor of the journey but no progress.” When we were astonished at this, the old man went on: “The end of our profession, as we have said, is the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven; but the aim, that is, the goal, is purity of heart, without which it is impossible for anyone to reach that end. Fixing the gaze of our direction on this aim, we shall direct our course most straight, as though toward a sure line; and if our thought turns aside from it even a little, we shall run back at once to the sight of it and correct it again most exactly, as by a rule. This rule, always calling all our efforts back to this one mark, will show at once if our mind has strayed even a little from the direction set before it.”

“It is like those who are practised in handling weapons of war: when they wish to show the skill of their art before a king of this world, they strive to hurl darts or arrows at very small targets on which the prizes are painted. They are certain that they cannot reach the end of the prize they desire except by the line of their aim, and they will obtain it only when they have been able to hit the goal set before them. If that goal happens to be withdrawn from their sight, however far the vain aim of the unskilled strays from the right path, they will not perceive that they have fallen away from the direction of that trained line, because they have no sure mark to prove the skill of their direction or expose its fault. And so, when they have poured out useless shots into the empty air, they cannot judge where they went wrong or how they were misled, since no sign shows them how far they have departed from the direction, and an undirected gaze cannot teach them how they ought to correct or recall the line of their discipline afterwards. So also the end of our purpose, according to the apostle, is eternal life, as he declares: ‘Having your fruit unto sanctification, and the end eternal life.’ But the goal is purity of heart, which he rightly called sanctification, without which the aforesaid end cannot be grasped; as if he had said in other words: ‘Having your goal in purity of heart, and the end eternal life.’ Teaching us about this aim, the same blessed apostle expressly used the very word, that is, skopos, saying: ‘Forgetting what is behind, and reaching out to what is ahead, I press on toward the mark, toward the prize of the heavenly calling of the Lord.’ This is put more plainly in the Greek, kata skopon diōkō, that is, ‘I press on according to the mark,’ as if he had said: ‘With this aim, by which I forget what is behind, that is, the vices of the former man, I strive to reach the end, the heavenly prize.’ Whatever, then, can direct us to this goal, that is, purity of heart, must be pursued with all our strength; whatever draws us away from it must be avoided as ruinous and harmful. For its sake we do and endure everything; for its sake parents, homeland, honors, riches, the delights of this world, and every pleasure are despised, so that purity of heart may be kept for ever. With this aim always set before us, our acts and thoughts will be directed most rightly to obtaining it. If it is not continually set before our eyes, it will not only make all our labors empty and unstable and force them to be poured out in vain and without any profit, but will also stir up all kinds of thoughts, different and contrary to one another. For a mind that has nowhere to return to and nothing to cling to principally must change every hour and moment with the variety of what assails it, and be transformed at once, by what comes to it from outside, into whatever state first presents itself.”

“This is why we have seen some who despised the greatest wealth of this world, not only many talents of gold and silver but also magnificent estates, afterwards become agitated over a knife, a stylus, a needle, or a pen. If they held fixed the contemplation of a pure heart, they would certainly never have fallen, for small things, into what they chose to cast off altogether with their great and precious riches, so as not to fall into it for their sake. Very often some guard a book with such zeal that they will not let anyone so much as read or touch it lightly; and from the very thing by which they are admonished to gain the rewards of patience and love, they take occasions of impatience and death. And though they have given away all their riches for the love of Christ, they keep their former attachment of heart in the smallest things and sometimes become quickly angry over them; and so, as those who do not have apostolic love, they are rendered fruitless and barren in everything. The blessed apostle foresaw this in the Spirit when he said: ‘Though I distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.’ From this it is clearly proved that perfection is not reached at once by nakedness and the loss of all possessions or by casting off honors, unless there is that love whose parts the apostle describes, which consists in purity of heart alone. For what else is it not to be envious, not to be puffed up, not to be provoked, not to act wrongly, not to seek one's own, not to rejoice in iniquity, not to think evil, and the rest, than always to offer God a perfect and utterly clean heart and to keep it untouched by all disturbances?”

“Everything, then, must be done and sought for the sake of this. For this solitude is to be pursued; for this we should know that we must undertake fasts, vigils, labors, bodily nakedness, reading, and the other virtues: that through them we may prepare and keep our heart unharmed by all harmful passions, and by leaning on these steps climb up to the perfection of love. And we must not, because of these observances, if perhaps we are prevented by some honorable and necessary occupation from fulfilling our customary strictness, fall into sadness or anger or indignation, the very things we were going to fight against by doing what has been left undone. For the gain from a fast is not as great as the loss from anger, nor is as much fruit gained from reading as harm is incurred by despising a brother. The things that are secondary, then, that is, fasts, vigils, withdrawal into solitude, meditation on the Scriptures, we ought to practise for the sake of the principal goal, that is, purity of heart, which is love, and not for their sake disturb this principal virtue. As long as it remains whole and unharmed in us, it will do no harm if any of the secondary things has been omitted out of necessity; whereas it will profit nothing to have done them all if this principal thing, for the sake of which everything is to be done, is taken away. For this is why someone hastens to get and prepare the tools of any art: not to have them lying idle, nor to place the profit he hopes for from them in the mere possession of the instruments, but so that by their service he may effectively grasp the skill and end of the discipline which they assist. Fasts, vigils, meditation on the Scriptures, nakedness, and the lack of all possessions are therefore not perfection but the instruments of perfection, because the end of that discipline does not consist in them, but through them one reaches the end. In vain, then, will a man labor at these exercises if he is content with them as the highest good and fixes the intention of his heart only so far, and does not extend all his zeal for virtue to grasping the end for which they are to be sought, having the instruments of the discipline but not knowing the end in which all the fruit consists. Whatever can disturb this purity and tranquillity of our mind, however useful and necessary it may seem, must be avoided as harmful. By this rule we shall be able to escape the scattering of all errors and wanderings and reach the desired end by the line of a sure direction.”

“This, then, must be our principal effort, and this the immovable aim of the heart to be sought continually: that the mind may always cling to divine things and to God. Whatever differs from this, however great, must be judged secondary, or even the lowest, or certainly harmful. A figure of this disposition and way of acting is beautifully shown in the Gospel in Martha and Mary. For while Martha was engaged in a service that was certainly holy, since she was serving the Lord himself and his disciples, and Mary, intent only on spiritual teaching, clung to the feet of Jesus, kissing them and anointing them with the ointment of a good confession, yet the Lord preferred her, because she had chosen the better part, and one that could not be taken from her. For when Martha, laboring with pious care and distracted by her serving, saw that she could not manage so great a service alone, she asked the Lord for her sister's help, saying: ‘Do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.’ She was certainly calling her not to a mean task but to a praiseworthy service. And yet what does she hear from the Lord? ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; but few things are needed, or even one. Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken from her.’ You see, then, that the Lord placed the principal good in theoria alone, that is, in divine contemplation. Therefore, though we declare the other virtues necessary, useful, and good, we judge that they must be ranked in the second degree, because all of them are practised for the sake of this one. For when the Lord says, ‘You are anxious and troubled about many things, but few are needed, or even one,’ he placed the highest good not in practical work, however praiseworthy and abounding in many fruits, but in contemplation of himself, which is truly simple and one. He declares that few things are needed for perfect blessedness, that is, the contemplation which is first practised in considering a few saints. Rising from contemplating them, one who is still in the course of progress will come, with God's help, to that which is called one, that is, the vision of God alone, so that, passing beyond even the wonderful acts and services of the saints, he may feed on the beauty and knowledge of God alone. ‘Mary, therefore, has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken from her.’ This must be looked at more closely. When he says, ‘Mary has chosen the good part,’ though he says nothing about Martha and does not seem to blame her at all, yet by praising the one he declares the other inferior. Again, when he says, ‘which shall not be taken from her,’ he shows that Martha's portion can be taken from her (for bodily service cannot remain with a human being for ever), but he teaches that Mary's pursuit can never come to an end in any age.”

Deeply moved at this, we said: “What then? Will the labor of fasting, diligence in reading, and works of mercy, justice, piety, and kindness be taken from us and not remain with those who do them? Especially since the Lord himself promises the reward of the kingdom of heaven to these works, saying: ‘Come, you blessed of my Father, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink,’ and the rest. How then will these things be taken away which bring those who do them into the kingdom of heaven?”

Moses: “I did not say that the reward of a good work will be taken away, for the same Lord says: ‘Whoever gives one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward.’ But I say that the activity itself will be taken away, which bodily necessity, or the assault of the flesh, or the inequality of this world requires to be carried out. For diligence in reading and the affliction of fasting are usefully practised only in the present, for cleansing the heart and chastening the flesh, while ‘the flesh lusts against the spirit.’ We see that even in the present they are sometimes taken away from those worn out by excessive labor, bodily illness, or old age, and that a person cannot practise them continually. How much more will they cease in the future, when ‘this corruptible has put on incorruption’ and this body which is now ‘natural’ has risen ‘spiritual’, and the flesh has begun to be no longer such as to lust against the spirit. Of these things the blessed apostle also plainly declares: ‘Bodily exercise is profitable for a little; but godliness’ (which is certainly to be understood as love) ‘is profitable for all things, having the promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come.’ What is said to be profitable for a little is plainly declared neither to be practised for all time nor able by itself to give the laborer the summit of perfection. ‘A little’ can refer to either: to the shortness of time, since bodily exercise cannot last for ever with a man both in the present and in the future; or else to the smallness of the profit gained from exercising the flesh, since bodily affliction brings about certain beginnings of progress, not the very perfection of love, which has the promise of the present life and of the future. And therefore we judge the exercises we have mentioned to be necessary, because without them one cannot climb to the heights of love. These works of piety and mercy you speak of are also necessary in this time, while unequal differences still prevail. Their exercise would not be expected even here if there were not an overwhelming number of the poor, the needy, and the sick, brought about by the wickedness of men: of those, namely, who seized for their own use alone what was granted to all by the common Creator, and yet did not use it. So as long as this inequality rages in the world, this activity will be necessary and useful to the one who does it, repaying a good disposition and a godly will with the reward of the eternal inheritance. But it will itself cease in the world to come, when equality reigns, since there will no longer be the inequality for which it must be done; all will pass from this manifold, that is, practical activity to the love of God and the contemplation of divine things in perpetual purity of heart. To this, those who care to devote themselves either to knowledge or to cleansing of the mind have already chosen, while still in this world, to give themselves with all their effort and strength, assigning themselves, while still in corruptible flesh, to that office in which they will remain when corruption is laid aside, and reaching the promise of the Lord and Savior in which it is said: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’”

“And why are you surprised that those duties mentioned above will pass away, when the holy apostle describes even the higher gifts of the Holy Spirit as passing away, and marks out love alone as remaining without end? ‘Whether there be prophecies,’ he says, ‘they shall be done away; whether tongues, they shall cease; whether knowledge, it shall be destroyed’; but of love: ‘Love never fails.’ For all gifts are given for a time, for use and need, and will surely pass away as soon as the dispensation is completed; but love will be cut off by no time. For it not only works usefully in us in the present world, but in the future too, when the burden of bodily need has been cast off, it will remain far more effective and excellent, never to be spoiled by any failing, but through perpetual incorruption clinging to God more ardently and more intently.”

Germanus: “Who then, surrounded by frail flesh, can be so fixed on this contemplation that he never thinks of a brother's arrival, of visiting the sick, of the work of his hands, or at any rate of the kindness to be shown to strangers and visitors? Finally, who is not interrupted by providing for and caring for the body itself? We want to be taught how, and in what, the mind can cling to that invisible and incomprehensible God.”

Moses: “To cling to God continually and to be joined inseparably to contemplation of him, as you say, is impossible for a human being surrounded by this frailty of the flesh. But we ought to know where we should keep the intention of our mind fixed, and to what aim we should always recall the gaze of our soul. When the mind has been able to keep it, let it rejoice; when it is drawn away from it, let it grieve and sigh, and feel that it has fallen from the highest good as often as it finds itself separated from that gaze, judging even a momentary departure from the contemplation of Christ to be sexual immorality. When our gaze has strayed from him even a little, let us turn the eyes of the heart back to him and recall the mind's sight as by a perfectly straight line. For everything depends on the inner recess of the soul: when the devil has been driven out of it and vices no longer reign there, the kingdom of God is consequently founded in us, as the evangelist says: ‘The kingdom of God will not come with observation, nor will they say, Look, here it is, or, Look, there it is; for truly I say to you that the kingdom of God is within you.’ But within us there can be nothing else than knowledge or ignorance of the truth, and love either of the vices or of the virtues, by which we prepare a kingdom in the heart either for the devil or for Christ. The apostle also describes the character of this kingdom, saying: ‘For the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.’ So, if the kingdom of God is within us, and the kingdom of God itself is righteousness and peace and joy, then whoever dwells in these is without doubt in the kingdom of God; and, on the contrary, those who live in unrighteousness and discord and the sadness that works death are placed in the kingdom of the devil, and in hell and death. For by these signs the kingdom either of God or of the devil is distinguished. And indeed, if we consider with the lofty gaze of the mind the state in which the heavenly and supernal powers live, who are truly in the kingdom of God, what else should we believe it to be than perpetual and unbroken gladness? For what is so proper to true blessedness, and so fitting to it, as unbroken tranquillity and everlasting joy? And so that you may be more surely taught that what we say is so, not by my conjecture but by the authority of the Lord himself, hear him describe most plainly the character and state of that world: ‘Behold,’ he says, ‘I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered, nor shall they come up upon the heart. But you shall rejoice and exult for ever in the things which I create.’ And again: ‘Joy and gladness shall be found in it, thanksgiving and the voice of praise. And it shall be month after month, and sabbath after sabbath.’ And again: ‘They shall obtain joy and gladness; sorrow and sighing shall flee away.’ And if you want to know still more clearly about that life and city of the saints, attend to what is addressed by the Lord's voice to Jerusalem itself: ‘I will make your visitation peace, and your overseers righteousness. Iniquity shall no more be heard in your land, nor devastation and destruction within your borders; salvation shall take possession of your walls, and praise of your gates. You shall no more have the sun to give light by day, nor shall the brightness of the moon give you light; but the Lord shall be to you an everlasting light, and your God for your glory. Your sun shall no more go down, and your moon shall not wane; but the Lord shall be an everlasting light, and the days of your mourning shall be ended.’ And therefore the blessed apostle does not declare generally or simply that every joy is the kingdom of God, but pointedly and specifically only that which is in the Holy Spirit. For he knew there is also another, blameworthy joy, of which it is said, ‘This world shall rejoice,’ and, ‘Woe to you who laugh, for you shall weep.’ The kingdom of heaven, indeed, is to be understood in three ways: either that the heavens, that is, the saints, will reign over others made subject to them, according to the words, ‘Be over five cities,’ and ‘you over ten,’ and what is said to the disciples, ‘You shall sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel’; or that the heavens themselves begin to be reigned over by Christ, when all things have been made subject to him and God has begun to be all in all; or else that the saints will reign with the Lord in heaven.”

“Therefore let each one know, while he is still in this body, that he will be assigned to that region or service in which he has shown himself a sharer and worker in this life; and let him not doubt that in that eternal age he will be the companion of the one whose servant and associate he now chooses to show himself, according to the saying of the Lord: ‘If anyone serves me, let him follow me; and where I am, there my servant will be also.’ For as the kingdom of the devil is taken up by connivance with the vices, so the kingdom of God is possessed by the practice of the virtues, in purity of heart and spiritual knowledge. Where the kingdom of God is, there without doubt eternal life is found; and where the kingdom of the devil is, there death and hell undoubtedly are. One who is in it cannot praise the Lord, according to the saying of the prophet: ‘The dead shall not praise you, O Lord, nor all those who go down into hell’ (of sin, without doubt). ‘But we,’ he says, ‘who live’ (that is, not to the vices nor to this world, but to God), ‘will bless the Lord from this time forth and for evermore.’ ‘For in death there is no one who remembers God; and in hell’ (of sin) ‘who will confess the Lord?’ That is, no one. For no one, though he declares a thousand times that he is a Christian or a monk, confesses God while he sins; no one who does what the Lord detests remembers God, nor truly declares himself the servant of one whose commands he despises with stubborn rashness. In this death the blessed apostle declares that widow to be who lives in pleasures: ‘The widow who lives in pleasures is dead while she lives.’ There are many, then, who while living in this body are dead, and lying in hell cannot praise God; and, on the contrary, there are those who, though dead in body, bless and praise God in the spirit, according to the words, ‘Bless the Lord, you spirits and souls of the righteous,’ and, ‘Let every spirit praise the Lord.’ And in the Apocalypse the souls of the slain are said not only to praise God but also to plead with him. In the Gospel, too, the Lord says still more plainly to the Sadducees: ‘Have you not read what was spoken by God, saying to you, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead but of the living; for all live to him.’ Of them the apostle also says: ‘Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for he has prepared a city for them.’ That souls are not idle after separation from this body, and do not lack all feeling, is shown also by the Gospel parable about the poor man Lazarus and the rich man clothed in purple: one of them wins the most blessed seat, that is, the rest of Abraham's bosom; the other is burned by the unbearable heat of eternal fire. And if we will consider what is said to the thief, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise,’ what else does it plainly mean than that there remains in souls not only their former understanding, but also that they enjoy a fitting lot according to the character of their merits and deeds? The Lord would never have promised him this if he had known that his soul, after separation from the flesh, would either be deprived of feeling or dissolved into nothing. For it was not his flesh but his soul that was to enter paradise with Christ. We must certainly beware of, and indeed detest with all horror, that most perverse punctuation of the heretics, who, not believing that Christ could be found in paradise on the same day on which he descended into hell, punctuate thus: ‘Truly I say to you today,’ and after the break add, ‘you will be with me in paradise’; so that this promise is understood as fulfilled not immediately after the passing of this life but after the coming of the resurrection. They do not understand what he said to the Jews before the day of his resurrection, who believed that he, like themselves, was confined by human limits and fleshly weakness: ‘No one has ascended into heaven except he who came down from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven.’ By these things it is plainly proved that the souls of the dead are not only not deprived of their senses, but do not lack even such affections as hope and sadness, joy and fear, and that they already begin to have some foretaste of what is reserved for them at that general judgment; and that they are not, as some unbelievers think, dissolved into nothing after departing this dwelling, but live on more vigorously and cling more intently to the praises of God. And indeed, to set aside the testimonies of Scripture for a moment and reason a little about the nature of the soul itself, as far as our modest understanding allows: is it not beyond, I will not say the foolishness, but the madness of all absurdity, even slightly to suspect that the more precious part of a human being, in which, according to the blessed apostle, the image and likeness of God consists, becomes senseless when this bodily burden that now dulls it is laid aside? For it contains in itself the whole power of reason, and by sharing itself makes even the dumb and senseless matter of the flesh sensible. Surely it follows, and the very order of reason requires, that the mind, stripped of this fleshly grossness by which it is now dulled, should restore its intellectual powers for the better and receive them purer and finer rather than lose them. So true does the blessed apostle know this to be that he even wishes to depart from this flesh, so that by separation from it he may be joined more closely to the Lord, saying: ‘I have a desire to depart and to be with Christ, for it is much better’; ‘for while we are in the body we are absent from the Lord. And therefore we are confident and have a good will rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord. Therefore we also strive, whether absent or present, to please him.’ He declares that the soul's dwelling in this flesh is absence from the Lord and separation from Christ, and trusts with full faith that its separation and departure from this flesh is presence with Christ. And again, still more clearly, the same apostle says of this most living state of souls: ‘But you have come to Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect.’ Of these spirits he says in another place: ‘Then we had fathers of our flesh who corrected us, and we revered them: shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?’”

“The contemplation of God, however, is conceived in many ways. For God is known not only by wonder at his incomprehensible substance, which is still hidden in the hope of the promise, but he is also seen in the greatness of his creatures, or in the consideration of his justice, or in the help of his daily providence: when with a most pure mind we survey what he has done with his saints in each generation; when with trembling hearts we wonder at the power by which he governs, directs, and rules all things, at the immensity of his knowledge, and at the eye from which the secrets of hearts cannot be hidden; when we think of the sand of the sea and the number of the waves as measured and known to him; when in amazement we contemplate the drops of rain, the days and hours of the ages, and all things past and future as present to his knowledge; when we behold with a kind of ecstasy of wonder his unspeakable mercy, by which with unwearied patience he bears the countless crimes committed every moment in his sight; the calling by which, with no merits of ours going before, he took us up by the grace of his compassion; and finally how many occasions of salvation he grants to those who are to be adopted: that he ordained us to be born in such a way that grace and the knowledge of his law were handed on to us from the very cradle; that he himself, overcoming the adversary in us, rewards us with eternal blessedness and everlasting rewards for the mere consent of a good will; and lastly, when he undertook the dispensation of his incarnation for our salvation and spread the wonders of his mysteries among all nations. There are also countless other contemplations of this kind, which arise in our minds according to the quality of our life and our purity of heart, by which God is either seen or held by pure eyes. No one, surely, will keep them permanently in whom anything of fleshly affections still lives, because, the Lord says, ‘You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live’ — that is, live to this world and to earthly affections.”

Germanus: “How is it, then, that superfluous thoughts creep in on us so subtly and secretly, even against our will, and indeed without our knowing it, that it is exceedingly difficult not only to drive them out but even to notice and detect them? Can the mind, then, ever be found free of them and never be assailed by such illusions?”

Moses: “It is impossible for the mind not to be approached by thoughts; but it is possible for anyone who makes the effort to accept or reject them. So, just as their arising does not wholly depend on us, their rejection or choice lies with us. Yet from our saying that it is impossible for the mind not to be approached by thoughts, it must not all be attributed either to their onset or to the spirits who try to put them into us. Otherwise free will would not remain in a human being, nor would the effort to correct ourselves be in our power. But it is, I say, largely up to us that the quality of our thoughts be amended, and that either holy and spiritual thoughts or earthly and fleshly ones grow in our hearts. This is why frequent reading and constant meditation on the Scriptures are practised, so that from them we may be given the occasion of spiritual remembrance; why the psalms are sung often, so that from them constant compunction may be supplied to us; why diligence in vigils, fasts, and prayers is practised, so that the mind, made lean, may not savor earthly things but contemplate heavenly ones. When these cease through creeping negligence, the mind, hardened by the filth of the vices, must soon incline toward the fleshly side and fall.”

“This exercise of the heart is fittingly compared to millstones, which the headlong current of water turns with its whirling force. They can by no means stop their work while they are driven round by the force of the waters; but it lies in the power of the one in charge whether he prefers wheat, barley, or darnel to be ground. What is put in by the one entrusted with the care of that work is certainly what must be ground. So too the mind, driven round by the torrents of temptation pouring in from every side in the assaults of the present life, cannot be free of the surge of thoughts; but what kind it should reject or prepare for itself, the effort of its own zeal and diligence will provide. For if, as we have said, we continually return to meditation on the holy Scriptures and raise our memory to the remembrance of spiritual things, the desire for perfection, and the hope of future blessedness, the spiritual thoughts that arise from them must make the mind dwell on what we have meditated. But if, overcome by sloth or negligence, we are taken up with vices and idle talk, or entangled in worldly cares and superfluous anxieties, then a kind of darnel will spring up from them and supply our heart with harmful work as well; and according to the saying of the Lord and Savior, where the treasure of our works or intention is, there our heart must remain.”

“Above all we ought to know that there are three sources of our thoughts: from God, from the devil, and from ourselves. They are from God when he deigns to visit us with the illumination of the Holy Spirit, raising us to higher progress; when he chastens us with most wholesome compunction where we have gained too little or been overcome by acting slothfully; or when he opens heavenly mysteries to us and turns our purpose and will to better actions. So it was when King Ahasuerus, chastened by the Lord, was prompted to search the books of the annals, by which he remembered the good deeds of Mordecai, raised him to the highest rank of honor, and at once revoked the most cruel sentence for the slaughter of the Jewish nation. Or when the prophet says: ‘I will hear what the Lord God speaks in me.’ Another also says: ‘And the angel who spoke in me said.’ Or when the Son of God promises that he will come together with the Father and make his dwelling with us; and, ‘It is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you’; and the chosen vessel: ‘You seek a proof of Christ who speaks in me.’ A train of thoughts arises from the devil when he tries to overthrow us both by the delight of the vices and by hidden snares, deceitfully showing evil things as good with the subtlest cunning and transforming himself before us into an angel of light. Or when the evangelist relates: ‘And when supper was over, the devil having already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, son of Simon, to betray the Lord’; and again, ‘After the morsel,’ he says, ‘Satan entered into him.’ Peter also says to Ananias: ‘Why has Satan tempted your heart, that you should lie to the Holy Spirit?’ And what we read in the Gospel, foretold long before by Ecclesiastes: ‘If the spirit of the one who has power rises up against you, do not leave your place.’ Also what is said to God against Ahab in the third book of Kingdoms, in the person of an unclean spirit: ‘I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ They arise from ourselves when we naturally remember what we are doing, have done, or have heard. Of these the blessed David says: ‘I thought of the days of old, and had the eternal years in mind; and I meditated; by night I communed with my heart, and searched my spirit.’ And again: ‘The Lord knows the thoughts of men, that they are vain’; and, ‘The thoughts of the righteous are judgments.’ In the Gospel, too, the Lord says to the Pharisees: ‘Why do you think evil in your hearts?’”

“We must therefore constantly observe this threefold distinction and examine with shrewd discernment all the thoughts that arise in our heart, first tracing their origins, causes, and authors, so that we can consider how we ought to treat them according to the merit of those who suggest them, and so become, according to the Lord's command, approved money-changers. Their highest skill and training is to test what is the purest gold, what is commonly called refined, and what has been less purified by fire; not to be deceived, by most prudent discernment, by a cheap copper coin if it imitates a precious one under the color of shining gold; not only to recognize wisely coins bearing the faces of usurpers, but also, with sharper skill, to detect those which bear the image of the true king but are not lawfully struck; and finally to examine carefully with the scales whether anything has been taken from their lawful weight. The Gospel saying, by the example of this term, shows that we too must observe all these things spiritually. First, whatever has crept into our hearts, or any teaching that has been introduced to us, we must examine most carefully to see whether it has been purified by that divine and heavenly fire of the Holy Spirit, or whether it belongs to Jewish superstition or comes down from the pride of worldly philosophy and displays piety only on the surface. We shall be able to do this if we follow the apostolic saying: ‘Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits whether they are from God.’ In this way those also were deceived who, after professing themselves monks, were enticed by elegance of speech and by certain teachings of the philosophers. Hearing at first sight some ideas that seemed pious and in keeping with religion, these deceived them like the gleam of gold, and, like copper and counterfeit coins, left those they had once enticed by their surface stripped and wretched for ever, either calling them back to the noise of the world or dragging them into heretical errors and swollen presumption. This is what we read in the book of Joshua that Achan suffered: coveting and stealing a golden bar from the camp of the Philistines, he deserved to be struck with the curse and condemned to eternal death. Second, we must carefully examine that a perverse interpretation fitted to the purest gold of the Scriptures does not deceive us by the preciousness of the metal. In this way the most cunning devil tried to impose even on the Lord and Savior, as though on a simple man: corrupting by a malicious interpretation what is to be understood generally of all the righteous, he tries to apply it specially to him who had no need of the guardianship of angels, saying: ‘For he shall give his angels charge concerning you, to keep you in all your ways; and in their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.’ So, by cunningly taking up the precious words of the Scriptures and twisting them to a contrary and harmful sense, he presents to us the image of a usurper's face under the color of deceptive gold. Or when he tries to deceive us with counterfeits, urging us to take up some work of piety which, not proceeding from the lawful coinage of the elders, leads to vices under the pretext of virtue; or, deceiving us by immoderate and unsuitable fasts, or excessive vigils, or disordered prayers, or unsuitable reading, draws us to a harmful end. Or when he persuades us to spend ourselves in pious intercessions and visits, by which he may shake us out of the spiritual enclosure of the monastery and the secrecy of friendly quiet; he suggests that we take on the cares and anxieties of religious and destitute women, so that, having ensnared the monk inextricably in such nets, he may distract him with the occupation of harmful cares. Or else he urges us to desire the holy office of the clergy, under the pretext of the edification of many and the love of spiritual gain, in order to tear us away from the humility and strictness of our way of life. All these things, though they are contrary to our salvation and profession, nevertheless, covered with a veil of mercy and religion, easily deceive the unskilled and unwary. For they imitate the coins of the true king, since for the present they seem full of piety; but they are not struck by lawful moneyers, that is, by approved and catholic fathers, nor do they come from the principal and public workshop of their conference, but are secretly forged by the fraud of demons and passed, not without loss, to the unskilled and ignorant. Though they seem useful and necessary for the present, yet if afterwards they begin to be contrary to the soundness of our profession and in some way to shake the whole body of our purpose, it is wholesome for us to cast them off and cut them away, like a member which is necessary but causes stumbling, and seems to perform the office of the right hand or foot. For it is better to remain sound and firm in the rest without one member of a command, that is, its practice or fruit, and to enter the kingdom of heaven as though maimed, than with the command intact to fall into some stumbling block which, separating us by a harmful habit from the rule of strictness and the discipline of the way of life we have taken up, leads us into such loss that, never making up for future damage, it causes all our past fruits and the whole body of our work to be burned in the fires of Gehenna. These kinds of illusions are also elegantly expressed in Proverbs: ‘There are ways that seem right to a man, but their end comes into the depth of hell’; and again: ‘The evil one does harm when he mingles with the righteous’, that is, the devil deceives when he is covered with the color of holiness; ‘but he hates the sound of safety’, that is, the power of discernment which comes from the words and admonition of the elders.”

“In this way, we know, Abba John, who lives at Lycus, was recently deceived. When his body was exhausted and worn out and he had put off taking food through a two-day fast, the devil came to him the next day, as he was going to his meal, in the form of a foul Ethiopian, and throwing himself at his knees said: ‘Forgive me, for it was I who laid this labor on you.’ So that great man, perfect in the practice of discernment, understood that under the color of an abstinence practised unsuitably he had been circumvented by the devil's cunning and drawn into such a fast that he imposed on his tired body a weariness that was unnecessary, and even harmful to the spirit. He had been deceived by a counterfeit coin: while he venerated the image of the true king on it, he did not examine closely enough whether it had been lawfully struck. The last observance of this approved money-changer, which we said concerns testing the weight, will be fulfilled in this way: if, reconsidering with all scruple whatever our thought suggests should be done, and placing it on the scales of our breast, we weigh with the most just balance whether it is full of the common good, whether it is heavy with the fear of God, whether it is sound in meaning, or whether it is light through human display or some presumption of novelty, and whether the glory of empty vainglory has not diminished or clipped the weight of its merit. And so, weighing these things at once in the public assay, that is, comparing them with the acts and testimonies of the prophets and apostles, let us either hold them as whole and perfect and matching those, or reject them with all caution and care as imperfect, harmful, and not agreeing with their weight.”

“This discernment, then, will be necessary to us in the fourfold way we have described: first, that the material of true or counterfeit gold may not escape us; second, that we may reject as adulterated and counterfeit coins those thoughts which falsely claim to be works of piety, since they bear a false image of the king, unlawfully stamped; or that we may likewise detect and reject those which, on the most precious gold of the Scriptures, display through a faulty and heretical sense the face not of the true king but of a usurper; or those whose weight and value the rust of vanity has eaten away, so that it does not match the standard weight of the elders, so that we may refuse them as light, harmful, and underweight coins. Otherwise we may fall into what we are warned by the Lord's command to guard against with all our strength, and be cheated of all the merit and wages of our labors: ‘Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where rust and moth consume, and where thieves dig through and steal.’ For whatever we do with an eye to human glory we should know, according to the Lord's saying, we are laying up on earth; and consequently, as though hidden in the ground and buried in the earth, it will be plundered by various demons, or consumed by the devouring rust of vainglory, or so eaten by the moths of pride that it brings no use or profit to the one who stored it. All the recesses of our heart, then, must be searched continually, and the tracks of whatever enters them traced back with the shrewdest investigation, lest some intelligible beast, a lion or a dragon, passing through, secretly leave there its harmful tracks, by which access into the inner sanctuary of our breast may be given to others as well through the negligence of our thoughts. And so, hour by hour and moment by moment, ploughing the soil of our heart with the Gospel plough, that is, with constant remembrance of the Lord's cross, we shall be able to destroy the lairs of harmful beasts and the hiding places of poisonous serpents in us.”

The old man, seeing us astonished and burning with insatiable ardor at the words of his discourse, paused for a little in wonder at our desire, and then added: “Since your earnestness, my sons, has drawn us into so long a discussion, and a kind of fire, answering your desire, supplies more fervent thoughts to our conference, so that from this very fact I clearly see that you truly thirst for the teaching of perfection, I want to say a little more to you about the excellence and grace of discernment, which holds the citadel and first place among all the virtues, and to prove its excellence and usefulness not only by everyday examples but also by the ancient questions and sayings of the fathers. For I remember that often, when some asked for such a discourse with groans and tears, and I wanted to give them some teaching, I could not do so at all; not only my thoughts but even my very speech failed me, so that I could not find how to send them away even with a little consolation. By these signs it is clearly recognized that the grace of the Lord breathes speech into those who discuss, according to the merit and desire of the hearers. But since the very short space of the night that remains is not enough to complete it, let us rather give it to bodily rest, which must be paid in full if even its small portion is denied, and keep the full course of the discourse for the whole of the coming day or night. For it befits the best counsellors on discernment first to show the diligence of their mind in this, and to prove by this sign and patience whether they are, or can be, capable of it, so that in treating of the virtue that is the mother of moderation they do not fall into the vice contrary to it, excess, violating in fact and deed the power of the principle and nature that they cultivate in words. Let the good of discernment, then, which we intend to investigate further as far as the Lord grants, first benefit us in this: that as we discuss its excellence and moderation, which is known to be its first virtue, it may not allow us to exceed due measure in discussion or in time.” With these words the blessed Moses brought our conference to an end. While we were still eager and hanging on his lips, he urged us to taste a little sleep, telling us to lie down on the very psiathia on which we had been sitting, with the embrimia placed under our heads instead of pillows. These are made of thicker papyrus gathered into long, thin bundles and tied together at intervals of a foot and a half; sometimes they serve as a very low seat, instead of a footstool, for the brothers sitting at the synaxis, and sometimes, placed under the necks of sleepers, they give the head a support not too hard but pliant and suitable. They are considered especially suitable and fitting for the monks' use, not only because they are somewhat soft and are made at little cost and labor, since papyrus grows everywhere along the banks of the Nile, but also because they are of a light and handy material for putting away or bringing out when needed. And so at the old man's bidding we at last settled down to taste sleep, in a burdensome quiet, as much inflamed with joy at the conference we had held as held in suspense by expectation of the discussion promised.

So, having tasted the morning's sleep, when we saw with joy that daylight had at last dawned for us and began to ask again for the promised discourse, the blessed Moses began thus: “Since I see you so inflamed with the ardor of desire that I do not believe even that very short moment of rest, which I had preferred to take from our spiritual conference and give to the refreshment of the flesh, has served for the rest of your bodies, a greater anxiety also weighs on me as I consider this fervor of yours. For I too must take all the more care and devotion in paying my debt, the more earnestly I see you demand it, according to the saying: ‘If you sit down to dine at the table of a ruler, consider wisely what is set before you, and put out your hand, knowing that you must prepare such things.’ Therefore, since we are to speak about the good of discernment and its power, on which our night conference had entered when it ended our discussion, we think it fitting first to establish its excellence by the sayings of the fathers. Then, when it has become clear what our elders thought and declared about it, we shall set out the ancient and recent falls and misfortunes of various men who were cast down in ruinous collapse because they had failed to attain it, and review its benefits and advantages as far as we can. When these have been discussed, we shall be more effectively taught how we ought to seek and cultivate it, considering the dignity of its merit and grace. For it is no ordinary virtue, nor one that human effort can grasp at will, unless it is bestowed by divine generosity. For we read that the apostle counts it among the noblest gifts of the Holy Spirit: ‘To one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith in the same Spirit, to another the grace of healings in the one Spirit’; and a little later, ‘to another discernment of spirits.’ Then, having completed the whole catalogue of spiritual gifts, he adds: ‘But all these are worked by one and the same Spirit, dividing to each one as he will.’ You see, then, that the gift of discernment is not earthly or small, but the greatest prize of divine grace. Unless a monk has pursued it with all his intention and possesses by sure reckoning the discernment of the spirits that rise up in him, he must, like one who runs in a blind night and thick darkness, not only fall into dangerous pits and precipices, but also frequently stumble even on level and straight ground.”

“I remember, then, that once, when I was still a boy, in the region of the Thebaid where the blessed Antony lived, elders came to him to inquire about perfection. The conference lasted from evening until dawn, and this question took up the greater part of the night. For they asked at great length what virtue or observance could keep a monk always unharmed by the snares and deceptions of the devil, or bring him by a right path and firm step to the summit of perfection. Each gave his opinion according to the capacity of his mind. Some placed it in zeal for fasts and vigils, because the mind, made lean by them and having attained purity of heart and body, would be more easily united to God. Others placed it in contempt of all things, because the mind, once completely stripped of them, would come to God more freely, with no snares holding it back any longer. Others judged anachoresis necessary, that is, withdrawal and the secrecy of the desert, where one could call upon God more intimately and cling to him more particularly. Some held that the duties of love, that is, of kindness, should be pursued, because to these the Lord in the Gospel promises the kingdom of heaven as if more especially, saying: ‘Come, you blessed of my Father, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink,’ and the rest. And when in this way they decided that a surer access to God could be opened by different virtues, and the greater part of the night had been spent in this inquiry, the blessed Antony at last said: ‘All the things you have mentioned are necessary and useful to those who thirst for God and long to come to him. But the countless falls and experiences of many by no means allow us to give the principal grace to these. For we have often seen men who applied themselves most keenly to fasts or vigils, who lived wonderfully withdrawn in solitude, who pursued the loss of all possessions so far that they would not allow even one day's food or a single denarius to remain to them, and who fulfilled the duties of kindness with all devotion, suddenly so deceived that they could not bring the work they had taken up to a fitting end, and closed their highest fervor and praiseworthy way of life with a detestable end. Therefore we shall be able to recognize clearly what principally leads to God if we search out more carefully the cause of their ruin and deception. For though the works of the virtues mentioned abounded in them, discernment alone was lacking and did not allow them to last to the end. No other cause of their fall is found than that, having been too little instructed by the elders, they could by no means acquire the principle of discernment, which, avoiding both extremes, teaches the monk always to walk by the royal road. It does not allow him to be carried away on the right hand of the virtues, that is, to exceed the measure of just self-control through excess of fervor and foolish presumption; nor does it allow him, delighting in relaxation, to turn aside to the vices on the left, that is, to grow slack with the opposite lukewarmness of spirit under the pretext of governing the body. For this is the discernment which is called in the Gospel the eye and lamp of the body, according to the saying of the Savior: The lamp of your body is your eye; if your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness. For it discerns all a person's thoughts and actions and sees and surveys everything that is to be done. If it is evil in a person, that is, not fortified by true judgment and knowledge, or deceived by some error or presumption, it makes our whole body dark, that is, it darkens the whole sight of our mind and our actions, wrapping them in the blindness of the vices and the darkness of disturbances. For, he says, if the light that is in you is darkness, how great will that darkness be! For no one doubts that when the judgment of our heart errs and is possessed by the night of ignorance, our thoughts and works too, which come from the deliberation of discernment, are entangled in the greater darkness of sins.’”

“Indeed, he who was the first to win the kingship of the people of Israel by the judgment of God, because he did not have this eye of discernment, was cast down even from the kingdom itself, as though his whole body were dark. Deceived by the darkness and error of this lamp, he judged his own sacrifices more acceptable to God than obedience to Samuel's command, and incurred offence from the very quarter from which he had hoped to win back the favor of the divine majesty. Ignorance of this discernment, I say, drove Ahab, king of Israel, after that most splendid triumph of victory which had been granted him by God's favor, to believe his own mercy better than the most severe execution of the divine command, and, as it seemed to him, a cruel order. Softened by this consideration, while he preferred to temper a bloody victory with clemency, he was made dark in his whole body because of his undiscerning mercy and condemned to irrevocable death.”

“This is the discernment which the apostle calls not only the lamp of the body but also the sun, according to the words: ‘Let not the sun go down upon your anger.’ It is also called the governance of our life, according to the words: ‘Those who have no governance fall like leaves.’ It is most rightly named counsel, without which we are not permitted by the authority of Scripture to do anything at all, so that we may not even take that spiritual wine which ‘gladdens the heart of man’ without its moderation, according to the words: ‘Do everything with counsel; drink wine with counsel’; and again: ‘Like a city whose walls are broken down and which is not surrounded, so is a man who does anything without counsel.’ How harmful its lack is to a monk, the example and figure of this testimony shows, comparing him to a city broken down and without walls. In it consist wisdom, understanding, and perception, without which neither can our inner house be built nor spiritual riches be gathered, according to the words: ‘By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is set up again; by perception the storerooms are filled with all precious and good riches.’ This, I say, is the solid food which can be taken only by the perfect and strong, according to the words: ‘But solid food is for the perfect, for those who by habit have their senses trained to the discernment of good and evil.’ So useful and necessary is it proved to be to us that it is even applied to the word of God and its powers, according to the words: ‘For the word of God is living and effective and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and a discerner of the thoughts and intentions of the heart.’ By these it is most plainly shown that no virtue can be perfectly completed or stand without the grace of discernment. And so it was determined by the verdict both of the blessed Antony and of all the others that it is discernment which leads the monk fearlessly to God with a firm step and keeps the aforesaid virtues continually unharmed; with it one can climb with less fatigue to the lofty heights of perfection, and without it many, even laboring very earnestly, could not reach the summit of perfection. For discernment is the mother, guardian, and governor of all the virtues.”

“And so that a recent example may also confirm, as we promised, this same definition declared of old by the holy Antony and the other fathers, recall what you lately saw done before your own eyes: the old man Hero, a very few days ago, cast down from the heights to the depths by the illusion of the devil. We remember that for fifty years he lived in this desert keeping the rigor of self-control with singular strictness, and pursued the secrecy of solitude with wonderful fervor beyond all who live here. How, then, and by what means was he mocked by the deceiver after such labors, and, falling into a most grievous collapse, struck all who live in this desert with mournful grief? Was it not because, possessing too little of the virtue of discernment, he chose to be ruled by his own decisions rather than to obey the counsels or conferences of the brothers and the institutions of the elders? For he always practised such unchanging abstinence in fasting with such rigor, and kept so constantly to the secrecy of solitude and his cell, that not even reverence for the day of Easter could ever persuade him to take part in the brothers' common meal. On that day, when all the brothers were kept in the church for the annual feast, he alone would not join them, lest by taking even a little of the pulse he should seem to have relaxed his purpose. Deceived by this presumption, he received an angel of Satan as an angel of light with the greatest reverence, and, obeying his commands with ready servility, threw himself headlong into a well so deep that the eye could not reach its bottom, not doubting the promise of his angel, who had assured him that because of the merit of his virtues and labors he could never again be subject to any danger. To prove the truth of this most clearly by the experience of his own safety, he threw himself, deluded, into the aforesaid well in the dead of night, meaning to prove the great merit of his virtue when he came out unharmed. When he had been drawn out, already almost lifeless, with great labor by the brothers, and was to end his life on the third day, what is worse, he remained so obstinate in his deception that not even the experience of his own death could persuade him that he had been deluded by the cunning of demons. Therefore, because of the merits of such great labors and the number of years he had persevered in the desert, those who grieved at his end were barely able, out of compassion and the greatest kindness, to obtain from Abba Paphnutius the presbyter that he should not be reckoned among the suicides and judged unworthy even of the memorial and offering for those at rest.”

“What shall I say of those two brothers who lived beyond that desert of the Thebaid where the blessed Antony once was? Moved by too little careful discernment, as they went through the vast expanse of the wilderness they resolved to take no food at all except what the Lord himself provided for them. When the Mazices saw them from afar wandering through the desert and already failing from hunger (this people is more savage and cruel than almost all wild nations, for it is not the desire of plunder, as with some peoples, but mere ferocity of mind that drives them to shed blood), and, contrary to their savage nature, came to meet them with bread, one of them, with the help of discernment, received it with joy and thanksgiving as held out to him by the Lord, reckoning that food was being supplied to him by God, and that it was not without God's doing that those who always delighted in human blood gave the means of life to men already failing and wasting away. But the other refused the food as offered to him by a man, and died of starvation. Though both began from a blameworthy conviction, one, with the help of discernment, corrected what he had rashly and incautiously conceived; the other, persisting in foolish presumption and wholly ignorant of discernment, brought on himself the death which the Lord wished to avert, not believing that it had come about by divine prompting that the fierce barbarians, forgetting their own savagery, had offered them bread instead of swords.”

“What shall I also relate of that man, whose name we do not wish to mention because he is still alive, who for a long time received a demon in the brightness of an angel, and, often deceived by his countless revelations, believed him to be a messenger of righteousness? For besides these, every night he provided light in his cell without the service of any lamp. At last he was commanded by the demon to offer to God his son, who lived with him in the monastery, so that by this sacrifice he might be made equal in merit to the patriarch Abraham. He was so led astray by this persuasion that he would have carried out the murder of his son in deed, had not the boy, seeing him unusually sharpening a knife and looking for cords with which he meant to bind him as if for sacrifice, taken fright at the omen of the coming crime and fled.”

“It would take long to go through the deception of that monk of Mesopotamia, too. In that province he kept a self-control that very few could imitate, which he practised for many years shut up alone in his cell; yet at last he was so deluded by diabolical revelations and dreams that, after such great labors and virtues, in which he had surpassed all the monks living there, he rolled in a miserable fall into Judaism and circumcision of the flesh. For the devil, wishing to entice him by the habit of visions into believing a future deception, had for a long time revealed things that were perfectly true, as though he were a messenger of truth. At last he showed him the Christian people, together with the leaders of our religion and faith, that is, the apostles and martyrs, dark and foul, wasted with every kind of emaciation and disfigured; and on the other hand the people of the Jews, with Moses, the patriarchs, and the prophets, dancing with the greatest joy and shining with the most brilliant light; and he urged him, if he wished to share in their merit and blessedness, to hasten to receive circumcision as well. None of these, surely, would have been so lamentably deluded if they had labored to attain the principle of this discernment. How harmful it is not to have the grace of discernment, then, the falls and experiences of many make clear.”

To this Germanus said: “It has been made abundantly clear, both by recent examples and by the definitions of the ancients, that discernment is in a way the source and root of all the virtues. We want to be taught, then, how it should be acquired, or how one can tell whether it is true and from God, or false and from the devil. So that, according to that Gospel parable you explained in the previous discussion, in which we are commanded to become approved money-changers, we may be able, looking closely at the image of the true king stamped on a coin, to detect what has not been struck in the lawful mint, and reject it, as you said yesterday using the common word, as a counterfeit, being instructed in that skill which you described quite fully and completely as proper to the spiritual and evangelical money-changer. For what will it profit us to have learned the merits of its power and grace if we do not know how it is to be sought or acquired?”

Then Moses said: “True discernment is acquired only by true humility. The first proof of this humility will be if everything, not only what is to be done but also what is thought, is kept for the examination of the elders, so that one trusts nothing to his own judgment but in everything accepts their decisions, and learns from their tradition what he ought to judge good or evil. This training will not only teach a young man to walk by the right path along the true way of discernment, but will also keep him unharmed by all the frauds and snares of the enemy. For no one can be deceived who lives not by his own judgment but by the example of the elders, nor will the cunning enemy be able to mock the ignorance of one who does not know how to hide, out of harmful shame, all the thoughts that arise in his heart, but either rejects or admits them by the mature examination of the elders. For as soon as an evil thought has been laid open, it withers; and before the judgment of discernment is even given, the foulest serpent, dragged out into the light by the power of confession as from a dark underground cave, and in a way exposed and disgraced, departs. For his harmful suggestions have dominion in us just as long as they are hidden in the heart. And so that you may grasp the force of this teaching more effectively, I will tell you what Abba Serapion did, which he used very often to set before the younger monks for their instruction.”

“‘When I was still a small boy,’ he said, ‘and lived with Abba Theonas, this habit had been forced on me by the assault of the enemy: after I had eaten at the ninth hour with the old man, I would secretly hide one paxamatium in my bosom every day, which I ate in the evening without his knowledge. Though I committed this theft without ceasing, through the connivance of my will and the lack of restraint of a desire once rooted, yet when my deceitful craving had been satisfied and I came back to myself, I was more tormented by the crime of the theft I had committed than I had enjoyed eating it. And while I was forced every day, not without pain of heart, to complete this most wearisome task, as though imposed on me by Pharaoh's taskmasters instead of bricks, and yet could not free myself from their most cruel tyranny, and was ashamed to reveal the secret theft to the old man, it happened by the will of God, who wished to rescue me from this yoke of captivity, that some brothers came to his cell for the sake of edification. When the meal was over and a spiritual conference had begun, the old man, answering their questions, spoke about the vice of gluttony and the dominion of hidden thoughts, and explained their nature and the most terrible power they have as long as they are hidden. I was pierced by the power of this conference and terrified by my accusing conscience, believing that these things had been said because the Lord had revealed the secrets of my breast to the old man. First I was moved to hidden groans; then, as the compunction of my heart grew, I burst into open sobs and tears, brought out from my bosom, the accomplice and receiver of my theft, the paxamatium which I had taken by my vicious habit to eat in secret, and, laying it in the midst, I prostrated myself on the ground and confessed, asking for pardon, how I ate one secretly every day; and with tears pouring out I begged them to ask the Lord for my release from this most cruel captivity. Then the old man said: “Take courage, my child. Your confession has set you free from this captivity even without my saying anything. For today you have triumphed over your victorious adversary, laying him low by your confession more powerfully than you had been cast down by him through your silence. By never refuting him, either by your own answer or another's, you had allowed him to rule over you until now, according to the saying of Solomon: Because sentence is not quickly passed against those who do evil, therefore the heart of the sons of men is filled within them to do evil. And therefore after this exposure of him that most wicked spirit will no longer be able to trouble you, nor will the foulest serpent henceforth claim a hiding place in you, since he has been dragged out of the darkness of your heart into the light by a saving confession.” The old man had not yet finished these words when, behold, a burning lamp came out of my bosom and filled the cell with such a sulphurous smell that the strength of the stench scarcely allowed us to remain there. Resuming his admonition, the old man said: “See, the Lord has visibly confirmed to you the truth of my words, so that you might see with your eyes the instigator of that passion driven out of your heart by your saving confession, and know, by his open expulsion, that the enemy, once exposed, will have no further place in you.” And so,’ he said, ‘according to the old man's words, the dominion of that diabolical tyranny was so extinguished in me and laid to rest for ever by the power of this confession that the enemy never again tried to bring even the memory of this craving to my mind, nor did I ever afterwards feel myself assailed by the prompting of that furtive desire.’ This meaning we also read beautifully figured in Ecclesiastes: ‘If the serpent bites without hissing, there is no advantage for the charmer.’ It signifies that the bite of a silent serpent is deadly; that is, if a diabolical suggestion or thought is not laid open by confession to some charmer, that is, to a spiritual man, who is accustomed to heal the wound at once with the charms of the Scriptures and draw the harmful poison of the serpent out of the heart, he cannot help the one who is in danger and about to perish. In this way, then, we shall most easily come to the knowledge of true discernment: following in the footsteps of the elders, let us not presume to do anything new or to decide anything by our own judgment, but walk in everything as either their tradition or the uprightness of their life has formed us. Anyone who is strengthened by this training will not only come to the perfect principle of discernment but will also remain most safe from all the snares of the enemy. For by no other vice does the devil drag a monk so headlong and lead him to death as when he persuades him to neglect the counsels of the elders and trust his own judgment and decision. For if all the arts and disciplines discovered by human ingenuity, which profit nothing more than the comforts of this temporal life, cannot be rightly grasped by anyone without a teacher's instruction, though they can be touched with the hand and seen with the eyes, how foolish it is to believe that this alone needs no teacher, which is invisible and hidden and seen only by the purest heart, and whose error brings not temporal loss, nor one easily repaired, but the perdition of the soul and everlasting death. For it involves a daily and nightly conflict not against visible adversaries but against invisible and pitiless enemies, and a spiritual struggle not against one or two but against countless troops; a fall in it is the more deadly than all others, the more hostile the enemy and the more hidden the combat. And therefore the footsteps of the elders must always be followed with the greatest care, and everything that arises in our hearts must be brought to them with the veil of shame removed.”

Germanus: “The occasion of the harmful shame by which we try to hide evil thoughts is created especially by this: we know that in the region of Syria someone who was believed to be a leading elder, when a brother revealed his thoughts to him in simple confession, was afterwards moved by a kind of indignation and severely reproached him for them. So it happens that while we keep them pressed down in ourselves and are ashamed to reveal them to the elders, we cannot obtain the remedies of healing.”

Moses: “Just as not all young men are equally fervent in spirit or trained in the best disciplines and habits, so not all old men can be found equally perfect or most approved. For the riches of old men are to be measured not by the grayness of their heads but by the diligence of their youth and the wages of past labors. ‘For what you have not gathered in your youth,’ it says, ‘how will you find in your old age?’ ‘For honorable old age is not that of long duration, nor is it reckoned by the number of years; but understanding is gray hair for a man, and a spotless life is ripe old age.’ Therefore we must not follow the footsteps, or accept the traditions and admonitions, of all old men whose heads are covered with gray hair and who are commended only by length of life, but of those whom we have found to have marked their life in youth in a praiseworthy and most approved way, and to have been trained not by their own presumption but by the traditions of the elders. For there are some, indeed, what is more lamentable, they are the greater number, who, growing old in the lukewarmness they took up from youth and in sloth, win authority for themselves not by maturity of character but by the number of their years. To them that reproach of the Lord through the prophet is quite properly directed: ‘Strangers have devoured his strength, and he did not know it; gray hairs too are spread upon him, and he did not know it.’ These, I say, have been brought forward as examples for the young not by uprightness of life or any praiseworthy and imitable strictness in this way of life, but by age alone. The most cunning enemy sets forth their gray hairs, with a prejudged authority, to deceive the young, and hastens with fraudulent subtlety to overthrow and deceive by their example even those who could have been spurred on to the way of perfection by their own or others' admonitions, leading them by their teachings and practices either into a new lukewarmness or into deadly despair. Wishing to give you an example of this, I will pass over the name of the person concerned, lest we too commit something like the fault of the man who published the faults a brother had revealed to him, and set out only what happened, which can give you necessary instruction. A young man, not one of the most slothful, went to an old man well known to us for the sake of his progress and healing, and simply confessed that he was troubled by fleshly incitements and the spirit of sexual immorality, believing he would find consolation for his struggles in the old man's prayer and remedies for the wounds inflicted on him. But the old man rebuked him with the bitterest words, declaring him wretched and unworthy, not fit to be counted by the name of monk, since he could be excited by such a vice and desire; and so wounded him, on the contrary, by his reproofs that he sent him out of his cell cast down in utter despair and prostrated by deadly sadness. While he, weighed down by such grief, was thinking deeply no longer about a remedy for his passion but about fulfilling the desire he had conceived, Abba Apollo, the most approved of the elders, met him. Guessing from his face and dejection the struggle and the violence of the assault which were silently turning in his heart, he asked the cause of such great disturbance. When the young man could not give any answer to the old man who spoke to him so gently, the old man, feeling more and more that he wished not without reason to hide in silence the cause of so great a sadness, which he could not even conceal in his face, began to ask him more earnestly the causes of his hidden grief. Pressed by this, he confessed that he was going to the village, since according to the verdict of that old man he could not be a monk, and could no longer restrain the goads of the flesh or find remedies for the assault, to take a wife, leave the monastery, and return to the world. The old man soothed him with gentle consolation, declaring that he himself was troubled every day by the same goads and heats of incitement, and that therefore he should not fall into despair at all, nor be surprised at the heat of the assault, which is overcome not so much by zealous effort as by the mercy and grace of the Lord. He asked him for a truce of just one day, and, having begged him to return to his cell, went with all haste to the monastery of the old man mentioned above. When he drew near to it, he stretched out his hands and poured out a prayer with tears, saying: ‘Lord, who alone are the merciful judge of hidden strength and human weakness and its secret physician, turn the assault of that young man onto this old man, so that he may learn, even in old age, to condescend to the weaknesses of those who struggle and to have compassion on the frailty of the young.’ When he had finished this prayer with a groan, he saw a foul Ethiopian standing opposite that man's cell and aiming fiery darts at it. The old man was at once wounded by them, came out of his cell, and ran here and there like one mad and drunk; going out and coming in, he could no longer stay in it, and hurriedly set off along the same road by which the young man had gone. Abba Apollo, seeing him driven about as if made mad by some furies, understood that the fiery dart of the devil which he had seen had been fixed in his heart and was working in him that confusion of mind and disturbance of the senses with unbearable heat. Going up to him he said: ‘Where are you hurrying, or what causes, making you forget the gravity of old age, disturb you so childishly and drive you to run about so restlessly?’ The old man, confused by the guilt of his conscience and his shameful agitation, believed that the burning of his breast had been found out and the secrets of his heart laid open to the old man, and did not dare give any answer to his question. ‘Go back to your cell,’ said Apollo, ‘and understand at last that you have until now been either unknown to the devil or despised by him, and not counted among those whose progress and efforts he is roused to fight and wrestle against every day, since after so long a series of years spent in this profession you could not, I will not say repel, but even put off for a single day one dart of his aimed at you. The Lord allowed you to be wounded by it so that at least in old age you might learn to have compassion on others' weaknesses and be taught by your own example and experience to condescend to the frailty of the young. For when you received a young man laboring under the devil's attack, you not only gave him no consolation, but even cast him down into ruinous despair and handed him over to the enemy's hands, to be devoured by him, as far as it lay with you, most lamentably. The enemy would certainly never have attacked him with so violent an assault, having disdained to attack you until now, unless, envying his future progress, he had hastened to forestall and anticipate with his fiery darts that virtue which he saw in his mind, understanding without doubt that he was the stronger, since he judged it worth his while to fight him with such violence. Learn, therefore, from your own example to have compassion on those who struggle, and never to terrify those in danger with ruinous despair or exasperate them with the harshest words, but rather to restore them with gentle and kind consolation; and, according to the command of the most wise Solomon, “Rescue those who are being led to death, and do not hesitate to redeem those who are being slain”; and by the example of our Savior, “not to break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax”; and to ask of the Lord that grace by which you too may confidently sing, in deed and in power: “The Lord has given me a learned tongue, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary.” For no one could withstand the snares of the enemy, or extinguish or restrain the fleshly heats that burn as with a natural fire, unless the grace of God either helped our weakness or protected and fortified it. And therefore, since the purpose of this saving dispensation has been accomplished, by which the Lord wished either to free that young man from harmful heats or to teach you about the violence of assault and the disposition of compassion, let us implore him with common prayers that he may order this scourge to be removed, which the Lord has deigned to inflict on you for your benefit (for “he makes sore and heals again; he strikes, and his hands have healed”; “he humbles and exalts, he kills and makes alive, he brings down to hell and brings back”), and that he may quench, with the abundant dew of his Spirit, the fiery darts of the devil which, at my request, he permitted to be inflicted on you.’ Although the Lord took this temptation away again, at a single prayer of the old man, as quickly as he had allowed it to come, he taught by clear experience not only that no one's faults, once revealed, should be reproached, but that the pain of one who struggles should not be despised even slightly. Therefore do not let the inexperience or levity of one old man, or of a few, whose gray hair the most cunning enemy misuses to deceive the young, frighten you away and shut you out from that saving way we have described and from the tradition of the elders. Rather, everything should be revealed to the elders without any covering of shame, and from them we should confidently receive either remedies for our wounds or examples of life and conduct. In them we shall find equal help and a like result if we try to undertake nothing at all by our own judgment and presumption.”

“Indeed, this principle is proved to be so pleasing to God that we find this same training not idly included in the holy Scriptures. The Lord did not wish to instruct the boy Samuel, chosen by his judgment, in the discipline of divine conversation by himself alone, but allowed him to run once and again to the old man. He was willing that one whom he was calling to converse with himself should be taught by the instruction even of a man who had offended God, provided he was an elder; and he preferred that one whom he had judged most worthy of his call should be formed by the training of an elder, so that the humility of one called to the divine ministry might be proved, and the pattern of this subjection might be set before the young by his example.”

“Christ, too, calling Paul and speaking to him himself, though he could have opened the way of perfection to him at once, preferred to send him to Ananias and commanded him to learn the way of truth from him, saying: ‘Arise and go into the city, and there you will be told what you must do.’ So he sends him too to an elder, and judges that he should be taught by the other's instruction rather than his own, lest what had been rightly done in Paul's case should give a bad example of presumption to those who came after, if each one persuaded himself that he too ought in the same way to be formed by the teaching and instruction of God alone rather than by the training of the elders. The apostle himself teaches, not only by his letters but also by his deeds and example, that this presumption is to be utterly detested. He declares that he went up to Jerusalem for this reason only: to compare the gospel which he was preaching to the Gentiles, with the grace of the Holy Spirit accompanying it and with the power of signs and wonders, with his fellow apostles and predecessors, in a private and as it were domestic examination. ‘And I conferred with them,’ he says, ‘about the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, lest perhaps I should run or had run in vain.’ Who then is so presumptuous and blind as to dare to trust himself to his own judgment and discernment, when the chosen vessel testifies that he needed the conference of his fellow apostles? From this it is most clearly proved that the Lord shows the way of perfection to no one who, having the means to be taught, despises the teaching or practices of the elders, making light of that saying which ought to be most carefully kept: ‘Ask your father, and he will tell you; your elders, and they will tell you.’”

“With every effort, then, the good of discernment must be acquired by the virtue of humility, which can keep us unharmed by both extremes. For there is an old saying: akrotētes isotētes, that is, extremes are equal. For excess of fasting and gluttony come to the same end, and immoderate continuation of vigils brings the monk the same loss as the torpor of the heaviest sleep. For anyone weakened by excess of self-control must be brought back to the state in which the negligent person is held through carelessness. So we have often seen that those whom we observed could not be deceived by gluttony were cast down by immoderate fasting, and through the occasion of weakness fell into the very passion they had overcome. Unreasonable vigils and all-night watches have also overthrown those whom sleep could not overcome. Therefore, according to the apostle, we must pass through ‘by the armor of righteousness on the right hand and on the left’ with right moderation, and so walk between both extremes under the guidance of discernment, that we neither consent to be led away from the path of self-control handed down to us nor, again, fall by harmful relaxation into the desires of the palate and the belly.”

“I remember that I have often so entirely rejected the desire for food that, when I had put off eating for two or three days, not even the memory of any food disturbed my mind; and again sleep was so taken from my eyes by the assault of the devil that for several nights and days I begged the Lord to pour a little sleep upon my eyes. And I felt that I was in greater danger from disgust for sleep and food than from the temptation of slumber and gluttony. So, just as we must take care not to slip into harmful laxity through the desire for bodily pleasure, and not presume to indulge in food before the appointed time or to exceed its measure, so also the refreshment of food and sleep must be taken at the proper hour, even if we shrink from it. For both battles arise by the scheming of the adversary, and immoderate self-control trips us up more ruinously than relaxed satiety. For from satiety one can climb up to the measure of strictness, with the help of saving compunction; from immoderate self-control one cannot.”

Germanus: “What, then, is the measure of self-control, by keeping which with even moderation we may pass unharmed between both extremes?”

Moses: “We know that this matter was often discussed among our elders. Examining the abstinence of various men, who lived continually either on pulse alone, or on vegetables only, or on fruit, they preferred to all of these a meal of bread alone, the fairest measure of which they fixed at two paxamatia, small loaves which certainly weigh scarcely a pound.”

We gladly welcomed this and answered that we did not regard this measure as abstinence at all, since we could by no means eat it all.

Moses: “If you want to test the force of this rule, keep to this measure constantly, taking no cooked relish besides, on Sunday or Saturday, or on the occasion of brothers arriving. For the flesh, refreshed by these, can not only be sustained on a smaller quantity on the remaining days, but can even put off its whole meal without difficulty, being supported by the addition of the food it has taken besides. But one who is always content with the quantity of the measure mentioned will by no means be able to do this or put off his meal of bread to the next day. For I remember that our elders, and I recall that we ourselves have often experienced it, kept this frugality with such labor and difficulty, and observed the measure with such hunger and want, that they imposed this limit on their meal as if against their will, and not without groaning and sadness.”

“The general measure of self-control, however, is this: that each one allow himself as much food as the support of the flesh requires, according to the capacity of his strength, body, or age, not as much as the desire for satiety demands. For whoever is uneven, now constricting the belly with the dryness of fasts, now distending it with excess of food, will suffer the greatest harm on both sides. For just as the mind, wearied by lack of food, loses the vigor of its prayers while, weighed down by excessive weariness of the flesh, it is forced to doze, so again, oppressed by excess of gluttony, it will not be able to send up pure and light prayers to God. Nor will it be able to keep even the purity of chastity with unbroken continuity, since even on those days on which it seems to chasten the flesh with sharper abstinence, the matter of food previously taken supplies the fire of fleshly desire.”

“For whatever has once been formed in the marrow by abundance of food must be expelled and driven out by the very law of nature, which does not allow an excess of any superfluous fluid to remain within it, as harmful and contrary to it. Therefore our body must always be chastened by a reasonable and even frugality, so that, if we who dwell in the flesh cannot be wholly free of this natural necessity, at least it may find us defiled by this discharge rarely, and not more than three times in the course of a whole year. Yet let a quiet sleep expel it without any itching, and let not a deceptive image, betraying hidden pleasure, draw it out. This, then, is the moderate evenness and measure of self-control we have spoken of, which is also approved by the judgment of the fathers: that daily hunger accompany the daily meal of bread, keeping soul and body alike in one and the same state, and allowing the mind neither to collapse from the fatigue of fasting nor to be weighed down by satiety. For it is limited by such frugality that sometimes, after evening, one neither feels nor remembers having eaten.”

“And this is achieved with such labor that those who do not know the perfection of discernment prefer even to prolong their fasts for two days and keep for tomorrow what they would have taken today, provided that when they come to their meal they may enjoy the satiety they long for. You know that your fellow citizen Benjamin recently held stubbornly to this. Rather than take two paxamatia every day and keep constantly to a continuous frugality with even discipline, he preferred always to keep two-day fasts, so that when he came to his meal he might fill the greed of his belly with a double measure; that is, by eating four paxamatia he enjoyed the satiety he desired, and in a way bought the filling of his belly with a two-day fast. You surely remember how he ended his way of life, who by the obstinacy and stubbornness of his mind trusted his own decisions rather than the traditions of the elders. Leaving the desert, he rolled back again to the empty philosophy of this world and the vanity of the age, so that he confirms the elders' saying by the example of his fall, and teaches everyone by his ruin that no one who trusts his own decisions or judgment can ever climb to the summit of perfection, nor even avoid being deceived by the devil's ruinous illusion.”

Germanus: “How then can this measure be kept by us without a break? For sometimes, when the fast has already been ended at the ninth hour and brothers arrive, it is necessary for their sake either to add something to the fixed and usual measure, or else to avoid altogether the kindness we are commanded to show to all.”

Moses: “Both must be observed in the same way and with equal care. For we ought to keep the measure of food with all scruple for the sake of self-control and purity, and likewise to show kindness and encouragement to arriving brothers for the sake of love; for it is quite absurd, when you offer a table to a brother, or rather to Christ, not to eat with him, or to make yourself a stranger to his meal. So we shall be found blameworthy on neither side if we keep this custom: at the ninth hour, of the two paxamatia which are rightfully due to us as the canonical measure, let us take one, and keep the other for the evening in expectation of this; and if any of the brothers arrives, let us eat it together with him, adding nothing more to our usual custom. By this arrangement the arrival of a brother, which ought to be most welcome to us, will not sadden us at all, since we shall show him the services of kindness in such a way as to relax nothing of the rigor of self-control. But if no one comes, we shall freely take this one too, as due to us by the canonical measure. By this frugality the stomach cannot be weighed down in the evening, since one paxamatium has already been taken at the ninth hour; which usually happens to those who, believing they keep a stricter abstinence, put off their whole meal to the evening. For food freshly taken does not allow the mind to be found fine and light in either the evening or the night prayers. Therefore the ninth hour has been granted as a quite convenient and useful time for the meal: a monk who eats then will be found not only light and empty in the night vigils, but also most fit in the evening services themselves, the food being already digested.” With such a feast of twofold instruction the holy Moses fed us. He showed us not only the grace and power of discernment, by the present teaching of his words, but also, in the earlier discussion, the reason for renunciation and the goal and end of our way of life. What we had pursued before only with fervor of spirit and zeal for God, with our eyes in a way closed, he opened more clearly than the light, and made us feel how far we had strayed until then from purity of heart and the line of direction; since even the discipline of all the visible arts in this world cannot exist without the principle of a goal, nor be reached at all without looking to a sure end.

In that choir of saints, who shone like the purest stars in the night of this world, we saw the holy Paphnutius shining with the brightness of knowledge like a great light. He was presbyter of our congregation, that is, of the one that lived in the desert of Scetis. He stayed there until extreme old age, and never moved from the cell he had begun to live in as a young man, which was five miles from the church, even to a place nearer, so as not to be troubled by so long a journey when, worn with years, he came to church on Saturday or Sunday. Nor was he content to return from there empty-handed: he carried back to his cell on his shoulders a vessel of the water he was to use for the whole week, and even when he was past ninety years of age he never allowed it to be brought to him by the labor of younger men. From his youth he gave himself to the schools of the coenobia with such ardor that, though he stayed in them only a short time, he was enriched equally with the good of subjection and with knowledge of all the virtues. By the discipline of humility and obedience he mortified all his own wishes; and when by this all his vices had been extinguished and all the virtues perfected which the institutions of the monasteries and the teaching of the most ancient fathers have established, burning with the ardor of higher progress he hastened to penetrate the secret places of the desert, so that he might be more easily united, with no human company any longer holding him back, to the Lord, to whom he had thirsted to cling inseparably while placed among crowds of brothers. There again, with such fervor, surpassing even the virtues of the anchorites themselves in his desire and intention for that constant and divine contemplation, he avoided the sight of everyone, going into the vaster and inaccessible places of the wilderness and hiding in them for a long time, so that he was found only with difficulty and very rarely even by the anchorites themselves, and was believed to enjoy and delight in the daily company of angels. Because of this virtue they gave him the surname of the Buffalo.

Wishing to be instructed by his teaching, and stirred also by the goads of our thoughts, we came to his cell as day was already drawing to evening. After keeping silence for a while, he began to praise our purpose: that we had left our homeland and, after travelling through so many provinces for the love of the Lord, were striving so hard to bear the poverty and desolation of the desert and to imitate the rigor of their way of life, which even those born and brought up in the same need and want could scarcely endure. We answered that we had come to his teaching and instruction so that we might be to some extent imbued with the training and perfection of so great a man, which we had perceived in him by countless proofs; not so that we might be burdened with praises that did not apply to us, or be puffed up by his words too with the elation of mind by which we were sometimes tickled, even in our own cells, at the suggestion of the enemy. We therefore begged him rather to pour into us words by which we might be pierced and humbled, not those by which we might flatter and exalt ourselves.

Then the blessed Paphnutius said: “There are three kinds of callings, and we should know that three renunciations are also necessary for a monk in whatever kind of calling he has been placed. First we must carefully inquire into the reason why we have said there are three kinds of callings, so that, when we recognize that we have been brought to the service of God by the first degree of calling, we may make our way of life fit its sublimity; for it will profit nothing to have begun sublimely if we do not show an end like the beginning. And if we know that we were drawn from the life of the world by the last kind, then the less praiseworthy the beginning of religious life on which we seem to rest, the more keenly let us take care to spur ourselves on with spiritual fervor to a better end. We must also know thoroughly the second matter, the threefold renunciation, because we shall by no means be able to reach perfection if we are either ignorant of it or, knowing it, do not strive to fulfil it in deed.”

“To set out these three modes of calling with particular distinction: the first is from God, the second through a man, the third from necessity. It is from God whenever an inspiration sent into our heart, sometimes even while we are asleep, rouses us to the desire of eternal life and salvation, and urges us with most wholesome compunction to follow God and cling to his commandments. So we read in the holy Scriptures that Abraham was called out by the Lord's voice from his native land, from the affections of all his kindred, and from his father's house, when the Lord said: ‘Go out from your land, and from your kindred, and from your father's house.’ In this way too we know that the blessed Antony was called, who received the occasion of his conversion from the Godhead alone. For he went into a church and heard the Lord proclaiming in the Gospel: ‘Whoever does not hate father and mother and children and wife and fields, and his own life also, cannot be my disciple’; and, ‘If you want to be perfect, go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ He received this command of the Lord with the greatest compunction of heart, as though it were addressed specially to him, and at once renounced everything and followed Christ, moved by no exhortation or teaching of men. The second mode of calling, which we said comes through a man, is when we are fired with the desire of salvation, spurred on by the examples or the admonitions of some of the saints. In this way we too recall that we were brought, by the grace of the Lord, when we gave ourselves to this pursuit and profession, spurred on by the admonitions and virtues of the man mentioned above. In this way also we read in the holy Scriptures that the children of Israel were freed from the affliction of Egypt through Moses. The third mode of calling is that which comes from necessity: when, bound by the riches or pleasures of this world, we are suddenly assailed by temptations which threaten us with the danger of death, or strike us with the loss of our goods and with confiscation, or pierce us with the death of those dear to us, and we are compelled at least to hasten to lean on God, whom we despised to follow in prosperity. This necessity of calling we also find very often in the Scriptures, when we read that the children of Israel were handed over by the Lord to their enemies because of their sins, and that because of their rule and most savage cruelty they turned again and cried out to the Lord. ‘And the Lord sent them a savior,’ it says, ‘Ehud, the son of Gera, the son of Jemini, who used both hands as the right.’ And again: ‘They cried to the Lord, who raised up a savior for them and delivered them, Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother.’ And of such people it is said in the psalm: ‘When he slew them, then they sought him; and they returned and came to God early in the morning. And they remembered that God is their helper, and the most high God their redeemer.’ And again: ‘And they cried to the Lord when they were in trouble, and he delivered them from their distresses.’”

“Of these three modes, although the first two seem to rest on better beginnings, yet we sometimes find that even from the third degree, which seems the lowest and lukewarm, perfect men most fervent in spirit have come, like those who began the Lord's service from the best beginning and spent the rest of their lives in praiseworthy fervor of spirit; and again, that very many of the higher degree have become lukewarm and very often fallen back to a blameworthy end. Just as it did the former no harm that they were converted not by their own choice but under the compulsion of necessity, since the kindness of the Lord provided them with the very occasion of their compunction, so it did the latter no good at all to have had more sublime beginnings of conversion, because they did not take care to end the rest of their life fittingly. Abba Moses, who lived in the place in this desert called Calamus, lacked nothing of the merit of perfect blessedness because he fled to the monastery driven by fear of death, which threatened him for the crime of murder. He so seized upon the necessity of his conversion that, turning it into willingness by the ready strength of his mind, he reached the highest summits of perfection. So too, on the contrary, it profited nothing to very many, whom I ought not to name, to have taken up the service of the Lord from a better beginning; for afterwards, through the sloth and hardness of heart that followed, they fell into harmful lukewarmness and the deep abyss of death. We see this clearly expressed in the calling of the apostles too. For what did it profit Judas to have taken up willingly the most sublime rank of apostleship in the same order in which Peter and the other apostles were called, when, ending the splendid beginning of his calling with the deadly end of covetousness and love of money, he broke out into the betrayal of the Lord as a most cruel murderer? Or what harm did it do Paul that, suddenly blinded, he seems to have been drawn to the way of salvation as if against his will, when afterwards, following the Lord with all fervor of mind, he completed his beginning of necessity with willing devotion and closed a life glorious with such virtues by an incomparable end? Everything, then, depends on the end, in which one who was dedicated by the beginnings of the best conversion may be found inferior through negligence, and one who was drawn by necessity to profess the name of monk may be made perfect through the fear of God and diligence.”

“Now we must speak about the renunciations, which the tradition of the fathers and the authority of the holy Scriptures show to be three, and which each of us must fulfil with all zeal. The first is that by which we despise bodily all the riches and possessions of the world; the second, that by which we reject our former habits, vices, and affections of soul and flesh; the third, that by which we call our mind away from all present and visible things, contemplate only the things to come, and desire what is invisible. We read that the Lord commanded Abraham to fulfil these three together when he said to him: ‘Go out from your land, and from your kindred, and from your father's house.’ First he said ‘from your land,’ that is, from the possessions of this world and earthly wealth; second, ‘from your kindred,’ that is, from our former way of life, habits, and vices, which, clinging to us from our birth, are related to us as if by a kind of kinship and blood relationship; third, ‘from your father's house,’ that is, from every memory of this world that meets the gaze of the eyes. For of the two fathers, that is, the one who is to be forsaken and the one who is to be sought, it is sung through David in the person of God: ‘Hear, O daughter, and see, and incline your ear; and forget your people and your father's house.’ For he who says ‘Hear, O daughter’ is certainly a father, and yet he testifies that the one whose house and people he urges her to forget was also her father. This happens when, having died with Christ to the elements of this world, we contemplate, according to the apostle, no longer the things that are seen but the things that are not seen; ‘for the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal’; and, going out in heart from this temporal and visible house, we direct our eyes and mind to that in which we shall remain for ever. We shall fulfil this when, walking in the flesh, we have begun not to fight for the Lord according to the flesh, proclaiming in deed and power that saying of the blessed apostle: ‘But our citizenship is in heaven.’ To these three renunciations the three books of Solomon properly correspond. Proverbs fits the first renunciation, since by it the desire for fleshly things and earthly vices are cut away; Ecclesiastes the second, where everything done under the sun is declared vanity; the Song of Songs the third, in which the mind, passing beyond all visible things, is now joined to the Word of God by the contemplation of heavenly things.”

“Therefore it will not profit us much to have undertaken the first renunciation with the greatest devotion of faith if we do not fulfil the second with the same zeal and ardor. And when we have attained this too, we shall be able to reach the third as well, by which, going out from the house of our former parent, whom we remember to have been our father from the beginning of our birth according to the old man, when we were by nature children of wrath like the rest, we shall turn the whole gaze of our mind to heavenly things. Of this father it is said to Jerusalem, which had despised God, its true father: ‘Your father was an Amorite, and your mother a Hittite’; and in the Gospel: ‘You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father.’ When we have left him, passing from the visible to the invisible, we shall be able to say with the apostle: ‘For we know that if our earthly house of this dwelling is dissolved, we have a dwelling from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens’; and what we mentioned a little before: ‘But our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also await the Savior, the Lord Jesus, who will transform the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory’; and that saying of the blessed David: ‘For I am a sojourner on the earth, and a stranger, as all my fathers were’; so that, according to the Lord's words, we may become such as those of whom the Lord spoke to the Father in the Gospel: ‘They are not of this world, as I also am not of this world’; and again to the apostles themselves: ‘If you were of this world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of this world, but I chose you out of this world, therefore the world hates you.’ We shall deserve to obtain the true perfection of this third renunciation when our mind, not dulled by any contagion of fleshly grossness, but polished by the most skilful filing from every earthly affection and quality, has passed through unceasing meditation on divine things and spiritual contemplations to the invisible, so far that, intent on things above and incorporeal, it does not feel itself surrounded by the frailty of the flesh and the position of the body, and is caught up into such ecstasies that it not only receives no sounds with the bodily hearing and is not occupied in looking at the images of passers-by, but does not even see the masses lying nearby and the huge objects set before the eyes of the flesh. No one will grasp the truth and power of this except one who has perceived what is said here with experience as his teacher: one, that is, whose heart's eyes the Lord has so called away from all present things that he regards them not as things that will pass but as things already past, and sees them dissolved into nothing like empty smoke; and, walking with God like Enoch, and translated from human life and ways, is not found in the vanity of the present age. The reading from Genesis records that this happened to him even bodily: ‘And Enoch walked with God, and he was not found, because God translated him.’ The apostle also says: ‘By faith Enoch was translated so that he should not see death.’ Of this death the Lord says in the Gospel: ‘Whoever lives and believes in me shall not die for ever.’ Therefore, if we desire to attain true perfection, we must hasten so that, just as we have despised in body our parents, homeland, the riches and pleasures of the world, so also, leaving all these in heart, we may never return with desire to what we have left. Like those who were led out by Moses: though they did not return in body, yet they are said to have returned in heart to Egypt, abandoning God who had brought them out with such power of signs and worshipping the idols of Egypt which they had despised, as Scripture records: ‘And in their hearts they turned back to Egypt, saying to Aaron, Make us gods to go before us.’ Otherwise we may be condemned together with those who, living in the desert after the food of heavenly manna, longed for the foods of foul and sordid vices, and we may seem to murmur like them: ‘It was well with us in Egypt, where we sat by the pots of flesh and ate onions and garlic and cucumbers and melons.’ Though this figure was first shown in that people, yet we see it fulfilled every day now too in our order and profession. For everyone who after renouncing this world returns to his old pursuits and is called back to his former desires proclaims in deed and mind the same thing as they, saying: ‘It was well with me in Egypt.’ I fear that as great a multitude of these may be found as the crowds of transgressors we read existed then under Moses. For though six hundred and three thousand armed men are numbered as having come out of Egypt, of these no more than two entered the land of promise. So we must hasten to take our examples of virtue from the few and very rare, because, according to the figure we have spoken of, in the Gospel too many are said to be called but few chosen. Bodily renunciation, then, and what is in a way a local migration from Egypt, will profit us nothing if we are not able likewise to attain the renunciation of the heart, which is higher and more useful. For of that bodily renunciation the apostle declared: ‘If I distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.’ The blessed apostle would never have said this unless he had foreseen in the Spirit that some, having spent all their goods on feeding the poor, would be unable to reach evangelical perfection and the steep summit of love, because, keeping their former vices and unrestrained habits, with pride or impatience ruling in their hearts, they would take no care to cleanse themselves of them, and therefore would not reach the love of God, which never fails. Having fallen short in this second degree of renunciation, they grasp still less that third, which is without doubt higher. But weigh this too more carefully in your mind: he did not say simply, ‘If I distribute my goods.’ For then he might seem perhaps to have spoken of one who had not yet fulfilled the Gospel command and had kept something back from them for himself, as some of the lukewarm do. But he says: ‘If I distribute all my goods to feed the poor,’ that is, even if I have renounced these earthly riches perfectly. And to this renunciation he added something greater: ‘and give my body to be burned, but have not love, I am nothing’; as if he had said in other words: If I distribute all my goods to feed the poor according to that Gospel command in which it is said, ‘If you want to be perfect, go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven,’ renouncing in such a way as to keep nothing at all back for myself; and if to this giving away I add martyrdom by the burning of my flesh, so as to give my body for Christ; and yet I am impatient, or wrathful, or envious, or proud, or am inflamed by others' injuries, or seek my own, or think what is evil, or do not bear patiently and willingly everything that can be inflicted on me: the renunciation and burning of the outer man will profit me nothing while the inner man is still wrapped in his former vices. For in the fervor of my first conversion I despised the mere substance of this world, which is defined as neither good nor evil but indifferent, but did not take care likewise to throw away the harmful possessions of a vicious heart, nor did I attain the love of the Lord, which is patient, which is kind, which does not envy, is not puffed up, is not provoked, does not act wrongly, does not seek its own, does not think evil, which bears all things, endures all things, and finally never lets its follower fall by the tripping of sin.”

“We must hasten, then, with all urgency, so that our inner man too may cast away and scatter all the riches of his vices which he gathered in his former way of life. These, clinging continually to body and soul, are properly our own, and unless they are cast away and cut off while we are still in this body, they will not cease to accompany us after our departure. For just as the virtues, or love itself, which is their source, when acquired in this world, make their lover beautiful and splendid even after the end of this life, so the vices send the mind on to that everlasting dwelling darkened and as it were stained with foul colors. For the beauty or ugliness of the soul is produced by the quality of the virtues or vices, from which it takes on a certain color that either makes it so splendid that it deserves to hear from the prophet, ‘And the king shall desire your beauty,’ or else black, foul, and ugly, so that it confesses the stench of its own disgrace and says, ‘My wounds have grown foul and festered because of my foolishness’; and the Lord himself says to it: ‘Why has the wound of the daughter of my people not been healed over?’ And therefore these are our own riches, which dwell continually with the soul, which no king and no enemy will be able either to give us or take from us. These are our own riches, which not even death will be able to separate from the soul; by renouncing them we can reach perfection, or, bound by them, be punished with eternal death.”

“For riches are understood in the holy Scriptures in three ways: evil, good, and indifferent. Evil riches are those of which it is said, ‘The rich have become needy and hungry,’ and, ‘Woe to you, rich, for you have received your consolation’; to have cast away these riches is the highest perfection. In distinction from them are those poor who are praised by the Lord's voice in the Gospel, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,’ and in the psalm, ‘This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him,’ and again, ‘The poor and needy shall praise your name.’ There are also good riches, the acquiring of which is a mark of great virtue and merit, for possessing which the righteous man is praised, as David says: ‘The generation of the upright shall be blessed; glory and riches are in his house, and his righteousness endures for ever’; and again, ‘The ransom of a man's soul is his own riches.’ Of these riches it is said in the Apocalypse to one who does not have them and is blameworthily poor and naked: ‘I will begin to spew you out of my mouth. Because you say, I am rich and wealthy and need nothing, and do not know that you are wretched and pitiable and poor and blind and naked, I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may become rich, and be clothed in white garments, and the shame of your nakedness may not appear.’ There are also indifferent riches, that is, those which can be either good or evil, for they are turned to either side according to the will and character of those who use them. Of these the blessed apostle says: ‘Command the rich of this world not to be high-minded, nor to hope in the uncertainty of riches, but in God, who gives us all things richly to enjoy; to do good, to give readily, to share, to lay up for themselves a good foundation for the future, so that they may lay hold on the true life.’ And again, that rich man in the Gospel who kept them and never gave them to the needy, the rich man from whose crumbs poor Lazarus, laid at his gate, longed to be fed, is assigned to the unbearable fires of Gehenna and to eternal burning.”

“In leaving these visible riches of the world, then, we cast away possessions that are not ours but another's, even though we boast that they were acquired by our own labor or handed down to us by inheritance from our parents. For nothing, as I said, is ours except only what is possessed in the heart and clings to our soul, and so can be taken away by no one at all. Of those visible riches Christ speaks in rebuke to those who keep them as their own and will not share them with the needy: ‘If you have not been faithful in what is another's, who will give you what is your own?’ So not only does daily experience teach that these riches are another's, but the Lord's saying has marked it by its very name. But of the invisible and worst riches Peter says to the Lord: ‘Behold, we have left everything and followed you; what then shall we have?’ And yet it is certain that they left nothing more than the cheapest torn nets. Unless all this is understood of this renunciation of the vices, which is truly great and supreme, we shall find neither that the apostles left anything precious, nor that the Lord had any reason to grant them so great a glory of blessedness that they deserved to hear from him: ‘In the regeneration, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of his majesty, you also shall sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’ If, then, those who perfectly give up these earthly and visible possessions cannot, for certain reasons, reach that apostolic love, and are not able to climb with ready vigor to that third and higher degree of renunciation, belonging to very few, what ought those to judge of themselves who do not even take up perfectly the first, which is very easy, but, keeping the old filth of their money together with their former unbelief, think they may boast only in the bare name of monks? The first renunciation we have spoken of, therefore, is of what belongs to another, and so it is not enough by itself to confer perfection on one who renounces, unless he comes to the second, which is truly the renunciation of what is ours. Having attained this by the expulsion of all the vices, we shall climb also to the summit of the third renunciation, by which, passing beyond in spirit and mind not only everything that is done in this world or possessed by individuals, but even the very fullness of all the elements, which is thought to be magnificent, as subject to vanity and soon to pass away, we despise it, looking, according to the apostle, not at the things that are seen but at the things that are not seen; ‘for the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal.’ So at last we may deserve to hear that supreme word which is said to Abraham: ‘And come into the land which I will show you.’ By this it is clearly shown that, unless someone has fulfilled those three renunciations above with all ardor of mind, he cannot reach this fourth, which is given as a reward and prize to one who has renounced perfectly: that he may deserve to enter the land of promise, which no longer sprouts for him the thorns and thistles of the vices. This land is possessed in this body, after the expulsion of all the passions, by purity of heart; and not the virtue or effort of the one who labors, but the Lord himself promises that he will show it: ‘And come,’ he says, ‘into the land which I will show you.’ By this it is plainly proved that the beginning of our salvation comes about by the calling of the Lord, who says, ‘Go out from your land,’ and that the completion of perfection and purity is likewise granted by him, when he says, ‘And come into the land which I will show you’: that is, not one which you can know of yourself or find by your own effort, but one which I will show you, when you not only do not know it but are not even seeking it. From this it is plainly gathered that, just as we run to the way of salvation called forth by the inspiration of the Lord, so also, led by his teaching and illumination, we reach the perfection of the highest blessedness.”

Germanus: “In what, then, does free will consist, and how is it credited to our effort that we are praiseworthy, if God both begins and completes in us everything that belongs to our perfection?”

Paphnutius: “This would rightly have troubled you if in every work or discipline there were only a beginning and an end, and not also a middle between them. So, just as we know that God works the occasions of salvation in various ways, so it is ours to serve the occasions granted by the Godhead either more earnestly or more slackly. For as the offer, ‘Go out from your land,’ belonged to God who called, so the obedience belonged to Abraham who went out; and as the words, ‘And come into the land,’ are the work of one who obeys and carries them out, so what is added, ‘which I will show you,’ is the grace of God who commands or promises. Yet we must be certain that, though we practise every virtue with unwearied efforts, we can by no means reach perfection by our own diligence and zeal, nor is human earnestness enough, by the merit of its labors, to attain such sublime rewards of blessedness, unless we obtain them with the Lord working with us and directing our heart to what is profitable. Therefore we ought to pray every moment with David and say: ‘Make my steps perfect in your paths, that my footsteps may not be moved’; and: ‘He set my feet upon a rock and directed my steps’; so that that invisible ruler of the human mind may deign to turn back to the pursuit of the virtues our will, which is more inclined to be carried toward the vices, either through ignorance of the good or through the delight of the passions. This we read most plainly sung by the prophet in a single little verse: ‘I was pushed and overturned, so that I might fall’: in this the weakness of free will is signified. ‘And the Lord upheld me’: again the Lord's help is shown as always joined to it; by it, lest we fall utterly through free will, when he sees that we have tottered, he supports and strengthens us, as it were by stretching out his hands. And again: ‘If I said, My foot has slipped’ (that is, by the slippery power of the will), ‘your mercy, O Lord, helped me.’ Again he joins God's help to his own instability, since he confesses that it was not by his own effort but by the Lord's mercy that the foot of his faith was not moved. And again: ‘According to the multitude of the sorrows in my heart’ (which arose in me, certainly, from free will), ‘your consolations have gladdened my soul’: that is, coming into my heart by your inspiration and opening up the contemplation of the future goods which you have prepared for those who labor for your name, they have not only taken away all the anxiety of my heart but have also brought the greatest joy. And again: ‘Unless the Lord had helped me, my soul had almost dwelt in hell.’ He testifies that through the perversity of free will he would have dwelt in hell, had he not been saved by the Lord's help and protection. For ‘the steps of a man are directed by the Lord’ (not by free will), ‘and when the righteous man falls’ (by free will, that is), ‘he shall not be bruised.’ Why? ‘Because the Lord puts his hand under him.’ This is to say most plainly: none of the righteous is sufficient of himself to obtain righteousness, unless at every moment, as he totters and falls, the divine mercy puts the support of its hand under him, lest he perish utterly, prostrate, when he has collapsed through the weakness of free will.”

“Nor indeed did the holy men ever testify that they had obtained by their own effort the direction of the way by which they walked, striving toward progress in the virtues and toward perfection; rather they begged it from the Lord, saying: ‘Direct me in your truth,’ and: ‘Direct my way in your sight.’ Another proclaims that he has discovered this very thing not only by faith but also by experience, and as it were in the very nature of things: ‘I know, O Lord, that a man's way is not in himself; nor is it in a man to walk and direct his steps.’ And the Lord himself says to Israel: ‘And I will direct him like a green fir tree; from me your fruit has been found.’”

“They also desire to gain knowledge of the law itself daily, not by diligence in reading but by the teaching and illumination of God, saying to him: ‘Show me your ways, O Lord, and teach me your paths’; and: ‘Open my eyes, and I will consider the wonders of your law’; and: ‘Teach me to do your will, for you are my God’; and again: ‘You who teach man knowledge.’”

“The blessed David also asks to receive from the Lord the very understanding by which he may know God's commandments, which he certainly knew were written in the book of the law, saying: ‘I am your servant: give me understanding, that I may learn your commandments.’ He certainly possessed the understanding given him once for all by nature, and he certainly had at hand knowledge of God's commandments, which were written down in the law. And yet he begged the Lord that he might grasp it more fully, knowing that what is implanted by the nature of creation could by no means be enough for him, unless his mind were enlightened by the Lord's daily illumination to understand the law spiritually and to know his commandments more clearly. The chosen vessel himself proclaims what we are saying still more clearly: ‘For it is God who works in you both to will and to accomplish, for his good will.’ What could be said more plainly than that he declares both our good will and the completion of the work to be fulfilled in us by the Lord? And again: ‘For it has been given to you for Christ's sake not only to believe in him but also to suffer for him.’ Here too he declared that both the beginning of our conversion and faith and the endurance of sufferings are given us by the Lord. David, understanding this, likewise prays that this very thing may be granted him by the Lord's mercy, saying: ‘Confirm, O God, what you have worked in us,’ showing that the beginnings of salvation, bestowed by God's gift and grace, are not enough for him unless they are completed by his same mercy and daily help. For not free will, but ‘the Lord sets free those in fetters’; not our strength, but ‘the Lord raises up those who are bowed down’; not diligence in reading, but ‘the Lord enlightens the blind,’ which in Greek is kyrios sophoi typhlous, that is, ‘the Lord makes the blind wise’; not our caution, but ‘the Lord guards the strangers’; not our strength, but ‘the Lord lifts up’ (or supports) ‘all who fall.’ We say this not to make void our zeal, labor, and effort, as though they were spent vainly and to no purpose, but so that we may know that without God's help we cannot even strive, nor are our efforts effective for grasping so immense a reward as purity, unless it is granted to us by the Lord's help and mercy. For ‘the horse is prepared for the day of battle, but help is from the Lord’; ‘for a man is not powerful by strength.’ We ought therefore always to sing with the blessed David: ‘My strength and my praise’ is not free will, but ‘the Lord, and he has become my salvation.’ The teacher of the Gentiles, too, not ignorant of this, proclaims that he was made fit for the ministry of the new covenant not by his own merit or sweat but by God's mercy: ‘Not that we are sufficient,’ he says, ‘to think anything of ourselves, as from ourselves; but our sufficiency is from God.’ This can be said less in good Latin but more expressively as: ‘our fitness is from God.’ Then follows: ‘who has also made us fit ministers of the new covenant.’”

“The apostles felt so strongly that everything belonging to salvation was granted them by the Lord that they asked the Lord to give them faith itself, saying: ‘Increase our faith,’ not presuming that its fullness came from free will but believing that it must be given them by God's gift. Then the same author of human salvation teaches us how slippery and weak our faith itself is, and by no means sufficient for itself unless it is strengthened by the Lord's help, when he says to Peter: ‘Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has desired to sift you like wheat; but I have asked my Father that your faith may not fail.’ Another, feeling this happen in himself, and seeing his faith driven by the waves of unbelief toward the rocks of a ruinous shipwreck, asks the same Lord for help for his faith, saying: ‘Lord, help my unbelief.’ So strongly, then, did the men of the Gospel and the apostles feel that all good things are completed by the Lord's help, and so little did they trust that they could keep even their faith unharmed by their own strength or freedom of will, that they asked the Lord either to help it in them or to give it to them. If Peter needed the Lord's help so that his faith might not fail, who will be so presumptuous and blind as to believe that he does not need the Lord's daily help to guard it? Especially since the Lord himself expressed this very thing plainly in the Gospel, saying: ‘As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in me’; and again: ‘For without me you can do nothing.’ How foolish and sacrilegious it is, then, to attribute any of our good acts to our own effort and not to God's grace and help is plainly proved by the Lord's declaration that no one can show spiritual fruits without his inspiration and cooperation. ‘For every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.’ Zechariah too: ‘For if there is anything good, it is his; and if anything best, it is from him.’ And therefore the blessed apostle says firmly: ‘What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?’”

“The blessed apostle also declares that the sum of endurance by which we can bear the temptations brought upon us consists not so much in our own strength as in God's mercy and governance: ‘No temptation has taken hold of you but what is human. But God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but will make with the temptation also a way out, so that you may be able to bear it.’ The same apostle teaches that God also fits or strengthens our minds for every good work and works in us what is pleasing to him: ‘Now the God of peace, who brought out of darkness the great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the eternal covenant, Jesus Christ, make you fit in every good thing, working in you what is pleasing in his sight.’ He also prays that this may happen to the Thessalonians, saying: ‘Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal consolation and good hope in grace, exhort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.’”

“Finally, the prophet Jeremiah plainly testifies, in the person of God, that the very fear of God by which we may hold firmly to him is poured into us by the Lord, saying: ‘And I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me all their days, and that it may be well with them and with their children after them. And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, and I will not cease to do them good; and I will put my fear in their hearts, that they may not depart from me.’ Ezekiel also: ‘And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within them; and I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my precepts and keep my judgments and do them; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.’”

“By these we are most plainly taught that the beginning of a good will is granted to us by the Lord's inspiration, when he draws us to the way of salvation either by himself, or by the exhortation of some person, or by necessity; and that the perfection of the virtues is likewise given by him; but that it is ours to follow God's exhortation and help either more slackly or more earnestly, and that for this we most justly deserve either reward or punishment, according as we have either neglected or striven, by the devotion of our obedience, to correspond to his dispensation and providence, bestowed on us with most kind condescension. This is plainly and openly described in Deuteronomy: ‘When the Lord your God has brought you into the land which you are going in to possess, and has destroyed many nations before you, the Hittite and the Girgashite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, seven nations far more numerous and stronger than you, and the Lord has delivered them to you, you shall strike them down to utter destruction. You shall make no covenant with them, nor make marriages with them.’ That they are brought into the land of promise, that many nations are destroyed before them, that peoples more numerous and stronger than the people of Israel are delivered into their hands, Scripture declares to be the grace of God. But whether Israel strikes them down to utter destruction or keeps and spares them, and whether or not it makes a covenant with them, and whether or not it makes marriages with them, it testifies to be their own. By this testimony it is plainly distinguished what we ought to ascribe to free will and what to the dispensation and daily help of the Lord: that it belongs to divine grace to provide us with the occasions of salvation, prosperous outcomes, and victory, but it is ours to follow up the benefits God has granted either more intently or more sluggishly. We see this principle quite plainly expressed also in the healing of the blind men. That Jesus passes by them is the grace of divine providence and condescension; that they cry out and say, ‘Have mercy on us, Lord, son of David,’ is the work of their faith and belief; that they receive the sight of their eyes is the gift of divine mercy. And that, even after receiving any gift, both the grace of God and the exercise of free will continue, is shown by the example of the ten lepers who were healed together. When one of them, by the goodness of his own will, returned thanks, the Lord, asking after the nine and praising the one, shows that he keeps his helping care constant even toward those who forget his benefits. For this very thing is a gift of his visitation, that he either receives and approves the grateful or seeks out and rebukes the ungrateful.”

“Yet we must believe with unshaken faith that nothing at all is done in this world without God. For it must be confessed that everything is done either by his will or by his permission: that is, that good things are believed to be accomplished by God's will and help, and contrary things by his permission, when the divine protection, forsaking us because of our wickedness and hardness of heart, allows the devil or shameful passions of the body to rule over us. This we are most plainly taught by the words of the apostle: ‘For this reason God gave them up to shameful passions’; and again: ‘Because they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a reprobate mind, to do what is not fitting.’ And the Lord himself says through the prophet: ‘And my people did not hear my voice, and Israel did not heed me. So I let them go,’ he says, ‘according to the devices of their hearts; they shall walk in their own devices.’”

Germanus: “This testimony most plainly shows free will: ‘If my people had heard me’; and elsewhere, ‘And my people did not hear my voice.’ For when he says ‘if they had heard,’ he shows that the decision to consent or not to consent was in their power. How then is our salvation not to be placed in ourselves, when he himself has granted us the power either to hear or not to hear?”

Paphnutius: “You have indeed considered shrewdly the words ‘if he had heard me,’ but you have paid no attention to who it is who speaks to the one who hears or does not hear, nor to what follows: ‘I would soon have humbled his enemies, and laid my hand on those who trouble him.’ Let no one, then, twisting by a perverse interpretation what we have brought forward to prove that nothing is done without the Lord, try to take it up in defence of free will in such a way as to attempt to take away from man the grace and daily providence of God, on the ground of the words, ‘And my people did not hear my voice,’ and again, ‘If my people had heard me, if Israel had walked in my ways,’ and the rest. Let him consider rather that, just as the power of free will is shown by the disobedience of the people, so God's daily providence toward them is shown, as he in a way cries out and warns. For when he says, ‘If my people had heard me,’ he plainly shows that he spoke to them first. The Lord does this not only through the law written in letters but also by daily admonitions, according to what is said through Isaiah: ‘All day long I have stretched out my hands to a people that does not believe me and contradicts me.’ Both things, then, can be proved by this testimony: ‘If my people had heard me, if Israel had walked in my ways, I would soon have humbled his enemies, and laid my hand on those who trouble him.’ For just as free will is shown by the disobedience of the people, so the dispensation of God and his help are declared at the beginning and the end of the verse itself, when he recalls that he spoke first and that he would afterwards have humbled their enemies, if he had been heard by them. For by what we have brought forward we do not wish to remove man's free will, but to prove that God's help and grace are necessary to it every day and every moment.” With these words Abba Paphnutius sent us out of his cell before midnight, instructed, and not so much cheered as pierced in heart. He gave us this as the chief gift of his conference: that, whereas we believed we should reach the summit of perfection by fulfilling the first renunciation, which we were striving to carry out with all our strength, we began to recognize that we had not yet begun even to dream of the heights of monks. For we had learned little in the coenobia about the second renunciation, and we knew that we had never before even heard of the third, in which all perfection is contained and which surpasses those two lower ones in many ways.

Among the other men of Christian philosophy we also saw Abba Daniel, equal indeed in every kind of virtue to those who lived in the desert of Scetis, but adorned more particularly with the grace of humility. Because of his purity and gentleness he was chosen for the office of deacon by the blessed Paphnutius, presbyter of that same wilderness, although he was younger than many. For the same blessed Paphnutius so rejoiced in his virtues that he hastened to make equal to himself in the order of priesthood too one whom he knew to be his equal in the merits and grace of life. Unable to bear his remaining any longer in the lower ministry, and wishing to provide a most worthy successor for himself, he raised him, while he himself was still living, to the honor of the presbyterate. Yet he did not give up the habit of his former humility, and never, in the other's presence, claimed anything for himself from the addition of the higher order; but whenever Abba Paphnutius offered the spiritual sacrifices, he remained in the duty of his former ministry, as a deacon. Yet in this, though the blessed Paphnutius was such and so great a man that in many things he possessed even the grace of foreknowledge, his hope and choice of a successor were disappointed; for not long afterwards he sent ahead of him to God the one he had prepared as his successor.

This blessed Daniel, then, when we asked him why it was that sometimes, as we sat in our cell, we were filled with such gladness of heart, with an unspeakable joy and an overflowing of the holiest feelings, that not only could speech not follow it, but even feeling could not keep pace with it; prayer too was sent up pure and ready, and the mind, full of spiritual fruits, felt its prayers reaching God effective and gentle even while it prayed in sleep; and why, again, for no reason at all, we were suddenly filled with such anguish and weighed down by an unreasonable sadness that we not only felt ourselves drying up as to such feelings, but even the cell was loathsome, reading was distasteful, and prayer itself was sent up unsteady, wavering, and as it were drunken; so that, though we groaned and tried, our mind could not be called back to its former direction, and the more intently it was led back to the contemplation of God, the more violently it was snatched away in a slippery excursion into unstable wanderings, and so became barren of all spiritual fruit that it could not be roused from this deadly sleep either by the desire of the kingdom of heaven set before it or by the fear of Gehenna, answered as follows.

“A threefold explanation of this barrenness of mind you speak of has been handed down to us by the elders. It comes either from our negligence, or from the assault of the devil, or from the Lord's dispensation and testing. From negligence, when, through our own fault and a preceding lukewarmness, we behave carelessly and slackly, and, feeding on harmful thoughts through idle sloth, make the soil of our heart produce thorns and thistles; as these spring up in it, we are consequently made barren and empty of all spiritual fruit and contemplation. From the assault of the devil, when, even while we are sometimes devoted to good pursuits, the adversary penetrates our mind with cunning subtlety and we are drawn away from the best intentions either without knowing it or against our will.”

“The dispensation and testing have a twofold cause. The first is that, being forsaken for a little while by the Lord and humbly seeing the weakness of our mind, we may not be puffed up at all over the earlier purity of heart given us by his visitation; and that, finding by experience that when forsaken by him we cannot recover that state of joy and purity by our groans and effort, we may understand that our former gladness of heart was bestowed on us not by our own zeal but by his condescension, and that our present one must be asked again from his grace and illumination. The second cause of the testing is that our perseverance, constancy of mind, and desire may be proved, and that it may be shown in us with what intention of heart and urgency of prayer we seek the visitation of the Holy Spirit when it leaves us; and that, recognizing at the same time with what labor this spiritual joy and the gladness of purity are regained once lost, we may take more care to guard it once found and hold it more attentively. For whatever is believed to be easily recoverable is usually guarded rather carelessly.”

“By this it is clearly proved that the grace and mercy of God always work in us what is good; that when it leaves us, the zeal of one who labors avails nothing; and that however much one strives, his effort cannot recover the former state without its help again; and that this is continually fulfilled in us: ‘It is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.’ On the other hand, this grace sometimes does not refuse to visit even the negligent and slack with that holy inspiration you speak of and an abundance of spiritual thoughts; it inspires the unworthy, rouses the sleepy, and enlightens those held in the blindness of ignorance, and mercifully reproves and chastens us by pouring itself into our hearts, so that, stirred by its compunction, we may be moved to rise even so from the sleep of sloth. Indeed, in these very visitations we are often suddenly filled with fragrances beyond all the sweetness of human compounding, so that the mind, dissolved in this delight, is caught up into a kind of ecstasy of the spirit and forgets that it is dwelling in the flesh.”

“So well did the blessed David know that this withdrawal, and so to speak desertion by God, of which we have spoken is useful, that he did not choose to pray not to be forsaken by God in anything at all (for he knew that this was not fitting either for himself or for human nature as it reaches toward any perfection); but rather he prayed that it might be moderated, saying: ‘Do not forsake me utterly’; as if he said in other words: ‘I know that you are accustomed to forsake your saints usefully, so as to test them; for otherwise they cannot be tempted by the adversary unless they have been forsaken by you for a little while. And therefore I do not ask that you never forsake me, because it is not good for me not to feel my weakness and say, “It is good for me that you have humbled me,” or not to have practice in fighting. This I certainly cannot have if the divine protection always clings to me without a break. For the devil will not dare to tempt me while I am propped up by your defence, casting up against me or you, and reproaching, what he is accustomed to say with slanderous voice against your athletes: “Does Job worship God for nothing? Have you not fenced him in, and his house, and all his substance round about?” But rather I ask that you do not forsake me utterly,’ which in Greek is heōs sphodra, that is, ‘to excess.’ ‘For as useful as it is to me that you forsake me a little, so that the constancy of my desire may be proved, so harmful it is if you allow me to be forsaken too much, according to my merits and sins. For no human strength, if it is long forsaken by your help in temptation, will be able to persevere by its own constancy and not at once give way to the power or scheming of the adversary; unless you yourself, who know human strength and govern the contests, do not allow us to be tempted beyond what we are able, but make with the temptation also a way out, that we may be able to bear it.’ We read something like this mystically signified in the book of Judges concerning the extermination of the spiritual nations that oppose Israel: ‘These are the nations which the Lord left, to train Israel by them, and that they might have practice in fighting with enemies’; and again a little later: ‘And the Lord left them, to test Israel by them, whether they would hear the commandments of the Lord which he had commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses, or not.’ God certainly kept back this battle not because he begrudged Israel peace or meant them ill, but because he knew it was useful: so that, while always pressed by the attack of these nations, they might never feel that they did not need the Lord's help, and so, remaining always in meditation on him and calling upon him, might neither be relaxed by idle ease nor lose the practice of fighting and the exercise of virtue. For security and prosperity have often cast down those whom adversity could not overcome.”

“We read in the apostle that this battle too has been usefully placed in our members: ‘For the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; for these are opposed to one another, so that you do not do whatever you will.’ Here too you have a battle rooted, as it were, in our body, arranged by the Lord's dispensation. For whatever is present in all generally and without any exception, what else can it be judged to be than something attributed as though by nature to human substance itself after the fall of the first man? And what is found to be born and grown together with all, how can it not be believed to have been placed there by the will of the Lord, who does not harm but takes counsel for our good? He declares the reason for this war, that is, of the flesh and the spirit, to be this: ‘so that,’ he says, ‘you do not do whatever you will.’ So what God has arranged so that it cannot be fulfilled by us, namely that we do not do whatever we will, what else can be believed than that it would be harmful if it were fulfilled? And this battle, placed in us by the Creator's dispensation, is in a way useful to us, calling and driving us to a better state; if it were taken away, a ruinous peace would without doubt follow in its place.”

Germanus: “Although some line of understanding seems already to be shining ahead of us, yet since we cannot yet see the apostle's statement clearly, we want this explained to us more plainly. For three things seem to be indicated here: first, the fight of the flesh against the spirit; second, the desire of the spirit against the flesh; third, our will, which is placed as it were in the middle, of which it is said, ‘so that you do not do whatever you will.’ Although, as I said, we gather some notions of understanding from what has been set out, yet, since the occasion of this conference has presented itself, we would like something to be discussed for us more clearly.”

Daniel: “To distinguish the divisions and lines of questions is a part of understanding, and the greatest part of intelligence is to know what you do not know. That is why it is said: ‘To a fool who asks, wisdom will be reckoned’; because, though the one who asks does not know the force of the question put forward, yet because he inquires prudently and understands what he does not understand, this very thing is reckoned to him as wisdom, since he has prudently recognized what he did not know. According to your division, then, three things seem to be named by the apostle in this place: the desire of the flesh against the spirit, and of the spirit against the flesh, whose fight against each other seems to have this cause and reason: that we cannot, he says, do what we will. There remains a fourth, which you did not see at all: that we do what we do not will. Now, then, we must first recognize the force of the two desires, that is, of the flesh and of the spirit, and so at last be able to discuss what our will is, which is placed between them both; then we must likewise distinguish what cannot be our will.”

“We read the word ‘flesh’ used in many ways in the holy Scriptures. Sometimes it means the whole human being, that is, one who consists of body and soul, as there: ‘And the Word was made flesh,’ and: ‘All flesh shall see the salvation of our God.’ Sometimes it means sinful and fleshly men, as there: ‘My spirit shall not remain in these men, because they are flesh.’ Sometimes it is put for sins themselves, as there: ‘But you are not in the flesh but in the spirit’; and again: ‘Flesh and blood shall not possess the kingdom of God’; and then it follows: ‘nor shall corruption possess incorruption.’ Sometimes it is used for kinship and relationship, as there: ‘Behold, we are your bone and your flesh,’ and the apostle: ‘If by any means I may provoke to emulation my flesh and save some of them.’ We must ask, then, in which of these four meanings we ought to take ‘flesh’ here. For it is plain that it cannot at all stand in the sense of ‘And the Word was made flesh,’ or ‘And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’ Nor in the sense of ‘My spirit shall not remain in these men, because they are flesh’; because ‘flesh’ is not put here, as it is there, absolutely of a sinful man, when he says: ‘The flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh.’ For he is speaking not of substances but of activities, which struggle in one and the same person, either together or one at a time, with a certain alternation and change over time.”

“Therefore in this place we should take ‘flesh’ to mean not the human being, that is, human substance, but the will of the flesh and its worst desires; just as ‘spirit’ does not designate any substance either, but the good and spiritual desires of the soul. The same blessed apostle plainly expressed this meaning just before, beginning thus: ‘But I say, walk by the spirit, and you will not fulfil the desires of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; for these are opposed to one another, so that you do not do whatever you will.’ Since both of these, that is, the desires of the flesh and of the spirit, are in one and the same person, an internal war is waged within us every day. The desire of the flesh, which rushes headlong toward the vices, delights in the pleasures that belong to present ease; the desire of the spirit, opposing these, wishes so to cling wholly to spiritual pursuits that it would even exclude the necessary uses of the flesh, longing to be occupied with them so continually that it would wish to give no care at all to the flesh's frailty. The flesh delights in luxury and lust; the spirit does not assent even to natural desires. The one longs to be satisfied with sleep and filled with food; the other is so fattened on vigils and fasts that it would not admit sleep and food even for the necessary uses of life. The one desires to abound in every plenty; the other is not content to have even the daily supply of a little bread. The one seeks to shine from the baths and to be thronged every day by crowds of flatterers; the other rejoices in the squalor of dirt and the vastness of an inaccessible desert, and shudders at the presence of all mortals. The one is warmed by the honors and praises of men; the other glories in the injuries and persecutions inflicted on it.”

“Between these two desires, then, the will of the soul stands in a more blameworthy middle ground. It neither delights in the crimes of the vices nor consents to the pains of the virtues. It seeks to refrain from fleshly passions in such a way as never to be willing to bear the necessary pains without which the desires of the spirit cannot be possessed: wishing to obtain chastity of body without chastising the flesh; to acquire purity of heart without the labor of vigils; to abound in spiritual virtues with the flesh at rest; to possess the grace of patience without being provoked by any insult; to practise the humility of Christ without loss of worldly honor; to pursue the simplicity of religion together with worldly ambition; to serve Christ with the praise and favor of men; to speak the strictness of truth without giving even slight offence to anyone; in short, it wishes to obtain the future goods in such a way as not to lose the present ones. This will would never bring us to true perfection, but would settle us in a most wretched lukewarmness and make us like those who are rebuked by the Lord in the Apocalypse: ‘I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot. But now you are lukewarm, and I will begin to spew you out of my mouth’ — unless these wars rising up on either side broke up this most lukewarm state. For when, serving this will of ours, we wish to relax ourselves a little into this slackness, at once the goads of the flesh rise up and, wounding us with their vices and passions, by no means allow us to remain in that quality of purity in which we delight, and drag us to that cold way of pleasures, full of thorns, which we dread. Again, if, burning with fervor of spirit and wishing to extinguish the works of the flesh, we try with pride of heart to give ourselves wholly to immoderate pursuits of virtue without any regard for human frailty, the weakness of the flesh intervenes and calls us back and holds us back from that blameworthy excess of the spirit. And so it happens that, as each desire fights the other alternately in such a struggle, the will of the soul, which neither wishes to give itself wholly to fleshly desires nor to toil at the labors of the virtues, is in a way tempered with just moderation. This contention between the two, excluding that more ruinous will of the soul, places, as it were, a just balance on the scales of our body, which marks off the boundaries of spirit and flesh with fair judgment, allowing neither the mind inflamed with the ardor of the spirit to outweigh on the right, nor the flesh with the goads of the vices on the left. And while this battle is usefully waged in us every day, we are driven, to our good, to that fourth thing which we do not will: to acquire purity of heart not by ease or security, but by constant sweat and contrition of spirit; to keep chastity of the flesh by strict fasts, hunger, thirst, and watchfulness; to gain direction of the heart by reading, vigils, continual prayer, and the squalor of solitude; to keep patience by the exercise of tribulations; to serve our Maker amid blasphemies and a surfeit of insults; to pursue the truth, if need be, amid the ill will and enmities of this world. And so, as such a struggle wages war in our body, and we are drawn away from that idle security and called to the labor and pursuits of virtue which we do not will, the best middle balance is kept. The fervor of the spirit on one side, and the coldest rigor of the flesh on the other, temper the lukewarm choice of our will with a most moderate warmth: the desire of the spirit does not allow the mind to be dragged into unbridled vices, nor does the frailty of the flesh allow the spirit to be carried up into unreasonable longings for virtue. So neither do the tinders of every kind of vice spring up from the one side, nor from the other does pride, the chief disease, emerge and pierce us with the heavier weapon of arrogance; but a just balance succeeding from their fight opens a sound and moderate way of virtues between them, teaching the soldier of Christ always to walk by the royal road. And so it will come about that when, through the lukewarmness of this most slothful will we have spoken of, the mind has been rolled down too readily toward the desires of the flesh, it is reined in by the desire of the spirit, which by no means consents to earthly vices; and again, if our spirit, through excess of heart, has been carried away with immoderate fervor to impossible and ill-considered things, it is drawn back to a just measure by the weakness of the flesh, and, rising above the most lukewarm state of our will, walks the way of perfection with the most suitable temperance, by a level path, and with the diligence of sweat. We read of something similar arranged by the Lord in the building of that tower in the book of Genesis, where the confusion of tongues that suddenly arose checked the sacrilegious and wicked daring of men. For there too a harmful agreement against God, indeed against themselves who had begun to assail his divine majesty, would have remained, had not the difference of language, opposing them among themselves by God's dispensation, compelled them by the discord of speech to advance to a better state; and good and useful discord recalled to salvation those whom ruinous agreement had spurred on to their own destruction, as they began, through the division that came between them, to feel the human frailty which, puffed up by their harmful conspiracy, they had not known before.”

“So useful to us is the delay that arises from the opposition of this battle, and so wholesome the postponement produced by this contest, that, as the solidity of the body resists and we are held back from carrying out what we have wickedly conceived in the mind, we are sometimes corrected into a better state, either by repentance that follows or by some amendment which usually comes from putting off the deed and thinking again. Indeed, we see that those whom we know are not held back by any obstacle of flesh from carrying out the desires of their wills, namely the demons and spiritual wickednesses, although they have fallen from a higher order of angels, are more detestable than men, because, the power to act lying close to their desires, they do not delay to carry out with incorrigible malice what they have once wickedly conceived. For as their mind is swift to devise, so their substance is quick and unhindered to accomplish; and since a ready facility of doing whatever they wish is at hand, no wholesome deliberation comes between to correct the evil conceived.”

“For a spiritual substance, not bound by any solidity of flesh, just as it admits no excuse for an evil will arising in it, so it excludes pardon for its malice, because it was not, as we are, provoked to sin from outside by the assault of the flesh, but was inflamed only by the fault of an evil will. And for this reason its sin is without pardon and its sickness without remedy. For just as it fell with no earthly matter enticing it, so it cannot obtain indulgence or a place for repentance. From these things it is clearly gathered that this contention of flesh and spirit stirred up against each other in us is not only not harmful but even brings us much benefit.”

“First, because it rebukes our sloth and negligence at once, and like a most diligent tutor never allows us to stray from the line of strictness and discipline: if our security exceeds even a little the measure of fitting seriousness, it immediately goads and rebukes us with the scourges of its incitements and calls us back to proper frugality. Second, as regards the integrity of chastity and purity: when, by the gift of God's grace, we have seen ourselves free for a long time from genital pollution, so that we believe we shall no longer be troubled even by a simple movement of the flesh, and for that reason, as though we no longer bore the corruption of the flesh, we have become puffed up in the secret of our conscience, it visits us again with its flow, though quiet and simple, humbles and checks us, and reminds us by its goads that we are human. For whereas we tend to fall rather indifferently into other kinds of vices, even graver and more harmful ones, and are not so easily pierced with compunction when we commit them, in this our conscience is humbled in a special way. Through this illusion it is stung by the memory of neglected passions too, clearly understanding that it has been made unclean by natural incitements, while it did not know that it was more unclean through spiritual vices; and running back at once to amend its former sloth, it is warned at the same time neither to trust in the successes of past purity, which it sees it has lost by turning a little away from the Lord, nor to think that this gift of purification can be possessed except through the grace of God alone. The very experience of the thing teaches us, as it were, that if we delight to attain integrity of heart permanently, we must strive to keep the virtue of humility constantly.”

“That pride in this purity would be more ruinous than all crimes and sins, and that because of it we should gain no profit from any integrity of chastity, those powers we mentioned above are witnesses. Though they are not believed to have had any such ticklings of the flesh, they were cast down with everlasting ruin from that lofty and heavenly station for pride of heart alone. We should therefore be lukewarm, wholly without remedy, having no indicator of our negligence seated either in our body or in our own conscience; we should never strive to reach the fervor of perfection, nor even keep the strictness of frugality or self-control, unless this growing tickling of the flesh humbled and checked us, and made us careful and intent on the cleansing of spiritual vices as well.”

“Indeed, we find that this lukewarmness of mind is generally present in those who are eunuchs in body for this reason: as though set free from this fleshly necessity, they think they need neither the labor of bodily self-control nor contrition of heart; and, made slack by this security, they never truly seek or hasten to possess perfection of heart, nor even the cleansing of spiritual vices. This state, departing from the fleshly condition, becomes ‘soulish’ (animal), which is without doubt a worse degree. For it is the one which, passing from cold to lukewarm, is marked by the Lord's voice as more detestable.”

Germanus: “The usefulness of the struggle stirred up between flesh and spirit has, it seems to us, been clearly expressed, so that we believe it has been made palpable to our very hands. And therefore we wish that this point too may likewise be opened to us: what the difference is between the fleshly and the soulish man, or how the soulish man can be worse than the fleshly.”

Daniel: “According to the definition of Scripture there are three states of souls: the first fleshly, the second soulish, the third spiritual. We read them marked out thus in the apostle. Of the fleshly it is said: ‘I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, for you were not yet able; and indeed you are not able even now, for you are still fleshly’; and again: ‘For where there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not fleshly?’ Of the soulish it is said thus: ‘But the soulish man does not perceive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.’ Of the spiritual: ‘But the spiritual man judges all things, and he himself is judged by no one’; and again: ‘You who are spiritual, instruct such a one in a spirit of gentleness.’ So we must hasten, when by renouncing we have ceased to be fleshly, that is, have begun to be separated from the way of life of worldly people and to cease from that open pollution of the flesh, to strive at once with all our strength to lay hold of the spiritual state; lest, flattering ourselves that we seem to have renounced this world as to the outer man, or to have left the defilements of fleshly sexual immorality, as though we had thereby grasped the summit of perfection, we become slacker and slower thereafter in cleansing the other passions, and, held back between the two, cannot reach the degree of spiritual progress, thinking it abundantly enough for perfection that in the outer man we seem to be separated from the life and pleasures of this world, or that we are free from corruption and fleshly intercourse. And so, found in that lukewarm state which is judged the worst, we should know that we are to be spewed out of the Lord's mouth, according to his saying: ‘Would that you were hot or cold. But now you are lukewarm, and I will begin to spew you out of my mouth.’ Not without reason does the Lord declare that those whom he had already received into the bowels of his love, but who have become harmfully lukewarm, must be spewed out with a kind of convulsion of his breast. Though they could have provided him with a wholesome nourishment, as it were, they preferred to be torn from his bowels, and so became worse than foods that have never been brought to the Lord's mouth, just as we detest with more loathing what we throw up under the compulsion of nausea. For whatever is cold, once taken into our mouth, is turned to warmth and received with wholesome pleasure; but what has once been thrown up through the fault of a ruinous lukewarmness, we cannot, I will not say bring to our lips, but even look at from afar without great horror. Most rightly, then, it is declared to be worse, because a fleshly person, that is, a worldly person or a pagan, comes more easily to saving conversion and the summit of perfection than one who has professed himself a monk and yet, not taking the way of perfection according to the rule of discipline, has departed from that fire of spiritual fervor. For the former, humbled at least by bodily vices and feeling himself unclean from fleshly defilement, will one day run, pierced with compunction, to the source of true purification and the summit of perfection; and shuddering at that coldest state of unbelief in which he is, he will fly more easily to perfection, inflamed with the ardor of the spirit. But the one who, as we said, once began with a lukewarm beginning to misuse the name of monk, and did not take up the path of this profession with the humility and fervor he should, once infected with this wretched plague and in a way dissolved in it, will no longer be able either to be wise in perfect things of himself or to be taught by another's admonitions. For he says in his heart, according to the Lord's saying: ‘For I am rich and wealthy and need nothing.’ To him what follows will consequently apply: ‘But you are wretched and pitiable and poor and blind and naked.’ In this he has become worse even than a worldly person, because he does not recognize that he is wretched, blind, and naked, or worthy of correction, or in need of anyone's admonitions or instruction; and so he does not admit even any exhortation of the saving word, not understanding that he is weighed down by the very name of monk and pressed down by everyone's opinion. For since he is believed holy by all and honored as a servant of God, he must be subjected in the future to a more severe judgment and punishment. Finally, why do we dwell longer on what is well known and proved to us by experience? We have often seen people come from the cold and fleshly, that is, from worldly people and pagans, to spiritual fervor; from the lukewarm and soulish, we have never seen it at all. We read that the Lord so detests them through the prophet that spiritual men and teachers are commanded to leave off admonishing and teaching them, and not to spend the seed of the saving word on them as on barren and unfruitful ground, overgrown with harmful briars; but, despising that ground, rather to cultivate new ground, that is, to transfer all the cultivation of teaching and the urgency of the saving word to pagans and worldly people. So it is read: ‘Thus says the Lord to the man of Judah and the inhabitant of Jerusalem: Break up your fallow ground, and do not sow upon thorns.’”

“Finally, shameful to say, we see many who have renounced the world in such a way that they are shown to have changed nothing of their former vices and habits except only their worldly rank and dress. For they are eager to acquire money which they did not possess before, or at any rate do not cease to keep what they had, or, what is more lamentable, even desire to increase it, under the pretext that they claim it is right for them always to support their servants or brothers from it; or else they keep it under the pretext of gathering a community, which they presume they can establish as abbots. If they truly sought the way of perfection, they would rather strive with all their strength to strip themselves not only of money but also of former affections and all distractions, and place themselves, alone and naked, under the rule of the elders, so as to have no care not only for others but even for themselves. But the opposite happens: while they hasten to be over the brothers, they themselves are never subject to the elders, and, beginning from pride, while they desire to instruct others, they do not deserve either to learn or to do what is to be taught. They must, according to the Savior's saying, become blind leaders of the blind and fall together into the pit. Although this pride is of one kind, it has two forms. One constantly imitates seriousness and gravity; the other dissolves with unbridled freedom into foolish laughter and giggling. The first delights in silence; the second disdains to be restrained by silence and is not ashamed to utter all sorts of unfitting and foolish things, while it blushes to be judged inferior or less learned than others. The one, out of pride, seeks the office of the clergy; the other despises it, judging it unfitting or unworthy of its former rank or of the merits of its life and birth. Which of these is to be declared the worse, let each person's examination discuss and weigh. It is certainly one and the same kind of disobedience to violate an elder's command either for the sake of urgent work or for the desire of leisure; it is as harmful to break the rules of the monastery for the sake of sleep as for the sake of watching; it is as much to transgress the abbot's command in order to read as to despise it in order to sleep; nor is it a different tinder of pride to neglect a brother for the sake of a fast than for the sake of a meal. Except that the vices which seem to arise under the appearance of virtues and the image of spiritual things are more ruinous and farther from remedy than those which openly come from fleshly pleasure. For these, like diseases laid open and manifest, are both rebuked at close quarters and healed; but the former, hidden under the pretext of virtues, remain uncured and make those they deceive sick more dangerously and more hopelessly.”

“How can one express how ridiculous it is that some, after that ardor of the first renunciation by which they left their family property or great wealth and worldly service and gave themselves to monasteries, are, as we see, bound with such zeal to the things which cannot be wholly cut off and which cannot fail to be had in this order, small and cheap as they are, that their care for them exceeds their passion for all their former possessions. It will certainly not profit them much to have despised greater wealth and substance, since they have transferred their affection for it, for which it had to be despised, to small and trifling things. For keeping the vice of covetousness and avarice, which they cannot practise on precious goods, for cheaper materials, they prove that they have not cut off but only exchanged their former passion. For, bound by excessive care for a mat, a basket, a cloak, a book, and other such things, however cheap, they are held by the same desire as before. They even guard and defend them with such jealousy that they are not ashamed to be angry with a brother over them, and, what is more shameful, even to quarrel. Still suffering from the sickness of their former covetousness in these things, they are not content to have, according to the common number and measure, the very things which the use of the body or necessity compels a monk to possess; and in this too they show the avarice of their heart, either by striving to have more readily than the others the things that must be used, or, going beyond the measure of care, by guarding more particularly and attentively, and defending from others' handling, things that ought to be common to all the brothers. As if only the difference in metals, and not the passion of covetousness itself, were harmful; and as if it were not lawful to be angry over great things, but to do the same over cheaper ones were without fault; and as if we had not cast away more precious materials precisely so that we might more easily learn to despise cheaper ones. For what difference does it make whether one exercises the disturbance of covetousness over ample and magnificent wealth or over cheaper goods, except that he is to be judged the more blameworthy in that, having despised the greatest things, he is bound by the least? And so this renunciation does not attain perfection of heart, because, while it has the property of a poor man, it has not cast off the will of a rich one.”

In that gathering of the most ancient elders there was a man named Serapion, especially adorned with the grace of discernment, whose conference I think it worth while to commit to writing. When we asked him to discuss the assault of the vices, so that their origins and causes might be laid open more clearly, he began thus.

“There are eight principal vices which attack the human race: first, gastrimargia, which means gluttony of the belly; second, sexual immorality; third, philargyria, that is, avarice or love of money; fourth, anger; fifth, sadness; sixth, acedia, that is, anxiety or weariness of heart; seventh, cenodoxia, that is, boasting or vainglory; eighth, pride.”

“These vices are of two kinds. Some are natural, like gluttony; others are outside nature, like love of money. Their working is fourfold. Some cannot be completed without a bodily action, like gluttony and sexual immorality; others are fulfilled even without any action of the body, like pride and vainglory. Some take the causes of their stirring from outside, like love of money and anger; others are aroused by inner movements, like acedia and sadness.”

“To make these things clearer not only by argument, as briefly as we can, but also by testimonies of Scripture: gluttony and sexual immorality, though they are in us by nature (for sometimes they arise even without any prompting of the mind, from the mere instigation and itching of the flesh), still need material from outside to be completed, and so come to effect by bodily action. ‘For each one is tempted by his own desire. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is completed, brings forth death.’ For the first Adam could not have been deceived by gluttony unless he had had the material of food at hand and used it unlawfully; nor is the second tempted without the enticement of some material, when it is said to him: ‘If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.’ That sexual immorality too is carried out only through the body is plain to all, as God says of this spirit to the blessed Job: ‘And his strength is in his loins, and his power in the navel of his belly.’ And therefore these two in particular, which are fulfilled by the service of the flesh, need, besides the spiritual care of the soul, bodily self-control in a special way. For the intention of the mind alone is not enough to blunt their goads (as sometimes happens against anger or sadness and the other passions, which the effort of the mind alone knows how to overcome even without any affliction of the flesh), unless bodily chastisement is added, which is achieved by fasts, vigils, and wearying work; and to these withdrawal to a separate place must be joined. For as they are produced by the fault of both, that is, soul and body, so they cannot be overcome except by the labor of both. And although the blessed apostle declared generally that all vices are fleshly, since he counted enmities, angers, and heresies among the other works of the flesh, we nevertheless distinguish them by a twofold division in order to gather their cures and natures more carefully. For we say that some of them are fleshly and some spiritual. Those are fleshly which belong especially to the comfort and feeling of the flesh, in which the flesh so delights and is fed that it even stirs up quiet minds and sometimes drags them unwilling to consent to its will. Of these the blessed apostle says: ‘Among whom we all once lived in the desires of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and of the thoughts, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest.’ We call those spiritual which, arising from the impulse of the soul alone, not only bring no pleasure to the flesh but even afflict it with the most grievous sicknesses, and feed only the sick soul with the food of a most wretched delight. And so these need a simple medicine of the heart; but the fleshly ones come to health only by a twofold cure, as we said. Hence it helps those who strive after purity very much to withdraw from themselves first the very materials of these fleshly passions, from which either occasion or memory of these passions can arise in the soul that is still sick. For a twofold cure must be applied to a twofold disease. From the body the image and material that entice must necessarily be withdrawn, lest desire try to break out into action; and to the soul no less must more attentive meditation on the Scriptures, wakeful vigilance, and the withdrawal of solitude be usefully applied, lest it conceive it even in thought. In the other vices, however, human company does no harm; indeed it helps very much those who truly wish to be free of them, because they are more exposed by the frequent company of men, and, being more often provoked and brought to light, they come to health by a quick medicine.”

“And therefore our Lord Jesus Christ, though the apostle declares that he was tempted in all things according to our likeness, is yet said to be without sin, that is, without the contagion of this passion. He certainly did not experience the goads of fleshly desire, by which we must be pricked even without knowing or willing it, since there was in him no likeness of human begetting or conception, as the archangel announced the manner of his conception: ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore also the holy one who will be born of you will be called the Son of God.’”

“For he too, possessing the uncorrupted image and likeness of God, had to be tempted in those passions in which Adam also was tempted while he still remained in that inviolate image of God, that is, gluttony, vainglory, and pride; not in those in which, after the transgression of the command, having violated the image and likeness of God, he fell by his own fault and is entangled. For gluttony is that by which he presumed to eat of the forbidden tree; vainglory that by which it is said, ‘Your eyes will be opened’; pride that by which it is said, ‘You will be like gods, knowing good and evil.’ In these three vices, then, we read that the Lord and Savior too was tempted: gluttony, when the devil says to him, ‘Command that these stones become bread’; vainglory, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down’; pride, when, showing him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, he says, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me’; so that, being assailed along the same lines of temptation as Adam, he might teach us by his example how we too ought to overcome the tempter. And therefore both the one is called Adam and this one Adam: the former first for ruin and death, the latter first for resurrection and life. Through the former the whole human race is condemned; through the latter the whole human race is set free. The former is formed from rough and untouched earth; the latter is born of the Virgin Mary. It was fitting, then, that he should undergo these temptations; it was not necessary that he should go beyond them. For one who had conquered gluttony could not be tempted by sexual immorality, which comes from its abundance and root; by which not even the first Adam would have been overthrown, had he not, deceived by the devil's enticements, first received the passion that gives birth to it. And for this reason the Son of God is said to have come not simply in the flesh of sin but in the likeness of the flesh of sin; because, though there was true flesh in him, since he ate, drank, and slept, and truly underwent the piercing of the nails, he did not have the sin contracted by the transgression truly, but only in likeness. For he did not experience the fiery goads of fleshly desire, which rise up in us even against our will, nature now bringing them about; but he took on a certain likeness of it by sharing our nature. For since he truly fulfilled everything that belongs to our condition and bore all human weaknesses, he was consequently thought to be subject to this passion too, so that through these weaknesses he might seem to bear in his flesh the condition of this vice and sin as well. Finally, the devil tempts him only in those vices in which he had deceived the first man, conjecturing that this one too, as a man, could likewise be deluded in the others, if he found him overthrown in those in which he had cast down the former. But, refuted in the first contest, he could not bring against him the second disease, which had sprung from the root of the principal vice. For he saw that he had by no means received the initial cause of this sickness, and it was useless to hope for the fruit of sin from one who he saw had in no way received its seeds or roots. Yet according to Luke, who places last the temptation in which it is said, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down,’ this may be understood as the passion of pride; so that the earlier one, which Matthew places third, in which, according to the evangelist Luke, the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and promised them to him, may be taken as the passion of love of money. That is, after the victory over gluttony, unable to tempt him with sexual immorality, he passed to love of money, which he knew to be the root of all evils; and, overcome again in this, not daring to bring upon him any of the vices that follow from it, since he knew they sprang from its root and tinder, he leapt to the last passion, pride, by which he knew that even the perfect could be assailed after all the vices had been conquered; by which he remembered that he himself, when he was Lucifer, and many others had fallen from heaven without any incitement of the preceding passions. According to the order we have mentioned, then, described by the evangelist Luke, even the enticement and form of the temptations by which the most cunning enemy attacks both the first and the second Adam agree most elegantly. For to the former he says, ‘Your eyes will be opened’; to the latter he shows ‘all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.’ There he says, ‘You will be like gods’; here, ‘If you are the Son of God.’”

“And so that we may discuss the workings of the other passions too, in the same order we had proposed (the explanation of gluttony and of the Lord's temptation necessarily compelled us to interrupt their account): vainglory and pride are usually completed even without any bodily service. For in what do they need fleshly action, since through mere connivance and the will to win praise and gain human glory they abundantly bring about the ruin of the captive soul? Or what bodily effect did the ancient pride of that Lucifer we mentioned have, except that he conceived it only in mind and thought, as the prophet records: ‘You who said in your heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will set my throne above the stars of God; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High’? As he had no one to incite this pride, so thought alone completed the crime and his everlasting ruin, even though no deeds of the tyranny he aimed at followed.”

“Love of money and anger, though they are not of one nature (for the former is outside nature, while the latter seems to have an original seed in us), yet arise in a similar way, since they usually take the causes of their stirring from outside. For those who are still weaker often complain that they have fallen into these vices through the provocation or prompting of others, and plead that they were driven headlong into anger or love of money by others' provocation. That love of money is outside nature is clearly seen from this: it is proved to have no original beginning in us, nor is it conceived from material that belongs to the life of soul or flesh and to the substance of life. For it is certain that nothing reaches the use and necessity of our common nature except daily food and drink. All other materials, however carefully and lovingly they are kept, are shown by the very experience of life to be foreign to human need. And so this vice, as existing outside nature, assails only lukewarm and badly grounded monks, whereas the natural ones do not cease to attack even the most approved monks, even those living in solitude. So true is this proved to be that we know of some nations wholly free from this passion, that is, love of money, because they have never taken on the sickness of this vice by use and habit. We believe too that the earlier world, which existed for a very long time before the flood, did not know the madness of this desire. In each of us who renounces rightly it is proved to be extinguished without any labor, when, having cast away all his possessions, he seeks the discipline of the coenobium in such a way as not to allow even a single denarius to remain to him. We can find many thousands of men as witnesses to this, who, having dispersed all their property in the briefest moment, so rooted out this passion that they are no longer assailed by it even slightly; and yet, fighting against gluttony all the time, they cannot be safe unless they have fought with great watchfulness of heart and abstinence of body.”

“Sadness and acedia usually arise, as we said above, without any provocation coming from outside. For they are known to trouble frequently and most bitterly even solitaries placed in the desert and mixing with no human company. That this is most true anyone who has lived in solitude and experienced the battles of the inner man will very easily prove by his own experience.”

“These eight vices, then, though they have different origins and unlike workings, yet the first six, that is, gluttony, sexual immorality, love of money, anger, sadness, and acedia, are connected with one another by a kind of kinship and, so to speak, a chain, so that the excess of the one becomes the beginning of the next. For from an abundance of gluttony sexual immorality must spring, from sexual immorality love of money, from love of money anger, from anger sadness, from sadness acedia. And therefore we must fight against them in the same way and by the same method, and always begin the contest against the later ones from the earlier. For the harmful breadth and height of any tree will more easily wither if the roots on which it rests have first been laid bare or cut; and troublesome waters will at once dry up when the spring that produces them and the flowing veins have been skilfully stopped. Therefore, to conquer acedia, sadness must first be overcome; to drive out sadness, anger must first be expelled; to extinguish anger, love of money must be trampled; to root out love of money, sexual immorality must be checked; to overthrow sexual immorality, the vice of gluttony must be chastened. The remaining two, however, that is, vainglory and pride, are joined to each other in a similar way to that which we described for the earlier vices, so that the growth of the first becomes the origin of the second (for an excess of vainglory produces the tinder of pride); but they differ entirely from those first six vices and are not bound to them in a similar alliance. For they not only take no occasion of their origin from them, but are even stirred up in a contrary manner and order: when those have been rooted out, these sprout more vigorously, and from their death they spring up and grow more lively. Hence we are also attacked by these two vices in a different way. We fall into each of those six vices when we have been overthrown by the ones preceding it; but we are in danger of falling into these two when we are victorious, and especially after triumphs. All vices, then, as they are produced by the growth of the preceding ones, so are they purged by their diminution. And on this principle, in order that pride may be driven out, vainglory must be stifled; and so, the earlier always being overcome, the following ones will subside, and with the extinction of the preceding ones the remaining passions will wither without labor. And although these eight vices we have mentioned are connected and intermixed with one another in the way we described, they are more particularly divided into four pairs and couplings. For sexual immorality is bound to gluttony in a special alliance; anger to love of money; acedia to sadness; pride is closely coupled with vainglory.”

“And now, to discuss the kinds of each vice one by one: there are three kinds of gluttony. The first urges a monk to hurry to his meal before the fixed and lawful hour; the second delights in filling the belly and in devouring any kind of food; the third desires more refined and very delicate foods. These three strike a monk with no slight harm unless he strives with equal zeal and watchfulness to free himself from all of them. For just as breaking the fast before the canonical hour must by no means be presumed, so gluttony of the belly and costly, exquisite preparation of foods must likewise be cut off. For from these three causes various and very bad conditions of the soul are produced. From the first, hatred of the monastery is born, and from it grows a horror and intolerance of the same dwelling, which will undoubtedly soon be followed by departure and very swift flight. From the second the fiery goads of luxury and lust are roused. The third ties the inextricable snares of love of money round the necks of its captives and never allows a monk to be grounded in the perfect nakedness of Christ. We detect traces of this passion in ourselves also by this sign: when perhaps we are kept for a meal by one of the brothers and are not content to eat the food with the seasoning with which our host has prepared it, but ask with unseemly and unbridled freedom that something be poured over it or added. This ought by no means to be done, for three reasons. First, because the mind of a monk should always be engaged in the exercise of endurance and frugality, and, according to the apostle, learn to be content with what it has. For one who is offended by tasting a little unpleasantness and cannot check the delights of his palate even for a moment will by no means be able to restrain the hidden or greater desires of the body. Second, because it sometimes happens that the thing we ask for is not available at the moment, and we put our host to shame for his need or frugality, making public his poverty, which he preferred to be known to God alone. Third, because the flavor we ask to be added sometimes displeases others, and we are found to do injury to many while we wish to satisfy our own palate and desire. For this reason such freedom must by all means be chastened in us. There are three kinds of sexual immorality. The first is accomplished by the union of both sexes. The second is without touching a woman, for which Onan, son of the patriarch Judah, is read to have been struck by the Lord; this is called uncleanness in the holy Scriptures. Concerning it the apostle says: ‘But I say to the unmarried and to widows: it is good for them if they remain as I am. But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn.’ The third is conceived in mind and thought, of which the Lord says in the Gospel: ‘Whoever looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’ The blessed apostle declares that these three kinds must be extinguished in the same way: ‘Mortify your members which are upon the earth: sexual immorality, uncleanness, lust,’ and the rest; and again, of two of them, to the Ephesians: ‘Let sexual immorality and uncleanness not even be named among you’; and again: ‘But know this, that no one who is sexually immoral or unclean or covetous, which is idolatry, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.’ That we may guard against these three with equal watchfulness, the same single exclusion from the kingdom of Christ deters us from them. There are three kinds of love of money. The first does not allow those who renounce to be stripped of their riches and possessions. The second persuades us to take back with greater greed what we have dispersed or distributed to the needy. The third compels us to desire or acquire what we did not possess even before. There are three kinds of anger. One burns within, which in Greek is called thymos. Another breaks out into word and deed and effect, which is called orgē; of these the apostle also says, ‘But now put away all these, anger and indignation.’ The third is not, like those, boiled off in an hour, but is kept for days and seasons, and is called mēnis. All these must be condemned by us with equal horror. There are two kinds of sadness. One arises when anger has ceased, or from some loss suffered, or from a desire hindered and frustrated; the other comes from unreasonable anxiety or despair of mind. There are two kinds of acedia. One drives those in its heat headlong into sleep; the other urges them to leave and flee the cell. Vainglory, though it is manifold and various and divided into different forms, has two kinds. The first is that by which we are puffed up over fleshly and visible things; the second, that by which we are inflamed with the desire for empty praise over spiritual and hidden things.”

“In one matter, however, vainglory is usefully taken up by beginners, at least by those who are still assailed by fleshly vices. For example, if at the time when they are pressed by the spirit of sexual immorality they conceive in mind either the dignity of the priestly office or the opinion of everyone by which they are believed to be holy and spotless, and so, judging the unclean goads of desire shameful and unworthy of their reputation or of that order, they turn from them at least out of this consideration, blunting the greater evil by a lesser. For it is better for anyone to be assailed by the vice of vainglory than to fall into the fire of sexual immorality, from which, after a fall, one cannot recover, or can scarcely recover. One of the prophets expressed this meaning elegantly in the person of God: ‘For my own sake I will put my fury far off, and with my praise I will bridle you, lest you perish’; that is, so that while you are fettered by the praises of vainglory, you may not rush into the depths of hell and be sunk irrevocably by the completion of deadly sins. Nor is it surprising that this passion has such power that it can restrain someone rushing into the stain of sexual immorality, since it has very often been proved by the experience of many that it makes the one it has once corrupted with the plague of its poison so tireless that it makes him not even feel two-day or three-day fasts. Indeed, we have often known some in this desert confess that when they were in the coenobia of Syria they bore going without food for five days without difficulty, but that now they were so pressed by hunger even from the third hour that they could scarcely put off their daily fast until the ninth. On this matter Abba Macarius answered finely someone who asked why he was troubled by hunger from the third hour in the desert, when in the coenobium he had often refused food for whole weeks and had not felt hunger: ‘Because here there is no witness of your fast to feed and sustain you with his praises; but there the pointing of men's fingers and the food of vainglory fattened you.’ A figure of this, namely that the vice of sexual immorality is shut out when vainglory comes upon it, is expressed quite beautifully and pointedly in the book of Kingdoms, where Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Assyrians, coming up from the borders of Egypt, carried off to his own region the people of Israel, who had been taken captive by Necho, king of Egypt; not, of course, to restore them to their former freedom and their native land, but to lead them away to his own lands, to be carried farther away than they had been as captives in the land of Egypt. This figure also fits the present case suitably. For though it is more tolerable to serve the vice of vainglory than that of sexual immorality, it is harder to escape the dominion of vainglory. For in a way the captive led away a longer distance will return with more labor to his native soil and ancestral freedom; and that prophetic rebuke will rightly be addressed to him: ‘Why have you grown old in a foreign land?’ For he is rightly said to grow old in a foreign land who is not renewed from earthly vices. There are two kinds of pride: the first fleshly, the second spiritual, which is also more ruinous. For it especially attacks those whom it has found to have made progress in some virtues.”

“Though these eight vices assail the whole human race, they do not attack everyone in the same way. In one the spirit of sexual immorality holds the chief place; in another fury rides roughshod; in another vainglory claims the tyranny; in another pride holds the citadel. And although it is agreed that all are assailed by all, each of us struggles in a different way and order.”

“Therefore we must take up these battles in such a way that each one, finding out the vice by which he is most troubled, takes up his principal struggle against it: fixing all the care and concern of his mind on watching for its assault; directing against it the daily darts of fasting; hurling against it at every moment the sighs of his heart and the frequent weapons of groans; spending against it the labors of vigils and the meditations of his heart; pouring out also unceasing tears of prayer to God and asking him specially and constantly for the extinction of its assault. For it is impossible for anyone to win a triumph over any passion until he has understood that he cannot obtain the victory in the contest by his own effort or labor, though, in order to be cleansed, he must remain day and night in all care and concern. And when he feels himself freed from it, let him again search the hiding places of his heart with like attention, pick out the one he sees to be the most dreadful among the rest, and move all the weapons of the spirit especially against it. And so, always overcoming the stronger ones, he will have a quick and easy victory over the remaining ones, because the mind will be made stronger by the progress of its triumphs, and the fight with the weaker ones that follows will make the outcome of the battles readier for him. This is what those usually do who are accustomed to fight all kinds of beasts before the kings of this world for the sake of prizes, a kind of spectacle commonly called the pancarpus. These men, I say, take up the first contest against whatever beasts they see to be stronger in might or more dreadful in savage fury; and when these have been killed they lay low the rest, which are less terrible and less fierce, with an easier outcome. So too, with the stronger vices always overcome and the weaker following, perfect victory will be prepared for us without any danger. Yet it must not be thought that one who fights chiefly against one vice, and is less careful to watch for the weapons of the others, can more easily be wounded by an unexpected blow. This will by no means happen. For it is impossible that one who, anxious for the cleansing of his heart, has armed the intention of his mind against the assault of any vice should not have a general horror and similar guard against the other vices too. For how will one merit victory even over the passion from which he desires to be freed, if he makes himself unworthy of the reward of purification by the contagion of other vices? But when the principal intention of our heart has taken up a special fight against one passion, it will pray more attentively about it, supplicating with particular care and zeal that it may watch it more diligently and so merit a speedy victory. The lawgiver too teaches us that we must practise this order of battles and yet not trust in our own strength, in these words: ‘You shall not fear them, because the Lord your God is in the midst of you, a great and terrible God. He will consume these nations in your sight little by little and by parts. You will not be able to destroy them all at once, lest the beasts of the earth multiply against you. And the Lord your God will give them up in your sight, and will slay them until they are utterly destroyed.’”

“He likewise warns that we ought not to be puffed up by our victory over them: ‘Lest, when you have eaten and are full, and have built fine houses and lived in them, and have herds and flocks of sheep, silver and gold, and plenty of all things, your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, and was your leader in the great and terrible wilderness.’ Solomon too in Proverbs: ‘If your enemy falls, do not rejoice; and do not be lifted up at his overthrow, lest the Lord see it and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him’; that is, lest, seeing the pride of your heart, he stop attacking him, and you, forsaken by him, begin again to be troubled by the passion which by God's grace you had earlier overcome. For the prophet would not have prayed, ‘Do not deliver to the beasts, O Lord, the soul that confesses you,’ unless he had known that some, because of the swelling of their hearts, are handed over again to the same vices they had conquered, so that they may be humbled. Therefore, taught both by the experience of things and by countless testimonies of Scripture, we must be certain that we cannot overcome such great enemies by our own strength unless we are supported by the help of God alone, and that we ought every day to refer the whole of our victory to him, as the Lord warns us on this point too through Moses: ‘Do not say in your heart, when the Lord your God has destroyed them in your sight: Because of my righteousness the Lord has brought me in to possess this land, when these nations have been destroyed because of their wickedness. For it is not because of your righteousness and the uprightness of your heart that you go in to possess their lands; but because they have acted wickedly they have been destroyed as you enter.’ I ask, what could be said more plainly against our ruinous opinion and presumption, by which we want to credit everything we do either to free will or to our own effort? ‘Do not say in your heart,’ he says, ‘when the Lord your God has destroyed them in your sight: Because of my righteousness the Lord has brought me in to possess this land.’ Has he not plainly told those who have the eyes of the soul opened and ears to hear: When your wars against the fleshly vices have gone well for you, and you see yourself freed from their filth and from the way of life of this world, do not, puffed up by the outcome of battle and victory, ascribe it to your own strength and wisdom, believing that you have won the victory over the spiritual wickednesses or the fleshly vices because of your labors, your zeal, and the freedom of your will? Over these you could certainly not have prevailed at all unless the Lord's help had fortified and protected you.”

“These are the seven nations whose lands the Lord promises to give to the children of Israel after they came out of Egypt. Since all these things happened to them in figure, according to the apostle, we ought to take them as written for our admonition. For it is said: ‘When the Lord your God has brought you into the land which you are going in to possess, and has destroyed many nations before you, the Hittite and the Girgashite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite, seven nations far more numerous than you and stronger than you, and the Lord has delivered them to you, you shall strike them down to utter destruction.’ The reason why they are said to be far more numerous is that the vices are more than the virtues. And so in the list seven nations are counted, but in their conquest they are set down without a number; for it says, ‘and has destroyed many nations before you.’ For the people of the fleshly passions, which comes from this sevenfold tinder and root of vices, is more numerous than Israel. From there sprout murders, strifes, heresies, thefts, false witness, blasphemies, revellings, drunkenness, slanders, jesting, foul talk, lies, perjuries, foolish talk, buffoonery, restlessness, rapacity, bitterness, clamor, indignation, contempt, murmuring, temptation, despair, and many others which it would take very long to mention. Since we judge these light, let us hear what the apostle thought of them and what sentence he passed on them. ‘Neither murmur,’ he says, ‘as some of them murmured and were destroyed by the destroyer’; and of temptation: ‘Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them tempted and perished by serpents’; of slander: ‘Do not love to slander, lest you be rooted out’; and of despair: ‘Who, despairing, have given themselves up to lewdness, to the working of all error, to uncleanness.’ That clamor, like anger, indignation, and blasphemy, is condemned, we are most plainly taught by the words of the same apostle, who commands: ‘Let all bitterness and anger and indignation and clamor and blasphemy be put away from you, with all malice’; and many other things like these. Though these are far more numerous than the virtues, yet when those eight principal vices, from whose nature it is certain that they flow, have been conquered, they all subside at once and are destroyed with them in everlasting destruction. For from gluttony are born revellings and drunkenness; from sexual immorality, foul talk, buffoonery, jesting, and foolish talk; from love of money, lying, fraud, theft, perjury, the desire of shameful gain, false witness, violence, inhumanity, and rapacity; from anger, murders, clamor, and indignation; from sadness, rancor, faintheartedness, bitterness, despair; from acedia, idleness, sleepiness, importunity, restlessness, wandering about, instability of mind and body, talkativeness, curiosity; from vainglory, strifes, heresies, boasting, and the presumption of novelties; from pride, contempt, envy, disobedience, blasphemy, murmuring, slander. That these plagues are also stronger we feel plainly from the assault of nature itself. For the delight of the fleshly passions wars more strongly in our members than the pursuit of the virtues, which are acquired only by the greatest contrition of heart and body. And if you contemplate with spiritual eyes those countless troops of enemies which the blessed apostle lists, saying, ‘Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places,’ and what is said of the righteous man in the ninetieth psalm, ‘A thousand shall fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand,’ you will see clearly that they are far more numerous and stronger than we, who are fleshly and earthly, since a spiritual and airy substance has been granted them.”

Germanus: “How, then, are there eight vices that attack us, when seven nations opposing the people of Israel are counted by Moses? Or how is it fitting for us to possess the lands of the vices?”

Serapion: “It is the settled opinion of all that there are eight principal vices which attack the monk. They are named figuratively under the word ‘nations,’ and they are not all given here because Moses, or the Lord through him, was speaking in Deuteronomy to those who had already come out of Egypt and been set free from one very strong nation, that is, the Egyptians. This figure is found to stand most rightly in our case too: freed from the snares of the world, we are known to be free of gluttony, that is, the vice of the belly or palate. And we now have a similar conflict against these remaining seven nations, the first, which has already been conquered, not being counted. Its land is not given to Israel as a possession; rather it is ordained by the Lord's command that they should leave it for ever and go out from it. And therefore fasts must be so moderated that we are not compelled, through immoderate self-control, contracted through the failing or weakness of the flesh, to return again to the land of Egypt, that is, to the former desire of the palate and the flesh which we cast off when we renounced this world. This is what those suffered in figure who, having gone out into the wilderness of the virtues, longed again for the pots of flesh over which they sat in Egypt.”

“The reason why the nation among which the children of Israel were born is not commanded to be utterly destroyed, but only its land to be left, while these seven are ordered to be destroyed to the last, is this: however much we are inflamed with ardor of spirit and have entered the desert of the virtues, we can by no means do without the neighborhood and service of gluttony and a kind of daily commerce with it. For the desire for food and eating will always live in us as something inborn and natural, even though we hasten to cut off its superfluous appetites and desires. As these cannot be wholly destroyed, so they must be avoided by a kind of turning aside. For of this it is said: ‘And make no provision for the flesh in its desires.’ So while we keep the disposition of this care, which we are commanded not to cut off entirely but to exercise without desires, we plainly do not destroy the Egyptian nation, but separate ourselves from it with a certain discernment, not thinking about superfluous or more lavish feasts, but, according to the apostle, content with daily food and clothing. This is commanded figuratively in the law as well: ‘You shall not abhor the Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land.’ For necessary food is not denied to the body without either harm to it or crime against the soul. But the movements of those seven disturbances, as wholly harmful, must be completely exterminated from the recesses of our soul. For of these it is said: ‘Let all bitterness and anger and indignation and clamor and blasphemy be put away from you, with all malice’; and again: ‘But let sexual immorality and all uncleanness and avarice not even be named among you, nor filthiness, nor foolish talk, nor buffoonery.’ We can, then, cut off the roots of these vices, which have been added to nature; but we shall by no means be able to cut off the use of gluttony. For however far we have advanced, we cannot not be what we were born. That this is so is shown by the life and conduct both of us who are small and of all the perfect. Even when they have cut off the goads of the other passions and seek the desert with all fervor of mind and nakedness of body, they cannot be freed from providing daily food and preparing the year's bread.”

“A figure of this passion, by which even the most spiritual and highest monk must be constrained, is quite properly signified by the likeness of the eagle. When it has been raised in its loftiest flight above the heights of the clouds and has hidden itself from the eyes of all mortals and the face of the whole earth, it is compelled by the necessity of its belly to come down again to the depths of the valleys, descend to the earth, and busy itself with dead carcasses. By this it is most plainly proved that the spirit of gluttony can by no means be cut off like the other vices, or be wholly extinguished in the same way, but only that its goads and superfluous appetites can be blunted and held in check by strength of mind.”

“One of the elders, disputing with philosophers who thought they could weary him as a rustic because of his Christian simplicity, expressed the nature of this vice elegantly under the guise of a riddle. ‘My father,’ he said, ‘left me bound to many creditors. I paid all the others in full and was freed from all the trouble of their demands; one I cannot satisfy though I pay him every day.’ When they, not knowing the force of the question put to them, begged him to give its solution, he said: ‘I was bound by my natural condition to many vices. But when the Lord inspired in me the desire of freedom, I renounced this world together with all of them, as with most troublesome creditors, and cast away from me all the property that had come to me by my father's succession; so I satisfied them and was wholly freed from them. But I have in no way been able to be free of the goads of gluttony. For though I have reduced it to a small measure and a very cheap quantity, I do not escape the force of its daily demand; I must be pressed by its perpetual claims, pay a kind of endless settlement by constant payment, and bring an insatiable tax to its levies.’ Then they declared that this man, whom they had earlier despised as ignorant and rustic, had thoroughly grasped the first part of philosophy, that is, ethics, and they wondered greatly that he could attain by nature what no worldly learning had given him, when they themselves, with much sweat and long study, had not been able to reach it. Let this suffice to have been said specially about gluttony. Now let us return to the discussion we had begun to set out about the general kinship of the vices.”

“When the Lord spoke to Abraham about the future (a point you did not ask about), we read that he counted not seven nations but ten, whose land is promised to be given to his seed. This number is clearly completed by adding idolatry and blasphemy, to which, before the knowledge of God and the grace of baptism, either the impious multitude of the Gentiles or the blaspheming multitude of the Jews is subject, as long as it lives in the spiritual Egypt. But if anyone, renouncing and going out from there by God's grace, has conquered gluttony too and reached the spiritual desert, he is freed from the assault of three nations and will take up war only against the seven which are counted by Moses.”

“That we are commanded to possess the regions of these ruinous nations, to our salvation, is understood thus. Each vice has its own station in our heart, which it claims for itself in the recess of our soul, driving out Israel, that is, the contemplation of the highest and holiest things, and never ceasing to oppose them. For virtues cannot dwell together with vices: ‘For what partnership has righteousness with iniquity? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?’ But when the vices have been overcome by the people of Israel, that is, by the virtues fighting against them, the place which the spirit of desire or sexual immorality held in our heart, chastity will henceforth occupy; the place which fury had taken, patience will claim; the place which the sadness that works death had seized, a wholesome sadness full of joy will possess; the place which acedia laid waste, fortitude will begin to cultivate; the place which pride trampled, humility will honor. And so, when each vice has been driven out, the contrary virtues will possess their places, that is, their dispositions; and these are rightly called the children of Israel, that is, of the soul that sees God. When they have driven out all the passions of the heart, they must be believed not so much to have invaded others' possessions as to have recovered their own.”

“For, as the ancient tradition teaches, these same lands of the Canaanites, into which the children of Israel are brought, had once been allotted to the sons of Shem in the division of the world, and afterwards the posterity of Ham took possession of them by force and power through the injustice of invasion. In this God's most righteous judgment is proved: he both drove the latter out of the foreign places they had wrongfully occupied, and restored to the former the ancient possession of their fathers, which had been assigned to their line in the division of the world. This figure is known by the surest reasoning to stand in our case too. For the Lord's will naturally assigned the possession of our heart not to the vices but to the virtues. These, driven out of their own region after Adam's transgression by the vices, that is, by the Canaanite peoples, growing insolent, when they have been restored to it again by God's grace through our diligence and labor, must be believed not so much to have occupied foreign lands as to have recovered their own.”

“These eight vices are also signified in the Gospel thus: ‘When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he walks through dry places seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, I will return to my house from which I came out; and coming he finds it empty, swept, and adorned. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.’ See, as there we read of seven nations besides that of the Egyptians from which the children of Israel had gone out, so here seven unclean spirits are said to return, besides the one that is first described as having gone out of the man. Solomon too describes this sevenfold tinder of vices in Proverbs: ‘If your enemy entreats you with a loud voice, do not consent to him; for there are seven wickednesses in his soul.’ That is, if the spirit of gluttony, having been overcome, begins to flatter you with its humiliation, asking you, as it were, to relax something of your first fervor and grant it what exceeds the measure of self-control and the limit of just strictness, do not be softened by its submission, nor, through the smiling security from assault by which you seem to have become a little quieter from fleshly incitements, return to your former slackness or to past desires of the palate. For through this that spirit you had conquered says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came out’; and at once the seven spirits of the vices that proceed from it will be fiercer to you than that passion which had been overcome at the beginning, and they will soon drag you to worse kinds of sins.”

“Therefore, while we apply ourselves to fasts and self-control, we must hasten, once the passion of the palate has been overcome, not to leave our soul empty of the necessary virtues, but to fill all the recesses of our heart with them more zealously, lest the spirit of desire, returning, find us empty and void of them, and, no longer content to prepare an entrance for itself alone, bring into our soul with it this sevenfold tinder of vices and make our last state worse than the first. For the soul that boasts that it has renounced this world while eight vices rule over it will afterwards be more shameful and unclean, and will be punished with a heavier penalty, than it was once when it was placed in the world, when it had professed neither the discipline nor the name of a monk. These seven spirits are said to be more wicked than the first which had gone out for this reason: that the desire of the palate, that is, gluttony, would not be harmful in itself if it did not bring in other, graver passions, namely sexual immorality, love of money, anger, sadness, or pride, which are without doubt harmful and deadly to the soul in themselves. And therefore no one will ever be able to obtain the purity of perfection who hopes to acquire it from this self-control alone, that is, bodily fasting, unless he knows that he must practise it so that, with the flesh humbled by fasts, he may more easily enter the contest against the other vices, the flesh not growing insolent through the gluttony of satiety.”

“It must be known, however, that the order of battles is not the same in all of us, because, as we said, we are not all attacked in one way, and each of us must take up the struggle of the contests according to the kind of war by which he is principally troubled; so that one must first fight against the vice placed third, another against the fourth or fifth. And so, according as the vices themselves hold the chief place in us and as the manner of the assault requires, we too must arrange the order of our battles; by which the outcome of victory and the triumph that follows will bring us to purity of heart and the fullness of perfection.” Thus far Abba Serapion discussed with us the nature of the eight principal vices. He laid open so clearly the kinds of passions hidden in our hearts, whose causes and relationships we had never before been able to know or distinguish, though we were being laid waste by them every day, that we seemed to see them set before our eyes as in a mirror.

In the region of Palestine, near the village of Tekoa, which had the honor of producing the prophet Amos, there is a very vast wilderness stretching to Arabia and the Dead Sea, into which the streams of the Jordan flow and fail, and the ashes of Sodom spread over a very wide expanse. In it monks of the highest life and holiness, who had lived there a very long time, were suddenly killed by roving bands of Saracen robbers. We knew that their bodies had been seized with such veneration by the bishops of that region and by the whole people of the Arabs, and laid among the relics of martyrs, that countless people from two towns rushed together and declared a most serious contest, and their dispute went as far as a clash of swords over the holy plunder, as they fought with each other in pious devotion over which of them had the juster right to possess their burial and relics, some boasting of the nearness of their dwelling, others of kinship by origin. Nevertheless, troubled by our own offence, and by that of some brothers who were no little scandalized on this score, and asking why men of such merit and such virtues had been killed in this way by robbers, and why the Lord had allowed so great a crime to be committed against his servants as to hand over men admired by all into the hands of the wicked, we went sorrowfully to the holy Theodore, a man outstanding in the practical life. He lived in the Cells, a place situated between Nitria and Scetis, five miles from the monasteries of Nitria and separated from the desert of Scetis, where we lived, by eighty miles of wilderness. When we complained to him about the killing of these men, wondering at God's great patience in permitting men of such merit to be killed in this way, so that those who by the weight of their holiness ought to have freed others from such a trial could not even snatch themselves from the hands of the wicked, or why God had allowed so great a crime to be committed against his servants, the blessed Theodore answered.

“This question usually troubles the minds of those who, having little faith or knowledge, think that the merits of the saints, or the rewards which are not paid in the present but stored up for the future, are repaid in the brevity of this temporal life. But we who do not hope in Christ in this life only, lest, according to the apostle, we be more miserable than all men (since, receiving none of the promises in this world, we would also lose them in the future through this unbelief), ought not to go astray after their opinions. Otherwise, not knowing the judgment of the true definition, we may be shaken, wavering and fearful, in temptations when we see ourselves too handed over to the same things, attributing to God either injustice or neglect of human affairs, which is wicked even to say, because he does not protect holy men who live rightly in temptation, and does not repay the good with good things or the wicked with evil in the present. Then we would deserve to be condemned with those whom the prophet Zephaniah rebukes: ‘Who say in their hearts, The Lord will not do good, nor will he do evil’; or at any rate we would be found with those who are said to blaspheme God with such complaints: ‘Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and such please him; or else, Where is the God of justice?’ adding also that blasphemy which is described in what follows: ‘He is vain who serves God; and what profit is it that we have kept his commandments and walked sorrowfully before the Lord? So now we call the arrogant blessed, since those who work wickedness have grown rich, and have tempted God and been saved.’ Therefore, so that we may escape this ignorance, which is the root and cause of this most perverse error, we must first know what is truly good and what is evil; and so at last, holding on these matters not the false definition of the crowd but the true definition of the Scriptures, we shall not be deceived by the error of unbelieving men.”

“All the things that are in this world are of three kinds: good, evil, and indifferent. We must therefore know what is properly good, what is evil, and what is indifferent, so that our faith, fortified by true knowledge, may remain unshaken in all temptations. Nothing, then, at least in human affairs, is to be believed to be the principal good except virtue of soul alone, which, leading us by sincere faith to divine things, makes us cling continually to that unchangeable good. And on the contrary, nothing is to be called evil except sin alone, which, separating us from the good God, joins us to the evil devil. Indifferent things are those which can be turned to either side according to the disposition and will of the one who uses them, such as riches, power, honor, bodily strength, health, beauty, life itself and death, poverty, weakness of the flesh, injuries, and other things like these, which can serve either the good side or the bad according to the character and disposition of the one who uses them. For riches often serve the good, according to the apostle, who commands the rich of this world to give readily, share with the needy, and lay up for themselves a good foundation for the future, so that through them they may lay hold on the true life; and according to the Gospel they are good for those who make friends for themselves by the unrighteous mammon. Again they are twisted to evil when they are heaped up only to be hoarded or for luxury, and are not dispensed for the use of the needy. How indifferent power, honor, bodily strength, and health are, and suitable for either side, is easily proved from this: many of the saints in the Old Testament had all these, and, placed in the greatest riches, the height of dignities, and bodily strength, are known to have been most acceptable to God. And on the other hand, those who misused them and twisted them to the service of their wickedness were not undeservedly either punished or destroyed, as the book of Kingdoms often shows happened. That life itself and death are indifferent is attested by the birth of the holy John and of Judas. For the life of the one was so profitable to himself that his birth is said to have brought joy to others as well, according to the words, ‘And many will rejoice at his birth.’ But of the other's life it is said: ‘It would have been good for that man if he had not been born.’ Of the death of John and of all the saints it is said: ‘Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints’; but of Judas and those like him: ‘The death of sinners is very evil.’ How advantageous bodily weakness sometimes is, the blessedness of that poor man Lazarus, covered with sores, shows. Though Scripture records no other merits of virtue of his, for this alone, that he bore poverty and bodily weakness most patiently, he deserved to possess Abraham's bosom by a most blessed lot. How useful and necessary poverty, persecutions, and injuries are, which the opinion of the whole crowd counts as evils, is also clearly proved from this: holy men not only never wished to avoid them, but, either seeking them or bearing them bravely with the greatest virtue, became friends of God and obtained the wages of eternal life, as the blessed apostle sings: ‘Therefore I am content in weaknesses, in insults, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong, because power is made perfect in weakness.’ And therefore those who are exalted by the greatest riches, honors, and powers of this world are not to be believed to have obtained the principal good from them, which is defined as being in the virtues alone, but something indifferent. For just as these things are found useful and advantageous to the righteous who use them rightly and as needed (for they produce the occasion of good works and fruits in the eternity of that life), so they are useless and harmful to those who misuse their wealth, and bring about the occasion of sin and death.”

“Keeping these divisions fixed and immovable, then, and knowing that nothing is good but virtue alone, which comes from the fear and love of God, and nothing evil but sin alone and separation from God, let us now carefully examine whether God ever allowed evil to be brought upon his saints, either by himself or through anyone else. You will certainly never find this anywhere at all. For no one could ever bring the evil of sin upon another who was unwilling and resisted, but only on one who took it into himself through sloth of heart and a corrupt will. Indeed, when the devil, using all the engines of his wickedness, wished to bring this evil of sin upon the blessed Job, and not only stripped him of all his possessions but, after that grief of bereavement, so terrible and unexpected, at the death of his seven sons, loaded him with a most grievous sore from the top of his head to the soles of his feet and with unbearable torments, he could by no means inflict on him the stain of sin, because, remaining immovable in all things, he gave no consent to blasphemy.”

Germanus: “We often read in the holy Scriptures that God created evils or brought them upon men, as in this: ‘For there is none besides me; I am the Lord, and there is no other, forming light and creating darkness, making peace and creating evil’; and again: ‘Is there evil in a city which the Lord has not done?’”

Theodore: “Divine Scripture sometimes uses ‘evils’ loosely for afflictions, not because they are properly evil by nature, but because they are felt as evils by those on whom they are brought for their good. For when the divine judgment speaks to men, it must speak in human words and feelings. For the wholesome cutting or burning which a physician kindly applies to those who are rotting with the infection of ulcers is thought an evil by those who bear it. The spur is not pleasant to a horse, nor correction to one who does wrong. All disciplines too are felt as bitter for the present by those who are being trained, as the apostle says: ‘All discipline for the present seems to be not of joy but of sorrow; but afterwards it yields the most peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it’; and: ‘Whom the Lord loves he corrects, and he scourges every son whom he receives. For what son is there whom the father does not correct?’ So ‘evils’ are sometimes put for afflictions, according to the words: ‘And God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it’; and again: ‘For you, Lord, are merciful and compassionate, patient and very merciful, and repenting of evils,’ that is, of the tribulations and hardships which you are compelled to bring upon us according to the deserts of our sins. Knowing that these are useful to some, another prophet, certainly not begrudging their salvation but taking counsel for it, prays: ‘Add evils to them, Lord, add evils to the glorious of the earth.’ And the Lord himself says, ‘Behold, I will bring evils upon them,’ that is, griefs and devastations, by which, wholesomely chastened in the present, they may be compelled at last to return and hasten to me, whom they despised in prosperity. And therefore we cannot define these as evils in the principal sense, for to many they serve for good and produce the causes of eternal joys. And therefore, to return to the question put forward, all the things thought evil which are inflicted on us by enemies or by any others are not to be believed to be evils, but indifferent. For they will be found to be not such as the one who inflicted them with a furious mind thinks them, but such as the one who bears them feels them. And so when death has been inflicted on a holy man, it must not be believed that evil has been inflicted on him, but something indifferent, which, though it is evil for a sinner, becomes for the righteous rest and release from evils. ‘For death is rest to a man whose way is hidden.’ And so the righteous man suffers no loss from it, because he has endured nothing new; but what was bound to come to him by the necessity of nature he received through the wickedness of an enemy, not without the reward of everlasting life, and paid the debt of human death, which must be paid by an inescapable law, with the richest fruit of suffering and the wage of a great reward.”

Germanus: “If, then, the righteous man who is killed not only suffers no evil but even obtains the reward of suffering, how will the one be called to account who did no harm by inflicting death, but did good?”

Theodore: “We are discussing the proper nature of good and evil and of what we have called indifferent, not the disposition of those who commit these things. For the impious or unjust man will not go unpunished because his malice could not harm the righteous man. For the endurance and virtue of the righteous man profits for reward not the one who inflicted death or torments, but the one who patiently received what was inflicted on him. And so the one will rightly be punished for the savagery of his cruelty, because he wished to inflict evil; and the other nevertheless suffered no evil, because, bearing temptations and pains patiently by the strength of his soul, he made what was inflicted with evil intent serve for progress to a better state and for the blessedness of eternal life.”

“For the patience of Job gained a reward not for the devil, because he made him more illustrious by his temptations, but for Job himself, who bore them manfully; nor will Judas be granted immunity from eternal punishment because his betrayal served the salvation of the human race. For it is not the outcome of the work that must be considered, but the disposition of the one who works. Therefore this definition must be kept immovably in us: that no evil can be inflicted on anyone by another, unless he has brought it upon himself by the sloth and faintheartedness of his own heart. The blessed apostle confirms this same judgment in a single verse: ‘We know that all things work together for good for those who love God.’ For in saying ‘all things work together for good,’ he includes everything alike, not only what is prosperous but also what is thought adverse. The same apostle describes elsewhere how he passed through them, when he says: ‘By the armor of righteousness on the right hand and on the left, through glory and dishonor, through ill repute and good repute, as deceivers and yet true, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich,’ and the rest. So all the things reckoned prosperous and said to belong to the right hand, which the holy apostle designated by the words ‘glory’ and ‘good repute,’ and also those thought adverse, which he clearly expressed by ‘dishonor’ and ‘ill repute’ and describes as being on the left, become for the perfect man the armor of righteousness, if he bears with greatness of soul what is inflicted on him. For, fighting through these, and using as weapons the very adversities by which he is thought to be attacked, fortified by them as by bow, sword, and very strong shield against those who bring them, he gains progress in his patience and virtue, winning the most glorious triumph of constancy from the very weapons of the enemy that are deadly in intent. He is neither puffed up by prosperity nor cast down by adversity, but always walks on a level path and by the royal road, never moved from that state of tranquillity as if to the right by the coming of joy, nor driven again as if to the left when adversities assail and sadness prevails. ‘Great peace have those who love your name, and there is no stumbling block for them.’ But of those who change with each chance that befalls them according to its character and variety it is said: ‘But the fool changes like the moon.’ For as it is said of the perfect and wise, ‘All things work together for good for those who love God,’ so it is declared of the weak and foolish: ‘All things are adverse to the foolish man.’ For he neither profits from prosperity nor is corrected by adversity. For it belongs to the same virtue to bear sad things bravely and to govern favorable things with moderation; and it is quite certain that one who is overcome in either of them can bear neither. Yet one can be more easily overthrown by prosperity than by adversity. For adversity sometimes holds men back and humbles them even against their will, and by most wholesome compunction makes them sin less or corrects them; but prosperity, lifting up the mind with soft and ruinous flatteries, lays low those made secure by the success of their good fortune with a greater ruin.”

“These, then, are those who are figuratively called in the holy Scriptures amphoterodexioi, that is, ambidextrous, as Ehud in the book of Judges is described as being, who used both hands as the right. We too shall be able to possess this virtue spiritually if, by good and right use, we make both what is prosperous and reckoned as on the right, and what is adverse and called the left, belong to the right side, so that whatever is inflicted may become for us, according to the apostle, the armor of righteousness. For we see that our inner man consists of two parts and, so to speak, two hands, and none of the saints can be without this left hand of which we speak; but perfect virtue is distinguished in this, that by good use it turns both into the right. And to make what we say more plainly understood: the holy man has a right hand, namely spiritual successes, in which he stands when, fervent in spirit, he masters all desires and lusts; when, safe from every diabolical assault, he rejects or cuts off the vices of the flesh without any labor or difficulty; when, raised above the earth, he looks upon all present and earthly things as empty smoke and a vain shadow and despises them as soon to pass; when, in ecstasy of mind, he not only longs most ardently for the things to come but also sees them more clearly; when he feeds more effectively on spiritual contemplations; when he sees heavenly mysteries opened to him more brightly; when he sends up his prayers to God more purely and eagerly; when, inflamed with the ardor of the spirit, he passes with all eagerness of soul to the invisible and eternal things, so that he no longer believes himself to be in the flesh. He likewise has a left hand, when he is entangled in the whirlwinds of temptations; when he is inflamed with the heats of incitement toward the desires of the flesh; when he is kindled by the fire of disturbances to the fury of anger; when he is assailed by the elation of pride or vainglory; when he is pressed down by the sadness that works death; when he is shaken by the engines and assault of acedia; and when, all spiritual fervor withdrawn, he grows numb with a kind of lukewarmness and unreasonable grief, so that not only do right and fervent thoughts desert him, but psalm, prayer, reading, and the seclusion of the cell all become loathsome, and all the instruments of virtue grow distasteful with an unbearable and foul disgust. When a monk is assailed by these, let him know that he is pressed on his left side. Whoever, then, in the things we said belong to the right side is not puffed up at all by the creeping in of vainglory, and in those of the left side, fighting manfully, does not fall into despair, but rather takes up from the adversities the weapons of patience for the exercise of virtue, will use both hands as the right, and, made a victor in both conditions, will win the palm of victory from the left state as much as from the right. We read that the blessed Job deserved such a palm. He was crowned by the right hand when, as the wealthy and rich father of seven sons, he offered daily sacrifices to the Lord for their purification, wishing to show them not so much as his own but as accepted and familiar to God; when his door was open to every comer; when he was the foot of the lame and the eye of the blind; when the shoulders of the sick were warmed by the fleece of his sheep; when he was the father of orphans and the husband of widows; when he did not rejoice even in his heart at the ruin of his enemy. And again by the left side he triumphed over adversities with a higher virtue, when, bereaved of his seven sons in one moment, he was not consumed with bitter grief as a father but rejoiced in his Creator's will as a true servant of God; when, from rich become utterly poor, from wealthy naked, from strong wasted, from renowned and glorious base and despised, he kept his strength of soul uncorrupted; when finally, stripped of all his property and wealth, he became a dweller on the dunghill, and, like a most severe executioner of his own body, scraped the flowing pus with a potsherd and, plunging his fingers into the depths of his wounds, drew out clods of worms from every part of his limbs. In all these things he did not slip through despair into any blasphemy, nor did he murmur against his Creator in anything. Rather, not at all terrified by so great a weight and bitterness of temptations, he tore and cast away the very garment that alone remained to his body from all his former possessions, which alone could be saved from the devil's devastation because he was wearing it, and added a voluntary nakedness to that which the most savage robber had inflicted. The hair of his head too, which alone of the remnants of his former glory had remained untouched, he cut off and threw to his tormentor; and, cutting away even what the raging enemy had left, he exults over him and mocks him with that heavenly voice: ‘If we have received good things from the hand of the Lord, shall we not bear evil things? Naked I came out of my mother's womb, naked I shall return there. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; as it pleased the Lord, so it has been done. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ I might rightly call Joseph ambidextrous too, who in prosperity was dearer to his father, more dutiful to his brothers, more acceptable to God; and in adversity was chaste, faithful to his master, most gentle to his fellow prisoners, forgetful of injuries, kind to his enemies; and toward his envious brothers, who as far as lay in them were his murderers, he is found not only kind but even generous. These, then, and those like them are rightly called amphoterodexioi, that is, ambidextrous. For they use both hands as the right, and passing through the things the apostle lists they say alike: ‘By the armor of righteousness on the right hand and on the left, through glory and dishonor, through ill repute and good repute,’ and the rest. Of this right and left hand Solomon speaks in the person of the bride in the Song of Songs: ‘His left hand is under my head, and his right hand shall embrace me.’ Though she indicates that both are useful, yet she puts the left under her head, because adversities ought to be subject to the ruling part of the heart. For they are useful only for this, to exercise us for a time, train us for salvation, and make us perfect in patience. But she wishes the right hand to cling to her, to cherish and preserve her for ever in the saving embrace of the bridegroom, and to be bound to him inseparably. We shall be ambidextrous, then, when neither plenty nor want of present things changes us, and the one does not drive us to the pleasures of harmful slackness nor the other draw us to despair and complaint, but, giving thanks to God alike in both, we reap equal fruit from favorable and adverse things. Such the true ambidextrous teacher of the Gentiles testifies he was, saying: ‘For I have learned to be content in whatever state I am. I know how to be humbled, and I know how to abound; everywhere and in all things I have been instructed, both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things in him who strengthens me.’”

“Although we have said that temptation is twofold, that is, in prosperous or adverse things, it must be known that all people are tempted for three reasons: often for testing, sometimes for purification, occasionally for the deserts of their sins. For testing, as we read that the blessed Abraham, Job, and many of the saints bore countless tribulations; or as it is said to the people through Moses in Deuteronomy: ‘And you shall remember all that way along which the Lord your God led you for forty years through the desert, to afflict you and test you, and that what was in your heart might be made known, whether you would keep his commandments or not’; and what is said in the psalm: ‘I tested you at the water of contradiction’; and to Job: ‘Or do you think I spoke to you for any other reason than that you might appear righteous?’ For purification, when he humbles his righteous ones for some small and light sins, or for pride in their purity, and hands them over to various temptations, so that he may burn out in the present all the filth of their thoughts and, in the words of the prophet, the dross which he sees has hardened in their hidden parts, and send them on to the future judgment like pure gold, allowing nothing to remain in them which the fire of judgment, searching them afterwards, would find to purge with penal torment; according to the words: ‘Many are the tribulations of the righteous’; and: ‘My son, do not neglect the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are rebuked by him. For whom the Lord loves he corrects, and he scourges every son whom he receives. For what son is there whom the father does not correct? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are bastards and not sons.’ And in the Apocalypse: ‘Those whom I love I rebuke and chasten.’ To them also the word is addressed through Jeremiah, in the person of God, under the figure of Jerusalem: ‘For I will make an end of all the nations among which I have scattered you; but of you I will not make an end; but I will chasten you in judgment, so that you may not seem to yourself innocent.’ For this wholesome purification David prays, saying: ‘Prove me, O Lord, and try me; burn my reins and my heart.’ Isaiah too, understanding the usefulness of this temptation, says: ‘Correct us, O Lord, but in judgment, and not in your fury’; and again: ‘I will confess to you, O Lord, for you were angry with me; your fury has turned away, and you have comforted me.’ For the deserts of sins the blows of temptation are inflicted, as where the Lord threatens that he will send plagues upon the people of Israel, saying: ‘I will send the teeth of beasts upon them, with the fury of things that drag along the ground’; and: ‘In vain have I struck your sons; you did not receive discipline.’ In the Psalms too: ‘Many are the scourges of sinners’; and in the Gospel: ‘See, you have been made well; sin no more, lest something worse happen to you.’ We also find a fourth reason, by which we know from the authority of the Scriptures that some sufferings are inflicted on certain people only to manifest the glory and works of God, according to the Gospel: ‘Neither this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God might be manifested in him’; and again: ‘This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified by it.’ There are also other kinds of vengeance, by which some who have gone beyond the heap of malice are struck in the present, as we read that Dathan and Abiram and Korah were condemned; and above all those of whom the apostle says: ‘For this reason God gave them up to shameful passions and to a reprobate mind’; which must be judged heavier than the other punishments. For of them the psalmist says: ‘They are not in the labors of men, and they will not be scourged with men.’ For they do not deserve to be saved by the Lord's visitation or to obtain healing by temporal blows, ‘who, despairing, have given themselves up to lewdness, to the working of all error, to uncleanness,’ and who by hardness of heart and the habit and frequency of sinning have gone beyond the purification of this very short age and the punishment of the present life. The divine word reproaches them too through the prophet: ‘I overthrew you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you became like a brand snatched from the fire; and even so you did not return to me, says the Lord.’ And Jeremiah: ‘I have killed and destroyed my people, and yet they have not turned back from their ways’; and again: ‘You struck them, and they did not grieve; you crushed them, and they refused to receive discipline; they hardened their faces above rock, they would not return.’ The prophet, seeing that all the medicine of this time had been spent in vain on their healing, despairing as it were of their salvation, cries out: ‘The bellows have failed in the fire; in vain has the smelter melted; for your wickednesses have not been consumed. Call them rejected silver, because the Lord has rejected them.’ The Lord complains that he has applied this wholesome purification of fire in vain to those who are hardened in their crimes, under the person of Jerusalem, encrusted with the deep rust of sins: ‘Set it empty on the coals, that it may grow hot, and its bronze may melt, and its filth may be melted out in the midst of it. Much labor has been spent, and its great rust has not gone out of it, not even by fire. Your uncleanness is detestable; because I wished to cleanse you, and you were not cleansed of your filth.’ Therefore, like a most skilled physician who has spent all his healing cares and sees that no kind of remedy remains that can be applied to their sickness, the Lord is in a way overcome by the greatness of their iniquities and compelled to withdraw from that merciful chastisement of his, and so he announces to her: ‘I will no longer be angry with you, and my jealousy has departed from you.’ But of others, whose heart the frequency of sins has not hardened, and who do not need that most severe and, so to speak, caustic medicine of fire, but for whom the instruction of the saving word is enough for salvation, it is said: ‘I will correct them by the hearing of their tribulation.’ We are not ignorant of other causes too of chastisements or punishments, which are inflicted on those who have sinned most grievously, not to expiate their crimes or to wipe out the deserts of their sins, but for the correction and fear of the living. We know that these were clearly inflicted on Jeroboam son of Nebat, on Baasha son of Ahijah, and on Ahab and Jezebel, as the divine sentence declares: ‘Behold, I will bring evil upon you, and I will cut off your posterity, and I will kill of Ahab every male, both him that is shut up and him that is last in Israel. And I will make your house like the house of Jeroboam son of Nebat and like the house of Baasha son of Ahijah, because you have acted so as to provoke me to anger and have made Israel sin. The dogs also shall eat Jezebel in the field of Jezreel. If Ahab dies in the city, the dogs shall eat him; but if he dies in the field, the birds of the sky shall eat him’; and what is announced as a great threat: ‘Your corpse shall not be brought into the tomb of your fathers.’ Not that so short and momentary a punishment could suffice to burn out either the profane inventions of the one who first set up the golden calves for the perpetual transgression of the people and their impious separation from the Lord, or the countless and wicked crimes of sacrilege of the others; but so that the terror of these punishments, which they feared, might be struck by example into others too, who, either neglecting or wholly disbelieving the future, were moved only by consideration of the present; and so that by the proof of this severity they might recognize that there is no neglect of human affairs and of daily providence with that majesty of the supreme Godhead, and might see more plainly through the things they most feared that God is the rewarder of all actions. We also find that some received the same sentence of death in the present even for lighter faults, by which those also were punished whom we mentioned as the authors of sacrilegious transgression; as happened to the man who gathered sticks on the sabbath, or to Ananias and Sapphira, who through the error of unbelief kept back a little of their property. Not that the weights of their sins were equal, but because, being found the first to dare a new transgression, they had to give others an example of punishment and terror as well as of sin; so that whoever afterwards attempted the same things might know that, according to the same pattern by which they were condemned, even if punishment is deferred in the present, it will be paid at the examination of the future judgment. And since we seem to have made a digression from the discourse we set out on, while we wished to run through the kinds of temptations and punishments, in which we were saying that the perfect man always remains immovable in both kinds of temptation, let us now return to it.”

“So the mind of the righteous man ought not to be like wax or any other softer material, which always yields to the stamp of those who seal it and is shaped according to its form and image, and keeps it only until it is reshaped by another seal pressed on it again. So it would happen that, never remaining in its own quality, it would always be turned and changed into the form of whatever is impressed on it. Rather it ought to be like a kind of adamant seal, so that our mind, always keeping its own form inviolate, may stamp and transform all the impressions that befall it into the quality of its own state, while it itself can be marked by no assaults.”

Germanus: “Can our mind keep one state continually and always remain in the same quality?”

Theodore: “It is necessary, according to the apostle, that one who is renewed in the spirit of his mind should make progress every day, always stretching out to what lies ahead; or, if he neglects it, it follows that he goes back and slips into a worse state. And therefore the mind can by no means remain in one and the same quality. It is as if someone tries to force a boat up against the current of a violent river by the stroke of the oars: he must either, by the strength of his arms, cut through the rush of the torrent and climb upstream, or, relaxing his hands, be carried back headlong by the downward stream. Therefore this will be a clear sign of our loss: if we realize that we have gained nothing more, let us not doubt that we have been carried back in every way on any day on which we have not felt ourselves progress upward. For, as I said, a man's mind cannot remain continually in the same state, nor will any of the saints, while in this flesh, so possess the height of the virtues that they remain immovable. For something must always either be added to them or taken away, and in all creation there can be no such perfection as is not subject to the passion of changeability, according to what we read in the book of the blessed Job: ‘What is man, that he should be spotless, and one born of woman, that he should appear righteous? Behold, among his holy ones none is unchangeable, and the heavens are not clean in his sight.’ For we confess God alone to be unchangeable, whom the prayer of the holy prophet thus addresses: ‘But you are the same’; and he says of himself: ‘I am God, and I do not change’; because he alone is by nature always good, always full, and always perfect, to whom nothing can ever be added or taken away. And therefore we must always stretch ourselves toward the pursuit of the virtues with unremitting care and concern, and occupy ourselves continually with these exercises, lest, when progress stops, decline follow at once. For, as we said, the mind cannot remain in one and the same state, that is, so as neither to gain increases of virtue nor suffer losses. For not to have gained is to have lost, because when the desire of progressing stops, the danger of going back will not be absent.”

“And therefore constant dwelling in the cell must be kept. For as often as anyone has wandered away from it, so often, even when he has returned, he will waver and be troubled like a new and beginning dweller in it. For the intention of mind he had acquired while staying in the cell, if it has been relaxed, he will not be able to recover again without labor and pain; and so, brought back, he will not think about the progress he lost, which he could have added if he had not been shaken out of his cell, but will rather rejoice if he feels that he has recovered the state from which he fell. For just as time lost and past cannot be recalled, so neither can the gains that have perished be restored. For however much the intention of the mind works afterwards, it is the progress of the present day and the gain of the present time, not the recovery of a profit once lost.”

“That even the heavenly powers are subject to changeability, as we said, is shown by those of their number who fell through the fault of a corrupt will. Hence neither are those who remain in the blessedness in which they were created to be thought of unchangeable nature, because they have not likewise been corrupted to the contrary side. For it is one thing to be of unchangeable nature, and another not to be changed, through the grace of the unchangeable God, by the effort of virtue and the keeping of the good. For whatever is acquired or held by diligence can also be lost by negligence. And therefore it is said: ‘Do not call a man blessed before his end’; because one who is still in the struggle and, so to speak, in the arena, though he usually wins and gains frequent palms of victory, cannot yet be safe from fear and anxiety about the uncertain outcome. And therefore God alone is called unchangeable and good, who, possessing goodness not by the zeal of effort but by nature, cannot be anything other than good. No virtue, then, can be possessed by man immovably; but, in order that it may be held continually once gained, it must always be guarded with the same diligence and effort by which it was acquired.”

“No one who has fallen should be believed to have collapsed by a sudden ruin, but either to have been deceived by the beginning of a bad training, or, through a long carelessness of mind, the strength of the soul gradually declining and the vices therefore growing little by little, to have fallen in a miserable collapse. ‘For injury goes before destruction, and an evil thought before a fall.’ Just as a house never falls in ruin by a sudden shock, unless either through an old fault in the foundation or through the long sloth of the inhabitants the defences of the roof have been gradually rotted by very small drips getting in first; and when these have been opened up more widely and have given way through long neglect, the storm of rains and showers afterwards flows in in streams. ‘For through slothfulness the roof-beams will sink, and through idleness of hands the house will leak.’ The same Solomon indicates in other words that this happens spiritually to the soul: ‘Drips drive a man out of his house on a winter day.’ He has elegantly compared carelessness of mind to a neglected roof and housetop, through which at first very tiny drips of the passions, as it were, get into the soul. If these are neglected as small and light, they rot the beams of the virtues, and afterwards the vices flow in in a great shower; by which, on a winter day, that is, in time of temptation, when the devil's attack comes, the mind will be driven out of the dwelling of the virtues, in which, while it kept watchful diligence, it had once rested as in the possession of its own house.” Having learned these things, we received an infinite delight of spiritual food, so that we were filled with greater joy of soul from this conference than we had before been affected by sadness at the killing of the saints. For we were not only taught about the things we had doubted, but also, under the questioning of that problem, learned things which, through the slenderness of our understanding, we had not known how to ask.

Wishing to commend to the minds of the studious Abba Serenus, a man of the highest holiness and self-control and a mirror of his own name, whom we admired with singular veneration above the others, we think we cannot fulfil our desire otherwise than by trying to include his conferences in our books. Beyond all the virtues, which shone by God's grace not only in his conduct and character but even in his very face, the gift of chastity was poured into him by a special favor, so that he no longer felt himself troubled even by natural incitements, even in sleep. But since it seems beyond the condition of human nature, I think it necessary first to explain how, with the help of God's grace, he came to this extraordinary purity of the flesh.

He, then, persevering tirelessly in prayers by night and day, and in fasts and vigils, for the inner chastity of his heart and soul, saw that he had obtained what his prayers asked and that all the heats of fleshly desire in his heart had been extinguished. Inflamed, as it were, by the most delightful taste of purity, he burned with a greater thirst and zeal for chastity and began to apply himself to more intense fasts and supplications, that the mortification of this passion, which had been granted to his inner man by the gift of God, might extend also to the purity of the outer man, so that he would no longer be troubled even by that simple and natural movement which is aroused even in little children and infants. Encouraged by the experience of the gift he had obtained, which he knew he had received not by the merit of his labors but by the grace of God, he was more ardently spurred to obtain this too in the same way, believing that God could much more easily tear out by the roots these goads of the flesh, which even the skill of human art sometimes removes by certain potions or drugs or by the knife, since he had given by his gift that purity of spirit which is higher and which it is impossible to attain by human labor or zeal. And as he persisted untiringly in the petition he had begun, with constant supplication and tears, an angel came to him in a vision by night, and as if opening his belly, tore out of his entrails a kind of fiery swelling of flesh and threw it away, and put back all his inner organs in their places as they had been, and said: ‘See, the incitements of your flesh have been cut off, and know that today you have obtained the perpetual purity of body which you have faithfully asked for.’ Let it suffice to have said this briefly about the grace of God which was specially granted to this man. As for the virtues he possessed in common with the other greatest men, I think it superfluous to mention anything, lest this particular account under his name seem to take away from others what has been specially proclaimed of him. Inflamed, then, with the greatest desire for his conference and instruction, we took care to see him during the days of Lent. When he had asked us, in the gentlest way, about the quality of our thoughts and the state of the inner man, and what our long dwelling in the desert had contributed to its purity, we began with these complaints.

“The counting of the years and dwelling in solitude, in view of which you conclude that we ought to have attained the perfection of the inner man, have brought us only this: that we have learned what we cannot be; but they have not made us what we strive to be. For we know that we have gained by this knowledge neither the fixed stability of the purity we desire nor any strength of firmness, but only increases of confusion and shame. For in all disciplines, the purpose of daily study is to exercise and advance, so that, passing from timid rudiments to sure and stable skill, one begins to know what one at first knew doubtfully or did not know at all, and, advancing with a firm step, so to speak, in the character of that discipline, one moves in it perfectly and now without any difficulty. On the contrary, laboring in the pursuit of this purity, I find I have progressed only so far as to know what I cannot be. From this I feel nothing brought to me but labor with such contrition of heart that the matter for tears is never lacking, and yet I do not cease to be what I ought not to be. And so what good has it been to learn what is highest, if once known it cannot be grasped? For when we feel the direction of our heart stretching toward its aim, the mind imperceptibly turns back and slips with a more violent rush into its former wanderings; and so, occupied with daily distractions, it is carried off unceasingly into countless captivities, so that we almost despair of the correction we desire and this observance seems superfluous. For the mind, wandering every moment in slippery excursions, when it is brought back to the fear of God or spiritual contemplation, vanishes again more fleetingly before it is established in it. And when, as if waking up, we catch it having strayed from the intention set before it, and, bringing it back to that contemplation from which it departed, we wish to bind it with the most tenacious intention of heart as with chains, in the very act of our effort it slips from the recesses of the mind faster than an eel. Therefore, burning with such daily observances and yet seeing that no strength of stability has come to our heart from them, we are brought, broken by despair, to this opinion: that we believe these wanderings of the soul are present in the human race not through our own fault but through the fault of nature.”

Serenus: “It is a mark of dangerous presumption, before matters have been rightly examined and a sure reason gathered, to define hastily the nature of anything, and to draw a conjecture from the consideration of one's own frailty rather than to give an opinion from the state and character of the discipline itself or from the experience of others. For if someone who does not know how to swim, knowing that the weight of his body cannot be borne by liquid water, should wish to define from the experience of his own lack of skill that no one at all surrounded by solid flesh can be held up by the liquid element, his opinion, which he seems to have put forward according to his experience, would not for that reason be judged true, since it is proved by the surest reasoning and the undoubted evidence of the eyes that this is not only not impossible but is done very easily by others. The nous, then, that is, the mind, is defined as aeikinētos kai polykinētos, that is, always moving and much moving. This is also described in other words in the Wisdom called Solomon's: kai geōdes skēnos brithei noun polyphrontida, that is, ‘and the earthly dwelling weighs down the mind that thinks many things.’ By the condition of its nature, then, it can never stand idle; but unless it has provided where it may exercise its movements and in what it may be continually occupied, it must run about by its own mobility and fly over everything, until, accustomed by long exercise and daily use, at which you say you labor in vain, it experiences and learns what materials it ought to prepare for its memory, around which it may turn its untiring flights and gain the strength to dwell; and so it may prevail to drive out the hostile suggestions of the enemy by which it was distracted, and remain in the state and quality it desires. We must not, then, ascribe this wandering of our heart either to human nature or to God its Creator. For the saying of Scripture is true: ‘God made man upright, and they have sought out many thoughts.’ Their quality, then, depends on us, because ‘a good thought draws near to those who know it, but a prudent man will find it.’ For whatever is subject to our prudence and effort in order that it may be found, if it is not found, must without doubt be reckoned the fault of our sloth or imprudence, not of nature. The psalmist too agrees with this, saying: ‘Blessed is the man whose help is from you, O Lord; he has set ascents in his heart.’ You see, then, that it lies in our power to set in our hearts either ascents, that is, thoughts that reach up to God, or descents, that is, thoughts that fall to earthly and fleshly things. If these did not lie in our power, the Lord would not have rebuked the Pharisees: ‘Why do you think evil in your hearts?’ Nor would he have commanded through the prophet: ‘Take away the evil of your thoughts from my eyes’; and: ‘How long will harmful thoughts remain in you?’ Nor would their quality be required of us on the day of judgment like that of our works, as the Lord threatens through Isaiah: ‘Behold, I come to gather their works and thoughts, together with all nations and tongues.’ Nor would we deserve to be either condemned or defended by their testimony in that terrible and fearful examination, according to the saying of the blessed apostle: ‘Their thoughts accusing or else excusing one another, on the day when God will judge the secrets of men according to my gospel.’”

“A figure of this perfect mind is most beautifully signified by that centurion of the Gospel. His strength and constancy, by which he was not carried away by whatever thoughts assailed him, but by his own judgment either admitted good ones or drove away contrary ones without any difficulty, is described in this figurative meaning: ‘For I too am a man under authority, having soldiers under me, and I say to this one, Go, and he goes, and to another, Come, and he comes, and to my servant, Do this, and he does it.’ If, then, we too, fighting manfully against disturbances and vices, are able to subject them to our control and discernment, to extinguish the passions warring in our flesh, to bring the unstable cohort of our thoughts under the command of reason, and to drive the most savage troops of the hostile powers from the borders of our breast with the saving standard of the Lord's cross, we shall be promoted, for the merit of such triumphs, to the rank of this spiritual centurion, whom we read mystically signified by Moses in Exodus too: ‘Appoint for yourself chiliarchs, and centurions, and captains of fifty, and captains of ten.’ And so we too, raised to the height of this dignity, shall have this power and strength of command, by which we shall not be carried away by thoughts we do not want, but shall be able to dwell and cling to those in which we spiritually delight. We shall command the evil suggestions, ‘Go,’ and they will go; to the good we shall say, ‘Come,’ and they will come; to our servant too, that is, the body, we shall likewise enjoin what belongs to chastity and self-control, and it will serve without any contradiction, no longer rousing hostile goads of desire against us but showing every service to the spirit. What the weapons of this centurion are, or for what exercises of battle they are prepared, hear the blessed apostle proclaim: ‘The weapons of our warfare,’ he says, ‘are not fleshly, but mighty in God.’ He has said what they are like, that is, not fleshly or weak, but spiritual and mighty in God. Then he indicates against whom the conflicts are to be waged: ‘for the destruction of strongholds, purging thoughts and every height that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and taking captive every understanding to the obedience of Christ, and ready to avenge all disobedience, when your obedience has first been fulfilled.’ Since to go through these one by one, though necessary, belongs to another time, I wish only to show you the kinds and properties of the weapons with which we too, if we wish to fight the Lord's battles and serve among the centurions of the Gospel, must always go girded. ‘Take,’ he says, ‘the shield of faith, with which you may be able to quench all the fiery darts of the most wicked one.’ It is faith, then, that catches the burning darts of lusts and deadens them by the fear of the future judgment and belief in the heavenly kingdom. ‘And the breastplate,’ he says, ‘of love.’ This is the one which, surrounding and fortifying the vital parts of our breast, set against the deadly wounds of the disturbances, blunts the hostile blows and does not allow the devil's darts to penetrate to our inner man; ‘for it bears all things, suffers all things, endures all things.’ ‘And for a helmet the hope of salvation.’ The helmet is the protection of the head. Since, then, our head is Christ, we must always fortify it in all temptations and persecutions with the hope of future goods as with an impregnable helmet, and above all keep faith in him unharmed and whole. For someone maimed in other members, though weak, can still somehow survive; but without a head no one's life is prolonged even for a short space. ‘And the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.’ For it is ‘sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and a discerner of the thoughts and intentions of the heart,’ dividing, that is, and cutting off whatever it finds fleshly or earthly in us. Whoever is fortified with these weapons, always defended from the darts and plundering of the enemy, will not be led away as a captive and subject, bound in the chains of the plunderers, to the hostile land of thoughts, nor will he hear through the prophet: ‘Why have you grown old in a foreign land?’ But as a conqueror and victor he will stand in whatever region of thoughts he wishes. Do you also want to know the strength and power of this centurion, by which he carries these weapons we have mentioned, not fleshly but mighty in God? Hear the King himself gathering brave men for spiritual warfare, with what levy he marks and tests them: ‘Let the weak say, I am strong’; and: ‘Let the patient man be a fighter.’ You see, then, that only the patient and the weak can fight the Lord's battles; with that weakness, surely, on which our centurion of the Gospel was grounded when he said with confidence: ‘For when I am weak, then I am strong’; and again: ‘For power is made perfect in weakness.’ Of this weakness one of the prophets says: ‘And he who is weak among them shall be like the house of David.’ The patient man too will fight these battles, with that patience of which it is said: ‘You have need of patience, that, doing the will of God, you may receive the reward.’”

“That we ought to cling to the Lord, and can, we shall discover by our own experience if we have mortified our wishes and cut off the desires of this world; and we shall be taught by the authority of those who, speaking with the Lord, say confidently: ‘My soul has clung after you’; and: ‘I have clung to your testimonies, O Lord’; and: ‘But it is good for me to cling to God’; and: ‘He who clings to the Lord is one spirit.’ We must not, then, wearied by these wanderings of the soul, slacken in this pursuit. ‘For he who tills his land will be filled with bread; but he who follows idleness will be filled with poverty.’ Nor let us be broken by ruinous despair from the intention of this observance, because ‘in all that is careful there is abundance. For he who is pleasant and without pain will be in want’; and again: ‘A man in pains labors for himself and does violence to his own destruction’; and also: ‘The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.’ For no virtue is perfected without labor, nor can anyone climb to that stability of mind which he desires without great contrition of heart. ‘For man is born to labor.’ In order that he may come ‘to the perfect man, to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,’ he must always keep watch with greater intention and toil with constant care. Yet no one will attain to the fullness of this measure in the future except one who has pondered it beforehand and been steeped in it in the present, and has had a foretaste of it while still placed in this world; and, marked out as a most precious member of Christ, has possessed in this flesh the pledge of that joining by which he may be united to his body: desiring only one thing, thirsting for one thing, directing to one thing not only all his acts but also his thoughts, so that what is said of the blessed life of the saints in the future he may already hold in the present as by a pledge, that is, that God may be to him all in all.”

Germanus: “This fickleness of the mind could perhaps be restrained to some extent, if so great a number of adversaries surrounding it did not constantly drive it to things it does not want, or rather where the mobility of its own nature also sweeps it. Since enemies so countless, so powerful, and so terrible surround it, we would believe it impossible to resist them, especially with this frail flesh, were we not encouraged to this opinion by your sayings, as by heavenly oracles.”

Serenus: “That adversaries lie in wait for us continually, no one who has experienced the battles of the inner man can doubt. But we say that they oppose our progress in such a way that we believe them only to be instigators of evil, not also compellers. Otherwise no human being could avoid at all any sin they wished to brand upon our hearts, if they had a violent power of compelling, as they have of suggesting. Therefore, just as in them there is abundance of instigation, so in us has been given the strength to reject, or the freedom to consent. Yet if we fear their power and attacks, let us on the other hand set against them the protection and help of God, of whom it is said: ‘For greater is he who is in us than he who is in this world.’ His help fights for us with far mightier strength than their multitude fights against us. For God is not only the suggester of good things but also their supporter and impeller, so that sometimes he even draws us to salvation unwilling and unknowing. It is certain, then, that no one can be deceived by the devil except one who chooses to give him the consent of his will. Ecclesiastes expressed this plainly in these words: ‘For because sentence is not quickly passed against those who do evil, therefore the heart of the sons of men is filled within them to do evil.’ It is clear from this that each one sins because he does not at once oppose a refusal of contradiction to the evil thoughts that assail him. For ‘resist him,’ it says, ‘and he will flee from you.’”

Germanus: “What, I ask, is this so indistinct and intermingled fellowship of the soul with these evil spirits, by which they can be, I will not say joined, but united to it, so that they can speak to it imperceptibly, enter into it, breathe into it whatever they wish, and incite it to whatever pleases them; and can see and survey its thoughts and movements; and so great a unity comes about between them and the mind that, without the grace of God, it is almost impossible to distinguish what comes to it from their incitement and what from our own will?”

Serenus: “It is not surprising that spirit can be joined imperceptibly to spirit and exercise a hidden power of persuasion toward whatever it likes. For there is between them, as between men, a certain likeness and kinship of substance, since the definition taken of the nature of the soul fits their substance likewise. But that they should enter into or be united with each other, so that one can contain the other, is wholly impossible. For this is most rightly attributed only to the Godhead, which alone is an incorporeal and simple nature.”

Germanus: “We think that what we see happen in the possessed is quite contrary to this reasoning, when, inspired by unclean spirits, they speak and do things they do not know. How then should we not believe that their souls are united to those spirits, when we see them made, as it were, their instrument, and, leaving their natural state, passing into the movements and feelings of the spirits, so that they utter not their own but the spirits' words and gestures?”

Serenus: “What you say happens in the possessed, when, seized by unclean spirits, they speak or do what they do not want, or are compelled to utter words they do not know, is not contrary to our definition above. For it is quite certain that they do not all undergo this infusion of spirits in one way. Some are so inspired that they do not understand at all what they do or say; others know it and remember afterwards. It must not be thought that this happens through the infusion of an unclean spirit in such a way that it penetrates into the very substance of the soul and, as if united to it and in a way clothed with it, sends out words and speech through the mouth of the sufferer. It must by no means be believed that they can do this. For it is found by plain reasoning to happen not through any diminution of the soul but through weakness of the body: the unclean spirit, settling on those members in which the vigor of the soul is contained, and laying on them an unbearable and immense weight, overwhelms and cuts off its intellectual senses with the foulest darkness. We see this sometimes happen also through the fault of wine or fever or excessive cold, and other illnesses coming from outside. The devil, who had received power over the flesh of the blessed Job, was forbidden to attempt to inflict this on him by the command of the Lord, who said: ‘Behold, I deliver him into your hands; only guard his soul’; that is: only do not make him mad by weakening the dwelling of the soul, and overwhelm the understanding and wisdom of the one who resists you, by choking the ruling part of his heart with your weight.”

“For if a spirit is mingled with this gross and solid matter, that is, the flesh, which can be done very easily, it is not for that reason to be believed that it can be united in the same way to the soul, which is likewise a spirit, so as to make it capable of its own nature too. That is possible only to the Trinity, which so penetrates all intellectual nature that it can not only embrace and surround it, but also flow into it and be poured, as incorporeal, into a body. For although we declare that there are some spiritual natures, such as angels, archangels, and the other powers, and our soul itself too, or indeed this subtle air, yet they are by no means to be considered incorporeal. For they have in their own way a body by which they subsist, though much finer than our bodies are, according to the saying of the apostle: ‘And there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies’; and again: ‘It is sown a natural body, it rises a spiritual body.’ From these it is plainly gathered that nothing is incorporeal except God alone, and therefore that all spiritual and intellectual substances can be penetrated by him alone, because he alone is whole and everywhere and in all things, so that he looks into and surveys the thoughts of men and all their inner movements and the inner sanctuaries of the mind. For it was of him alone that the blessed apostle declared: ‘For the word of God is living and effective and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and a discerner of the thoughts and intentions of the heart; and there is no creature invisible in his sight, but all things are naked and open to his eyes.’ And the blessed David: ‘Who fashions their hearts one by one’; and again: ‘For he knows the secrets of the heart.’ Job too: ‘Who alone knows the hearts of men.’”

Germanus: “By the reasoning you give, these spirits cannot even see our thoughts. We think it very absurd to hold this, since Scripture says: ‘If the spirit of the one who has power rises up against you’; and again: ‘When the devil had put it into the heart of Simon Iscariot to betray the Lord.’ How then can it be believed that our thoughts are not open to them, when we feel that the seedbed of them for the most part springs up from their putting it in and prompting it?”

Serenus: “No one doubts that unclean spirits can reach the character of our thoughts, but only by gathering them from outside through perceptible signs, that is, from our dispositions, or from the words and pursuits to which they have seen us more inclined. But those which have not yet come out from the inner parts of the soul they cannot reach at all. Even the thoughts they suggest, whether they have been received, or how they have been received, they detect not through the nature of the soul itself, that is, through that inner movement hidden, so to speak, in its marrow, but from the movements and signs of the outer man. For example, when they have suggested gluttony, if they see a monk look curiously at the window or at the sun, or ask anxiously about the hour, they know that the desire of the palate has been received. If, when suggesting sexual immorality, they perceive that he has received the dart of lust patiently, or see him stirred in the flesh, or at least not sighing as he should against the wantonness of the unclean suggestion, they understand that the dart of lust has been fixed in the inner parts of the soul. If they have brought incitements to sadness, anger, or fury, they discern whether these have settled in the heart by the gesture of the body and perceptible agitation, when they observe him groaning silently, or sighing with a kind of indignation, or changing color in the face, turning pale or red; and so they subtly find out who is given to which vice. For they know with sure reasoning that each of us delights in that vice to whose instigation they have seen him give consent and connivance by some nod or movement of the body. It is not surprising that these things are detected in this way by those powers of the air, since we see this very often done even by prudent men, who recognize the state of the inner man from the figure, face, and bearing of the outer. How much more surely, then, can these things be detected by those who, as of a spiritual nature, are without doubt far subtler and shrewder than men!”

“For just as some thieves are accustomed to find out the hidden wealth of people in houses they wish to break into secretly: in the black darkness of night, scattering fine grains of sand with a careful hand, they detect hidden riches which they cannot see, by a kind of ringing that answers the fall of the grains, and so by the betrayal of the sound drawn out they arrive at the surest knowledge of the thing or metal; so these too, in order to explore the treasure of our heart, scatter harmful suggestions on us like grains of sand, and when they see a bodily feeling arise corresponding to their kind, they recognize, as by a ringing coming from the inner chambers, what is hidden in the recesses of the inner man.”

“We ought to know, however, that not all demons brand all passions on men, but that particular spirits brood over each vice: some delight in uncleanness and the filth of lusts, others in blasphemies; others are especially bent on anger and fury; others feed on sadness; others are soothed by vainglory and pride; and each inserts into human hearts the vice in which he himself rejoices. Nor do they all press their wickedness at once, but in turn, as the opportunity of time, place, or recipient invites.”

Germanus: “Must we then believe that there is an ordered and, so to speak, disciplined wickedness among them, so that a certain order of succession is kept by them and the onset of their attack is carried out rationally, when it is agreed that neither measure nor reason can exist except among the good and upright, according to the saying of Scripture: ‘You will seek wisdom among the wicked and not find it’; and: ‘Our enemies are senseless’; and also: ‘There is no wisdom, there is no strength, nor is there counsel among the impious’?”

Serenus: “It is a certain principle that there is no lasting agreement among the wicked in everything, and that perfect harmony cannot stand even in those very vices in which they delight in common. For, as you said, discipline and measure can never be kept in undisciplined things. Yet in some things, namely where community of action or necessity demands it, or partnership in some gain invites it, they must lend a temporary agreement. We see this most plainly in this warfare of spiritual wickedness: they are known not only to observe times and turns among themselves, but also to cling especially to certain places and besiege them continually. For that they must put forth their attacks with changing temptations and in particular vices and times, we clearly prove from this: no one can at the same time be deluded by the vanity of vainglory and burned by the desire of sexual immorality; no one can be puffed up with the swelling elation of spiritual pride and at the same time be brought low by the humiliation of fleshly gluttony; no one can dissolve in foolish giggling and laughter and at the same time be spurred by the goads of anger, or be filled with the grief of consuming sadness. Rather, each spirit must take up its attack on the mind one at a time, so that when it withdraws, either defeated, it yields the mind to another spirit to be attacked more fiercely, or, if it has been the victor, hands it over no less to another to be mocked in the same way.”

“We must also by no means be ignorant that they are not all of the same ferocity and desire, nor even of one strength and wickedness; and that only the weaker spirits are matched in combat with beginners and the weak; and when these spiritual wickednesses have been overcome, the fights of the stronger are kindled against the athlete of Christ step by step. For the difficulty of the struggle increases in proportion to human strength and progress. For none of the saints would be able at all to bear the wickedness of such and so great enemies, or to meet their snares, or even to endure their cruelty and savagery, if Christ, the most merciful umpire and president of the games, presiding over our contest, did not match the strength of the wrestlers and repel and rein in their immoderate onsets, and make with the temptation also a way out, that we may be able to bear it.”

“We believe, however, that they do not carry out this struggle without labor of their own. For they too have a certain anxiety and sadness in their conflict, especially when they have engaged stronger opponents, that is, holy and perfect men. Otherwise it would no longer be a conflict or a struggle, but a simple and, so to speak, secure deception of men granted to them. And how would that saying of the apostle stand: ‘Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places’? And also: ‘So I fight, not as one beating the air’; and again: ‘I have fought the good fight.’ For where a contest, a match, and a fight are spoken of, sweat, labor, and anxiety must be undergone on both sides, and grief and shame at defeat must await both equally, or joy follow victory. But where one struggles with sweat while the other fights with ease and security, and uses only his will, as much as he can, to throw his opponent, it should not be called a fight, or a struggle, or a contest, but a kind of unjust and unreasonable assault. But plainly they too labor no less, attacking the human race, and toil in order to win the victory they desire over each one; and the shame which awaited us, if we had been thrown by them, is turned back on them, according to the words: ‘The head of their circuit, the labor of their lips shall cover them’; and: ‘His sorrow shall be turned upon his own head’; and again: ‘Let the snare which he does not know come upon him, and let the net which he has hidden catch him, and into that very snare let him fall,’ namely, the one he contrives for the deception of men. They too therefore grieve no less, and just as they throw us, they themselves are likewise thrown, and do not depart defeated without shame. He who had the sound eyes of the inner man, seeing their falls and conflicts every day, and seeing them exult over the falls and ruin of individuals, and fearing that they might have this joy over him too, prays to the Lord: ‘Enlighten my eyes, lest I ever sleep in death, lest my enemy ever say, I have prevailed against him. Those who trouble me will exult if I am moved’; and: ‘My God, let them not rejoice over me; let them not say in their hearts, Aha, aha, to our soul; nor let them say, We have swallowed him up’; and: ‘They gnashed their teeth at me. Lord, when will you look? For he lies in wait in secret like a lion in his den; he lies in wait to seize the poor’; and: ‘He seeks his food from God.’ And again, when they have spent all their efforts and cannot achieve our deception, they must be confounded and blush at their frustrated labor: ‘Let those who seek our souls to take them away be put to shame; let those who devise evil against us be clothed with shame and confusion.’ Jeremiah too says: ‘Let them be confounded, and let me not be confounded; let them be afraid, and let me not be afraid; bring upon them the wrath of your fury, and crush them with a double crushing.’ For no one doubts that when they have been overcome by us they must be crushed with a double crushing: first, because, while men seek holiness, they, who possessed it, lost it and became the cause of human perdition; second, because, being spiritual substances, they have been overcome by fleshly and earthly ones. Seeing these falls of the enemies and his own victories, each of the saints proclaims with exultation: ‘I will pursue my enemies and overtake them, and I will not turn back until they fail. I will crush them, and they will not be able to stand; they will fall beneath my feet.’ Praying against them the same prophet also says: ‘Judge, O Lord, those who harm me; fight against those who fight against me. Take hold of arms and shield, and rise up to help me. Draw out the sword, and shut up the way against those who persecute me; say to my soul, I am your salvation.’ When we have conquered them, all the passions having been subdued and extinguished, we shall deserve to hear consequently that voice of blessing: ‘Let your hand be exalted over your foes, and all your enemies shall perish.’ So when we read or sing all these things and those like them inserted in the sacred books, unless we take them to have been written against these spiritual wickednesses which lie in wait for us day and night, we shall not only gain no edification of gentleness and patience from them, but shall even conceive a dreadful disposition contrary to evangelical perfection. For we shall not only not be taught to pray for our enemies and love them, but shall even be provoked to detest them with implacable hatred, to curse them, and to pour out prayer against them unceasingly. It is utterly wicked and profane to think that holy men and friends of God spoke in such a spirit; men for whom, before the coming of Christ, the law was not laid down, because, going beyond its commands, they chose to obey the precepts of the Gospel and to strive after apostolic perfection, anticipating the dispensation of the time.”

“That they have no power to harm anyone is plainly shown by the example of the blessed Job, where the enemy dares tempt him no further than is granted him by the divine dispensation; and the confession of these same spirits, recorded in the Gospel, testifies to it: ‘If you cast us out, send us into the herd of swine.’ Much more must it be believed that they cannot enter at will into any human being, who is created in the image of God, since they did not have the power to enter unclean and dumb animals without God's permission. Otherwise no one, I will not say of the young men whom we see living most steadfastly in this desert, but not even of the perfect, could live alone in the desert surrounded by so many hosts of such enemies, if they had the power and freedom to harm or attack at will. This is confirmed still more clearly by the saying of our Lord and Savior, which he spoke to Pilate in the humility of the manhood he had assumed: ‘You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.’”

“Yet we have learned well enough, both from our own experience and from the account of the elders, that the demons do not now have the same force as in an earlier time, at least in the beginnings of the anchorites, when monks still dwelt in the desert only rarely. For their ferocity was such that only a few, very steadfast and advanced in age, could bear to live in solitude. Even in the coenobia, where eight or ten lived together, their savagery raged so, and their attacks were felt so often and visibly, that they did not dare all sleep at night at the same time; but in turns, while some took sleep, others kept vigil, applying themselves to psalms and prayers or readings. And when the necessity of nature invited them to sleep, the others were woken and the watch was handed over to them in the same way, to guard those who were going to sleep. Hence it cannot be doubted that one of two things gives this security or confidence now, not only to us, who seem somewhat strengthened by the experience of age, but even to those younger in years. Either the wickedness of the demons has been blunted by the power of the cross, penetrating even the deserts, and its grace shining everywhere; or our negligence has made them slower in their former assault, since they disdain to fight against us with the intensity with which they then raged against those most approved soldiers of Christ, so that they throw us down more cruelly by this very fraud, the cessation of visible temptations. For we see that some have fallen into such lukewarmness that they must be coaxed even with gentler admonitions, if only they will not leave their cells and roll off into more ruinous restlessness, and, wandering about, get entangled in grosser vices, so to speak; and it is thought a great gain from them if only they can keep themselves in solitude even with some sloth; and the elders tend to say to them, as a great remedy: ‘Sit in your cells, and eat and drink and sleep as much as you like, provided you remain in them constantly.’”

“It is certain, then, that unclean spirits cannot enter into those whose bodies they are going to take possession of in any other way than by first possessing their minds and thoughts. When they have stripped them of the fear and remembrance of God or of spiritual meditation, they boldly attack them, as though disarmed of all divine defence and fortification and easy to bind, and thereafter take up their dwelling in them as in a possession handed over to them.”

“Though it is certain that those are troubled far more grievously and severely who, while they do not seem to be filled by them bodily, are more ruinously possessed in mind, entangled, that is, in their vices and pleasures. For according to the apostle's saying, ‘by whatever a man is overcome, of that he is also the slave.’ Except that these are the more hopelessly sick in this: though they are their slaves, they do not recognize that they are attacked by them or bear their rule. On the other hand, we know that even holy men have been handed over bodily to Satan, or to great infirmities, for very slight faults, since the divine mercy does not allow even the slightest blemish or stain to be found in them on that day of judgment. It burns out in the present all the dross of their filth, according to the saying of the prophet, or rather of God, so as to send them on to that eternity like gold or refined silver, needing no penal purification. ‘And I will smelt away your dross to purity,’ he says, ‘and I will take away all your tin. And after this you shall be called the city of the righteous, the faithful city’; and again: ‘As silver and gold are tried in the furnace, so the Lord chooses hearts’; and again: ‘Fire tries gold and silver, but a man is tried in the furnace of humiliation.’ Also: ‘For whom the Lord loves he corrects, and he scourges every son whom he receives.’”

“We see this plainly fulfilled in that prophet and man of God in the third book of Kingdoms, who for the fault of one act of disobedience, which he incurred not deliberately nor by the fault of his own will but through another's deception, was at once crushed by a lion, as Scripture relates: ‘It is the man of God, who was disobedient to the mouth of the Lord; and the Lord delivered him to the lion, and it broke him, according to the word of the Lord which he spoke.’ In this event, both the discharge of his present fault and incautious error, and the merits of righteousness for which the Lord handed his prophet over for a time to the tormentor, are shown by the very restraint and self-control of the beast of prey, by which the most voracious animal dares taste nothing at all of the corpse handed over to it. A quite clear and open proof of this occurred in our own times too, in Abba Paul and Abba Moses, who lived in the place in this wilderness called Calamus. The former lived in the desert which lies next to the city of Panephysis, a wilderness which we know was made not long ago by a flood of very salty water. Whenever the north wind blows, this water, driven from the lagoons and poured over the neighboring lands, so covers the whole surface of that region that it makes the ancient villages there, which for this very reason were long ago deserted by all their inhabitants, look like islands. This Abba Paul, then, had advanced to such purity of heart through the quiet and silence of solitude that he would not allow, I will not say a woman's face, but not even the clothes of that sex to come before his sight. For when he was going to the cell of a certain elder together with Abba Archebius, who lived in the same wilderness, and a woman happened to meet him, offended by meeting her he left the duty of pious visitation he had undertaken and ran back to his monastery with a flight greater than anyone would flee from the face of a lion or a most monstrous dragon, so that he could not be turned even by the shouts and entreaties of the aforesaid Abba Archebius calling him back to continue the journey they had begun, to go and see the old man as they had intended. Although this was done out of zeal for chastity and ardor for purity, yet because it was presumed not according to knowledge, and the measure of discipline and of just strictness was exceeded (for he believed that not only familiarity with women, which is truly harmful, but the very form of that sex was to be abhorred), he was at once struck by such a chastisement that his whole body was loosened by paralysis and no member in him could perform its function at all. Not only his feet and hands, but even the movements of the tongue by which the voice expresses speech, and his very ears, lost their proper sense, so that nothing more of a man remained in him than a motionless and senseless figure. He was brought to such a state that the care of men could in no way suffice to serve his infirmity, unless the diligence of women alone ministered to him. For he was carried to a community of holy virgins, and food and drink, which he could not ask for even by a nod, were brought to him by women's service; and they served him with the same diligence in fulfilling all the necessities of nature for about four years, that is, until the end of his life. Though he was held fast by such weakness of all his limbs that none of them kept any lively or sensitive movement, yet such a grace of virtues proceeded from him that when the sick were anointed with oil which had touched what was more his corpse than his body, they were at once cured of all their illnesses. So it became plainly and openly clear even to unbelievers, concerning this illness of his, both that the weakness of all his limbs had been brought upon him by the dispensation and love of the Lord, and that the grace of healings was given him by the power of the Holy Spirit as a testimony to his purity and a manifestation of his merits.”

“The second, whom we said lived in this wilderness, though he too was a singular and incomparable man, for the fault of one remark which he uttered a little too harshly in a dispute with Abba Macarius, carried away by a certain opinion, was at once handed over to so dreadful a demon that, filled by it, he put human excrement into his mouth. The Lord showed that he had inflicted this scourge for the sake of purification, so that not even the stain of a momentary fault should remain in him, by the speed of his cure and the author of the remedy. For as soon as Abba Macarius gave himself to prayer, quicker than a word the evil spirit was put to flight and departed from him.”

“From this it is plainly judged that those whom we see handed over to various temptations or to these spirits of wickedness ought not to be abhorred or despised. For we must believe immovably these two things: first, that no one at all is tempted by them without God's permission; second, that everything brought upon us by God, whether it seems sad or joyful for the present, is inflicted for our benefit as by a most loving father and a most merciful physician. And therefore they are humbled as though handed over to tutors, so that when they depart this world they may either be transferred more purified to the other life or be punished with a lighter penalty, being, according to the apostle, handed over in the present to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Germanus: “And how is it that we see them not only despised and shunned by all, but even kept away permanently from the Lord's communion in our provinces, according to that saying of the Gospel, ‘Do not give what is holy to dogs, nor cast your pearls before swine,’ if we are to believe about them, as you say, that the humiliation of this temptation is given them for purification or benefit?”

Serenus: “If we have this knowledge, or rather faith, which I set out above, so as to believe that everything is done by God and all is arranged for the benefit of souls, we shall not only never despise them, but shall even pray unceasingly for them as for our own members, and suffer with them with our whole heart and full affection (for when one member suffers, all the members suffer with it), knowing that we cannot be made perfect in any way without them, since they are our members; just as we read that not even those before us could obtain the fullness of the promise without us, as the apostle declares of them: ‘And all these, approved by the testimony of faith, did not receive the promises, God providing something better for us, that they should not be made perfect without us.’ But we do not remember that holy communion was ever forbidden them; on the contrary, they judged that if it were possible it ought to be given them even daily. For, according to the saying of the Gospel which you have unsuitably applied to this meaning, ‘Do not give what is holy to dogs,’ holy communion must not be believed to become food for the demon, but rather to serve for the purification and protection of body and soul. Received by a man, it drives away, as by a kind of burning fire, the spirit that sits in his members or tries to hide in them. In this way we recently saw Abba Andronicus and many others cured. For the enemy will insult the possessed man more and more when he sees him separated from the heavenly medicine, and will attack him the more cruelly and frequently the farther he perceives him cut off from the spiritual remedy.”

“But those are to be judged truly wretched and pitiable who, while they defile themselves with all crimes and sins, not only show no visible sign of diabolical possession, but have no temptation brought on them worthy of their works, nor any scourge of correction. For they do not deserve the quick and ready medicine of this time, whose hardness and impenitent heart, going beyond the punishment of the present life, ‘treasures up for itself wrath and indignation in the day of wrath and of the revelation of the just judgment of God,’ in which ‘their worm will not die, and their fire will not be quenched.’ The prophet, as though distressed at the affliction of the saints, seeing them subject to various hardships and temptations, and on the other hand sinners not only passing through the course of this world without any scourge of humiliation, but even rejoicing in an abundance of riches and the greatest prosperity in everything, is inflamed with unbearable zeal and the ardor of his spirit and cries out: ‘But my feet were almost moved; my steps had well-nigh slipped. For I was jealous of the wicked, seeing the peace of sinners. For there is no regard for their death, nor firmness in their plague. They are not in the labors of men, and they will not be scourged with men’; that is, they will be punished in the future with the demons, who in the present did not deserve to be scourged with men in the lot and discipline of sons. Jeremiah too, disputing with God about this prosperity of the wicked, though he professes that he does not doubt the Lord's justice at all, saying, ‘You are indeed just, O Lord, if I dispute with you,’ yet, asking the causes of so great an inequality, adds: ‘Yet I will speak just things to you: Why does the way of the wicked prosper? It is well with all who transgress and act wickedly. You planted them, and they took root; they grow and bear fruit. You are near their mouth and far from their reins.’ When the Lord laments their ruin through the prophet and anxiously sends physicians and teachers to heal them, and in a way calls them to a similar lament, saying, ‘Babylon has suddenly fallen and been crushed; wail over her, take balm for her pain, if perhaps she may be healed,’ the angels, to whom the care of human salvation has been entrusted, answer in despair, or else the prophet in the person of the apostles or spiritual men and teachers, seeing the hardness of their mind and their impenitent heart: ‘We have tried to heal Babylon, and she is not healed; let us leave her and let us go each to his own land, because her judgment has reached to the heavens and been lifted up to the clouds.’ Of their hopeless sickness Isaiah speaks to Jerusalem in the person of God: ‘From the sole of the foot to the top of the head there is no soundness in her: wounds and bruises and swelling sores; they are not bound up, nor treated with medicine, nor soothed with oil.’”

“That there are as many pursuits among the unclean spirits as among men is proved without doubt. For it is plain that some of them, whom the people also call Plani, are such deceivers and jesters that, continually besetting particular places or roads, they take no delight at all in the torments of those passers-by whom they manage to deceive, but, content only with mockery and illusion, they try to tire them rather than harm them. Some only spend the night with men by harmless lying upon them. Others are so given to fury and savagery that they are not content to torment the bodies of those they have filled with cruel tearing, but hasten to rush upon those passing at a distance and inflict the most savage slaughter on them: such are those described in the Gospel, for fear of whom no one dared any longer to pass by that way. These, and those like them, no doubt rejoice in wars and the shedding of blood because of their insatiable ferocity. Others, whom the people also call Bacucei, we see have so infected the hearts of those they seized with a kind of empty swelling that, raising themselves beyond the height of their bodies, they now puffed themselves up in haughty airs and gestures, and now, as if bending down to a state of tranquillity and affability, they lowered themselves as friendly and flattering; and thinking themselves illustrious and admired by all, they now showed by bending their bodies that they were bowing to higher powers, and now believed themselves to be adored by others, and went through all the movements by which real duties are performed either proudly or humbly. Others we have found not only eager for lies but also inspiring blasphemies in men. We ourselves are witnesses of this, having heard a demon most openly confess that he had put forth the impiety of a sacrilegious doctrine through Arius and Eunomius. We plainly read one of these same spirits proclaiming this in the fourth book of Kingdoms too: ‘I will go out,’ he says, ‘and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ Of them the apostle, rebuking those who are deceived by them, says: ‘Giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, of those who speak lies in hypocrisy.’ The Gospels testify that there are also other kinds of demons, namely dumb and deaf ones. The prophet mentions that some spirits are instigators of lust and luxury: ‘The spirit of sexual immorality,’ he says, ‘deceived them, and they went whoring away from their God.’ The authority of the Scriptures likewise teaches that there are demons of the night, of the day, and of noon. It would take very long, if we wished to search all the volumes of the Scriptures and go through their variety one by one: what are meant by the prophet's onocentaurs, hairy ones, sirens, lamias, owls, ostriches, hedgehogs; what is called the asp and the basilisk in the psalm; what the lion, the dragon, and the scorpion in the Gospel; what the apostle names the prince of this world, the rulers of this darkness, and the spiritual forces of wickedness. We must not take these names as given to them by chance or accident, but understand that their ferocity and fury are distinguished by the meaning of these beasts, which among us are either less harmful or more deadly; and that they are called by their names from the likeness of their virulent wickedness or of the primacy which a certain excellence of malice gives these among other beasts or serpents. So one has received the name of lion for the violence of his fury and the rage of his ferocity; another that of basilisk for that deadly poison which kills before it is felt; another, for the lukewarmness of his malice, the name of onocentaur, hedgehog, or ostrich.”

Germanus: “We do not doubt that those orders which the apostle lists also refer to these: ‘For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.’ Yet we want to know where so great a difference among them comes from, or how such grades of wickedness came to exist. Were they created for this purpose, to be allotted these orders of malice and in a way to serve this wickedness?”

Serenus: “Although your questions so steal the whole time of the night's rest from our eyes that we do not feel the nearness of the approaching dawn, and we are tempted to go on weaving the words of this conference insatiably until sunrise, yet since the answer to the question put forward, once it begins to be investigated, leads us out into a very wide and deep sea of questions, which the shortness of the present hour does not allow us to cross, I think it more convenient to keep it for the investigation of the coming night. So, on the occasion of this question, spiritual joy and a richer fruit may come to me from your more eager conversation, and we may be able to penetrate the bays of the questions proposed more freely, the Holy Spirit giving us favorable winds. Therefore, tasting a little sleep, let us shake off the drowsiness that creeps over our eyes now that the light is near; and then, going to church together, as the solemnity of the Lord's day reminds us to do, and returning after the synaxis, we shall share with doubled joy what the Lord gives for our common instruction, according to your desire.”

When the things the solemnity of the day required had been completed and the congregation of the church dismissed, we returned to the old man's cell and were first treated to a most lavish meal. For instead of the brine, with a drop of oil poured over it, which was usually served at the daily meal, he mixed in a little fish sauce and poured over it rather more oil than usual. For each one, when about to eat, lets fall that drop of oil every day, not in order to receive some pleasure from tasting it (for its amount is so small that it is scarcely enough, I will not say to coat, but even to pass through the passage of the throat and gullet), but so that by this practice he may blunt the boasting of heart, which usually creeps in smoothly and secretly because of a stricter abstinence, and the goads of elation; because the more secretly abstinence itself is practised, and without any human witness, the more subtly it does not cease to tempt the one who hides it. Then he set before us fried salt and three olives each; after these he brought a basket holding roasted chickpeas, which they call trogalia, of which we took only five grains each, two myxaria each, and one dried fig each. For it is blameworthy in that desert for anyone to exceed this number. When this meal was over and we began to ask again for the promised answer to the question, the old man said: “Put forward your question, the investigation of which we had postponed to this hour.”

Then Germanus said: “Whence, we ask, has so great a variety of hostile powers against man arisen, and this diversity which the blessed apostle lists thus: ‘Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places’; and again: ‘Neither angels nor principalities nor powers nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’? Whence, then, has so great a rival hostility of malice arisen against us? Or must we believe that these powers were made by the Lord for this purpose, to fight against man in these grades and orders?”

Serenus: “The authority of the divine Scriptures has declared some of the things in which it wished to instruct us so clearly and plainly, even for those who lack sharpness of mind, that not only are they not veiled by any obscurity of a more hidden sense, but they do not even need any help of interpretation, and show their meaning and sense on the surface of the word and letter. Others, however, are so covered and obscured by certain mysteries that in discussing and understanding them it has reserved for us an immense field of exercise and care. It is clear that God arranged this for many reasons. First, so that the divine mysteries, with no veil of spiritual understanding drawn over them, might not be laid open to all people, that is, to the faithful and the profane alike, with equal knowledge and acquaintance, and so there would be no difference of virtue and prudence between the idle and the studious. Then, so that even among the household of faith, while immense spaces of understanding stretch before them, there might be things in which the emptiness of the slothful might be exposed and the eagerness and diligence of the studious proved. And so the divine Scripture is quite properly compared to a rich and fertile field, which produces many things that serve for human food without any cooking by fire, while some, unless first softened and tempered by the heat of flame so that they lose all the harshness of their rawness, will be found either unsuitable for human use or harmful. Some grow fit for both uses, so that they neither displease nor offend when uncooked in their rawness, and yet become more wholesome when cooked by the heat of fire. Many are also produced only as food for irrational beasts of burden and animals, or wild beasts and birds, of no use for human food, which, remaining in their harshness without any preparation by fire, give healthy life to the beasts. We see this principle quite plainly contained in this most fruitful paradise of the spiritual Scriptures. In it some things shine so plain and bright in the meaning of the letter that, needing no higher interpretation, they abundantly feed and nourish the hearers by the simple sound of the letter alone, such as: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord’; and: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.’ But some, unless they have been refined by allegorical explanation and softened by the testing of spiritual fire, will in no way reach the wholesome food of the inner man without the stain of corruption, and harm rather than any benefit will follow from taking them, such as: ‘Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning’; and: ‘Let him who has no sword sell his tunic and buy himself a sword’; and: ‘Whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.’ Some of the strictest monks, having indeed a zeal for God but not according to knowledge, understanding this simply, made themselves wooden crosses and, carrying them constantly on their shoulders, brought not edification but laughter to all who saw them. Some things, however, are taken so suitably and necessarily in both senses, that is, the historical and the allegorical, that both explanations supply life-giving juices to the soul, such as: ‘If anyone strikes you on your right cheek, offer him the other also’; and: ‘When they persecute you in this city, flee to another’; and: ‘If you want to be perfect, go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ It certainly produces hay for the beasts too, fodder with which all the fields of the Scriptures are filled: the simple and pure narrative of the historical reading, by which all the simpler people, and those less capable of perfect and complete understanding, of whom it is said, ‘Men and beasts you will save, O Lord,’ are made more vigorous and strong, according to the condition of their state and measure, only for the work and labor of the practical life.”

“Therefore, about those things which have been set out with plain explanation, we too can define firmly and give our opinion boldly. But those which the divine Spirit has placed covered in the holy Scriptures, reserving them for our meditation and exercise, and wishing them to be gathered by certain signs and conjectures, must be brought forward step by step and cautiously, so that their assertion or confirmation is left to the judgment of the one discussing or receiving them. For sometimes, when different opinions are put forward on one matter, both can be judged reasonable and be accepted either firmly or provisionally without harm to the faith, that is, so that neither full belief nor absolute rejection is assigned to it, and the later opinion ought not to detract from the former, since neither of them is found to oppose the faith. Such is the view that Elijah came in John and will again be the forerunner of the Lord's coming; and that the abomination of desolation stood in the holy place through that image of Jupiter which we read was set up in the temple at Jerusalem, and will stand again in the church at the coming of the Antichrist; and all those things that follow in the Gospel, which are understood both to have been fulfilled before the captivity of Jerusalem and to be yet fulfilled at the end of this world. Of these neither opinion attacks the other, nor does the former understanding make the latter void.”

“And therefore, although the question you have proposed seems not to have been discussed enough or often among men, and is not clear to most, and for that very reason what we shall say may perhaps seem doubtful to some, we ought so to temper our opinion, since it does not prejudice faith in the Trinity at all, that it may be counted among those things which are held provisionally; although it is not an opinion of the kind usually gathered only by guesses and conjectures, but everything is proved by clear testimonies of the Scriptures.”

“Far be it from us, then, to confess that God created anything that is evil in substance, since Scripture says: ‘All the things that God made were very good.’ For if these were created such by God, or made for this purpose, to hold these grades of malice and always to be busy with the deception and ruin of men, then, against the saying of the Scripture above, we shall defame God as the creator and inventor of evils, as if he himself had made the worst wills and natures, creating them for this, that, always persisting in wickedness, they could never pass to the disposition of a good will. We have received this explanation of this diversity, then, from the tradition of the fathers, out of the fountain of the holy Scriptures.”

“No one of the faithful doubts that before the creation of this visible creation God made the spiritual and heavenly powers, who, precisely because they knew they had been brought forth from nothing to such glory of blessedness by the kindness of the Creator, gave him perpetual thanks and clung unceasingly to his praises. For we must not think that God first began the beginnings of his creation and handiwork with the founding of this world, as if in those earlier and countless ages he had been idle of all providence and divine dispensation, and is to be believed to have been solitary, as though having none on whom to exercise the benefits of his goodness, and a stranger to all generosity. To think this of that immense, beginningless, and incomprehensible majesty is quite mean and unfitting, since the Lord himself says of those powers: ‘When the stars were made together, all my angels praised me with a loud voice.’ Those, then, who were present at the creation of the stars are most plainly proved to have been created before that beginning in which heaven and earth are said to have been made; since they are recorded to have praised the Creator with a loud voice and with wonder for all these visible creatures, which they saw come forth from nothing. Before that temporal beginning, then, which is spoken of by Moses, and which, according to the historical or rather the Jewish sense, marks the age of this world (saving, of course, our own sense, by which we interpret Christ to be the beginning of all things, in whom the Father created all things, according to the words, ‘All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made’), before that temporal beginning of Genesis, I say, there is no doubt that God created all those powers and heavenly virtues. The apostle lists them in order and describes them thus: ‘For in Christ all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether angels or archangels, whether thrones or dominions, whether principalities or powers. All things were created through him and in him.’”

“That some princes of their number fell is most plainly taught by the laments of Ezekiel and Isaiah, in which we recognize that the prince of Tyre, or that Lucifer who rose in the morning, is lamented with a mournful dirge. Of the former the Lord speaks thus to Ezekiel: ‘Son of man, raise a lament over the prince of Tyre, and say to him: Thus says the Lord God: You were the seal of likeness, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty; you were in the delights of the paradise of God; every precious stone was your covering: sardius, topaz, and jasper, chrysolite and onyx and beryl, sapphire and carbuncle and emerald; gold was the work of your beauty, and your openings were prepared on the day you were created. You were a cherub stretched out and protecting, and I set you on the holy mountain of God; you walked in the midst of the stones of fire. You were perfect in your ways from the day of your creation, until iniquity was found in you. In the multitude of your trading your inner parts were filled with iniquity, and you sinned; and I cast you out from the mountain of God, and destroyed you, O protecting cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. Your heart was lifted up in your beauty; you lost your wisdom through your beauty; I cast you to the earth; I set you before the face of kings, that they might look on you. In the multitude of your iniquities and in the iniquity of your trading you have defiled your sanctuary.’ Isaiah too says of another: ‘How you have fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who rose in the morning! You who wounded the nations have fallen to the earth. You who said in your heart: I will ascend into heaven, I will set my throne above the stars of God, I will sit on the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north; I will ascend above the height of the clouds, I will be like the Most High.’ Yet Scripture records that these did not fall alone from that summit of most blessed station, saying that the dragon drew a third part of the stars with him. One of the apostles also says more plainly: ‘But the angels who did not keep their own principality, but left their own dwelling, he has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day.’ And what is said to us, ‘But you shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes,’ what else does it signify but that many princes have fallen? From these indications the reason for this diversity is gathered: the hostile powers are said to have these differences of orders, after the pattern of the holy and heavenly virtues, either because they still keep them now from the grade of that earlier order in which each had been created; or else because, having fallen from heaven, they have claimed for themselves these grades and titles of orders on the opposite side, in imitation of those virtues which remain there, according to the measure of the wickedness in which each grew in evil.”

Germanus: “Until now we believed that the cause and beginning of the devil's ruin or transgression, by which he was cast down from his angelic station, was chiefly envy, when he deceived Adam and Eve with spiteful cunning.”

Serenus: “The reading of Genesis shows that this was not the beginning of his transgression or fall, since before their deception it thought him fit to be branded with the mark of the name ‘serpent,’ saying: ‘Now the serpent was wiser,’ or, as the Hebrew books express it, ‘more cunning, than all the beasts of the earth which the Lord God had made.’ You understand, then, that before that deceiving of the first man he had departed from angelic holiness, so that he not only deserved to be marked with the disgrace of this name but was even preferred to the other beasts of the earth in the evasiveness of wickedness. For Scripture would not have designated a good angel by such a word, nor said of those who remain in that blessedness: ‘Now the serpent was wiser than all the beasts of the earth.’ For this name could in no way be applied to Gabriel or Michael, nor would it even suit any good man. Most plainly, then, both the word ‘serpent’ and the comparison with beasts suggest not the dignity of an angel but the disgrace of a transgressor. In fact, the material of the envy and seduction by which he was urged to deceive man arose from the cause of his earlier fall: namely, that he saw one who had very recently been formed from the slime of the earth being called to that glory from which, being one of the princes, he remembered he had fallen. And therefore his first fall, by which he had fallen through pride and for which he had also deserved to be called a serpent, was followed by a second fall through envy. This second fall, finding him still having something upright in himself, so that he could even have a certain fellowship of conversation and counsel with man, cast him down, usefully, by the Lord's sentence into the depths, so that he would no longer go about lofty and looking up at anything high as before, but would crawl, cleaving to the ground, and, humbled, be fed on his belly with the earthly food and works of the vices. So the Lord made public an enemy who until then was hidden, and put between him and man a useful enmity and a saving discord, so that, while he is guarded against as a harmful enemy, he might no longer be able to harm man by deceitful friendships.”

“In this, however, the following ought especially to teach us to turn away from evil counsels: that although the author of the deception is struck with fitting punishment and condemnation, not even the one who is seduced is free from penalty, though it is somewhat lighter than that of the one who was the author of the deception. We see this expressed very plainly here. For Adam, who was seduced, or rather, to speak in the words of the apostle, who was not seduced, but seems to have come to a deadly consent by yielding to the one who was seduced, is condemned only to the sweat of his face and labor, which is decreed for him not by a curse on himself but by the curse and barrenness of the earth. But the woman, who was the persuader in this matter, earns a multiplication of groans, pains, and sadness, and is also bound to a perpetual yoke of subjection. And the serpent, who was the first instigator of this offence, is punished with an everlasting curse. Therefore we must guard with the greatest care and watchfulness against evil counsels, because, just as they punish the author, so they do not let the one deceived go free either of sin or of punishment.”

“This air which is spread between heaven and earth is so thickly crowded with spirits, which do not fly about in it quietly and idly, that divine providence has very usefully withdrawn them from human sight. For either men would be struck down and faint with unbearable fear at the terror of their onrush or the horror of the faces into which they transform and change themselves at will whenever they please, being quite unable to look at these things with fleshly eyes; or else they would become more wicked every day, corrupted by their constant example and by imitation. And so a harmful familiarity and ruinous union would arise between men and the unclean powers of the air; because those crimes which are now committed among men are hidden by the enclosure of walls, or by distance of place, and by a certain confusion of shame. If they saw them with constant open vision, they would be roused to a greater madness of fury, since no moment of time would intervene in which they would see the spirits ceasing from these crimes; for no bodily weariness, or occupation with household affairs, or care for daily food compels them, as it sometimes compels us even against our will, to cease from what we have begun.”

“It is quite certain that they also direct against one another the attacks with which they assail men. For with unwearied strife they likewise never cease to carry on discords and conflicts over certain nations which they have taken under their care, as by a kind of native familiarity of wickedness. We read this most plainly figured in the vision of the prophet Daniel, when the angel Gabriel relates: ‘Do not fear, Daniel: for from the first day on which you set your heart to understand and to afflict yourself in the sight of your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words. But the prince of the kingdom of the Persians withstood me twenty-one days; and behold, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, and I remained there beside the king of the Persians. But I have come to teach you what will come upon your people in the last days.’ It must by no means be doubted that this prince of the kingdom of the Persians is a hostile power which favored the nation of the Persians, enemy of the people of God. To hinder the benefit which he saw was to be brought by the archangel through the answer to the question for which the prophet had prayed to the Lord, he set himself in the way out of envy, lest the saving consolation of the angel should reach Daniel quickly and strengthen the people of God, over whom the archangel Gabriel was set. Yet Gabriel says that not even then could he have reached him because of the violence of that attack, had not the archangel Michael come to help him and, meeting the prince of the kingdom of the Persians, throwing himself into the conflict and opposing him, and defending Gabriel from his attack, enabled him to come after twenty-one days to instruct the prophet. And a little later: ‘And the angel said: Do you know why I have come to you? And now I will return to fight against the prince of the Persians. For when I was going out, the prince of the Greeks appeared, coming. But I will tell you what is inscribed in the writing of truth; and there is no one who helps me in all these things except Michael your prince.’ And again: ‘At that time Michael shall arise, the great prince, who stands for the sons of your people.’ We read, then, that another is likewise called the prince of the Greeks, who, favoring the nation subject to him, seemed hostile both to the people of Israel and to the nation of the Persians. From this it is clearly seen that the hostile powers also carry on among themselves the discords, conflicts, and rivalries of the nations which these wage with one another at their instigation, and either rejoice in their victory or are tormented by their defeat; and therefore they cannot be in harmony among themselves, as each contends with restless rivalry on behalf of those over whom he is set against the ruler of another nation.”

“Besides the opinions we set out above, then, we can gather by clear reasoning that they are called principalities or powers for this reason too: either because they rule and preside over different nations, or else because they exercise their rule over inferior spirits and demons, who, as the Gospels testify by their own confession, are legions. For they cannot be called dominions unless they have those over whom they exercise the rule of their dominion; nor can they be called powers or principalities unless there are those over whom they claim their principality for themselves. We find this most plainly indicated in the Gospel by the blaspheming Pharisees: ‘He casts out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons.’ For we also read that they are called rulers of darkness, and another is named the prince of this world. Yet the blessed apostle asserts that these grades will be made void in the future, when all things have been subjected to Christ: ‘When he has handed over the kingdom to God the Father,’ he says, ‘when he has made void all principality and power and dominion.’ This will certainly not happen otherwise than by taking away from their rule those over whom they are known to exercise powers, dominions, or principalities in this age.”

“For no one doubts that the same names of orders have not been given to the good side without reason or cause, and that they are names of offices, merits, or dignities. For it is plain that angels, that is, messengers, are so called from the office of announcing; the very meaning of the name teaches that archangels are so called because they are set over the angels; dominions, because they rule over some; principalities too, because they have those of whom they are princes; and thrones, because they cling so closely to God and are so much of his household and family that the divine majesty rests in a special way in them as on a kind of throne, and in a way reclines more firmly on them.”

“That unclean spirits are ruled by more wicked powers and are subject to them, besides those testimonies of the Scriptures which we read described in the Lord's answer to the slandering Pharisees in the Gospels, ‘If I cast out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons,’ many clear visions and experiences of the saints also teach us. For when one of our brothers was travelling in this wilderness, as day was already drawing to evening he found a cave and stopped there, wishing to celebrate the evening synaxis in it. While he was singing the psalms there according to custom, the time passed midnight. And when, the service finished, he had sat down a little to rest his tired body, suddenly he began to see countless troops of demons flocking together from all sides. Coming forward in an endless throng and a very long line, some went before their prince and others followed. At last he arrived, taller than all in stature and more terrible in appearance, and, a throne having been set, sat down on a very lofty tribunal and began to examine the acts of each one with careful scrutiny. Those who said they had not yet been able to get the better of their opponents he ordered to be driven from his sight with disgrace and insult, as idle and sluggish, reproaching them with the roar of fury for so much time and labor spent in vain. But those who reported that they had deceived those assigned to them he sent out before all, with the highest praise and with the exultation and applause of all, as the bravest warriors and most glorious, as an example to all. Among them a most wicked spirit came up more joyful, as one about to report a most sublime triumph, and named a monk who was very well known, asserting that after fifteen years in which he had constantly besieged him, he had at last prevailed so as to throw him down that very night by the fall of sexual immorality: for he had not only driven him to commit the crime of sexual immorality with a certain consecrated virgin, but had also persuaded him to keep her for himself by right of marriage. At his report an immense joy arose among them all, and he departed, raised up by the prince of darkness with the highest praises and crowned with great commendations. So, when dawn came and the whole multitude of demons had vanished from his eyes, the brother, doubting the assertion of the unclean spirit, and thinking rather that it had wished to deceive him by the ingrained falsehood of its habit and to brand an innocent brother with the crime of unchastity, remembering the saying of the Gospel, ‘He did not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him; when he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own, for he is a liar, and his father,’ went to Pelusium, where he knew the one the unclean spirit said had fallen was living; for the brother was very well known to him too. When he inquired about him, he found that on the same night on which that most foul demon had announced his fall to his troop and prince, he had left his former monastery, gone to the village, and fallen in a miserable lapse with the woman who had been named.”

“For Scripture testifies that two angels are joined to each of us, that is, a good one and a bad one. Of the good ones the Savior says: ‘Do not despise one of these little ones; for I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.’ Also: ‘The angel of the Lord will encamp around those who fear him, and will deliver them’; and also what is said of Peter in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘It is his angel.’ Of both kinds the book of the Shepherd teaches most fully. And if we consider the one who sought the blessed Job, we are most plainly taught that it was he who, always lying in wait for him, could never incite him to sin, and therefore asked the Lord for power, as one who was being defeated not by Job's strength but by the Lord's defence, which always protected him. Of Judas too it is said: ‘And let the devil stand at his right hand.’”

“About the differences of demons we have also learned much from those two philosophers who had once often experienced, through their magic arts, either their sluggishness or their strength and savage wickedness. For they despised the blessed Antony as an unskilled and unlettered man, and wished, if they could harm him in nothing more, at least to drive him out of his cell by magic tricks and the snares of demons; so they sent the most wicked spirits against him, led to this attack by the bite of envy, because very great crowds of people came to him every day as to a servant of God. And when, as he now pressed the sign of the cross on his breast and forehead, now applied himself humbly to prayer, those most savage demons did not dare even to come near him, and returned without any effect to those who had sent them; and when they sent against him others more violent in wickedness, and these too spent their strength in vain and returned empty; and when stronger ones again, sent against the victorious soldier of Christ, prevailed not at all, all these great snares of theirs, sought with all their magic, went so far that by them they proved most plainly that there is great power in the Christian profession, since those shades, so savage and so powerful, which they thought could have darkened the sun and moon if they had been sent against them, could not only do him no harm at all but could not even drive him from his monastery for a moment.”

“In wonder at this, they came at once to Abba Antony, laid open the greatness of their attacks and the causes and snares of their hidden envy, and asked at once to become Christians. When he asked them the day of the attack they had revealed, he declared that he had then been assailed by the most bitter goads of thoughts. By this experience the blessed Antony proved and defined the view we put forward yesterday in the conference: that demons can by no means invade anyone's mind or body, nor have the power to rush into anyone's soul at all, unless they have first stripped it of all holy thoughts and made it empty and bare of spiritual contemplation. It must be known, however, that unclean spirits obey men in two ways. Either they are subjected by divine grace and power to the holiness of the faithful, or, soothed by the sacrifices of the impious or by certain incantations, they flatter them as their familiars. Deceived by this opinion, the Pharisees too thought that the Lord and Savior commanded the demons by this art, saying: ‘He casts out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons’; according, that is, to that custom by which they knew that their magicians or sorcerers, by invoking his name and by the rite of sacrifices in which they knew he delighted and rejoiced, had power, as his household, even over the demons subject to him.”

Germanus: “Since the reading of Genesis was brought forward a little earlier by God's arrangement, which has fittingly reminded us that we may now suitably ask what we have always wanted to learn, we wish to know what we are to think also of those apostate angels who are said to have mingled with the daughters of men, and whether this can be fitting for a spiritual nature according to the letter. We likewise wish to hear about that testimony of the Gospel which you cited a little earlier concerning the devil, ‘for he is a liar, and his father’: who is to be understood as his father?”

Serenus: “You have put forward together two questions of no small weight, which I will answer as best I can in the same order in which you put them. It must by no means be believed that spiritual natures can have carnal intercourse with women. If this could ever have happened according to the letter, why would it not happen now too, at least rarely, and why would we not likewise see some born of women, conceived by demons, without the seed or intercourse of a man? Especially since it is certain that they delight greatly in the filth of lusts, which they would no doubt rather practise by themselves than through men, if this could in any way be done; and Ecclesiastes declares the same: ‘What is it that has been? The same that is. And what is it that has been done? The same that will be done. And there is nothing new under the sun, of which one may speak and say, See, this is new; it has already been in the ages that were before us.’ But the question put forward is solved thus. After the murder of the righteous Abel, lest the whole human race should take its beginning from a fratricide and an impious man, Seth was born in place of the slain brother, to succeed not only to his posterity but also to his brother's righteousness and piety. His descendants, following their father's righteousness, always remained separate from fellowship and union with the kindred that descended from the sacrilegious Cain, as the distinction of the genealogy also plainly shows, saying: ‘Adam begot Seth, Seth begot Enos, Enos begot Cainan, Cainan begot Mahalalel, Mahalalel begot Jared, Jared begot Enoch, Enoch begot Methuselah, Methuselah begot Lamech, Lamech begot Noah.’ Likewise the genealogy of Cain is described separately thus: ‘Cain begot Enoch, Enoch begot Cainan, Cainan begot Mahalalel, Mahalalel begot Methuselah, Methuselah begot Lamech, Lamech begot Jabal and Jubal.’ So that generation which descended from the stock of the righteous Seth, always intermarrying within its own line and kindred, continued for a long time in the holiness of its fathers and forefathers, never infected by the sacrileges and malice of that most wicked offspring, which kept the seed of impiety implanted in itself as if by ancestral tradition. As long as this distinction of their generations remained between them, that seed of Seth, as coming from the best root, was called, for the merit of its holiness, ‘angels of God,’ or, as other copies have it, ‘sons of God’; and on the contrary the others, because of their own or their fathers' impiety and their earthly works, were called ‘sons of men.’ While this useful and holy division existed between them up to that time, the sons of Seth, who were the sons of God, afterwards seeing the daughters of those born of the stock of Cain, and inflamed with desire for their beauty, took wives for themselves from them; and these, pouring their parents' wickedness into their husbands, at once corrupted them from that inborn holiness and ancestral simplicity. To them that saying is quite fittingly addressed: ‘I said, You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High. But you shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.’ They fell away from that true discipline of natural philosophy handed down to them by their forefathers, which that first man, who came immediately after the establishment of all natures, could plainly attain and hand on to his posterity by sure reasoning. For he had seen the infancy of the world itself, still tender and in a way throbbing and unformed; and there was in him not only so great a fullness of wisdom but also the grace of prophecy, poured in by that divine inbreathing, that as the first dweller in this still unformed world he gave names to all living creatures, and not only distinguished the rage and poisons of every kind of beast and serpent, but also set out the powers of herbs and trees, the natures of stones, and the changes of seasons not yet experienced; so that he could truly say: ‘The Lord has given me true knowledge of the things that are, that I may know the arrangement of the world and the powers of the elements, the beginning and end and middle of times, the changes of the seasons and the divisions of times, the courses of the years and the arrangements of the stars, the natures of animals and the rages of beasts, the force of winds and the thoughts of men, the differences of trees and the powers of roots; and all things that are hidden and manifest I have known.’ This knowledge of all natures, then, the seed of Seth received by ancestral tradition through the succession of generations; and as long as it remained separate from the sacrilegious stock, as it had received it holily, so it used it either for the worship of God or for the benefit of common life. But when it was mixed with the impious generation, it turned what it had piously learned to profane and harmful things, at the prompting of demons too, and boldly established from it the curious arts of sorcery, tricks, and magical superstitions, teaching its descendants to abandon that holy worship of the divine Godhead and to venerate and worship these elements, or fire, or the demons of the air. How this knowledge of curious things did not perish in the flood and became known in the ages that followed, although the answer to the question put forward does not require it, yet since the occasion of this explanation has reminded us, I think it should be touched on briefly. As far as ancient traditions tell, Ham the son of Noah, who had been instructed in these superstitions and sacrilegious and profane arts, knowing that he could not bring any book of memorial about them into the ark, into which he was to enter together with his righteous father and holy brothers, engraved the wicked arts and profane inventions on plates of various metals, which could not be spoiled by the flood of waters, and on very hard stones. When the flood was over, searching for them with the same curiosity with which he had hidden them, he passed on the seedbed of sacrileges and perpetual wickedness to his posterity. In this way that popular opinion, by which people believe that angels handed on sorceries and various arts to men, was fulfilled in truth. Of those sons of Seth and daughters of Cain, then, as we said, more wicked sons were born, who were very mighty hunters, most violent and fierce men, who were called giants because of the enormity of their bodies or of their cruelty and malice. For they first began to plunder their neighbors and practise robbery among men, preferring to get their living by plunder rather than being content with the sweat and labor of work; and their crimes grew so great that the world could not be purified otherwise than by the flood. So, since the sons of Seth, driven by lust, had transgressed that command which had been kept by natural instinct for a very long time from the beginning of this world, it was necessary afterwards for it to be restored by the letter of the law: ‘You shall not give your daughter to his son as wife, nor take any of their daughters for your son; for they will seduce your hearts to depart from your God and follow their gods and serve them.’”

Germanus: “The crime of transgression could rightly have been ascribed to them for presuming this marriage if this command had been given to them. But since the observance of this separation had not yet been fixed by any ordinance, how could the mixing of the race be imputed to them as a fault, when it had been forbidden by no command? For the law usually condemns not past crimes but future ones.”

Serenus: “God, in creating man, implanted in him naturally all knowledge of the law. If man had kept it as he had begun, according to the Lord's purpose, it would certainly not have been necessary for another to be given, which he afterwards published in writing; for it was superfluous to offer from outside a remedy that was still in force within. But because, as we said, this had already been wholly corrupted by the freedom and habit of sinning, the severe strictness of the Mosaic law was set beside it as its executor and avenger, and, to speak in the very words of Scripture, as its helper, so that, at least through fear of present punishment, they might not wholly extinguish the good of natural knowledge, according to the saying of the prophet: ‘He gave the law as a help.’ It is also described by the apostle as having been given like a tutor to little children, teaching and guarding them lest through some forgetfulness they depart from that discipline in which they had been naturally trained. For that all knowledge of the law was implanted in man from the beginning of creation is plainly proved by this: we know that all the saints kept the commands of the law without reading the letter, before the law, indeed before the flood. For how could Abel know, before the law commanded it, that he ought to offer God a sacrifice of the firstlings of his sheep and of their fat, unless he had been taught naturally by the law implanted in him? How would Noah have distinguished which animal was clean and which unclean, before any command of the law distinguished them, unless he had been instructed by natural knowledge? Where did Enoch learn to walk with God, having received no illumination of the law from anyone? Where had Shem and Japheth read, ‘You shall not uncover your father's nakedness,’ so that, walking backwards, they covered their father's shame? Where was Abraham warned to abstain from the enemies' spoils offered to him, so as not to receive a reward for his labor, or to pay the tithes to the priest Melchizedek which are commanded by the Mosaic law? Where did Abraham himself, and Lot, humbly offer the rights of hospitality and the washing of feet to passers-by and strangers, before the command of the Gospel shone forth? Where did Job attain such devotion of faith, such purity of chastity, such knowledge of humility, gentleness, mercy, and kindness, as we do not see fulfilled now even by those who know the Gospels by heart? Which of the saints do we read failed to keep any command of the law before the law? Which of them did not keep, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord’? Which of them did not fulfil, ‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image, nor any likeness of what is in heaven or on earth or in the waters under the earth’? Which of them did not observe, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ or what follows in the Decalogue: ‘You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife,’ and other things far greater than these, by which they anticipated the commands not only of the law but also of the Gospel?”

“So we understand that from the beginning God created all things perfect, and that there was nothing which needed to be added to his original ordering, as though it were improvident and imperfect, if all things had remained in the state and arrangement in which they were created by him. And therefore we prove that God punished with just judgment those who sinned before the law, indeed before the flood, because, having transgressed the natural law, they deserved to be punished without any excuse. Nor shall we fall into the blasphemous slander of those who, not knowing this reason, disparage the God of the Old Testament, and, detracting from our faith and mocking it, say: ‘What pleased your God, then, that after so many thousands of years he chose to publish the law, having let so many ages pass without law? If afterwards he found something better, it appears that at the beginning of the world he knew lower or worse things, and afterwards, as if taught by experience, began to foresee better things and to amend his original ordinances for the better.’ This could by no means fit the immense foreknowledge of God, nor can these things be said of him without enormous blasphemy by heretical madness, since Ecclesiastes says: ‘I have known that all the things which God has made from the beginning will be for ever; nothing can be added to them, and nothing can be taken from them.’ And therefore ‘the law is not laid down for the righteous, but for the unrighteous and insubordinate, for the impious and sinners, for the wicked and defiled.’ For those, having the sound and whole discipline of the natural and implanted law, had no need of this law applied from outside and written in letters, which was given as a help to that natural one. From these it is gathered by the plainest reasoning that neither should this law written in letters have been given from the beginning (for it was superfluous to do this while the natural law still stood and had not been wholly violated), nor could evangelical perfection have been handed on before the keeping of the law. For those could not hear, ‘Whoever strikes you on your right cheek, offer him the other also,’ who were not content to avenge their own injuries with the equality of retaliation, but repaid the lightest slap with deadly kicks and wounds of weapons, and for one tooth sought the lives of those who struck them. Nor could it be said to them, ‘Love your enemies,’ among whom it was thought a great fruit and benefit if they loved their friends and turned away from their enemies, differing from them only by hatred, and did not hasten to crush and kill them.”

“As for what troubled you about the devil, ‘for he is a liar, and his father’ — as if the Lord seemed to declare both him and his father liars — it is quite absurd to think this even slightly. For, as we said a little before, spirit does not beget spirit, just as soul cannot procreate soul, though we do not doubt that the formation of the flesh grows from human seed. The apostle distinguishes more plainly which author each substance, that is, flesh and soul, is to be ascribed to: ‘Furthermore,’ he says, ‘we had fathers of our flesh who corrected us, and we revered them; shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?’ What could define it more clearly than this division, declaring men the fathers of our flesh, but firmly expressing that God alone is the Father of souls? Although even in the very formation of this body only the ministry is to be ascribed to men, but the sum of creation to God, the Creator of all, as David says: ‘Your hands have made me and fashioned me’; and the blessed Job: ‘Have you not milked me like milk, and curdled me like cheese? You have knit me together with bones and sinews’; and the Lord to Jeremiah: ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.’ Ecclesiastes, gathering quite plainly and properly the nature and origin of each substance by examining the birth and beginning from which each came, and by considering the end to which each tends, and discussing likewise the separation of this body and soul, reasoned thus: ‘Before the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.’ What could be said more plainly than that he declares that the matter of the flesh, which he called dust, since it takes its beginning from human seed and seems to be sown by its ministry, returns to the earth as having been taken from the earth; but indicates that the spirit, which is not begotten by the union of both sexes but is given specially by God alone, returns to its author? This is also plainly expressed by that inbreathing of God with which he first gave life to Adam. So from these testimonies we plainly gather that no one can be called the father of spirits except God alone, who makes them from nothing when he wills, while men are called only the fathers of our flesh. Therefore the devil too, in that he was created a spirit, or an angel, or good, had no father except God his maker. But when he was lifted up by pride and said in his heart, ‘I will ascend above the height of the clouds, I will be like the Most High,’ he became a liar and did not stand in the truth; but, bringing forth a lie from his own treasury of wickedness, he became not only a liar but also the father of the lie itself, by which, promising divinity to man and saying, ‘You will be like gods,’ he did not stand in the truth, but was a murderer from the beginning, either by bringing Adam into the condition of mortality, or by killing Abel at his instigation through his brother's hand.” But now the following dawn brings to a close our discussion, carried on through the vigils of nearly two nights, and the brevity of our rusticity has drawn the little boat of this conference from the deepest sea of questions into the safest harbor of silence. The farther the breath of the divine Spirit leads us into that deep, the more widely the immensity ahead will always open before the sight of our eyes, and, according to Solomon's saying, it will become farther from us than it was, ‘and deep is the depth; who will find it?’ Therefore let us pray the Lord that either his fear, or the love that knows no falling, may remain immovable in us, which will make us wise in all things and always protect us unharmed from the devil's darts. For with these guardians it is impossible for anyone to fall into the snares of death. But this is the difference between the perfect and the imperfect: in the former, love, fixed and, so to speak, riper, persevering more tenaciously, makes them endure in holiness more firmly and easily; in the latter, placed as it were more weakly and growing cold more easily, it quickly and often compels them to be entangled in the snares of sins. When we had heard this, the discourse of this conference so inflamed us that, going away from the old man's cell, we thirsted for the fullness of his teaching with greater ardor of mind than when we came.

What was promised in the second book of the Institutes about the perpetual and unceasing continuance of prayer will, with the Lord’s favor, be fulfilled by the conferences of this elder whom we shall now bring forward, that is, Abba Isaac. When these have been set out, I believe I shall have satisfied both the instructions of Pope Castor of most blessed memory and your desire, most blessed Pope Leontius and holy brother Helladius. But I must first excuse the length of the volume: although we tried not only to compress what had to be told into brief narration but also to pass over a great deal in silence, it has grown longer than we had planned. For after a full discussion of various practices, which we have preferred to cut out for the sake of brevity, the blessed Isaac at the end spoke these words.

“The whole goal of the monk and the perfection of his heart tends toward constant and unbroken perseverance in prayer, and, as far as human frailty allows, it strives toward immovable tranquillity of mind and perpetual purity. For the sake of this we tirelessly seek and continually practise all labor of body as well as contrition of spirit. And there is a kind of reciprocal and inseparable bond between the two. For just as the whole structure of the virtues tends toward the perfection of prayer, so unless all of them are bound together and fitted into one by this as their crown, they cannot in any way remain firm or stable. For just as this perpetual and continual tranquillity of prayer of which we are speaking cannot be acquired or completed without them, so neither can those virtues which lay its foundation be brought to completion without persistence in it. And therefore we shall not be able either to treat rightly of the effect of prayer or to enter by a hasty discussion into its principal end, which is achieved by the labor of building all the virtues, unless first everything that must be either cut away or provided for its sake has been counted out in order and examined, and, according to the teaching of the gospel parable, whatever belongs to the building of that spiritual and most lofty tower has been reckoned up and carefully gathered beforehand. Yet even these things, once prepared, will be of no use, nor will they allow the high summits of perfection to be rightly set upon them, unless first all the rubbish of vices has been cleared away and the decayed and dead debris of the passions has been dug out, and the firmest foundations of simplicity and humility have been laid upon the living and solid ground, as they say, of our breast, or rather upon that rock of the gospel. On these foundations this tower, to be built by the labors of the spiritual virtues, will be able both to stand immovably and to rise, confident in its own firmness, to the highest heights of heaven. For if it rests on such foundations, though the heaviest rains of passions pour down, though violent torrents of persecutions strike against it like a battering ram, though a savage storm of hostile spirits rushes upon it and presses on it, not only will no collapse bring it down, but the shock will not even shake it at all.

“And therefore, so that prayer may be offered with the fervor and purity it ought to have, these things must be observed in every way. First, anxiety about fleshly things must be cut off altogether; next, not only the care but even the memory of any business or affair must not be admitted at all. Slander, empty talk or much talking, and buffoonery must likewise be cut away; above all, the disturbance of anger or of sadness must be rooted out completely, and the harmful tinder of carnal desire and of love of money torn up by the roots. When these and similar vices, which can also be seen by human eyes, have been thoroughly driven out and cut off, and when such a cleansing of the rubbish, as we have said, has gone before, a cleansing that is completed by the purity of simplicity and innocence, then first the unshaken foundations of deep humility must be laid, able to bear a tower that is to reach into heaven; next, the spiritual structure of the virtues must be set upon them, and the mind restrained from all running about and slippery wandering, so that it may begin little by little to be raised to the contemplation of God and to spiritual insight. For whatever our soul has taken in before the hour of prayer must of necessity come back to us through the working of memory while we pray. Therefore, such as we wish to be found when we pray, such we ought to make ourselves before the time of prayer. For the mind in supplication is shaped by its previous state; and when we bow down to pray, the image of the same actions, words, and thoughts plays before our eyes, and will make us either angry, as in our previous condition, or sad, or turn over again our past desires or affairs, or be shaken (I am ashamed to say it) by silly laughter, tickled by some joking word or act, or fly back to our former distractions. And therefore whatever we do not want to creep in upon us while we pray, let us hasten before prayer to drive out of the inner sanctuary of our breast, so that we may thus fulfil the apostle’s words: “Pray without ceasing,” and: “In every place lifting up pure hands without anger and disputing.” For otherwise we shall not be able to carry out this command, unless our mind, purified from all contagion of vices and given over to the virtues alone as to its natural goods, is fed by the continual contemplation of almighty God.

“For the nature of the soul is not unfittingly compared to a very fine down or a very light feather. If it has not been spoiled or soaked by the corruption of some moisture coming upon it from outside, it is lifted up as if naturally to the heights of heaven by the lightness of its substance, with the help of the slightest breath. But if it has been weighed down by the sprinkling or soaking of some moisture, not only will it not be carried off by its natural lightness into any flight through the air, but it will even be pressed down to the depths of the earth by the weight of the moisture it has taken in. So too our mind, if it is not weighed down by vices that come upon it and by the cares of the world, or corrupted by the moisture of harmful desire, will be lifted up, as by the natural benefit of its own purity, and raised on high by the lightest breath of spiritual meditation; and leaving what is low and earthly, it will be carried over to those heavenly and invisible things. Hence we are quite fittingly warned by the Lord’s commands: “See that your hearts are never weighed down with surfeiting and drunkenness and the cares of this world.” And therefore, if we want our prayers to pierce not only the heavens but even what is above the heavens, let us take care to bring our mind, cleansed from all earthly vices and purified from all the dregs of the passions, back to its natural lightness, so that its prayer may rise to God weighed down by no burden of vices.

“We should note, however, the causes by which the Lord indicated that the mind is weighed down. For he did not name adulteries, sexual immorality, murders, blasphemies, or robberies, which no one fails to know are deadly and damnable, but surfeiting and drunkenness and the cares or anxieties of this world. No one in this world guards against these or judges them damnable; indeed some (I am ashamed to say it) who call themselves monks entangle themselves in these very distractions as if they were harmless and useful. Although these three, when committed literally, weigh down the soul, separate it from God, and press it down to earthly things, they are nevertheless easy to avoid, especially for us who are cut off by so long a separation from all the life of this world and have no occasion at all to mix in these visible cares and drunkenness and surfeiting. But there is also another surfeiting, no less harmful, and a spiritual drunkenness harder to avoid, and a worldly care and anxiety that often entangles us even after the complete renunciation of all our possessions, after abstinence from wine and all feasting, and even when we are settled in solitude. (Of these the prophet says: “Awake, you who are drunk, and not with wine.” Another also says: “Be astonished and wonder, waver and stagger; be drunk, and not with wine; reel, and not with drunkenness.” The wine of this drunkenness must consequently be, as the prophet says, “the fury of dragons”; and notice from what root this wine comes: “Their vine,” he says, “is from the vineyard of Sodom, and their branches from Gomorrah.” Would you also know the fruit of that vine and the shoot of that branch? “Their grape is a grape of gall, their cluster a cluster of bitterness.”) For unless we have been cleansed of all vices and are sober from the surfeiting of all the passions, our heart will be weighed down, even without the drunkenness of wine and without any abundance of feasting, by a drunkenness and surfeiting more harmful still. That worldly cares can sometimes fall even on us who take part in no business of this world is shown plainly by the rule of the elders, who defined as belonging to worldly care and anxiety whatever goes beyond the necessity of daily food and the unavoidable use of the flesh. For example, if, when the work of one solidus could supply the needs of our body, we choose to stretch ourselves with more eager work and labor to acquire two or three solidi; and when the covering of two tunics suffices, that is, for use by night and by day, we contrive to become owners of three or four; and when a dwelling of one or two cells suffices, we build, delighting in worldly ambition and grandeur, four or five cells, and these with exquisite decoration and larger than use requires, displaying the passion of worldly desire in whatever we can.

“That this does not happen without the prompting of demons the clearest experiences have taught us. For a certain highly approved elder was passing by the cell of a brother who was suffering from this sickness of mind we have described, who was restlessly toiling with daily distractions in building and repairing superfluous things. From a distance he saw him breaking a very hard stone with a heavy hammer, and he saw an Ethiopian standing beside him, striking the blows of the hammer together with him, their hands joined and clasped, and urging him on to keep at the work with fiery torches. He stood still for a very long time, marveling at the force of the most dreadful demon and at the fraud of so great a delusion. For whenever the brother, worn out with excessive weariness, wanted to rest and put an end to the work, he was spurred on by the prompting of that spirit and driven to take up the hammer again and not to stop from the effort of the work he had begun, so that, sustained tirelessly by its incitements, he did not feel the harm of so great a labor. At last the old man, moved by such a dreadful mockery of the demon, turned aside to the brother’s cell and, greeting him, said: ‘What is this work that you are doing, brother?’ He answered: ‘We are laboring against this very hard stone, and we have barely been able to break it at last.’ The old man replied: ‘You said well, “we have been able.” For you were not alone when you were striking it; there was another with you whom you did not see, who stood by you in this work not so much as a helper but as a most violent driver.’ And therefore that the disease of worldly ambition is not in our minds will not be proved merely by abstaining from those affairs which we could not seek or carry out even if we wanted to, nor by despising those things which, if we pursued them, would at once make us conspicuous both among spiritual men and among people of the world, but when with strict severity of mind we reject even those things which lie within our power and seem to be cloaked with a certain respectability. And indeed these things, which seem small and trifling and which we see admitted indifferently by those of our profession, weigh down the mind according to their kind no less than those greater things which, according to their condition, commonly intoxicate the senses of worldly people. They do not allow the monk to lay aside the earthly dregs and breathe toward God, on whom his attention ought always to be fixed; for him even a slight separation from that highest good must be regarded as present death and the most ruinous destruction. And when the mind has been established in such tranquillity and freed from the bonds of all fleshly passions, and the attention of the heart clings most tenaciously to that one and highest good, it will fulfil the apostle’s words: “Pray without ceasing,” and: “In every place lifting up pure hands without anger and disputing.” For when by this purity (if one may say so) the mind’s understanding has been absorbed and reshaped from its earthly condition into a spiritual and angelic likeness, whatever it takes in, whatever it considers, whatever it does, will be a most pure and sincere prayer.

Germanus: “If only we could possess the permanence of spiritual thoughts in the same way and with the same ease with which we often conceive their seeds! For when they have been conceived in our heart, whether through remembering the Scriptures, or through recalling some spiritual actions, or through contemplating heavenly mysteries, they slip away by an unnoticed flight and vanish very quickly. And when our mind has found other occasions for spiritual thoughts, still others creep in, and those it had grasped also escape with slippery fickleness, so that the soul, keeping no constancy of its own and not possessing firm hold of holy thoughts by its own power, must be thought, even when it seems to hold them somehow, to have conceived them by chance and not by effort. For how can their origin be thought attributable to our will, when their continuance does not lie with us? But lest in investigating this question we stray too far from the order of the account we began and delay any longer the promised exposition of the state of prayer, let us reserve it for its own time. We earnestly ask to be instructed about the character of prayer, especially since the blessed apostle warns us never to cease from it, saying: “Pray without ceasing.” And so we want first to be taught about its character, that is, what kind of prayer ought always to be offered; and then how we can possess or practise this same prayer, whatever it is, without ceasing. For both daily experience and the discourse of your holiness show that it cannot be accomplished with slight attention of heart, since you have defined the goal of the monk and the summit of all perfection as consisting in the consummation of prayer.”

Isaac: “I think that all the kinds of prayer cannot be grasped without great purity of heart and soul and the illumination of the Holy Spirit. For there are as many of them as there are states and conditions that can arise in one soul, or rather in all souls. And therefore, although we know that because of the dullness of our heart we cannot see into all the kinds of prayer, we shall nevertheless try to set them out somehow, as far as our modest experience has been able to reach. For according to the measure of purity to which each mind advances, and the character of the state into which it is inclined by what befalls it or is renewed by its own effort, the prayers themselves also change from moment to moment; and therefore it is quite certain that no one can always offer uniform prayers. For a person prays in one way when he is cheerful, in another when he is weighed down by the burden of sadness or despair, in another when he is flourishing in spiritual success, in another when he is pressed down by the weight of attacks, in another when he asks pardon for sins, in another when he asks to acquire grace or some virtue, or prays for the extinction of some vice, in another when he is pierced by the thought of hell and the fear of the judgment to come, in another when he burns with the hope and desire of good things to come, in another when he is in needs and dangers, in another when he is in security and quiet, in another when he is enlightened by revelations of heavenly mysteries, in another when he is hemmed in by barrenness in virtues and dryness of feeling.

“And therefore, having set these things out about the character of prayer, though not as fully as the greatness of the subject demands, but as far as the shortness of time allows or at least as the slenderness of our ability and the dullness of our heart can manage, a greater difficulty now faces us: to explain one by one the kinds of prayer which the apostle distinguished in a fourfold division, saying: “I urge, then, first of all, that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made.” We should not doubt at all that the apostle did not make this division idly. First we must investigate what is meant by supplication, what by prayer, what by intercession, and what by thanksgiving. Then we must inquire whether these four kinds are to be taken up by the one praying all together, that is, so that all are joined in every supplication; or whether they are to be offered in turn and one by one, so that, for instance, sometimes supplications, sometimes prayers, sometimes intercessions or thanksgivings ought to be put forth; or whether one person ought to offer God supplications, another prayers, another intercessions, another thanksgivings, according to the measure of the age to which each mind advances by the effort of its attention.

“And so first the proper meanings of the names and words must be treated, and we must discuss what difference there is between prayer, supplication, and intercession; then likewise we must examine whether they are to be offered one by one or together; third, we must investigate whether the very order, arranged as it is by the apostle’s authority, teaches the hearer something more, or whether this distinction is to be taken simply and it should be thought that he arranged it in this way without any purpose. That seems to me quite absurd. For we must not believe that the Holy Spirit spoke anything through the apostle casually and without reason. And therefore let us go over each point in the same order in which we began, as the Lord shall grant.

“I urge, then, first of all, that supplications be made.” Supplication is an imploring or petition concerning sins, by which each one, pierced with compunction, begs pardon for his present or past offenses.

“Prayers are those by which we offer or vow something to God, which in Greek is called euchē, that is, a vow. For where the Greek says tas euchas mou tō kyriō apodōsō, the Latin reads: “I will pay my vows to the Lord,” which according to the proper sense of the word can be expressed thus: “I will pay my prayers to the Lord.” And what we read in Ecclesiastes, “If you vow a vow to God, do not delay to pay it,” is likewise written in Greek: ean euxē euchēn tō kyriō, that is, “If you pray a prayer to the Lord, do not delay to pay it.” Each of us will fulfil this as follows. We pray when, renouncing this world, we pledge that, dead to all the deeds and way of life of the world, we will serve the Lord with the whole attention of our heart. We pray when we promise that, despising worldly honor and scorning earthly wealth, we will cleave to the Lord in all contrition of heart and poverty of spirit. We pray when we promise that we will show perpetually the purest chastity of body or unshaken patience, or when we vow that the roots of anger or of sadness that works death will be torn completely out of our heart. If, grown slack through sloth and returning to our old vices, we do not do this, we shall be guilty of our prayers and vows, and it will be said of us: “It is better not to vow than to vow and not pay,” which according to the Greek can be put: “It is better for you not to pray than to pray and not pay.”

“In the third place are set intercessions, which we are accustomed to offer for others also when we are in fervor of spirit, asking either for our dear ones or for the peace of the whole world, and, to use the apostle’s own words, when we make supplication “for all men, for kings and all who are in high position.”

“Then in the fourth place are set thanksgivings, which the mind, in ineffable raptures, renders to the Lord, either when it recalls God’s past benefits, or when it contemplates his present ones, or when it looks forward to what great things God has prepared in the future for those who love him. With this intention, too, fuller prayers are sometimes poured out, when our spirit, gazing with most pure eyes on the rewards of the saints laid up for the future, is moved to pour out ineffable thanks to God with immense joy.

“From these four kinds occasions of rich supplications sometimes arise. For we know that most fervent and fiery prayers very often come forth from the kind called supplication, which is born of compunction for sins; from the state of prayer, which flows from confidence in one’s offerings and the fulfilment of vows through purity of conscience; from intercession, which proceeds from the ardor of love; and from thanksgiving, which is produced by considering God’s benefits and his greatness and kindness. So it is clear that all these kinds we have mentioned are found useful and necessary for all people, so that in one and the same man a changing disposition puts forth pure and most fervent supplications, now of the kind called supplication, now of prayers, now of intercessions. Nevertheless the first seems to belong more particularly to beginners, who are still stung by the goads and the memory of their vices; the second to those who already stand with some elevation of mind in spiritual progress and in the pursuit of the virtues; the third to those who, fulfilling the perfection of their vows by works, are moved also to intercede for others out of regard for their frailty and zeal of love; the fourth to those who, the thorn of a guilty conscience now pulled from their hearts, secure at last, go over with most pure mind the Lord’s generosity and mercies, which he gave in the past, bestows in the present, or prepares for the future, and are carried away with most fervent heart into that fiery prayer which can neither be grasped nor expressed by the mouth of man. Sometimes, however, the mind that advances into that true disposition of purity and has already begun to be rooted in it, conceiving all these at once and together, and flying through them all like some incomprehensible and all-devouring flame, pours out to God ineffable prayers of the purest strength, which “the Spirit himself, interceding with groanings that cannot be uttered,” sends up to God without our knowing it; conceiving in the moment of that hour and pouring out ineffably in supplication things so great that the mind cannot, I will not say run through them with the mouth, but even recall them at another time. Hence it is that a person at any level is sometimes found to offer pure and intent prayers. For even from that first and lowly rank, which concerns the remembrance of the judgment to come, one who is still placed under the penalty of terror and the fear of examination is for the moment so pierced with compunction that he is filled with the richness of supplication with no less eagerness of spirit than one who, through the purity of his heart surveying and running over the generosity of God, melts in ineffable joy and gladness. For, according to the Lord’s saying, he begins “to love more,” because he knows that more has been forgiven him.

“Yet as life advances and the virtues are perfected, we should seek rather those kinds of supplication which pour forth either from the contemplation of future goods or from the ardor of love, or at least, to speak more humbly and according to the measure of beginners, those that arise for the acquiring of any virtue or the extinction of any vice. For we shall by no means be able to reach those more sublime kinds of supplication we spoke of unless our mind has been carried forward gradually and step by step through the order of these petitions.

“The Lord himself also deigned to initiate us into these four kinds of supplication by his example, so that in this too he might fulfil what is said of him: “what Jesus began to do and to teach.” For he takes up the kind called supplication when he says: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me,” or what is sung in his person in the psalm: “O God, my God, look upon me; why have you forsaken me?” and other things like these. It is prayer when he says: “I have glorified you on earth; I have finished the work that you gave me to do,” or this: “And for them I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in the truth.” It is intercession when he says: “Father, those whom you have given me, I will that where I am, they also may be with me, that they may see my glory which you have given me,” or indeed when he says: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” It is thanksgiving when he says: “I confess to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to little ones. Yes, Father, for so it was pleasing in your sight,” or indeed when he says: “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. And I knew that you always hear me.” Yet although our Lord distinguished these four kinds of supplication, to be offered singly and at different times in the way we have described, he also showed repeatedly by his examples that they can be included together in a perfect supplication, namely through that prayer which we read, at the end of the Gospel according to John, that he poured out most abundantly. Since it would be long to go through all its text, a diligent inquirer can learn from the sequence of the reading itself that this is so. The apostle too expressed this sense clearly in the Epistle to the Philippians, setting down these four kinds of supplication in a somewhat changed order and showing that they ought sometimes to be offered together in the ardor of a single supplication, saying: “But in every prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your petitions be made known to God.” By this he wished to teach us especially that in both prayer and supplication thanksgiving ought to be mingled with petition.

“These kinds of supplication will be followed by a still more sublime and exalted state, which is formed by the contemplation of God alone and the ardor of love, by which the mind, melted and cast down into his love, speaks with God most familiarly, as with its own father, with a special devotion. That we ought diligently to seek this state is taught by the form of the Lord’s Prayer, which says: “Our Father.” When, then, we confess with our own voice that the God and Lord of the universe is our Father, we indeed profess that we have been taken from the condition of slaves into the adoption of sons. We then add: “who art in heaven,” so that, shunning with all horror the sojourn of this present life which we spend on this earth as a foreign land that separates us very far from our Father, we may rather hasten with the greatest longing to that country in which we confess that our Father dwells, and may admit nothing of the kind that would make us unworthy of this profession of ours and of the nobility of so great an adoption, deprive us of our father’s inheritance as degenerate sons, and make us incur the wrath of his justice and severity. Advanced to this rank and degree of sons, we shall at once burn with the devotion that is in good sons, so that we spend our whole affection no longer on our own advantage but on our Father’s glory, saying to him: “Hallowed be thy name,” testifying that our desire and our joy is the glory of our Father, and becoming imitators of him who said: “He who speaks of himself seeks his own glory; but he who seeks the glory of him who sent him, he is true, and there is no unrighteousness in him.” So the vessel of election, filled with this disposition, even wishes to be accursed from Christ, provided that a numerous household be gained for him and the salvation of the whole people of Israel increase to the glory of his Father. For he wishes without anxiety to perish for Christ, knowing that no one can die for the sake of life. And again he says: “We rejoice when we are weak and you are strong.” And what wonder if the vessel of election wishes to be accursed from Christ for the glory of Christ, the conversion of his brothers, and the privilege of his nation, when the prophet Micah also would be made a liar and a stranger to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, provided that the people of the Jewish nation might escape those blows and the ruin of captivity that he had foretold in his prophecy, saying: “Would that I were not a man who has the spirit, and that I spoke a lie instead”? Not to mention that disposition of the lawgiver, who did not refuse to perish with his brothers who were about to perish, saying: “I beseech you, Lord, this people has sinned a great sin; either forgive them this offense, or, if you do not, blot me out of your book which you have written.” But the words “Hallowed be thy name” can also quite fittingly be taken thus: God’s hallowing is our perfection. And so, saying to him “Hallowed be thy name,” we are saying in other words: Make us such, Father, that we may deserve either to understand or to receive how great your holiness is, or at least that you may appear holy in our spiritual way of life. This is effectively fulfilled in us when men “see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven.”

“The second petition of the most pure mind longs for the kingdom of its Father to come at once: either that by which Christ reigns daily in the saints (which happens when the devil’s rule has been driven out of our hearts by the extinction of the stinking vices, and God has begun to reign in us through the sweet fragrance of the virtues, and, sexual immorality overcome, chastity, anger vanquished, tranquillity, pride trampled down, humility reigns in our mind), or else that which has been promised in general, at the appointed time, to all the perfect and the sons of God, in which Christ will say to them: “Come, blessed of my Father, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” The mind longs for and awaits this kingdom with eyes, as it were, intent and fixed, and says to him: “Thy kingdom come.” For it knows by the testimony of its conscience that when it appears it will soon share in it. None of the guilty will dare to say or wish this, since whoever knows that at his coming not the palm or rewards but punishment will at once be paid for his deserts will not want to see the judge’s tribunal.

“The third supplication is that of sons: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” There can be no greater prayer than to wish that earthly things may be made equal to heavenly. For what else is it to say “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” than that men may be like the angels, and that, as God’s will is fulfilled by them in heaven, so also all those on earth may do not their own will but his? No one will be able to say this with full affection except the one who believes that God arranges all things that seem either adverse or prosperous for our good, and that he is more provident and concerned for the salvation and welfare of his own than we are for ourselves. Or it may be taken in this way: God’s will is the salvation of all, according to the saying of blessed Paul: “who wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” Of this will the prophet Isaiah also says, in the person of God the Father: “And all my will shall be done.” So when we say to him “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we are praying in other words that, as those in heaven, so all who dwell on earth may be saved, Father, by the knowledge of you.

“Next: “Give us this day our epiousios bread,” that is, our supersubstantial bread, which another evangelist called “daily.” The former signifies the character of its nobility and substance, namely that it is above all substances and the height of its magnificence and holiness exceeds all creatures; the latter expresses the special nature of its use and benefit. For when he says “daily,” he shows that without it we cannot receive spiritual life on any day. When he says “this day,” he shows that it must be taken every day and that yesterday’s supply of it is not enough unless it is given to us today as well. Our daily need of it should remind us that we ought to pour out this prayer at every time, for there is no day on which we do not need to strengthen the heart of our inner man by eating and receiving it. Yet the words “this day” can also be understood of the present life, that is: while we sojourn in this world, grant us this bread. For we know that it will be given in the future also to those who have deserved it from you, but we ask that you bestow it on us today, since unless one has deserved to receive it in this life, he will not be able to share in it in that life.

“And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.” O ineffable mercy of God! Not only has he given us a form of prayer and established a discipline of conduct acceptable to him, and through the necessity of the form he handed down, by which he commanded that he always be prayed to, torn out the roots of anger and of sadness alike; he has also given those who pray an occasion and opened a way by which they may call forth a merciful and kind judgment of God upon themselves. In a way he has given us power to moderate the sentence of our judge, constraining him by the example of our own forgiveness to pardon our offenses, when we say to him: “Forgive us as we also have forgiven.” So whoever has been forgiving toward his own debtors, and not merely toward his Lord’s, will ask pardon for his sins with confidence in this prayer. For some of us (which is worse) are accustomed to show ourselves gentle and most merciful toward things done to God’s injury, however great the crimes, but to be found harsh and inexorable exactors of the debts of even the smallest offenses against ourselves. Whoever, then, has not forgiven from the heart a brother who has wronged him will obtain by this prayer not pardon but condemnation for himself, and by his own profession will ask to be judged more severely, saying: “Forgive me as I too have forgiven.” When it is paid back to him according to his request, what else will follow but that he is punished, after his own example, with implacable wrath and an unremitted sentence? And therefore, if we want to be judged mercifully, we too must be merciful toward those who have wronged us. For we will be forgiven as much as we have forgiven those who have harmed us with any malice. Some, fearing this, when this prayer is sung together by the whole people in church, silently pass over this part, lest by their own profession they seem to bind themselves rather than excuse themselves. They do not understand that they are trying in vain to put forward these quibbles to the judge of all, who wished to show his suppliants beforehand how he will judge. For since he does not want to be found harsh and inexorable toward them, he has laid down the pattern of his judgment, so that as we wish to be judged by him, so we should judge our brothers if they have wronged us in anything; for “judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy.”

“Then follows: “And lead us not into temptation,” from which no small question arises. For if we pray not to be allowed to be tempted, how will the virtue of steadfastness be proved in us, according to the saying: “Every man who has not been tempted has not been proved,” and again: “Blessed is the man who endures temptation”? So “lead us not into temptation” does not mean “do not ever allow us to be tempted,” but “do not allow us, when we are placed in temptation, to be overcome.” For Job was tempted, but he was not led into temptation: he did not “charge God with folly,” nor did he enter with impious mouth into blasphemy, the will of the tempter to which he was being drawn. Abraham was tempted, Joseph was tempted, but neither of them was led into temptation, because none of them gave consent to the tempter. Then follows: “But deliver us from evil,” that is, do not allow us to be tempted by the devil beyond what we are able, but “with the temptation make also a way of escape, that we may be able to bear it.”

“You see, then, what measure and form of prayer has been set before us by the very judge who is to be entreated by it. It contains no request for riches, no mention of honors, no petition for power and strength, no mention of bodily health or of temporal life. For the creator of eternity wants nothing perishable, nothing base, nothing temporal to be asked of him. And so whoever passes over these everlasting petitions and prefers to ask him for something transitory and perishable will do the greatest injury to his magnificence and generosity, and by the meanness of his prayer will incur the offense rather than the favor of his judge.

“So although this prayer seems to contain the whole fullness of perfection, since it was begun and established by the Lord’s own authority, it nevertheless carries his intimates forward to that higher state we mentioned above, and leads them by a more exalted step to that fiery prayer known or experienced by very few, or rather, to speak more properly, ineffable prayer. It transcends all human understanding and is marked, I do not say by no sound of the voice, but by no movement of the tongue and no utterance of words. The mind, enlightened by the inpouring of that heavenly light, does not express it in narrow human speech, but, its thoughts gathered together, pours it out abundantly as from a most copious spring and utters it ineffably to God, bringing forth in that briefest moment of time things so great that the mind, when it returns to itself, cannot easily express or run through them. Our Lord too likewise figured this state by the form of those supplications which he is described as having poured out, either withdrawing alone to the mountain or in silence, when, placed in the agony of prayer, he even shed drops of blood, an example of intensity beyond imitation.

“But who, however much experience he has, could sufficiently explain the varieties, causes, and origins of the compunctions by which the mind, inflamed and set alight, is stirred to pure and most fervent prayers? We shall set out a few of them by way of example, as far as we can remember them at present through the Lord’s enlightenment. Sometimes a verse of some psalm, as we sang it, has given occasion for fiery prayer. At times the tuneful melody of a brother’s voice has stirred the minds of the dull to intent supplication. We know too that the clear enunciation and gravity of one chanting the psalms has given great fervor even to those standing by. The exhortation of a perfect man and a spiritual conference have also often raised the disposition of those lying low to most abundant prayers. We know too that we have been carried away to full compunction no less by the death of a brother or of someone dear. The remembrance of our own lukewarmness and negligence has also sometimes brought us a saving ardor of spirit. And in this way no one doubts that countless occasions are not lacking by which, through the grace of God, the lukewarmness and sleepiness of our minds can be roused.

“But how, or in what ways, these compunctions are brought forth from the inmost chambers of the soul is no less difficult to investigate. For often the fruit of most wholesome compunction comes out through ineffable joy and eagerness of spirit, so that it even bursts out into cries because of the immensity of a joy it cannot contain, and the delight of the heart and the greatness of its exultation reach the cell of a neighbor. Sometimes, however, the mind is hidden in such silence within the secret of deep stillness that the amazement of a sudden illumination shuts off every sound of the voice, and the astonished spirit either keeps all its senses within or loses them, and pours out its desires to God “with groanings that cannot be uttered.” At times, again, it is filled with such abundance of compunction and grief that it cannot relieve it except by pouring it out in tears.

Germanus: “Even my littleness is not wholly ignorant of this feeling of compunction. For often, when tears have sprung up at the remembrance of my sins, I have been so quickened by the Lord’s visitation with this ineffable joy you have spoken of that the very greatness of the gladness told me I ought not to despair of their pardon. I think nothing is more sublime than this state, if only its renewal lay in our power. For sometimes, when I want to rouse myself with all my strength to a like compunction of tears, and set all my errors and sins before my eyes, I cannot bring back that abundance of weeping, and my eyes become as hard as the hardest flint, so that not a single drop of moisture falls from them. And so, as much as I rejoice in that flood of tears, so much do I grieve that I cannot recover it when I wish.”

Isaac: “Not every flow of tears is produced by one feeling or one virtue. The weeping that is brought forth when the thorn of sins pricks our heart flows in one way; of it is said: “I have labored in my groaning; every night I will wash my bed; I will water my couch with my tears,” and again: “Let tears run down like a torrent day and night; give yourself no rest, and let not the apple of your eye be still.” In another way arises the weeping that comes from the contemplation of eternal goods and the longing for that future glory, for which even richer fountains of tears burst out from unbearable joy and immense eagerness, while our soul thirsts for the mighty, living God, saying: “When shall I come and appear before the face of God? My tears have been my bread day and night,” crying out daily with wailing and lament: “Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged,” and: “My soul has long been a sojourner.” In another way flow the tears which come, not indeed from any consciousness of deadly crimes, but from fear of hell and remembrance of that terrible judgment; struck by its terror, the prophet prays to God, saying: “Enter not into judgment with your servant, for in your sight no one living will be justified.” There is also another kind of tears, produced not by one’s own conscience but by the hardness and sins of others. With these Samuel is described as weeping for Saul, and with these the Lord in the gospel, and Jeremiah in former times, wept for the city of Jerusalem, the latter saying: “Who will give water to my head, and a fountain of tears to my eyes? And I will weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people.” Or again there are such tears as are sung of in the hundred and first psalm: “For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping.” It is certain that these are not brought forth by the feeling with which tears come in the sixth psalm in the person of the penitent, but from the anxieties, straits, and hardships of this life by which the righteous are pressed down while they are in this world. Not only the text of that psalm but also its title shows this plainly; it is written in the person of that poor man of whom it is said in the gospel: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” and runs thus: “A prayer of the poor man, when he was in anguish and poured out his prayer before God.”

“From these tears, then, those that are squeezed out of dry eyes when the heart is hardened differ greatly. We do not believe them wholly fruitless (for the attempt to shed them is made with a good purpose, especially by those who have not yet been able to reach perfect knowledge or to be cleansed thoroughly from the stain of past or present vices). Yet those who have already passed into a settled disposition of the virtues ought by no means to wring out a flow of tears in this way, nor should the weeping of the outer man be sought with great effort; even if it is produced in some fashion, it will never reach that abundance of spontaneous tears. Rather, by his own efforts it will drag down the soul of the one praying, humble it, sink it in human things, and bring it down from that heavenly height on which the astonished mind of the one praying ought to be fixed unswervingly; and, the intentness of his prayers slackened, it will make the mind grow sick over a few barren, forced drops of tears.

“And so that you may grasp the disposition of true prayer, I will give you, not my own opinion, but that of blessed Antony. We know that he sometimes persisted in prayer so long that, while he was praying in this same ecstasy of mind, when the sunrise began to pour in, we heard him cry out in fervor of spirit: “Why do you hinder me, sun, rising now for this, to draw me away from the brightness of this true light?” His too is this heavenly and more than human saying about the end of prayer: “That prayer is not perfect,” he said, “in which the monk understands himself, or even the very fact that he is praying.” And so that we too, according to the measure of our slenderness, may dare to add something to this wonderful saying, we shall set out the signs, as far as we have experienced them, of prayer that is heard by the Lord.

“When no hesitation interrupts us as we pray, and no despair casts down the confidence of our petition, but we feel in the very outpouring of prayer that we have obtained what we ask, let us not doubt that our prayers have effectively reached God. For one will deserve to be heard and to obtain in the measure that he believes either that he is regarded by God or that God is able to grant it. For that saying of our Lord cannot be withdrawn: “Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you will receive, and it will come to you.”

Germanus: “We believe that this confidence of being heard certainly flows from purity of conscience. But how can we, whose heart is still pricked by the thorn of sins, have it, when we have no merits to plead for us by which we might confidently presume that our prayers will be heard?”

Isaac: “The words of the gospels and of the prophets testify that there are different grounds for being heard, according to the different and varied states of souls. You have the fruit of being heard marked by the Lord’s voice in the agreement of two, according to the saying: “If two of you agree on earth about anything whatever that they ask, it will be done for them by my Father who is in heaven.” You have another in the fullness of faith, which is compared to a grain of mustard seed: “For if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed,” he says, “you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” You have it in constancy in prayer, which the Lord’s word called importunity because of its unwearied perseverance in asking: “Truly I say to you, if not for friendship, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as much as he needs.” You have it in the fruit of almsgiving: “Shut up alms in the heart of the poor,” he says, “and it will pray for you in the time of trouble.” You have it in amendment of life and works of mercy, according to the saying: “Loose the bonds of wickedness, undo the burdens that press down,” and a little after, where the barrenness of fruitless fasting is rebuked: “Then you will call, and the Lord will hear you; you will cry, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’” Sometimes, indeed, the very excess of tribulations causes one to be heard, according to the saying: “In my trouble I cried to the Lord, and he heard me,” and again: “Do not afflict the stranger, for if he cries to me, I will hear him, for I am merciful.” You see, then, in how many ways the grace of being heard is obtained, so that no one should be broken by despair of his own conscience in asking for the things that are saving and eternal. For suppose I grant, considering our miseries, that we are utterly destitute of all the virtues we have mentioned above, and have neither that praiseworthy agreement of two, nor that faith compared to a grain of mustard seed, nor those works of piety which the prophet describes: surely we cannot fail to have importunity, which is within reach of anyone who wishes, and by which alone the Lord promises that he will give whatever he is asked? And therefore we must persist in prayer without the unbelief of hesitation, and not doubt in the least that by its constancy we shall obtain all that we have asked according to God. For the Lord, wishing to bestow what is eternal and heavenly, urges us in a way to constrain him by our importunity. He not only does not despise or reject the importunate, but even invites and praises them, and most kindly promises that he will grant them whatever they have hoped for with perseverance, saying: “Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened”; and again: “All things whatever you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive,” and “nothing will be impossible for you.” And therefore, if all the grounds of being heard that we have mentioned are wholly lacking to us, let at least the persistence of importunity encourage us, which lies within the power of anyone who wishes, without any difficulty of merit or of labor. But let no one who prays doubt that he will certainly not be heard if he doubts that he is heard. That we must pray to the Lord tirelessly we are also taught by the example of blessed Daniel: though he was heard from the first day on which he began to pray, he obtained the effect of his petition only after the twenty-first day. Hence we too ought not to cease from the intentness of prayer we have begun if we feel that we are heard rather slowly, lest perhaps the grace of being heard is usefully delayed by the Lord’s dispensation, or the angel who has gone out from the face of the Almighty to bring us the divine benefit is held up by the devil’s resistance. It is certain that he cannot bring the desire of the gift sent to us if he finds that we have ceased from the intentness of the petition we set before us. This could surely have happened to the prophet mentioned above too, had he not with incomparable strength drawn out the perseverance of his prayers to the twenty-first day. Let us therefore not be broken by any despair from confidence in this faith when we feel that we have not obtained what we prayed for, nor let us hesitate over the Lord’s promise that says: “All things whatever you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” For we should reflect on that saying of the blessed evangelist John, by which the ambiguity of this question is clearly resolved: “This is the confidence we have toward him, that whatever we ask according to his will, he hears us.” So he told us to have full and undoubting confidence of being heard only concerning those things that agree not with our own advantage or temporal comforts but with the Lord’s will. This too we are commanded to include in the Lord’s Prayer, saying “Thy will be done,” that is, yours, not ours. For if we also remember the apostle’s words, that “we do not know what we should pray for as we ought,” we understand that we sometimes ask for things contrary to our salvation, and that what we ask is most beneficially refused us by him who sees our advantage more rightly and truly than we do. There is no doubt that this happened even to the teacher of the Gentiles, when he prayed that the angel of Satan be taken from him, who had been set by the Lord’s will to buffet him for his good, saying: “For this I asked the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And he said to me: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’” Our Lord too, praying in the person of the man he had taken up, so that he might give us by his example a pattern of praying as of everything else, expressed this sense when he prayed thus: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not as I will, but as you will,” although his will did not differ from the Father’s will. For he had come “to save what was lost” and “to give his life as a ransom for many,” of which he himself says: “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.” In his person, concerning the unity of will which he always had with the Father, it is also sung by blessed David in the thirty-ninth psalm: “To do your will, my God, I have willed.” For though we read of the Father: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son,” we find no less of the Son: “who gave himself for our sins.” And as it is said of the one: “who did not spare his own Son but delivered him up for us all,” so it is told of the other: “He was offered because he himself willed it.” And so the will of the Father and of the Son is shown to be one in all things, so that even in the very mystery of the Lord’s resurrection their work is taught not to have been discordant. For as the blessed apostle proclaims that the Father worked the resurrection of his body, saying: “and God the Father, who raised him from the dead,” so the Son declares that he will raise the temple of his body, saying: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” And therefore, taught by these examples of the Lord that we have cited, we too ought to close all our supplications with a like prayer, and always add this word to all our petitions: “Yet not as I will, but as you will.” It is quite plain, however, that one who prays with an intent mind cannot keep to that number of three bows which is customarily made in the gatherings of the brothers to close the synaxis.

“Above all, that gospel precept must be observed most carefully, that we should enter our room, shut the door, and pray to our Father. This will be fulfilled by us as follows. We pray within our room when, withdrawing our heart completely from the din of all thoughts and anxieties, we disclose our prayers to the Lord in secret, as it were, and familiarly. We pray with the door shut when, with closed lips and in complete silence, we make supplication to him who searches not voices but hearts. We pray in secret when with the heart alone and an intent mind we lay open our petitions to God only, so that not even the hostile powers can recognize the kind of petition we make. For this reason we must pray in the greatest silence, not only so as not to distract the brothers standing by with our whispers or cries and disturb the thoughts of those praying, but so that the aim of our petition may be hidden also from our enemies themselves, who lie in wait for us most of all when we pray. For thus we shall fulfil that precept: “Guard the doors of your mouth from her who sleeps in your bosom.”

“For this reason we should pray often, but briefly, lest, if we linger, the enemy lying in wait may be able to insert something into our heart. For this is the true sacrifice, since “the sacrifice to God is a contrite spirit”; this is the saving offering, these are the pure libations, this is “the sacrifice of righteousness,” this is “the sacrifice of praise,” these are the true and fat victims, these are the “burnt offerings full of marrow,” which are offered by contrite and humbled hearts. Offering them with the discipline and intentness of spirit we have described, we shall be able to sing with effective power: “Let my prayer be directed as incense in your sight, the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.” The coming of that very hour and of night also reminds us to pay this with fitting devotion. Although, for the measure of our slenderness, much seems to have been said on this subject and the conference has been drawn out long, yet for the sublimity and difficulty of the matter we believe that very little has been discussed.” Astonished rather than filled by these words of holy Isaac, after celebrating the evening synaxis we rested our limbs a little in sleep, and, having agreed to return at first dawn for a fuller treatment, we went back to our quarters, rejoicing both in the acquisition of the precepts and in the assurance of what had been promised. For we felt that the excellence of prayer had only been shown to us in outline in those discussions, but that we had not yet fully grasped the method and power by which its perpetuity is to be acquired or kept.

Among these sublime institutions of the anchorites, which, by God’s gift, have been set out somehow, though in an unskilled style, the very order of the narrative compels us to insert and weave in something that may seem to put a kind of blemish on a beautiful body. Yet I do not doubt that even from this no small instruction will be given to the simpler sort about the image of almighty God of which we read in Genesis, especially since the question concerns so great a doctrine that ignorance of it cannot exist without great blasphemy and harm to the catholic faith.

In the region of Egypt this custom is kept by ancient tradition: when the day of Epiphany is over, which the priests of that province regard as the day both of the Lord’s baptism and of his birth according to the flesh, and so they celebrate the solemnity of both mysteries not separately, as in the western provinces, but in the one festival of this day, letters of the bishop of Alexandria are sent throughout all the churches of Egypt, by which the beginning of Lent and the day of Easter are announced, not only in all the cities but also in all the monasteries. In accordance with this custom, then, a very few days after the earlier conference with Abba Isaac had been held, the festal letters of Theophilus, bishop of that city, arrived. In them, together with the announcement of Easter, he also discussed at length the foolish heresy of the Anthropomorphites and demolished it with an abundant discourse. This was received with such bitterness by almost the whole body of monks who lived throughout the province of Egypt, through the error of simplicity, that, on the contrary, the greater part of the elders decreed that the said bishop should be abhorred by the whole brotherhood as corrupted by a most serious heresy, since he seemed to attack the teaching of Holy Scripture by denying that almighty God is formed in the fashion of a human figure, when Scripture testifies most plainly that Adam was created in his image. In the end this letter was rejected even by those who lived in the desert of Scetis and who surpassed all in the monasteries of Egypt in perfection and knowledge, to such a degree that, apart from Abba Paphnutius, the presbyter of our congregation, none of the other presbyters who presided over the other three churches in that desert would allow it even to be read or recited at all in their assemblies.

Among those who were held by this error was a man named Sarapion, of the most ancient strictness and perfect in every way in the practical discipline. His ignorance about the opinion on the said doctrine was the more prejudicial to all who held the true faith, the more he surpassed almost all the monks in the merit of his life and in length of years. When he could not be brought to the path of right faith by the many exhortations of the holy presbyter Paphnutius, because this persuasion seemed to him new and never known or handed down by those before, it happened that a certain deacon named Photinus, a man of the highest learning, came from the parts of Cappadocia from a desire to see the brothers living in that desert. The blessed Paphnutius welcomed him with the greatest joy and, to confirm the faith contained in the letter of the said bishop, brought him forward before all the brothers and asked him how the catholic churches of the whole East interpreted what is said in Genesis: “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” He explained that the image and likeness of God is taught by all the leaders of the churches not according to the lowly sound of the letter but spiritually, and proved this with an abundant discourse and many testimonies of the Scriptures: that nothing of this kind can apply to that immense, incomprehensible, and invisible majesty, such as could be circumscribed by a human composition and likeness, since it is an incorporeal, uncompounded, and simple nature, which can no more be grasped by the mind than it can be seen by the eyes. At last the old man, moved by the many and very strong arguments of this most learned man, was drawn to the faith of the catholic tradition. His assent filled Abba Paphnutius and all of us with boundless joy, that the Lord had by no means allowed a man of such great age and perfect in such virtues, who erred only through ignorance and rustic simplicity, to stray from the path of the right faith to the end. But when we rose to give thanks and were pouring out prayers to the Lord together, the old man was so confused in mind during the prayer, because he felt that the anthropomorphic image of the Godhead which he had been accustomed to set before himself in prayer was being wiped from his heart, that he suddenly burst into the bitterest weeping and repeated sobs, threw himself on the ground, and cried out with a loud wail: “Alas, wretch that I am! They have taken my God from me, and I have none now to hold, nor do I know whom to adore or to address.” Greatly moved by this, and with the power of the earlier conference still settled in our hearts, we returned to Abba Isaac, and, seeing him face to face, addressed him with these words.

“Even apart from this new thing that has lately arisen, the desire for the earlier conference, which was held on the state of prayer, was calling us to put everything aside and hurry back to your blessedness. Yet the grievous error of Abba Sarapion, conceived, as we think, by the cunning of the most wicked demons, has added something to this longing. For we are cast down in no small despair when we consider that through the fault of this ignorance he has not only entirely lost the great labors which he has carried out so laudably for fifty years in this desert, but has even incurred the danger of eternal death. First, then, we want to know from where and why so grievous an error crept in upon him. Then we ask to be taught how we can reach that quality of prayer about which you discoursed the other day not only fully but also magnificently. For that admirable conference has so far affected us that it has only struck our minds with amazement, but has not shown us how we might achieve or grasp it.”

Isaac: “It is no wonder that a most simple man, never instructed at all about the substance and nature of the Godhead, could until now be held or deceived by the fault of rusticity and the habit of an old error, or, to put it more truly, continue in his former error. This comes, not as you think from a recent delusion of the demons, but from the ignorance of the old paganism. For according to the habit of that error, by which they worshiped demons shaped in human figure, even now they think that the incomprehensible and ineffable majesty of the true God must be adored under the circumscription of some image. They believe that they hold or have nothing if they have not set before them some image which they can continually address when they are at prayer, carry about in their mind, and keep always fixed before their eyes. Against this error of theirs that saying is fittingly aimed: “And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man.” Jeremiah also says: “My people have changed their glory for an idol.” Although this error has grown into some people’s minds from the origin we have described, it has nevertheless been contracted, through lack of learning or rusticity, also in the minds of those who were never polluted by pagan superstition, under color of this testimony which says: “Let us make man in our image and likeness,” so that even the heresy called that of the Anthropomorphites has arisen on the occasion of this detestable interpretation, which with obstinate perversity maintains that the immense and simple substance of the Godhead is composed with our features and human shape. But anyone who has been instructed in the catholic doctrines will abhor this as pagan blasphemy, and so will come to that most pure quality of prayer which will not only mix no likeness of the Godhead and no bodily features (which it is wicked even to speak of) into its supplication, but will not admit into itself even the memory of any word, or the appearance of any deed, or the form of any shape whatever.

“For, as I said in the earlier conference, every mind in its prayer is either raised up or shaped according to the measure of its purity, withdrawing from the contemplation of earthly and material things just so far as the state of its purity has carried it forward, and making it see Jesus with the inner eyes of the soul either still humble and in the flesh, or glorified and coming in the glory of his majesty. For those cannot behold Jesus coming in his kingdom who, still held in a sort of Jewish weakness, cannot say with the apostle: “Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer.” Only those gaze on his divinity with the purest eyes who, rising from lowly and earthly works and thoughts, withdraw with him to the high mountain of solitude. That mountain, free from the tumult of all earthly thoughts and disturbances and set apart from the admixture of all vices, raised high by the purest faith and the eminence of the virtues, reveals the glory of his face and the image of his brightness to those who deserve to behold him with the pure eyes of the soul. Jesus is indeed seen also by those who live in cities, towns, and villages, that is, who are in the practical way of life and engaged in works, but not in that brightness in which he appeared to those who can climb with him the said mountain of the virtues, that is, Peter, James, and John. For so in solitude he appeared to Moses and spoke with Elijah. Our Lord, wishing to confirm this and to leave us examples of perfect purity, although he, the very fountain of inviolable holiness, had no need of the outward help of withdrawal and the benefit of solitude to obtain it (for the fullness of purity could not be stained by any filth of the crowds, nor could he be defiled by human company who cleanses and sanctifies all that is polluted), nevertheless withdrew alone to the mountain to pray. By the example of his withdrawal he teaches us that if we too wish to call upon God with a pure and whole disposition of heart, we should likewise withdraw from all the restlessness and confusion of the crowds, so that while still living in this body we may fit ourselves at least in some part to a kind of likeness of that blessedness which is promised to the saints in the future, and that God may be to us “all in all.”

“For then that prayer of our Savior will be perfectly fulfilled in us, in which he prayed to the Father for his disciples, saying: “that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and they in us,” and again: “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us,” when that perfect love of God, with which “he first loved us,” has passed into the disposition of our heart too, this prayer of the Lord being fulfilled, which we believe can in no way be made void. This will come about when all our love, all our desire, all our zeal, all our effort, all our thought, all that we live, all that we speak, all that we breathe, will be God, and that unity which now exists of the Father with the Son and of the Son with the Father has been poured into our understanding and mind; that is, that as he loves us with a sincere, pure, and indissoluble love, we too may be joined to him with a perpetual and inseparable love, so united to him that whatever we breathe, whatever we understand, whatever we speak, is God. So we shall reach, I say, that end we mentioned before, which the same Lord in his prayer longs to be fulfilled in us: “that they may all be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they too may be made perfect in one,” and again: “Father, those whom you have given me, I will that where I am, they also may be with me.” This, then, ought to be the goal of the solitary, this his whole intention: that he may deserve to possess the image of future blessedness in this body, and begin in a way to taste beforehand in this vessel the pledge of that heavenly life and glory. This, I say, is the end of all perfection: that the mind, refined from every fleshly condition, may be raised daily to spiritual things, until its whole life and every movement of the heart become one continual prayer.

Germanus: “The greatness of our amazement grows beyond our admiration for that earlier conference, on account of which we have hurried back here. For the more we are inflamed with desire for perfect blessedness by the incitement of this teaching, the more we fall into despair, not knowing how we can seek or obtain a discipline of such height. Therefore, since what we had begun to turn over in long meditation in our cell must perhaps be set out in a wordy account, we ask you to allow us patiently to explain it, although we know that your blessedness is not usually offended by the follies of the weak, which should be brought into the open for this very reason, that what is absurd in them may be corrected. As far as our opinion goes, then, the perfection of any art or discipline must begin from certain soft rudiments and first be imbued with easier and very tender beginnings, so that, nourished as it were with a kind of reasonable milk, it may grow little by little and be brought up, and so climb gradually and step by step from the lowest to the highest. When it has entered on the plainer first principles and, so to speak, the gates of the profession it has taken up, it will consequently reach the inner chambers and the lofty summits of perfection without toil. For how could any boy pronounce the simple combinations of syllables unless he had first carefully learned the forms of the letters? Or how will one gain quick skill in reading who is not yet able to join together short and very brief groupings of words? And by what method will one who is poorly instructed in the skill of grammar attain either rhetorical eloquence or philosophical knowledge? Therefore I do not doubt that this most sublime discipline too, by which we are taught to cleave to God continually, has certain foundations of instruction; once these are laid most firmly, the lofty summits of perfection can then be raised upon them. We faintly suspect that its first principles are these: that we should first know by what meditation God may be held or thought of, and then how we can keep this same subject, whatever it is, without wavering, which we do not doubt is the summit of all perfection. And therefore we want to be shown some subject for this remembrance by which God may be conceived in the mind and held perpetually, so that, keeping it before our eyes, when we feel we have slipped away from it, we may have at hand something to which we can at once return when we come to ourselves, and take it up again without any delay of going round about and without difficulty of searching. For it happens that when we have wandered from spiritual contemplations and turn back to ourselves as from a deadly sleep, and, as if awakened, look for a subject by which we might revive that spiritual remembrance which has been buried, we are held up by the delay of the search itself, and before we find it we fall back again from our effort, and before any spiritual insight is born the intention conceived in the heart vanishes. It is quite certain that this confusion happens to us because we do not keep firmly before our eyes something specific, like a formula, to which the wandering soul could be called back after many twists and various excursions, and enter, as it were, a harbor of rest after long shipwrecks. So it comes about that the mind, continually hindered by this ignorance and difficulty, is always wandering and tossed about as if drunk among various things, and does not hold long or firmly even the spiritual thing which has occurred to it by chance rather than by effort, since, always taking in one thing after another, it does not notice their end and departure any more than their entry and beginnings.”

Isaac: “Your inquiry, so minute and subtle, is an early sign of approaching purity. For no one will be able even to ask about these things, I will not say to look into them and discern them, unless diligent and effective effort of mind and watchful care have carried him forward to search out the depth of these questions, and the constant intention of a disciplined life has made him, through practical experience, attempt the threshold of this purity and knock at its doors. And therefore, since I see you standing, I will not say before the doors of that true prayer we are discussing, but already feeling its inner chambers and interior with the very hands of experience, as it were, and on the point of touching some of its parts, I do not think I shall have much labor in bringing you, who are already wandering about within its hall, into its sanctuary too, as far as the Lord shall guide; nor do I think that you will be held back by any obstacle of difficulty from seeing into the things that are to be shown. For he is close to knowledge who wisely recognizes what he should ask, and he is not far from understanding who has begun to understand what he does not know. And therefore I do not fear to incur the charge of betrayal or of lightness if I disclose what, in the earlier treatment of the perfection of prayer, I had withheld from the discussion; for I think that its power would have been opened to you, set as you are in this practice and pursuit, by God’s grace even without the service of our words.

“Therefore, following the method which you have most wisely compared to the teaching of little children (who cannot otherwise receive the first teaching of the letters, nor recognize their strokes nor draw their shapes with a steady hand, unless they grow accustomed to copying their forms by constant looking and daily imitation, using certain models and patterns carefully pressed into wax), we must hand on to you the formula of this spiritual contemplation too. Fixing your gaze always most tenaciously on it, you may learn either to turn it over profitably in unbroken continuity or, by its use and meditation, to climb to higher contemplations. This, then, will be set before you as the formula of the discipline and prayer you are seeking, which every monk who is striving for the continual remembrance of God should grow used to meditating by the unceasing turning of the heart, all the variety of thoughts driven out; for he will not be able to keep it in any other way unless he has been freed from all bodily cares and anxieties. As it was handed down to us by a few who were left of the most ancient fathers, so it is disclosed by us only to very few, and to those who truly thirst. For keeping the perpetual remembrance of God, then, this formula of devotion will be set before us inseparably: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Not without reason has this verse been chosen out of the whole body of the Scriptures. For it takes up all the feelings that can come upon human nature, and it fits every state and all assaults quite properly and suitably. It contains an invocation of God against every danger; it contains the humility of devout confession; it contains the watchfulness of constant care and fear; it contains the consideration of one’s own frailty, confidence in being heard, and trust in a protection always present and at hand. For whoever continually calls on his protector is sure that he is always present. It contains the ardor of love and charity; it contains an awareness of snares and fear of enemies, by whom, seeing himself surrounded day and night, one confesses that he cannot be freed without the help of his defender. This verse is an impregnable wall, an impenetrable breastplate, and a most strong shield for all who are troubled by the attacks of demons. It does not allow those who are in acedia and anxiety of mind, or depressed by sadness or any thoughts, to despair of the remedies of salvation, since it shows that the one it calls upon is continually watching our struggles and is not far from those who pray to him. It warns us, when we are in spiritual success and joy of heart, that we must not be lifted up at all or puffed up by our prosperous state, which it testifies cannot be kept without God as protector, since it implores him not only always but also quickly to help. This verse, I say, is found necessary and useful for each of us in whatever condition he lives. For whoever wants to be helped always and in all things shows that he needs God as helper not only in hard and sad things but equally in prosperous and joyful ones, so that as God rescues him from the former, he may make him remain in the latter, knowing that in neither can human frailty survive without his aid. I am troubled by the passion of gluttony; I seek foods the desert does not know, and in the squalid solitude the smells of royal dishes are thrust upon me, and I feel myself dragged, much against my will, toward desire for them: I must therefore say: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I am urged to anticipate the hour fixed for the meal, or I struggle with great pain of heart to keep the measure of due and customary sparingness: I must cry out with groaning: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Because of the assault of the flesh I need stricter fasts, but weariness of stomach forbids me, or dryness and constriction of the bowels deter me: so that effect may be given to my desire, or else that the heat of carnal lust may subside without the remedy of a stricter fast, I must pray: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Coming to the meal when the lawful hour prompts, I shrink from taking bread and am kept from all eating that nature needs: I must cry out with a wail: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” When I want to apply myself to reading for steadiness of heart, a headache interrupts and prevents me, and at the third hour sleep knocks my face against the sacred page, and I am forced either to go beyond the time set for rest or to anticipate it; finally, the heaviest pressure of sleep compels me to cut short the canonical measure of the synaxis and the psalms: likewise I must cry out: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Sleep taken from my eyes, I see myself worn out for many nights by devilish sleeplessness, and all the refreshment of night’s rest shut out from my eyelids: I must pray with sighs: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” While I am still engaged in the struggle with the vices, the titillation of the flesh suddenly pricks me and tries by a pleasant delight to draw me to consent while I sleep: lest the strange fire, blazing up, burn the sweet-smelling flowers of chastity, I must cry out: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I feel the incitements of lust extinguished and the generative heat grown cool in my members: that this virtue that has been won, or rather the grace of God, may remain longer or for ever in me, I must say intently: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I am disquieted by the goads of anger, love of money, and sadness, and am driven to break the gentleness I had set before me and held dear: lest I be carried away by the disturbance of rage into the bitterness of gall, I must cry out with the deepest groaning: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I am tried by acedia, vainglory, and the elation of pride, and my mind flatters itself with a subtle thought about the negligence or lukewarmness of others: lest this pernicious suggestion of the enemy prevail in me, I must pray with all contrition of heart: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I have acquired the grace of humility and simplicity by laying aside the swelling of pride through constant compunction of spirit: lest “the foot of pride come against me” again “and the hand of the sinner move me,” and I be pierced more gravely by elation at my victory, I must cry out with all my strength: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” I seethe with countless and various wanderings of the soul and instability of heart, and I cannot restrain the scattering of my thoughts, and I cannot pour out my very prayer without the interruption and phantasm of empty figures and the going over of words and deeds, and I feel myself so bound by the dryness of this barrenness that I feel myself unable to bring forth any birth of spiritual thoughts at all: so that I may deserve to be freed from this squalor of soul, from which I cannot extricate myself with many groans and sighs, I shall of necessity cry out: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Again, I feel that I have obtained, by the visitation of the Holy Spirit, direction of soul, steadiness of thoughts, and eagerness of heart with ineffable joy and ecstasy of mind, and in the overflowing of spiritual thoughts I have received, by a sudden illumination of the Lord, the revelation of most holy meanings that were previously quite hidden from me: so that I may deserve to remain longer in them, I must cry anxiously and often: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Surrounded by the terrors of demons at night I am harassed, and I am disquieted by the phantasms of unclean spirits; the very hope of salvation and life is taken from me by the horror of fear: fleeing to the saving harbor of this verse, I shall cry out with all my strength: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” Again, when I have been restored by the Lord’s consolation and, heartened by his coming, feel myself surrounded as it were by countless thousands of angels, so that I suddenly dare to seek out the encounter and challenge to combat of those whom I used to dread worse than death, and whose touch, or rather nearness, I felt with horror of mind and body: so that the vigor of this steadfastness may by God’s grace remain longer in me, I must cry out with all my strength: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.” The prayer of this verse, then, must be poured out with unceasing continuity: in adversity, that we may be rescued; in prosperity, that we may be kept and not lifted up. Let the meditation of this verse, I say, turn unbroken in your breast. Do not cease to sing it while you are at any work or service, or on a journey. Meditate on it while sleeping and eating and in the last necessities of nature. This turning of the heart, become for you a saving formula, will not only keep you unharmed from every attack of demons, but will also cleanse you of all the vices of earthly contagion and lead you to those invisible and heavenly contemplations and carry you on to that ineffable ardor of prayer that very few have experienced. Let sleep steal upon you as you meditate on this verse, until, formed by its unceasing exercise, you grow used to singing it even in your sleep. Let it be the first thing that comes to you when you wake; let it anticipate all your thoughts as you awake; let it hand you over, as you rise from your bed, to the bending of the knees, and from there lead you on to every work and action; let it accompany you at all times. You shall meditate on it, according to the lawgiver’s precepts, “sitting in your house and walking on the way, sleeping and rising.” You shall write it on the threshold and doors of your mouth; you shall place it on the walls of your house and in the inner chambers of your breast, so that this chant may be your prayer bowing down when you kneel to pray, and, when you rise from it and go about all the necessary business of life, it may become your upright and continual prayer.

“Let the mind hold this formula, this one, unceasingly, until, strengthened by its unceasing use and continual meditation, it casts off and rejects the riches and ample wealth of all thoughts, and so, restricted to the poverty of this verse, comes with ready ease to that gospel beatitude which holds first place among the other beatitudes. For he says: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” And so one who becomes an outstanding poor man through such poverty will fulfil the prophet’s saying: “The poor and needy will praise the name of the Lord.” And indeed what greater or holier poverty can there be than that of the man who, knowing that he has no protection and no strength of his own, asks daily help from another’s bounty, and, understanding that his life and substance are sustained at every moment by divine aid, not without reason professes himself the Lord’s true beggar, crying to him humbly every day: “But I am a beggar and poor; O God, help me”? And so, rising by his illumination to that manifold knowledge of God too, he may then begin to be fed on more sublime and more sacred mysteries, according to what is said by the prophet: “The high mountains for the stags, the rock a refuge for the hedgehogs.” This fits quite properly the sense we have described, since whoever persists in simplicity and innocence is harmful or troublesome to no one, but, content with his simplicity alone, wishes only to protect himself from becoming the prey of those who lie in wait; having become a spiritual hedgehog, he is protected by the continual covering of that rock of the gospel; that is, fortified by the remembrance of the Lord’s passion and by unceasing meditation on the said verse, he escapes the snares of the attacking enemy. Of these spiritual hedgehogs it is also said in Proverbs: “And the hedgehogs are a feeble people, who have made their houses in the rocks.” And indeed what is feebler than a Christian, what weaker than a monk, to whom not only is no vengeance for injuries allowed, but not even a mild and silent disturbance is permitted to spring up within? But whoever, advancing from this state, not only possesses the simplicity of innocence but, armed also with the virtue of discernment, has become a destroyer of poisonous serpents, having Satan crushed under his feet, and has reached by his eagerness of mind the likeness of the rational stag, will feed on the mountains of the prophets and apostles, that is, on their highest and most sublime mysteries. Nourished by their continual pasture, and taking into himself all the feelings of the psalms, he will begin to sing them in such a way that he utters them with deep compunction of heart, not as though composed by the prophet but as if produced by himself, like his own prayer; or at least he will consider that they were directed to his own person, and will recognize that their sayings were not fulfilled only then by or in the prophet but are carried out and fulfilled in himself every day. For then the divine Scriptures lie open to us more clearly, and in a way their veins and marrow are laid bare, when our experience not only grasps but even anticipates their meaning, and the sense of the words is disclosed to us not by exposition but by proofs. For taking up the same disposition of heart in which each psalm was sung or written, and becoming as it were its authors, we shall go before its meaning rather than follow it; that is, gathering the force of what is said before we gather knowledge of it, we shall in a way remember, as we meditate on them, what has been done in us or is done in daily assaults; and as we sing we shall recall what our negligence has produced in us, or our diligence gained, or divine providence bestowed, or the enemy’s prompting cheated us of, or slippery and subtle forgetfulness taken away, or human frailty brought upon us, or improvident ignorance deceived us in. For we find all these feelings expressed in the Psalms, so that, seeing what has befallen us as in a most clear mirror, we may recognize it more effectively; and so, taught by our feelings as teachers, we may touch these things not as heard but as seen, and bring them forth from the inner disposition of the heart not as committed to memory but as implanted in the very nature of things, so that we penetrate their sense not by the text we read but by the experience that has gone before. And so our mind will reach that incorruption of prayer to which, as far as the Lord deigned to grant, the order of the conference ascended in the earlier discussion: prayer that is not only occupied with the sight of no image, but is marked by no utterance of voice or words, and is brought forth with the fiery intention of the mind, through an ineffable ecstasy of heart, with an insatiable eagerness of spirit; prayer which the mind, carried beyond all senses and visible matter, pours out to God with “groanings that cannot be uttered” and with sighs.

Germanus: “We think that you have set out quite openly and clearly not only the teaching of this spiritual discipline we asked for, but perfection itself. For what can be more perfect or more sublime than to embrace the remembrance of God in so brief a meditation, and by turning over a single verse to pass beyond all the bounds of visible things, and in a way to enclose the feelings of all prayers in a short phrase? And therefore we ask that one thing that remains be explained to us: how we can hold firmly this very verse which you have given us as a formula, so that, as by God’s grace we have been freed from the follies of worldly thoughts, we may likewise keep hold of spiritual ones without wavering.

“For when our mind has taken up a passage of some psalm, it slips away without our noticing and, unaware and dazed, rolls on to the text of another Scripture. And when it has begun to turn this over within itself, before it has been fully examined, the memory of another text arises and shuts out meditation on the earlier subject. From this too it is carried to another as a new meditation slips in, and so the soul, always rolling from psalm to psalm, leaping from the text of the gospel to a reading from the apostle, and tumbling from this also to the words of the prophets, and carried from there to certain spiritual histories, is tossed unsteady and wandering through the whole body of the Scriptures. It can neither reject nor keep anything at will, nor finish anything with full judgment and examination, having become only a toucher and taster of spiritual meanings, not their begetter or possessor. And so the mind, always changeable and wandering, is drawn this way and that as if drunk even at the time of the synaxis, discharging no duty fittingly. For example, when it prays, it recalls a psalm or some reading. When it sings, it meditates on something other than what the text of the psalm itself contains. When it recites a reading, it turns over something to be done or remembers something done. And in this way, receiving and letting go nothing in a disciplined or timely way, it seems to be driven by chance assaults, having no power to keep what delights it or to remain in it. It is necessary for us above all, then, to know how we can carry out these spiritual duties fittingly, or at least keep this very verse which you have given us as a formula unwaveringly, so that the beginnings and ends of all our thoughts may not drift in their own fickleness but may lie in our control.”

Isaac: “Although I think this was sufficiently explained the other day when we were discussing the state of prayer, yet since you ask for the same things to be repeated to you, I shall speak briefly about the steadying of the heart. There are three things that make a wandering mind stable: vigils, meditation, and prayer; constancy and continual attention to them give the soul stable firmness. But this can in no way be grasped unless all the anxieties and cares of the present life have first been cast off by the tireless constancy of work, work devoted not to love of money but to the sacred uses of the coenobium, so that we may be able to fulfil that apostolic command: “Pray without ceasing.” For he prays very little who is accustomed to pray only at the time when the knees are bent. But he never prays who, even with bended knees, is distracted by any wandering of heart. And therefore, such as we wish to be found when we pray, such we ought to be before the time of prayer. For the mind at the time of its supplication must be formed by its previous state, and when it prays it is either raised to heavenly things or sunk into earthly ones by those thoughts on which it dwelt before prayer.” Thus far Abba Isaac set out the second conference on the character of prayer to us in our astonishment. We greatly admired his teaching on the meditation of the said verse, which he had handed on to be kept by beginners as a kind of first instruction, and we desired to practise it most tenaciously, since we thought it brief and easy; but we found it quite a lot harder to observe than that former pursuit of ours, by which we used to run about everywhere through the whole body of the Scriptures in varied meditation without the bond of any perseverance. It is clear, then, that no one at all is excluded from perfection of heart by lack of learning, nor is rusticity an obstacle to attaining that purity of heart and soul which lies most briefly at hand for all, provided only that they keep a sound and whole intention of mind toward God by continual meditation on this verse.

When we were living in a coenobium in Syria, after the first rudiments of the faith, and with some growth following, we had begun to long for a greater grace of perfection, we resolved at once to go to Egypt and, penetrating even the most remote desert of the Thebaid, to visit very many of the saints whose fame had spread everywhere, from a desire, if not to imitate them, at least to know them. So we came by sea to a town of Egypt called Thennesus. Its inhabitants are so surrounded on every side either by the sea or by salt lagoons that, since there is no land, they give themselves only to trade and gain their wealth and livelihood by commerce by ship; so much so that when they want to put up buildings there is no earth available unless it is brought by boat from far away.

When we arrived there, God, favoring our desires, brought about the arrival of the most blessed and eminent man, Bishop Archebius. He had been snatched from the company of the anchorites and given as bishop to the town of Panephysis, and he kept his purpose of solitude with such strictness all his life that he relaxed nothing of the course of his former humility and was not flattered by the honor added to him. For he did not testify that he had been called to that office as one fit for it, but lamented that he had been driven out of the discipline of the anchoritic life as unworthy, because, though he had stayed in it for thirty-seven years, he had by no means been able to reach the purity of so great a profession. When he had received us devoutly and most kindly in the said Thennesus, where the business of electing a bishop there had brought him, and learned of our desire to seek out the holy fathers even in the further parts of Egypt, he said: “Come, see meanwhile the old men who live not far from our monastery. Their age shines out in their bodies, now bent, and their holiness in their very appearance, so that even the sight of them alone can give great teaching to those who see them. From them you may learn, not so much by words as by the very example of a holy life, what I grieve that I have lost and, having lost it, can no longer hand on. But I believe my poverty will be somewhat relieved by this effort, if, when you are seeking that gospel pearl which I myself do not have, I at least provide where you may more readily buy it.”

So, taking a staff and a wallet, as is the custom there for all monks setting out on a journey, he himself led us as guide of the way to his own city, that is, Panephysis. Its lands, and indeed most of the neighboring region, once very rich (for, as it is said, everything for the royal table was supplied from it), had been overrun by the sea, which a sudden earthquake had driven out beyond its bounds; and so, almost all the villages having collapsed, it covered lands once fertile with salt marshes, so that people think that what is sung spiritually in the psalm, “He turned rivers into a desert, and springs of water into thirst, a fruitful land into saltness, for the wickedness of those who dwell in it,” was foretold literally of that region. In these places, then, many towns set on higher mounds, their inhabitants driven away, were in this way made into islands by that flood, and they offer the solitude the saints desire in their withdrawal. In them lived three elders, anchorites of great age: Chaeremon, Nesteros, and Joseph.

So blessed Archebius chose to take us first to Chaeremon, because he was both nearer to his monastery and older than the other two. For he had passed the hundredth year of his life, eager only in spirit, and his back had been so bent by length of years and constancy in prayer that, as if returned to earliest infancy, he went about with his hands let down and stretched out to the ground. Looking at both his wonderful face and his gait (for though all his limbs were now weakened and deadened, he had by no means lost the rigor of his former strictness), we humbly asked him for a word of teaching, declaring that the desire for spiritual instruction alone had been the reason for our coming. Sighing heavily he said: “What teaching can I give you, when the weakness of old age, as it has slackened my former rigor, has also taken away my confidence in speaking? For how should I presume to teach what I myself do not do, or instruct another in what I know I now practise either less or more coldly? For that reason I have not allowed any of the younger men to live with me up to this age, lest another’s strictness be relaxed by my example. For the authority of one who teaches will never be effective unless he fixes it in the hearer’s heart by the effect of his own practice.”

Pierced with no small confusion at this, we answered: “Although the hardness of this place, or the solitary life itself, which even robust youth can hardly endure, should be enough for all our instruction, and these teach us and pierce us quite abundantly even if you are silent, we nevertheless ask you to set aside your silence a little and kindly pour into us those things by which we may embrace the virtue we see in you, not so much by imitation as by admiration. For even if our lukewarmness, revealed to you, does not deserve to obtain what we ask, at least the labor of so long a journey should obtain it, by which we have hurried here from the rudiments of the coenobium at Bethlehem, out of desire for your instruction and love of our own progress.”

Then blessed Chaeremon said: “There are three things that make people refrain from vices: either the fear of hell or of present laws, or the hope and desire of the kingdom of heaven, or the disposition toward goodness itself and the love of the virtues. For we read that fear abhors the contagion of evil: “The fear of the Lord hates evil.” Hope too shuts out the assault of all vices: “For none who hope in him will offend.” Love also does not fear the fall of sins, since “love never fails,” and again: “Love covers a multitude of sins.” And therefore the blessed apostle, including the whole sum of salvation in the perfection of these three virtues, says: “Now there remain faith, hope, love, these three.” For it is faith that makes us avoid the contagion of vices through fear of the judgment to come and its punishments; hope that, calling our mind away from present things, despises all the pleasures of the body in expectation of heavenly rewards; love that, kindling us with ardor of mind to the love of Christ and the fruit of the spiritual virtues, makes us detest with complete hatred whatever is contrary to them. Although these three seem to tend to one end (for they urge us to abstain from unlawful things), yet they differ from one another by great degrees of excellence. For the two former belong properly to those people who, tending toward progress, have not yet acquired the disposition of the virtues; the third belongs especially to God and to those who have received into themselves the image and likeness of God. For he alone does what is good with no fear and no reward urging him, but solely from the disposition of goodness. For, as Solomon says, “The Lord has made all things for himself.” For by reason of his goodness he bestows all abundance of good things on worthy and unworthy alike, since he can neither be wearied by injuries nor moved in his feelings by the iniquities of men, remaining always perfect goodness and unchangeable nature.

“If anyone, then, is striving for perfection, from that first stage of fear, which we have called properly servile, of which it is said: “When you have done all things, say: We are unprofitable servants,” he will climb by a step of progress to the higher path of hope. This is compared no longer to a slave but to a hired servant, because it awaits the wages of recompense, and, as though secure about the pardon of sins and the fear of punishment, and conscious of its good works, although it seems to seek the reward promised, it has not yet been able to reach that disposition of the son who, trusting in his father’s generous indulgence, does not doubt that all that is his father’s is his own. To this even the prodigal, who had lost the name of son together with his father’s property, does not dare to aspire, saying: “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” For after those husks of the swine, of which he was denied his fill, that is, the filthy food of the vices, when he came to himself and, pierced by saving fear, had now begun to shudder at the uncleanness of the swine and to dread the torments of dire hunger, he, having become as it were a slave, now thinking of wages, desires even the rank of a hired servant and says: “How many hired servants of my father have bread in abundance, and I perish here with hunger! I will return to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me as one of your hired servants.” But the father, running out to meet him, received this word of humble repentance with greater kindness than it had been uttered, and, not content to grant him the lesser things, passed over both stages without delay and restored him to the former dignity of sons. We too, then, must hasten, so that, climbing by the indissoluble grace of love to the third stage, that of the sons, who believe that all that is the father’s is theirs, we may deserve to receive the image and likeness of that heavenly Father and be able to cry out, in imitation of that true Son: “All that the Father has is mine.” This the blessed apostle also declares of us, saying: “All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world or life or death, or things present or things to come: all are yours.” To this likeness the Savior’s commands also call us: “Be perfect,” he says, “as your heavenly Father is perfect.” For in those others the disposition toward goodness is sometimes interrupted, when the vigor of the soul, slackened by some lukewarmness or joy or delight, takes away for the moment either the fear of hell or the desire of future things. And there is indeed in them a certain stage of progress that teaches us, so that when we begin to avoid vices through fear of punishment or hope of rewards, we may be able to pass on to the stage of love; for, he says, “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has punishment, and he who fears is not perfect in love. Let us therefore love, because God first loved us.” So we shall not be able to climb to that true perfection in any other way than this: that as he first loved us for no other reason than our salvation, so we too love him for no other reason than for love of him alone. Therefore we must strive to climb with perfect ardor of mind from this fear to hope, and from hope to the love of God or the love of the virtues themselves, so that, passing over into the disposition toward goodness itself, we may hold unwaveringly, as far as is possible for human nature, to what is good.

“For there is a great difference between one who extinguishes the fires of the vices in himself through fear of hell or hope of future reward, and one who, from the disposition of divine love, shudders at wickedness and uncleanness themselves and possesses the good of purity only out of love and desire for chastity, who, no longer looking to the reward of a future promise but delighted with the consciousness of a present good, does everything not in view of punishments but in delight in the virtues. For this state can neither abuse an opportunity to sin when all human witnesses are removed, nor be violated by the hidden delights of thoughts, since, holding the disposition of virtue itself in its very marrow, it not only does not admit into the heart whatever is contrary to it, but even detests it with the greatest horror. For it is one thing for someone, delighted by a present good, to hate the vices and the contagions of the flesh, and another to restrain unlawful desires in view of future reward; and it is one thing to fear present loss and another to dread future punishment. Finally, it is far greater to be unwilling to leave the good for the sake of the good itself than not to consent to evil for fear of evil. For in the former the good is voluntary, but in the latter it is as though forced and violently wrung from one who is unwilling, either by fear of punishment or by desire of rewards. For he who abstains from the allurements of the vices by reason of fear will return again to what he loves once the barrier of fear is removed, and so he will not keep the stability of good continually, nor will he ever rest even from attack, since he will not possess a firm and lasting peace of chastity. For where there is the unrest of wars, the dangers of wounds cannot but occur. For anyone placed in battle, however much a warrior he is and however bravely he fights, often inflicting deadly wounds on his opponents, must sometimes be grazed by the enemy’s sword. But he who has overcome the assault of the vices and now enjoys the security of peace, and has passed over into the disposition of virtue itself, will keep the state of that good to which he now wholly belongs, since he believes nothing more damaging than the loss of inner chastity. For he judges nothing dearer or more precious than present purity, and for him either a harmful transgression of the virtues or the poisonous contagion of vice itself is a grievous punishment. To such a man, I say, neither will reverence for human presence add anything of uprightness, nor will solitude lessen it; but carrying everywhere and always with him his conscience as judge not only of his actions but also of his thoughts, he will strive to please it above all, knowing that he can neither get round it, nor deceive it, nor escape it.”

“If anyone, relying on God’s help and not on the labor of his own effort, deserves to possess this state, he will begin to pass from the servile condition, in which there is fear, and from the hireling’s desire of hope, in which what is sought is not so much the goodness of the giver as the reward of recompense, into the adoption of sons, where there is no longer fear, no longer desire, but that love which never fails continues for ever. Rebuking certain people about this fear and love, the Lord showed what suits which person: “A son honors his father, and a servant fears his master. If then I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear?” For one who is a slave must fear, since “if, knowing his master’s will, he has done things worthy of stripes, he will be beaten with many.” Whoever, then, through this love has reached the image and likeness of God will now delight in the good for the pleasure of the good itself, and, possessing in a way a like disposition of patience and gentleness, will no longer be angry at any vices of sinners, but rather, grieving and suffering with their weaknesses, will beg pardon for them. Remembering that he himself was attacked by the goads of similar passions until he was saved by the Lord’s mercy, and that he was delivered from the assault of the flesh not by his own effort but by God’s protection, he will understand that not anger but mercy should be shown to those who go astray, singing to God that verse with all tranquillity of heart: “You have broken my bonds; to you I will offer the sacrifice of praise,” and: “Unless the Lord had helped me, my soul would soon have dwelt in hell.” And abiding in this humility of mind he will be able to fulfil that gospel command of perfection too: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and slander you.” And so we shall deserve to reach that reward which is added, by which we not only bear the image and likeness of God but are even called sons: “that you may be,” he says, “sons of your Father who is in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” Blessed John, knowing that he had attained this disposition, says: “that we may have confidence on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world.” For in what can weak and frail human nature be as he is, unless it always extends the calm love of its heart to good and evil, just and unjust, in imitation of God, and does good from the disposition of goodness itself, reaching that true adoption of the sons of God of which the same blessed apostle declares: “Everyone who is born of God does not commit sin, because his seed abides in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God,” and again: “We know that everyone who is born of God does not sin, but his being born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him”? This must be understood as said not of every kind of sin but only of capital crimes. Whoever will not withdraw and cleanse himself from these, the same apostle in another place declares should not even be prayed for, saying: “If anyone knows that his brother is sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and He will give him life, for those who sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death; I do not say that one should ask for that.” But of those which are declared not to be unto death, from which even those who serve Christ faithfully cannot be free, however carefully they guard themselves, it is said: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us,” and again: “If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” For it is impossible for any of the saints not to fall into those small faults which are committed by word, by thought, by ignorance, by forgetfulness, by necessity, by the will, by surprise. Although these are different from the sin that is called unto death, they cannot be free from fault and blame.

“When, then, someone has attained this disposition of goodness and imitation of God that we have described, then, clothed with the heart of the Lord’s long-suffering, he will pray even for his persecutors, saying likewise: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” On the other hand, it is a clear sign of a soul not yet strained clean of the dregs of the vices not to grieve with a feeling of mercy at the crimes of others, but to keep the rigid censure of a judge. For how will he be able to obtain perfection of heart who does not have that by which the apostle indicated that the fullness of the law can be completed, saying: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so you will fulfil the law of Christ,” and who does not possess that virtue of love which “is not provoked, is not puffed up, thinks no evil, bears all things, endures all things”? For “the righteous man has pity on the lives of his beasts, but the heart of the wicked is without mercy.” And therefore it is quite certain that a monk is subject to the same vices that he condemns in another with unmerciful and inhuman severity. For “a harsh king will fall into evils,” and “he who stops his ears so as not to hear the weak, he too will call, and there will be no one to hear him.”

Germanus: “You have discoursed powerfully and magnificently on the perfect love of God. Yet this troubles us: that while you exalted it with such praise, you said that the fear of God and the hope of eternal reward are imperfect, although the prophet seems to have thought quite otherwise of them, saying: “Fear the Lord, all you his saints, for there is no want to those who fear him,” and again confessing that he practised the keeping of God’s righteous ordinances in view of the reward, saying: “I have inclined my heart to do your righteous ordinances for ever, because of the reward.” And the apostle says: “By faith Moses, when he was grown, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be afflicted with the people of God than to have the pleasure of sin for a time, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of the Egyptians; for he looked to the reward.” How, then, are they to be thought imperfect, when blessed David boasts that he did the Lord’s righteous ordinances for the sake of the reward, and the lawgiver is said to have scorned adoption into royal dignity and to have preferred the harshest affliction to the treasures of the Egyptians, looking forward to future rewards?”

Chaeremon: “Divine Scripture calls the freedom of our will to different degrees of perfection according to the state and measure of each mind. For one uniform crown of perfection could not be set before all, since there is not one virtue, will, or fervor in all; and therefore the divine word has established, as it were, different ranks and different measures of perfection itself. The variety of the gospel beatitudes also shows plainly that this is so. For although those are called blessed whose is the kingdom of heaven, and blessed those who will possess the earth, and blessed those who will receive consolation, and blessed those who will obtain their fill, yet we believe there is a great difference between dwelling in the kingdom of heaven and possessing that earth, whatever it is, and between receiving consolation and the fullness and satisfaction of righteousness, and a great distance between those who will obtain mercy and those who will deserve to enjoy the most glorious vision of God. “For there is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead.” Although, then, in this way divine Scripture praises those who fear God and says: “Blessed are all who fear the Lord,” and thereby promises them full blessedness, yet again it says: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has punishment, and he who fears is not perfect in love.” And again, though it is glorious to serve God, and it is said: “Serve the Lord in fear,” and: “It is a great thing for you to be called my servant,” and: “Blessed is that servant whom his master, when he comes, will find so doing,” yet it is said to the apostles: “I no longer call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master does; but I call you friends, because all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you,” and again: “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” You see, then, that the degrees of perfection are different, and that we are called by the Lord from high things to higher, so that one who has become blessed and perfect in the fear of God, walking, as it is written, “from strength to strength,” and from one perfection to another, that is, rising with eagerness of mind from fear to hope, may be invited again to a more blessed state, which is love; and that one who has been “a faithful and wise servant” may pass to the companionship of friendship and the adoption of sons. In this sense, then, our statement too is to be understood: not that we declare the thought of that eternal punishment, or of the most blessed reward promised to the saints, to be of no moment, but that, although these are useful and bring those who follow them to the beginnings of blessedness, love, in which there is fuller confidence and joy now lasting, takes them up from servile fear and hireling hope, transfers them to the love of God and the adoption of sons, and in a way makes the perfect more perfect. For “in my Father’s house,” says the Savior, “there are many mansions,” and although all the stars appear to be in the sky, yet there is a great difference between the brightness of the sun and of the moon and of the morning star and of the other stars. And therefore the blessed apostle, preferring love not only to fear and hope but also to all the gifts that are held great and wonderful, shows the way of love as more excellent beyond measure than all. For when, having completed the whole list of spiritual gifts, he wanted to describe the members of its virtue, he began thus: “And yet I show you a more excellent way beyond measure. If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I could move mountains, and if I distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.” You see, then, that nothing is found more precious, nothing more perfect, nothing more sublime, and, if I may so put it, nothing more lasting than love. “For whether there are prophecies, they will pass away; whether tongues, they will cease; whether knowledge, it will be destroyed. But love never fails,” and without it not only those most excellent kinds of gifts but even the glory of martyrdom itself is made void.

“Whoever, then, has been grounded in the perfection of this love must climb by a more excellent step to that more sublime fear of love, which is produced not by terror of punishment or desire of rewards but by the greatness of love. It is the fear with which a son reveres a most indulgent father, or a brother his brother, or a friend his friend, or a spouse a spouse, with anxious affection, dreading not his blows or reproaches but even the slightest offense against love, and in all things, not only deeds but also words, is always intent with anxious devotion lest the fervor of that love toward himself should cool in the least degree. One of the prophets expressed the magnificence of this fear elegantly, saying: “Wisdom and knowledge are the riches of salvation; the fear of the Lord is his treasure.” He could not express the dignity and merit of this fear more plainly than by saying that the riches of our salvation, which consist in the true wisdom and knowledge of God, cannot be kept except by the fear of the Lord. To this fear, then, not sinners but saints are invited by the words of the prophet, as the psalmist says: “Fear the Lord, all you his saints, for there is no want to those who fear him.” For it is certain that nothing is wanting to the perfection of one who fears the Lord with this fear. For of that penal fear the apostle John plainly says: “He who fears is not perfect in love, because fear has punishment.” There is therefore a great distance between this fear to which nothing is wanting, which is the treasure of wisdom and knowledge, and that imperfect fear which is called “the beginning of wisdom,” and which, containing punishment in itself, is driven out of the hearts of the perfect when the fullness of love comes upon them. “For there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” And indeed, if the beginning of wisdom lies in fear, what will be its perfection but in the love of Christ, which, containing in itself that fear of perfect love, is called no longer the beginning but the treasure of wisdom and knowledge? And therefore fear has a twofold degree. One is that of beginners, that is, of those who are still under the yoke and terror of slaves, of which it is said: “And a servant will fear his master,” and in the gospel: “I no longer call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master does.” And therefore, he says, “the servant does not remain in the house for ever; the son remains for ever.” For he teaches us to pass from that penal fear to the fullest freedom of love and to the confidence of the friends and sons of God. Finally, the blessed apostle, who had long since passed beyond that servile degree of fear by the power of the Lord’s love, despises the lower things and declares that he has been enriched by the Lord with greater goods: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and self-control.” Those, too, who were burning with perfect love for that heavenly Father, and whom divine adoption had already made sons out of slaves, he exhorts with these words: “For you have not received the spirit of slavery again in fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption, in which we cry, Abba, Father.” Of this fear also the prophet speaks when he describes that sevenfold Spirit which, without doubt, descended upon the Lord’s man according to the dispensation of the incarnation. Having said: “And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and godliness,” he added last, as something special: “And the spirit of the fear of the Lord shall fill him.” Here we must first note carefully that he did not say, “And the spirit of the fear of the Lord shall rest upon him,” as he had said of the former, but “the spirit of the fear of the Lord shall fill him.” For so great is the abundance of its richness that, when once it has possessed someone by its power, it occupies not a part but the whole of his mind. And not without reason. For, clinging to that love which never fails, it not only fills but possesses the one it has taken hold of with a perpetual and inseparable continuity, not lessened by any delights of temporal joy or pleasures, as sometimes happens to the fear that is cast out. This, then, is the fear of perfection with which the Lord’s man, who had come not only to redeem the human race but also to give a pattern of perfection and examples of the virtues, is said to have been filled. For the true Son of God, “who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth,” could not have that servile fear of punishments.

Germanus: “Since the discourse has dealt with the perfection of love, we want also to ask somewhat more freely about the end of chastity. For we do not doubt that that most exalted height of love, by which, as has been discussed so far, one climbs to the image and likeness of God, cannot exist at all without the perfection of chastity. But we want to be taught whether its permanence can be obtained so fully that the titillation of lust never troubles the integrity of our heart, and whether we can be so far removed from this fleshly passion while living in the flesh that we are never burned by the heat of its incitements.”

Chaeremon: “It belongs to the highest blessedness and singular merit so to learn or teach continually this disposition by which we cleave to the Lord that, according to the psalmist’s saying, meditation on it takes up all the days and nights of our life, and sustains our mind, insatiably hungering and thirsting for righteousness, by continual rumination on this heavenly food. But we must also care for the beast of burden that is our body, according to the most kind providence of our Savior, “lest it faint on the way”; for “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” It must now be cared for by taking a little food, so that after its refreshment the attention of the mind may also be applied to investigating more carefully what you desire.”

When the meal was over, which seemed to us, longing as we were for the food of teaching, more burdensome than pleasant, the old man, sensing that we were at once expecting the discourse he owed us, said: “I am pleased not only by the intentness of your mind, eager to learn, but also by the orderliness of the question you have put. For you have indeed kept a reasonable order in your inquiry. For it is necessary that the immense rewards of perfect and perpetual chastity should follow the fullness of so exalted a love, and that the joy should be equal where the palms are so alike. For they are bound together in so close a fellowship that one cannot be possessed without the other. This, then, is what your question includes: that we should explain in a like discussion whether that fire of desire, whose heat this flesh feels as if implanted in it, can be wholly extinguished. On this let us first inquire carefully what the blessed apostle thought. “Put to death,” he says, “your members which are on the earth.” Before we examine the rest, then, let us investigate what these members are that he commanded to be put to death. For the blessed apostle does not drive us by a cruel command to cut off our hands or feet or genitals, but, in zeal for perfect holiness, desires that the body of sin, which certainly consists of members, be destroyed as quickly as possible. Of this body he says elsewhere: “that the body of sin may be destroyed,” and he then explains what its destruction is: “that we may no longer serve sin.” From this body he also begs with a cry to be freed, saying: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?”

“This body of sin, then, is shown to be built up of many members, the vices, and whatever sin is committed in deed, word, or thought belongs to its share. Its members are most rightly said to be on the earth, for those who make use of their service cannot truthfully declare: “But our citizenship is in heaven.” Describing the members of this body in this place, then, the apostle says: “Put to death your members which are on the earth: sexual immorality, uncleanness, lust, evil desire, and covetousness, which is the service of idols.” In the first place, then, he thought sexual immorality should be put, which is consummated by carnal intercourse. The second member he called uncleanness, which sometimes steals upon a person, whether asleep or awake, through the carelessness of an unguarded mind, without any touch of a woman; and therefore it is marked and forbidden in the law, which not only deprived all the unclean of sharing in the sacred meats, but also ordered them to be separated from the assembly of the camp, lest they pollute the holy things by their touch, saying: “Any soul that eats of the flesh of the peace offering, which is the Lord’s, while uncleanness is on it, shall perish before the Lord,” and: “Whatever the unclean person touches shall be unclean.” In Deuteronomy too: “If there is among you a man who has been defiled by a dream in the night, he shall go outside the camp and shall not return until he has washed in water toward evening; and after sunset he shall return to the camp.” Then he puts the third member of sin, lust, which, growing within the recesses of the soul, can befall someone even without any passion of the body. For there is no doubt that libido, lust, takes its name from libet, “it pleases.” After this, descending from greater sins to lesser, he added a fourth member, evil desire, which can be referred not only to the said passion of unchastity but to all harmful desires in general, and which is a sickness of the corrupted will alone. Of it the Lord says in the gospel: “Whoever looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” For it is far greater to restrain the desire of a slippery mind even when the occasion of an enticing sight is offered to it. By these things it is most plainly proved that the chastity of bodily continence alone cannot suffice for perfection of purity unless integrity of mind is added. After all these, he names the last member of that body, covetousness, showing without doubt that the soul must not only be kept from the craving for other people’s things, but also that one’s own must be magnanimously despised. For we read in the Acts of the Apostles that the multitude of believers did this, of whom it is said: “And the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul, and no one said that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common. For as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the prices of what they sold and laid them at the apostles’ feet; and it was distributed to each as anyone had need.” And lest this perfection should seem to concern only a few, he testified that covetousness is the service of idols. And rightly. For whoever does not share in the necessities of the needy, and sets the commands of Christ after his money, which he keeps with faithless tenacity, incurs the crime of idolatry, preferring love of worldly matter to the love of God.

“If, then, we see that many have so cast away their property for Christ that we can prove that not only the possession of money but even the desire for it has been cut out of their hearts for ever, it follows that we should believe that the heat of sexual immorality too can be extinguished in the same way. For the apostle would not have joined an impossible thing with a possible one, but, knowing both to be possible, he decreed that they must be put to death alike. And the blessed apostle is so confident that sexual immorality and uncleanness can be rooted out of our members that he declares they should not only be put to death but not even be named among us: “Let sexual immorality and all uncleanness or covetousness not even be named among you, nor filthiness, nor foolish talk, nor scurrility, which are not fitting.” He also teaches that they are equally pernicious and drive us out by an equal exclusion from the kingdom of God, saying: “But know this, that no one who is sexually immoral or unclean or covetous, which is the service of idols, has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God,” and again: “Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the soft, nor those who lie with males, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will possess the kingdom of God.” There should be no doubt, therefore, that the contagion of sexual immorality and uncleanness can be abolished from our members, since he commanded them to be cut off in the same way as covetousness, foolish talk, scurrility, drunkenness, and thefts, which are easily cut away.

“Yet we must be sure that, even if we undergo every strictness of continence, namely hunger and thirst, vigils too and constant work, and unceasing application to reading, we cannot attain the lasting purity of chastity by the merit of these labors, unless, while we sweat continually in them, we are taught by the teaching of experience that its incorruption is granted by the generosity of divine grace. Each one should know that he must persevere tirelessly in these exercises only for this reason: that, having obtained the Lord’s mercy through their affliction, he may deserve to be freed by divine gift from the assault of the flesh and the rule of the overpowering vices; not that he should trust that he will attain by them the inviolate chastity of body that he desires. But let him be inflamed with as great a desire and love for acquiring chastity as that with which a most greedy seeker of money, or one who is driven by the highest ambition for honors, or one who is carried away by an unbearable love of a beautiful woman, longs with most impatient ardor to have his desire fulfilled. So it will come about that, while he burns with insatiable desire for lasting integrity, desirable food will be despised, necessary drink will be shunned, and even the sleep that is owed to nature will be rejected, or at least taken with an alert and suspicious mind as a most fraudulent deceiver of purity and a rival and adversary of chastity. And so each one, becoming every morning an examiner of his own integrity, may rejoice at the purification granted him, and feel that he has obtained it not by his own effort or watchfulness but by the Lord’s protection, and understand that its constancy will cling to his body only as long as the Lord in his mercy grants it. For whoever holds this faith firmly will by no means be proud and trust in his own virtue, nor, beguiled by long respites from the unclean flow, will he be relaxed into a most flattering security, knowing that he would at once be stained by the sprinkling of the foulest defilement if divine protection withdrew from him even a little. And accordingly, for its continuance, he must keep watch in unwearied prayers with all contrition and humility of heart.

“Do you want to grasp a clear proof of the truth of what we are saying, by which you may both confirm what has been said and learn that this bodily warfare, which is thought hostile and harmful to us, has been usefully set in our members? Consider, I ask you, those who are eunuchs in body: what is the chief cause that makes them sluggish and lukewarm in seeking the virtues? Is it not because they believe they are in no danger of having their chastity corrupted? Let no one think that I have said this in order to maintain that none of them at all can be found burning with perfect renunciation; but if any of them strive with the utmost strictness of soul for the palm of perfection set before them, they overcome their nature in a way. For the ardor and desire of that palm compels one whom it has once kindled to bear hunger, thirst, vigils, nakedness, and all bodily labors not only patiently but even gladly. For “a man in sorrows labors for himself and does violence to his own ruin,” and again: “To a needy soul even bitter things seem sweet.” For desires for present things cannot otherwise be either restrained or torn out unless, in place of those harmful feelings that we wish to cut away, other saving ones are brought in. For the liveliness of the mind can in no way exist without some feeling of desire or fear, of joy or grief, unless these same feelings are changed to the good side. And therefore, if we want to drive fleshly desires out of our hearts, let us at once plant spiritual delights in their place, so that our soul, always bound to these, may have something in which to dwell continually and may reject the allurements of present and temporal joys. And when our mind, trained by daily exercises, has advanced to this state, then it will grasp by the teaching of experience the feeling of that verse which we all sing together in the usual chanting of psalms, but whose force only a few who have experienced it perceive: “I set the Lord always before my face, for he is at my right hand, that I may not be moved.” For only he will effectively attain the force and meaning of this song who, reaching this purity of body and soul of which we are speaking, understands that he is kept by the Lord at every moment lest he fall away from it again, and that his right hands, that is, his holy works, are continually protected by him. For the Lord stands by his saints not on the left, since a holy man has nothing “left” about him, but always on the right; but he is not seen by sinners and the ungodly, since they do not have those right hands by which the Lord is accustomed to stand, and they cannot say with the prophet: “My eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he will pluck my feet out of the snare.” No one will be able truthfully to say this except one who, judging everything in this world to be either harmful or superfluous or at least inferior to the highest virtues, has fixed all his gaze, all his zeal, and all his care on the cultivation of his heart and the purity of chastity. And so the mind, refined by these exercises and polished by these advances, will come to perfect holiness of body and soul.

“For as far as one advances in gentleness and patience of heart, so far will he advance in purity of body, and the further he drives away the passion of anger, the more firmly he will hold chastity. For no one will escape the heats of the body unless he has first suppressed the movements of the soul. This the beatitude praised by our Savior’s mouth declares most plainly: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.” We shall not possess our earth in any other way, that is, the earth of this rebellious body will not otherwise be subjected to our control, unless our mind has first been founded in the gentleness of patience; nor will anyone be able to suppress the wars of lust rising against his flesh unless he has first been equipped with the arms of meekness. “For the meek shall possess the earth, and shall dwell upon it for ever and ever.” How we may obtain this earth, I say, the same prophet teaches in what follows in the same psalm: “Wait for the Lord, and keep his way, and he will exalt you to take the earth as an inheritance.” It is clear, then, that no one can rise to the firm possession of this earth except those only who, keeping the Lord’s hard ways and precepts through unshaken gentleness of patience, have been lifted by him out of the mire of fleshly passions. The meek, then, will possess the earth, and not only possess it but also “delight in the abundance of peace,” which no one in whose flesh the wars of desire are still stirred up will enjoy steadily. For he must be assailed by the most dreadful battles of the demons and, wounded by the fiery darts of lust, be thrown out of the possession of his earth, until the Lord “takes away wars to the ends of his earth, breaks the bow and shatters the weapons, and burns the shields with fire,” that fire, namely, which the Lord came to cast upon the earth; he also shatters the bows and weapons with which the spiritual forces of wickedness, fighting against him day and night, used to pierce his heart with the fiery darts of the passions. And so, when the Lord, breaking the wars, has freed him from all the heats of their incitements, he will reach such a state of purity that, laying aside the shame with which he used to shudder at himself, that is, at his flesh, while it was under attack, he begins to delight in it as in a most pure tabernacle (for “evils shall not come near it, and the scourge shall not approach its tabernacle”), attaining by the virtue of patience to that saying of the prophet, so that by the merit of meekness he not only inherits his earth but also delights in the abundance of peace. But where anxiety about the struggle still remains, there cannot be abundance of peace. For he does not say “they will delight in peace,” but “in the abundance of peace.” By this it is plainly shown that patience is so effective a medicine of the heart, according to Solomon’s saying, “A meek man is the physician of the heart,” that it roots out the tinder not only of anger, sadness, acedia, vainglory, and pride, but also of lust and of all the vices alike. For, as Solomon says, “In long-suffering is prosperity for kings.” For one who is always gentle and calm is neither set on fire by the disturbance of anger, nor consumed by the anguish of acedia and sadness, nor distracted by the vanity of vainglory, nor lifted up by the swelling of pride. “For great peace have those who love the name of the Lord, and there is no stumbling block for them.” And so it is rightly declared: “Better is the patient man than the strong, and he who restrains his anger than he who takes a city.” Until, then, we deserve to obtain this peace firm and lasting, we must be tried by many attacks, and we must often repeat this verse with groaning and tears: “I am become wretched and am bowed down utterly; I went about mourning all the day, for my loins are filled with illusions,” and: “There is no health in my flesh because of your anger; there is no peace for my bones because of my folly.” For we shall rightly and truly lament these things when, after a long purity of our body, hoping that we have now escaped fleshly contagions altogether, we feel the goads of the flesh rising against us again because of elation of heart, or when through the deceit of dreams the impurity of the old defilement sprinkles us. For when someone has begun to rejoice in a long purity of heart and body, it is inevitable that, believing he can no longer fall from that sincerity, he should in a way boast within himself and say: “I said in my abundance, I shall never be moved.” But when, abandoned for his good by the Lord, he feels that state of purity in which he trusted disturbed, and sees himself stumbling in that spiritual success, let him run at once to the author of that integrity and, recognizing his weakness, confess and say: “Lord, in your will,” not mine, “you gave strength to my beauty. You turned away your face, and I was troubled,” and also that saying of blessed Job: “If I were washed as with snow water, and my hands shone most clean, yet you would plunge me in filth, and my clothes would abhor me.” Yet one who plunges himself into filth by his own fault cannot say this to his creator. Until, then, he reaches the perfect state of purity, he must be trained quite often by these inequalities, until, strengthened by God’s grace in the purity he seeks, he may deserve to say effectively: “I waited patiently for the Lord, and he regarded me, and heard my prayer; and he brought me up out of the pit of misery and out of the mire of dregs, and set my feet upon a rock, and directed my steps.”

“For there are many degrees of chastity by which one climbs to that inviolable purity. Although our strength is not sufficient to see or describe them as they deserve, yet, since the course of the account requires it, we shall try to set them out somehow according to the modesty of our experience, reserving the more perfect things for the perfect and not prejudging those who, possessing a purer chastity through more fervent zeal, excel in keenness of insight as much as they excel in diligence. So I shall distinguish the lofty heights of chastity by six degrees, though they are far apart from one another in height, passing over certain intermediate ones, which are nevertheless many, and whose subtlety so escapes human perception that neither can the mind see nor the tongue express it, by which the perfection of chastity itself gradually grows through daily progress. For as earthly bodies each day take their increase without noticing it and so, without knowing it, are brought to their full stature, so too the strength and maturity of chastity are acquired by the soul. The first degree of chastity, then, is that the monk should not be struck down by carnal attack while awake; the second, that his mind should not dwell on voluptuous thoughts; the third, that he should not be moved to desire even slightly by the sight of a woman; the fourth, that he should not experience even a simple movement of the flesh while awake; the fifth, that when the course of a discussion or the necessity of reading brings to mind the begetting of human beings, not even the subtlest assent to the voluptuous act should touch his mind, but that he should regard it with a calm and pure gaze of the heart as a simple work and a service necessarily given to the human race, and conceive nothing more from the remembrance of it than if he were thinking of brickmaking or any other trade. The sixth degree of chastity is that he should not be deluded by alluring phantasms of women even when asleep. For although we do not believe that this delusion is liable to sin, it is nevertheless a sign of desire still lurking in the marrow. This delusion, it is clear, happens in different ways. For each one is tempted even in sleep according to the habit he was accustomed to practise or think about when awake. Those who have known carnal union are deceived in one way, and those who have no experience of intercourse with women in another. For the latter, just as they are usually troubled by simpler and purer dreams, so they can also be cleansed with easier care and less labor. But the former are deluded by filthier and more vivid phantasms, until, little by little, according to the measure of chastity each strives for, the mind even when lulled in sleep turns to hatred of the thing it once felt as pleasurable, and the Lord grants it what is promised through the prophet to brave men as the highest wage of their labors: “And I will break the bow and the sword and war out of your land, and I will make you sleep confidently.” And so at last one may come to that purity of blessed Serenus and a few men like him. I have set this apart from the said six degrees of chastity because it can be not only possessed but even believed by very few, and because what was granted to him by the special generosity of a divine gift cannot be set out as the pattern of a general precept: namely, that our mind should be so formed by the purity of chastity itself that, even the natural movement of the flesh being dead, it does not experience that unclean flow at all. I ought not to pass over in silence the opinion of certain people about this defilement of the flesh. They say that it happens to sleepers not because the deceit of dreams produces it, but rather because the overflow of that fluid fashions certain allurements in a sick heart. Finally they say that at the time when that accumulation does not trouble, the delusion ceases just as its flow does.

“But no one will be able to accept or test these things, or to determine by sure examination whether they are possible or impossible, unless through long experience and purity of heart, with the word of the Lord guiding him, he has come to the borders of flesh and spirit. Of this the blessed apostle says: “The word of God is living and effective and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, of joints also and marrow, and a discerner of the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” And so, placed as it were between their boundaries, he will discern with a just balance, like an inspector and arbiter, what is necessarily and unavoidably assigned to the human condition and what has been brought in by vicious habit and the carelessness of youth. He will not be led astray by the false opinions of the crowd about their effect and nature, nor will he rest in the prejudged definitions of the inexperienced; but weighing the measure of purity on the sure scale of his own experience and by exact examination, he will by no means be deceived by the error of those who, soiled through the fault of their negligence by more frequent discharges than nature compels, plead natural condition. Although it is clear that they rather do violence to nature and wring from it a pollution that it does not itself bring on, they refer their intemperance to the necessity of the flesh, or rather to its creator, transferring their own faults to the discredit of nature. Of them it is elegantly said in Proverbs: “The folly of a man corrupts his ways, but he blames God in his heart.” Finally, if anyone wishes to withhold belief from this assertion of ours, I ask him not to dispute with us on the basis of a prejudged opinion before he takes up the practices of this discipline; when he has kept them for a very few months with the moderation in which they are handed down, he will certainly be able to test what we have said with true judgment. Otherwise he will argue in vain about the end of any art or discipline who has not first pursued with the greatest zeal and strength all that belongs to its completion. Suppose, for example, I were to assert that something like honey can be produced from wheat, or again that a liquid of the smoothest oil can be produced from it, as also from the seeds of radish and flax: if someone wholly ignorant of these things were present, would he not cry out that this is against the nature of things and laugh at me as the author of a most obvious lie? If I showed him countless witnesses who testify that they have seen, tasted, and made these things, and further explained the method and process by which these substances are changed either into the richness of oil or the sweetness of honey, and he, persisting in the obstinacy of a most foolish conviction, denied that anything either sweet or oily can be produced from those seeds, would not his irrational and stubborn contention be the thing to be censured, rather than the truth of my words be ridiculed, which is supported by the weight of many faithful witnesses, by clear proofs, and, what is more than these, by the test of experience? And therefore whoever, by the constant intention of the heart, has reached that state of purity in which, his mind wholly freed from the titillation of this passion, his flesh during sleep expels, as it were, the overflow of superfluous fluid, will most certainly grasp the condition and measure of nature. And so, when on waking he finds that his flesh has been polluted after long intervals without his knowing or being aware of it, then at last he may plead natural necessity. He will without doubt have come to that state in which he is found the same by night as by day, the same in bed as at prayer, the same alone as when surrounded by crowds of people; in short, he never sees himself in private as he would blush to be seen by men, nor does that inescapable eye catch in him anything he would wish to be hidden from human sight. And so, when he has begun to delight continually in the sweetest light of chastity, he will be able to say with the prophet: “And night is my light in my delights, for darkness will not be dark to you, and the night will be lit up like the day; as its darkness, so also its light.” Finally, how he obtained this very thing, since it seems beyond the condition of human nature, the same prophet adds, saying: “For you have possessed my reins,” that is: I have not earned this purity by my own effort or strength, but because you have put to death the heat of lustful pleasure implanted in my reins.

Germanus: “We have experienced in some part that lasting purity of body can by God’s grace be possessed by those who are awake, and we do not deny that, when the rigor and judgment of strictness resist, a movement of the flesh need not befall those who are awake. But we want to be taught whether we can also be free of this disturbance when asleep. For we do not believe this possible for two reasons, which, though we cannot speak of them without shame, we ask you to receive with your pardon, if anything has perhaps been laid bare too immodestly, since the necessity of the remedy itself compels it. The first is that, when the vigor of the mind is relaxed in the rest of sleep, the stealing in of that movement can by no means be watched against; the second, that the accumulation of urine, when the unceasing inflow of internal fluid has filled the capacity of the bladder while we rest, rouses the sluggish members, which happens by the same law even to little children and eunuchs. Hence it comes about that, even if the delight of lust does not wound the mind’s consent, yet the unseemliness of the members humbles it with shame.”

Chaeremon: “It appears that you have not yet recognized the power of true chastity, since you believe it is kept by those who are awake only with the help of strictness, and hence you think that integrity cannot be kept by those asleep, when the rigor of the soul is relaxed. But chastity does not subsist, as you think, by the defense of strictness, but by love of itself and delight in its own purity. For where some opposition of pleasure still resists it, it is called not chastity but continence. You see, then, that for those who have received the disposition of chastity into their very marrow by the grace of God, the cessation of strictness when they sleep does no harm, strictness which is shown by the surest reasoning to be untrustworthy even for those who are awake. For whatever is suppressed by labor gives the fighter a temporary truce, but does not grant him the lasting rest of security after the labor; whereas whatever has been conquered by deep virtue, being settled without any suspicion of disturbance, will give the victor a continual firmness of peace. Therefore, as long as we feel ourselves struck by the movement of the flesh, let us know that we have not yet reached the heights of chastity but are still placed under the weakness of continence and are worn by battles in which the outcome must always be doubtful. As for your wish to prove the movement of the flesh unavoidable by this sign, that not even eunuchs, whose genitals have been removed, can be free of it, you must know that what they lack is not fleshly heats or the working of lust but only the power of generating seed. Hence it is clear that not even they, if they wish to reach this chastity we are striving for, should relax their humility and contrition of heart or the strictness of continence, although it must by no means be doubted that chastity can be attained by them with less labor and effort.

“Therefore the perfection of chastity is distinguished from the laborious rudiments of continence by its lasting tranquillity. For this is the consummation of true chastity: that it does not fight the movements of carnal desire but detests them with all horror, keeps its purity continual and inviolable, and can be nothing other than holiness. This will come about when the flesh, ceasing to “lust against the spirit,” consents to its desires and its virtue, and they begin to be bound to each other in the firmest peace, and, according to the psalmist’s saying, “brothers dwell together in unity,” possessing that blessedness promised by the Lord, of which he says: “If two of you agree on earth about anything whatever that they ask, it will be done for them by my Father who is in heaven.” Whoever, then, has passed beyond the stage of that spiritual Jacob, that is, the supplanter, will rise, the sinew of his thigh numbed, from that wrestling of continence and supplanting of the vices to the merit of Israel by the constant uprightness of his heart. This order blessed David also distinguished by the prophecy of the Holy Spirit, saying first: “God is known in Judah,” that is, in the soul that is still held in the confession of sins, for Judah is interpreted “confession.” But “in Israel,” that is, in one who sees God, or, as some interpret it, who is most upright before God, he is not only known, but “his name is great.” Then, calling us to higher things and wishing to show the very place in which the Lord delights, he says: “And his place has been made in peace,” that is, not in the conflict of battle and the wrestling with the vices, but in the peace of chastity and the lasting tranquillity of the heart. If anyone, then, deserves to obtain this place of peace by the extinction of the fleshly passions, advancing from this stage too, and having consequently become the spiritual Sion, that is, the watchtower of God, he will also be his dwelling place. For the Lord dwells not in the conflict of continence but in the continual watchtower of the virtues, where he no longer beats back or restrains, but has broken for ever “the powers of the bows,” from which the fiery darts of lust were once aimed against us. You see, then, that as the place of the Lord is not in the wrestling of continence but in the peace of chastity, so also his dwelling is in the watchtower and contemplation of the virtues. Hence the gates of Sion are rightly preferred to all the tents of Jacob: “For the Lord loves the gates of Sion above all the tents of Jacob.” As for your argument that the movement of the flesh is unavoidable because urine, when it has filled the bladder by continual dripping, rouses the resting members: although this movement, when this necessity alone sometimes arouses it, and only during sleep, is no prejudice to true followers of purity in obtaining it, you must know that, if they have been stirred, they are brought back to their own rest by the command of chastity, so that they subside not only without any itch but without even the slightest remembrance of lust. And therefore, so that the law of the body may agree with the law of the mind, excess must be curbed even in the drinking of water, so that the daily accumulation of fluid, flowing more slowly into dried members, may make that movement of the body which you think unavoidable not only very rare but also slow and lukewarm, and may stir up, so to speak, a cold fire and a flame that bedews without any burning heat, like that wonderful vision of Moses, so that the bush of our flesh, surrounded by a harmless fire, is not burned; or like that of the three young men, for whom the flame of the Chaldean furnace was so scattered by a bedewing wind that the smell of fire did not even touch their hair or the fringes of their garments; so that we may begin already in this body to possess in a way what is promised to the saints through the prophet: “When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not burn in you.”

“For great indeed and wonderful, and known to no one at all except those who have experienced them, are the things which the Lord with ineffable generosity bestows on his faithful while they are still in this vessel of corruption. The prophet, surveying them with purity of mind, cried out both in his own person and in that of those who reach this state and disposition: “Wonderful are your works, and my soul knows it very well.” Otherwise the prophet would be understood to have said nothing new or great, if he were believed to have spoken these words with some other disposition of heart or about other works of God. For there is no one who does not recognize that the works of God are wonderful, even from the greatness of creation itself; but those which he dispenses in his saints by daily working and pours out abundantly with special generosity, no one knows except the soul of the one who enjoys them. In the secret of its conscience it is the sole witness of his benefits, so that it cannot express them in any words, nor even embrace them in feeling and thought, when, leaving that fiery fervor, it has fallen back to these material and earthly perceptions. For who would not marvel at the works of the Lord in himself when he sees that the insatiable greed of the belly and the costly and ruinous luxury of the palate have been so suppressed in him that he takes even a small and very cheap meal rarely and unwillingly? Who would not be astonished at the works of God when he feels that the fire of lust, which he used to believe natural and as it were inextinguishable, has so cooled that he does not feel himself stirred even by a simple movement of the body? How could anyone not tremble at the power of the Lord who sees that men once fierce and savage, who were provoked to the highest fury of anger even by the most flattering attentions of their subordinates, have passed to such gentleness that they are not only moved by no injuries but even rejoice with the greatest magnanimity when injuries are inflicted? Who, indeed, would not marvel at the works of God and cry out with all his heart, “For I know that the Lord is great,” when he sees either himself or someone else changed from most rapacious to generous, from prodigal to self-restrained, from proud to humble, from delicate and tender to unkempt and shaggy, and even enjoying of his own will poverty and scarcity of present things? These are indeed the wonderful works of God which the soul of the prophet, and of those like him, knows in a special way, astonished at the sight of a wonderful contemplation. These are the wonders which he has set upon the earth, and the same prophet, considering them, calls all peoples to marvel at them, saying: “Come and see the works of God, what wonders he has set upon the earth, taking away wars to the ends of the earth. He will break the bow and shatter the weapons, and burn the shields with fire.” For what greater wonder can there be than that in the briefest moment the most rapacious tax collectors become apostles, and savage persecutors are made most patient preachers of the gospel, so that they spread by the shedding of their own blood the faith they persecuted? These are the works of God which the Son declares he works daily together with the Father, saying: “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” Of these works of God blessed David sings in the Spirit, saying: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who alone does great wonders.” Of these also the prophet Amos says: “He who makes all things and changes them, and turns the shadow of death into morning.” This indeed is “the change of the right hand of the Most High.” For this saving work of God the prophet prays, saying: “Confirm, O God, what you have wrought in us.” I pass over those secret and hidden dispensations of God which the mind of all the saints sees being carried out within itself in a special way at every moment: that heavenly inpouring of spiritual joy by which the dejected soul is lifted up by the eagerness of an inspired gladness; those fiery ecstasies of the heart and those consolations of joy as ineffable as they are unheard of, by which, when we are sunk in the most sluggish torpor, we are sometimes roused to most fervent prayer as from the deepest sleep. This, I say, is the joy of which the blessed apostle says: “What eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man,” that is, of one who, dulled by earthly vices, is still a man, clings to human feelings, and sees nothing of these gifts of God. Finally, the same apostle added, both of himself and of those like him who had already departed from human ways of life: “But God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.”

“In all these things, then, the further the mind has advanced toward a finer purity, the more sublimely it will see God, and it will gain within itself increases of wonder rather than find the power of speaking or words to tell of it. For as one without experience cannot grasp the force of this joy with his mind, so one who has experienced it cannot explain it in words. It is as if someone wished to describe in words the sweetness of honey to one who had never tasted anything sweet: the one will surely not take in with his ears the pleasantness of a taste he has never received in his mouth, nor will the other be able to express in words the sweetness he knew by the pleasure of taste; but, drawn only by his own recognition of the sweetness, he can only marvel in silence within himself at the delight of the taste he has experienced. So, then, whoever deserves to reach this state of the virtues that we have described, surveying with silent mind all these things that the Lord works in his own by special grace, and set on fire by the astonished consideration of them all, will cry out with the inmost feeling of his heart: “Wonderful are your works, and my soul knows it very well.” This, then, is the wonderful work of God: that a man of flesh, placed in the flesh, has rejected fleshly feelings, and in so great a variety of things and assaults keeps one state of soul and remains unmoved through every change of circumstance. Grounded in this virtue, a certain old man at Alexandria, surrounded by crowds of unbelievers who pressed him not only with curses but with the most grievous insults, was asked mockingly: “What miracle has your Christ, whom you worship, done?” He replied: “This: that I am neither moved nor offended by these insults, or by greater ones if you inflict them.”

Germanus: “Wonder at this chastity, which is not human or earthly but plainly heavenly and angelic, has so confounded us with sudden astonishment that it has struck us with the terror of despair rather than stirring our souls to seek it. We therefore ask you to instruct us, with the teaching of a very full discussion, about the manner of the practice and the length of time in which it can be acquired or perfected, so that we may believe that it can be achieved and be encouraged to seek it within a fixed space of time. For we judge it in a way beyond the reach of those placed in this flesh, unless an order and way by which it can be reached is shown to us by a sure method.”

Chaeremon: “It is quite rash to fix a definite measure of time for the perfecting of this chastity of which we are speaking, especially with so great a diversity of wills and strengths, since this cannot easily be determined even in the material arts and visible disciplines; for each person must grasp them more quickly or more slowly according to the intentness of his mind and the quality of his talent. Yet we can lay down with complete confidence the method of the practice and the measure of time within which its possibility may be recognized. Whoever, then, withdrawn from all idle conversations and dead to all anger, anxiety, and worldly care, is content with only two paxamatia as his daily meal, and, taking less than his fill of water, limits the rest of sleep to three, or, as others have laid down, four hours, and yet believes that he will attain it not by the merit of his labors or of this continence but by the Lord’s mercy (since without this faith every effort of human labor is vain), will know within no more than six months that its perfection is not impossible for him. It is, however, a clear sign that purity is already near when one begins not to hope in the diligence of one’s own labor. For if each one has truly grasped the sense of that verse, “Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it,” it follows that he will neither be lifted up by the merits of his purity, understanding that he has obtained it not by his own diligence but by the Lord’s mercy, nor be moved with harsh rigor against others, knowing that human virtue is nothing unless divine virtue helps it.

“Therefore, for each of us who struggles with all his strength against the spirit of sexual immorality, the singular victory is not to hope for a remedy from the merit of his own effort. Although this faith seems easy and plain to all, it is as hard for beginners to possess as the perfection of chastity itself. For when even a little purity has smiled on them, at once, as a kind of elation slips subtly into the secret places of their conscience, they flatter themselves; and believing that they have obtained it by the effort of their own diligence, they must be stripped a little of that heavenly protection and be oppressed by those passions which divine power had extinguished, until they learn by experience that they cannot obtain the good of purity by their own strength and effort. And to conclude briefly our discussion on the end of fullest chastity, which has been carried on through a long night’s vigil, gathering into one all that has been set out at length and in scattered fashion: this is the consummation of chastity, that no delight of lust should touch the monk when awake, that no delusion of dreams should deceive him at rest, but that when, only while he sleeps, a movement of the flesh has stolen upon him through the carelessness of the sleeping mind, it should subside without any itch of the body, just as it was roused without any titillation of pleasure. These things about the end of chastity we have set out as best we could, with experience rather than words as our teacher. Although I think that the slothful and negligent will perhaps judge them impossible, I am sure that the zealous and spiritual will recognize and approve them alike. For there is as great a distance between man and man as between the things toward which their minds are directed, that is, as heaven from hell or Christ from Belial, according to the saying of the Lord and Savior: “If anyone serves me, let him follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also,” and again: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Thus far blessed Chaeremon discoursed on the perfection of chastity. He closed his admirable teaching on the most sublime purity with these words, urging us, astonished and anxious as we were, since the greater part of the night had now passed, to give our limbs a little rest and by no means to cheat them of the natural food of sleep, lest the mind too, languishing with the torpor of the body, should lose the vigor of its holy intention.

When, after a little sleep, we were returning to the morning synaxis and waiting for the old man, Abba Germanus was troubled by a great scruple: that in the previous discussion, whose power had filled us with the highest desire for a chastity unknown to us, the blessed old man had, by adding a single sentence, made void the merit of human effort, maintaining that a man, however much he strives with the utmost strength toward good fruit, cannot possess the good unless he has received it solely by the generosity of the divine gift, and not by the effort of his own work. As we were turning this question over in astonishment, blessed Chaeremon came out of his cell, and, sensing that we were murmuring something to each other, went through the solemn office of prayers and psalms more briefly than usual and asked what was troubling us.

Then Germanus said: “As much as we are almost shut out, if I may say so, from belief in its possibility by the sublimity of the most excellent virtue that was disclosed in the night’s discussion, so much does it seem to us absurd (by your leave) that the wage of the labors, that is, the perfection of chastity, which is acquired by the persistence of one’s own sweat, should not be credited particularly to the effort of the one who labors. For it is foolish, if, for example, we see a farmer giving unremitting effort to cultivating the land, that we should not ascribe the harvest also to his effectiveness.”

Chaeremon: “By the very example you have put forward it is proved more plainly that the effort of the one who labors can accomplish nothing without God’s help. For when the farmer has spent all his efforts in cultivating the land, he cannot at once credit the yield of the crops and the abundance of the harvest to his own effort, which he has often found to be in vain unless the timeliness of the rains and the calm fair weather of winter follow it; so that we have often seen fruits already grown and firmed in full ripeness snatched, as it were, from the hands of those who held them, and that constant persistence of sweat has given the laborers nothing, because it was not directed by the Lord’s help. Just as, then, divine kindness does not give this abundance of crops to idle farmers who do not work their fields with frequent ploughing, so all-night anxiety will not profit those who labor unless it has been prospered by the Lord’s mercy. Yet in this let human pride by no means try either to make itself equal to the grace of God or to mix itself with it, and to insert itself as a sharer in God’s gifts by thinking that its labor is the cause of the divine generosity, and boasting that the yield of most abundant crops has answered to the merits of its own effort. For let it consider and weigh with truthful examination that it could not have spent by its own strength even those efforts which it put forth intent on its desire for wealth, unless the Lord’s protection and mercy had strengthened it for carrying out all the work of the field, and its will and strength would have been ineffective unless the divine mercy had also provided the means of accomplishing it, which is sometimes cheated either by drought or by too much rain. For even when the strength of the oxen, the health of the body, and the prosperity of all works and actions have been granted by the Lord, one must pray that it may not happen to him, as it is written, that “the heaven be brass and the earth iron,” and that “what the locust has left the caterpillar may eat, and what the caterpillar has left the cankerworm may devour, and what the cankerworm has left the mildew may consume.” Nor does the effort of the laboring farmer need divine help in this alone, but also that he may avert unexpected accidents by which, even if the field has been enriched with the desired fruitfulness of crops, he will not only be cheated by the vain expectation of his hope, but will even be robbed of the abundance of the crops already gathered and stored on the threshing floor or in the barn. From this it is plainly gathered that the beginning not only of good actions but also of good thoughts is from God, who both inspires in us the beginnings of a holy will and grants the strength and opportunity to carry out what we rightly desire. For “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights,” who both begins what is good and carries it on and completes it in us, as the apostle says: “He who gives seed to the sower will also supply bread to eat, and will multiply your seed and increase the fruits of your righteousness.” But it is ours humbly to follow each day the grace of God that draws us, or else, resisting it “with a stiff neck and uncircumcised ears,” as it is written, to deserve to hear through Jeremiah: “Shall one who falls not rise again? Or shall one who has turned away not return? Why then has this people in Jerusalem turned away with a stubborn turning? They have hardened their necks, they have refused to return.”

Germanus: “This view, whose piety cannot be rashly rejected by us, seems to be opposed by the fact that it tends to the destruction of free will. For since we see many of the pagans, who certainly do not merit the grace of divine help, shining not only with the virtues of frugality and patience but, what is more wonderful, even of chastity, how are we to believe that these were conferred on them by God’s gift, with the choice of their free will taken captive, when the followers of worldly wisdom, knowing not only nothing of God’s grace but nothing even of the true God himself, are said, as we have learned from the course of our reading or from the tradition of certain people, to have possessed the highest purity of chastity by the effort of their own labor?”

Chaeremon: “I am glad that, burning with the greatest love of knowing the truth, you put forward even some foolish things, so that by your objection the strength of the catholic faith may appear better proved and, if I may say so, more thoroughly tested. For what wise man would use such contradictory propositions as to believe that the heavenly purity of chastity, which yesterday you maintained could not be conferred on any mortal even by God’s grace, was now possessed even by pagans by their own strength? But since you raise these things, no doubt, as has been said, out of zeal for searching out the truth, notice what we hold about them. First, we must by no means believe that the philosophers attained such chastity of soul as is required of us, who are commanded that not only sexual immorality but not even uncleanness be named among us. They had a kind of partial chastity, that is, a small portion of chastity, namely abstinence of the flesh, so that they restrained their lust only from intercourse; but this inner purity of mind and lasting purity of body they could not attain, I will not say in practice, but even in thought. Finally that most famous of them, Socrates, as they themselves celebrate, was not ashamed to declare this of himself. For when a certain physiognomist, looking at him, said: “The eyes of a corrupter of boys,” and his disciples, rushing at him, wanted to avenge the insult offered to their master, he is said to have checked their indignation with this saying: “Stop, friends; for I am, but I restrain myself.” It is shown most clearly, then, not only by our assertion but by their own profession, that only the consummation of unchastity, that is, the shamefulness of intercourse, was suppressed by them by violent necessity, but that the desire and delight of that passion was not shut out of their hearts. And with what horror must that saying of Diogenes be quoted! For what the philosophers of this world were not ashamed to put forward as something memorable cannot be spoken by us or heard without shame. For to someone who was to be punished for the crime of adultery, he is reported to have said: “Do not buy with death what is sold for nothing.” It is certain, then, that they did not even know the virtue of the true chastity that is sought by us; and therefore it is quite certain that our circumcision, which is in the spirit, can be possessed only by God’s gift, and is present only in those who serve God with the whole contrition of their spirit.

“And therefore, although it can be shown in many, indeed in all things, that men always need God’s help and that human frailty can accomplish nothing that concerns salvation by itself alone, that is, without God’s help, yet in nothing is this shown more clearly than in the acquiring and keeping of chastity. For, to put off for a while the discussion of the difficulty of its integrity, let us meanwhile speak briefly of its instruments. Who, I ask, however fervent in spirit, could endure by his own strength, supported by no human praise, the squalor of the desert, or the dry bread, I will not say its daily hunger, but even its full measure? Who could bear the continual thirst for water without the Lord’s consolation, and cheat human eyes of that sweet and delightful morning sleep, and confine all the refreshment of rest by a constant rule within the limit of four hours? Who could manage, without the grace of God, unceasing persistence in reading and unremitting diligence in work, seeking no advantage of present gain? All these things, just as they cannot be continually desired by us without divine inspiration, so neither can they in any way be accomplished without his help. And to make these same things plainer, not only as proved to us by the discipline of experience but also by sure signs and arguments: is it not so that in many useful things we wish to carry out, when neither full ardor of desire nor perfect will is lacking, some interfering frailty makes void the vows we have conceived, and the effect does not attend our purpose unless the power of accomplishing it has been given by the Lord’s mercy? So much so that, though there is a countless multitude of those who faithfully desire to cling to the pursuit of the virtues, you find very few indeed who are able to carry them out or endure them. Not to mention that even when no infirmity at all holds us back, the full power of doing what we wish does not lie in our control. For we do not keep, according to our own choice, the silence of withdrawal, the strictness of fasts, or persistence in reading, even at the time when we are able; but when certain circumstances arise we are often drawn away from our saving practices even very much against our will, so that we must beg from the Lord the opportunity of place or time in which we can practise them. And it is certain that what we are able to do is not enough for us unless the opportunity of carrying out what is certainly possible for us is also granted by the Lord (of which the apostle says: “For we wanted to come to you, once and again, and Satan hindered us”). So much so that we sometimes feel that we are called away from these spiritual pursuits for our good, so that, while the intention of our course is interrupted against our will and we relax something for the weakness of the flesh, we may be kept, even unwillingly, for saving perseverance. Of such a dispensation of God the blessed apostle says something similar: “For this I asked the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And he said to me: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness,’” and again: “For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought.”

“For the purpose of God, by which he made man not to perish but to live for ever, remains unchangeable. When his kindness sees that even the smallest spark of good will has shone out in us, or which he himself has struck, as it were, from the hard flint of our heart, he fosters it, rouses it, and strengthens it by his inspiration, “willing all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” For, he says, “it is not the will before your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish,” and again: “Nor does God will that a soul should perish, but he reconsiders, thinking how he who is cast off may not perish altogether.” For he is true and does not lie when he declares with an oath: “As I live, says the Lord God, I do not will the death of the wicked, but that he should turn from his way and live.” For if he does not will that one of the little ones should perish, how can he be thought, without great sacrilege, to will that not all universally but only some be saved instead of all? Whoever perish, then, perish against his will, since he cries out daily against each of them: “Turn from your most evil ways; and why will you die, O house of Israel?” and again: “How often would I have gathered your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!” and: “Why has this people in Jerusalem turned away with a stubborn turning? They have hardened their faces, they have refused to return.” The grace of Christ, then, is at hand daily, which, since “it wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth,” calls all without any exception, saying: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you.” But if he calls not all universally but only some, it follows that not all are burdened either by original or by actual sin, and that the saying, “For all have sinned and lack the glory of God,” is not true, nor should it be believed that “death has passed to all men.” And so truly do all who perish perish against God’s will that it is not even said that God made death itself, as Scripture testifies: “For God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.” And hence it is that often, when we ask for harmful things instead of good ones, our prayer is heard slowly or not at all; and again the Lord, like a most kind physician, deigns to bring upon us, even very much against our will, things we believe harmful, for our good; and sometimes he holds back and recalls our pernicious plans and deadly efforts from their detestable outcome, draws back to salvation those who are hastening to death, and pulls out of the jaws of hell those who do not know it.

“The divine word expressed this care and providence of his for us elegantly through the prophet Hosea, under the figure of Jerusalem as a harlot, hastening with ruinous eagerness to the worship of idols. For when she says: “I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink,” the divine condescension, consulting her salvation and not her will, answers: “Behold, I will hedge up her ways with thorns, and I will wall her in, and she shall not find her paths; and she shall follow her lovers and not overtake them, and seek them and not find them, and she shall say: I will return to my first husband, for it was better with me then than now.” And again he describes our stubbornness and contempt, with which we disdain him with rebellious spirit when he invites us to a saving return, by this comparison: “And I said: You shall call me Father, and shall not cease to walk after me. But as a woman despises her lover, so has the house of Israel despised me, says the Lord.” Quite fittingly, since he had compared Jerusalem to an adulteress leaving her husband, he compared the love and persistence of his own kindness to a man who is madly in love with a woman. For the kindness and love of God which he always shows toward the human race, in that it is overcome by no injuries so as to withdraw from care for our salvation or, as if defeated by our iniquities, to be called back from his principal purpose, could not be expressed more properly by any other comparison than by the example of a man who loves a woman with most ardent love, and who, the more he feels himself neglected and despised by her, the more he is inflamed with a vehement zeal for her. Divine protection, then, is inseparably with us always, and so great is the Creator’s kindness toward his creature that his providence not only accompanies it but continually goes before it. The prophet, having experienced this, confesses it most openly, saying: “My God, his mercy will go before me.” When he sees in us some beginning of good will, he at once enlightens it, strengthens it, and urges it on to salvation, giving increase to what he himself has planted or has seen spring up by our own effort. For he says: “Before they call, I will hear; while they are still speaking, I will hear,” and again: “At the voice of your cry, as soon as he hears, he will answer you.” And not only does he kindly inspire holy desires, but he also prepares occasions and the opportunity of good effect, and shows those who go astray the direction of the way of salvation.

“Hence it is not easily discerned by human reason how the Lord gives to those who ask, is found by those who seek, and opens to those who knock, and on the other hand is found by those who do not seek him, appears openly among those who did not ask for him, and all day long stretches out his hands to a people that does not believe him and contradicts him; calls those who resist and are far off, draws the unwilling to salvation, takes from those who wish to sin the opportunity of fulfilling their will, and kindly stands in the way of those hastening to wickedness. But to whom is it easily clear how the sum of salvation is ascribed to our choice, of which it is said: “If you are willing and will listen to me, you shall eat the good things of the land,” and how it is “not of him who wills nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy”? What, too, is meant by this, that God “will render to each according to his works,” and: “It is God who works in you both to will and to accomplish, for his good pleasure,” and: “This is not from yourselves but is the gift of God; not from works, lest anyone should boast”? What is meant also by what is said: “Draw near to the Lord, and he will draw near to you,” and what he says elsewhere: “No one comes to me unless the Father who sent me draws him”? What is meant by what is said: “Make straight paths for your feet, and direct your ways,” and what we say in prayer: “Direct my way in your sight,” and: “Perfect my steps in your paths, that my footsteps may not be moved”? What is meant again by our being admonished: “Make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit,” and what is promised: “I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within them, and I will take away the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my commandments and keep my judgments”? What is meant by the Lord’s command: “Wash your heart from wickedness, Jerusalem, that you may be saved,” and by the prophet’s asking the same thing of the Lord, saying: “Create a clean heart in me, O God,” and again: “You will wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow”? What is meant by what is said to us: “Light for yourselves the light of knowledge,” and by what is said of God: “who teaches man knowledge,” and: “The Lord gives light to the blind,” or indeed by what we say in prayer with the prophet: “Enlighten my eyes, lest I ever sleep in death”? What else, but that in all these both the grace of God and the freedom of our will are declared, since even by his own movements a man can sometimes reach out toward the desire of the virtues, but always needs to be helped by the Lord? For no one enjoys health when he wishes, or is freed from the disease of sickness at the desire of his own choice. And what does it profit to have longed for the grace of health unless God, who gives the use of life itself, also imparts the vigor of soundness? But that it may be clearer that the beginnings of good wills sometimes come forth even through the good of nature, which has been granted by the kindness of the Creator, but that these cannot reach the perfection of the virtues unless they are directed by the Lord, the apostle is witness, saying: “For to will is present with me, but to accomplish the good I do not find.”

“For divine Scripture affirms the freedom of our will, saying: “Keep your heart with all watchfulness,” but the apostle shows its weakness, saying: “May the Lord keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” David declares the power of free will, saying: “I have inclined my heart to do your righteous ordinances,” but the same man likewise teaches us its weakness, saying: “Incline my heart to your testimonies, and not to covetousness”; Solomon too: “May the Lord incline our hearts to himself, that we may walk in all his ways and keep his commandments, his ceremonies, and his judgments.” The psalmist indicates the power of our will, saying: “Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit”; our prayer bears witness to its weakness when we say: “Set a guard, O Lord, on my mouth, and a door of enclosure about my lips.” The ability of our will is declared by the Lord when it is said: “Loose the bonds of your neck, O captive daughter of Sion”; the prophet sings of its frailty, saying: “The Lord looses the fettered,” and: “You have broken my bonds; to you I will offer the sacrifice of praise.” We hear the Lord in the gospel calling us to hasten to him by free will: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you,” but the same Lord bears witness to its weakness, saying: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” The apostle points to our free will, saying: “So run that you may obtain,” but John the Baptist testifies to its weakness when he says: “A man can receive nothing of himself unless it is given him from heaven.” We are commanded to guard our souls carefully, as the prophet says: “Guard your souls,” but another prophet cries out by the same Spirit: “Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.” The apostle, writing to the Philippians, says, to indicate their free will: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling”; but to show its weakness he adds: “For it is God who works in you both to will and to accomplish, for his good pleasure.”

“And so these things are in a way mingled and confused without distinction, so that among many it is debated as a great question which depends on which: that is, whether God has mercy on us because we have shown the beginning of good will, or whether we obtain the beginning of good will because God has mercy. For many, believing one or the other of these and asserting it more than is right, have become entangled in various errors contrary to each other. For if we say that the beginning of good will is ours, what was there in Paul the persecutor, what in Matthew the tax collector, of whom one, eager for the blood and torments of the innocent, the other intent on public violence and plunder, is drawn to salvation? But if we say that the beginnings of good will are always inspired by the grace of God, what shall we say of the faith of Zacchaeus, what of the devotion of that thief on the cross, who, by their own desire doing a kind of violence to the heavenly kingdom, anticipated the special admonitions of a call? And if we ascribe the perfecting of the virtues and the carrying out of God’s commandments to our own choice, how do we pray: “Confirm, O God, what you have wrought in us,” and: “Direct the works of our hands over us”? We know that Balaam was hired to curse Israel, but we see that he was not permitted to curse, though he wished to. Abimelech is kept from sinning against God by touching Rebecca. Joseph is sold away by the envy of his brothers, so that the descent of the sons of Israel into Egypt might take place, and while they were plotting their brother’s death, remedies for the coming famine were being prepared. This same Joseph, when recognized by his brothers, makes it plain, saying: “Do not be afraid, and let it not seem hard to you that you sold me into these regions; for God sent me before you for your salvation,” and below: “For God sent me before you that you may be preserved on the earth and may have food to live. I was sent not by your counsel but by the will of God, who has made me as a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and ruler in all the land of Egypt.” And when, after their father’s death, he took away the suspicion of fear from his frightened brothers, he said: “Do not fear; can we resist the will of God? You thought evil against me, but God turned it to good, to exalt me, as you see at present, that he might save many peoples.” Blessed David also declared in the hundred and fourth psalm that this was done then by God’s dispensation, saying: “And he called a famine upon the land and broke every staff of bread. He sent a man before them; Joseph was sold as a slave.” These two, then, the grace of God and free will, seem indeed opposed to each other, but both agree, and we gather by the reasoning of piety that we ought to accept both alike, lest by taking one of them away from man we seem to have gone beyond the rule of the church’s faith. For when God sees us turning to will the good, he meets, directs, and strengthens us: “For at the voice of your cry, as soon as he hears, he will answer you,” and: “Call upon me,” he says, “in the day of trouble, and I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.” And again, if he sees that we are unwilling or have grown lukewarm, he applies saving exhortations to our hearts, by which a good will may be either restored or formed in us.

“For we must not believe that God made man such that he can never either will or be able to do good. Otherwise he has not granted him free will, if he has allowed him only to will and be able to do evil, but not to will or be able to do good of himself. And how will that sentence of the Lord stand, pronounced after the transgression of the first man: “Behold, Adam has become as one of us, knowing good and evil”? For we must not think that he was previously such as to be wholly ignorant of good. Otherwise we would have to admit that he was formed like some irrational and senseless animal, which is quite absurd and wholly foreign to the catholic faith. On the contrary, according to the saying of the most wise Solomon, “God made man upright,” that is, to enjoy continually the knowledge of good only; “but they themselves have sought out many thoughts,” for they became, as has been said, “knowing good and evil.” After the transgression, then, Adam acquired the knowledge of evil which he had not had, but he did not lose the knowledge of good which he had received. Finally, that the human race did not lose the knowledge of good after Adam’s transgression is declared most plainly by the apostle’s words: “For when the Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves; they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them, and their thoughts among themselves accusing or else defending them, on the day when God will judge the secrets of men.” In this sense also the Lord through the prophet rebukes the blindness of the Jews, not natural but voluntary, which they obstinately brought upon themselves: “Hear, you deaf, and look, you blind, that you may see. Who is deaf but my servant? And who is blind but he to whom I have sent my messengers?” And lest anyone should ascribe their blindness to nature rather than will, he says elsewhere: “Bring forth the people that is blind and has eyes, deaf and has ears,” and again: “You who have eyes and do not see, and ears and do not hear.” The Lord also says in the gospel: “Because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear nor understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, which says: Hearing you will hear and will not understand, and seeing you will see and will not perceive. For the heart of this people has grown fat, and with their ears they have heard heavily, and they have closed their eyes, lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and be converted, and I should heal them.” Finally, to show that the possibility of good was in them, he rebuked the Pharisees: “And why do you not even of yourselves judge what is right?” He would certainly not have said this to them unless he knew that they could discern what is just by natural judgment. Hence we must beware of referring all the merits of the saints to the Lord in such a way that we ascribe to human nature nothing but what is evil and perverse. In this we are refuted by the testimony of the most wise Solomon, or rather of the Lord himself, whose words these are; for when he prayed on the completion of the building of the temple, he said: “And David my father wished to build a house for the name of the Lord God of Israel. And the Lord said to David my father: Whereas you thought in your heart to build a house for my name, you did well in having this very thing in mind. Yet you shall not build a house for my name.” Is this thought and this intention of King David, then, to be called good and from God, or evil and from man? For if that thought was good and from God, why is its effect denied to him by the one who inspired it? But if it was evil and from man, why is it praised by the Lord? It remains, then, that it be believed to have been both good and from man. In this way we can judge our own thoughts daily too. For it was not granted to David alone to think good of himself, nor is it denied to us by nature that we can ever think or understand anything good. It cannot be doubted, then, that the seeds of the virtues have been implanted by nature in every soul by the kindness of the Creator; but unless these are stirred up by God’s help, they will not be able to reach the growth of perfection, since, according to the blessed apostle, “neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.” That freedom of will lies open to man in either direction is also taught most plainly by the book called the Shepherd, in which two angels, a good one and an evil one, are said to attend each of us, while it rests with man’s option to choose which he will follow. And therefore free will always remains in man, which can either neglect or love the grace of God. For the apostle would not have commanded, saying: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” had he not known that it could be either cultivated or neglected by us. But lest they should believe that they did not need divine help for the work of salvation, he adds: “For it is God who works in you both to will and to accomplish, for his good pleasure.” And therefore, warning Timothy, he says: “Do not neglect the grace of God which is in you,” and again: “For this reason I remind you to stir up the grace of God which is in you.” Hence also, writing to the Corinthians, he exhorts and warns them not to show themselves unworthy of God’s grace by fruitless works, saying: “And helping, we also beseech you not to receive the grace of God in vain.” Simon, no doubt because he had received it in vain, did not profit from receiving saving grace; for he would not obey the commands of blessed Peter, who said: “Repent of this wickedness of yours, and pray to God if perhaps this thought of your heart may be forgiven you; for I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity.” God, then, anticipates man’s will, as it is said: “My God, his mercy will go before me”; and again, when God waits and in a way usefully holds back in order to test our choice, our will anticipates him, as it is said: “And in the morning my prayer will go before you,” and again: “I anticipated in the dawn and cried out,” and: “My eyes anticipated the morning.” He also calls and invites us, when he says: “All day long I have stretched out my hands to a people that does not believe me and contradicts me,” and he is invited by us, when we say to him: “All day long I have stretched out my hands to you.” He waits for us, when it is said through the prophet: “Therefore the Lord waits to have mercy on you,” and he is waited for by us, when we say: “I waited patiently for the Lord, and he regarded me,” and: “I have waited for your salvation, O Lord.” He strengthens us, when he says: “And I have instructed and strengthened their arms, and they have thought evil against me,” and he exhorts us to strengthen ourselves, when he says: “Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees.” Jesus cries: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink”; the prophet also cries to him: “I have labored crying out; my throat has become hoarse; my eyes have failed while I hope in my God.” The Lord seeks us, saying: “I sought, and there was no man; I called, and there was no one to answer”; and he himself is sought by the bride, who laments tearfully: “On my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loved; I sought him and did not find him; I called him and he did not answer me.”

“And so the grace of God always cooperates with our will for good and helps, protects, and defends it in all things, in such a way that it sometimes even requires or waits for some efforts of good will from it, lest it should seem to confer its gifts on one wholly asleep or slack in idle sloth. It seeks occasions, as it were, so that, when the torpor of human sluggishness has been shaken off, the generosity of its bounty may not seem unreasonable, since it imparts it under the appearance of a certain desire and labor. And nevertheless the grace of God remains free, since in return for certain slight and small efforts it bestows with inestimable generosity such glory of immortality and such gifts of everlasting blessedness. For it must not be declared that, because the faith of the thief on the cross came first, the blessed dwelling in paradise was therefore not promised to him freely; nor must it be believed that the repentance of King David, that one word with which he said, “I have sinned against the Lord,” rather than the mercy of God, took away two such grave crimes of his, so that he deserved to hear through the prophet Nathan: “And the Lord has taken away your iniquity; you shall not die.” That he added murder to adultery, then, was certainly of free will; that he was rebuked by the prophet is the grace of divine condescension. Again, that he humbly acknowledged his sin was his own; but that in the briefest moment of time he gained pardon for such great crimes is the gift of the merciful Lord. And what shall we say of this so brief confession and the incomparable immensity of the divine reward, when it is very easy to consider what the blessed apostle declared about his own countless persecutions, looking to that greatness of future reward? “For this momentary and light affliction of ours,” he says, “works in us beyond measure, beyond comparison, an eternal weight of glory.” Of this he also declares steadfastly elsewhere: “For the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the future glory that will be revealed in us.” However much, then, human frailty has striven, it cannot be equal to the future reward, nor will it so lessen divine grace by its labors that grace does not always remain free. And therefore the said teacher of the Gentiles, although he testifies that he obtained the rank of apostleship by the grace of God, saying: “But by the grace of God I am what I am,” nevertheless declares that he too responded to divine grace, saying: “And his grace in me was not in vain, but I labored more abundantly than all of them; yet not I, but the grace of God with me.” For when he says “I labored,” he indicates the effort of his own will; when he says “yet not I, but the grace of God,” he shows the power of divine protection; when he says “with me,” he declares that it cooperated with him, not idle or careless, but laboring and toiling.

“We read that divine justice provided this also in Job, his most approved athlete, when the devil had asked for him for single combat. For if he had engaged the enemy not by his own strength but solely by the protecting grace of God, and had endured those manifold masses of temptations and disasters, sought out with all the enemy’s cruelty, without any virtue of his own patience, supported only by divine aid, how could the devil not have repeated more justly against him that slanderous word which he had earlier uttered: “Does Job serve God for nothing? Have you not fenced him in, and all his property round about? But take away your hand,” that is, let him fight against me by his own strength, “and see if he does not bless you to your face.” But since the slanderous enemy does not dare to repeat any such complaint after the conflict, he confesses that he was defeated not by God’s strength but by Job’s. Yet we must not believe that the grace of God was wholly absent from him; it gave the tempter as much power to tempt as it knew Job had strength to resist, not protecting him from the attack in such a way as to leave no room for human virtue, but providing only this, that the most violent enemy should not, by making him mad and deprived of his senses, crush him with an unequal and unfair weight of combat. That the Lord is accustomed sometimes to test our faith so that it may become stronger or more glorious, we are taught by the example of the centurion in the gospel. Though the Lord certainly knew that he would heal his servant by the power of his word, he chose to offer his bodily presence, saying: “I will come and heal him.” But when the centurion surpassed this offer by the ardor of a more fervent faith and said: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof; but only say the word, and my servant will be healed,” the Lord marvels at him, praises him, and prefers him to all those of the people of Israel who had believed, saying: “Truly I say to you, I have not found such faith in Israel.” For there would be no praise or merit if Christ had preferred in him what he himself had given. We read that divine justice arranged this testing of faith also in that most magnificent patriarch, when it is said: “And it came to pass after these words that God tested Abraham.” For divine justice wished to try, not that faith which the Lord was inspiring in him, but that which, once called and enlightened by the Lord, he could show by the choice of his freedom. Hence the constancy of his faith is not without reason proved, and when the grace of God, which had left him for a little while in order to prove him, came to his aid, it is said: “Do not lay your hand on the boy, nor do anything to him; for now I know that you fear the Lord, and you have not spared your beloved son for my sake.” That this kind of temptation can happen to us too, for the merit of proving us, is plainly foretold by the lawgiver in Deuteronomy: “If there arises among you a prophet, or one who says he has seen a dream, and foretells a sign and a wonder, and what he said comes to pass, and he says to you: Let us go and serve strange gods which you do not know, do not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer, for the Lord your God is testing you, whether you love him with all your heart and keep his commandments or not.” What then? When God has allowed that prophet or dreamer to arise, are we to believe that he will protect those whose faith he intends to prove in such a way as to leave no room at all for their free will to fight with the tempter by their own strength? And why should they be tempted at all, if he knows them to be so weak and frail that they cannot resist the tempter by their own strength? But the Lord’s justice would surely not have allowed them to be tempted unless he knew that there was in them a strength equal to resisting, by which, in the justice of his judgment, they could be judged deservedly either guilty or praiseworthy in either case. Of the same kind is what the apostle says: “Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has taken you but what is human. But God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but will make with the temptation also a way out, that you may be able to bear it.” For when he says, “Let him who stands take heed lest he fall,” he makes the freedom of the will watchful, knowing that, once grace has been received, it can either stand by diligence or fall by negligence. And when he adds, “No temptation has taken you but what is human,” he rebukes their weakness and the inconstancy of a mind not yet strong, by which they could not yet be attacked by the whirlwinds of the spiritual forces of wickedness, against whom he knew that he himself, or those who were perfect, fought daily; of these he says to the Ephesians: “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.” But when he adds, “God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able,” he does not wish that the Lord should not allow them to be tempted, but that they should not be tempted beyond what they could bear. The former indicated the capacity of human will; the latter shows the grace of the Lord moderating the struggles of temptations. In all these things, then, it is proved that divine grace always stirs up man’s will, but not so as to protect and defend it in all things in such a way that it does not also make it fight by its own efforts against its spiritual enemies; in which, if victorious, it may recognize the grace of God, or, if overcome, its own weakness, and so learn to hope not in its own strength but always in divine aid, and to run continually to its protector. And that this may be proved not by our conjecture but by still clearer testimonies of divine Scripture, let us consider what we read in Joshua: “The Lord left these nations and would not destroy them, that he might test Israel by them, whether they would keep the commandments of the Lord their God, and that they might have practice in fighting with enemies.” And to compare something mortal with the incomparable mercy of our Creator, not as equal in kindness but by some likeness of indulgence: if a devoted and careful nurse carries a little child in her bosom for a long time, so that at some point she may teach it to walk, she first lets it crawl, then holds it up with the strength of her right hand so that it may lean on alternate steps; soon, leaving it a little, if she sees it stumbling, she catches it at once, supports it when it totters, lifts it when it falls, and either keeps it from falling or, letting it fall lightly, raises it after the tumble. But when she has brought it to boyhood or to the strength of adolescence and youth, she lays on it certain burdens or labors by which it is not crushed but exercised, and lets it compete with its rivals. How much more does that heavenly Father of all know whom to carry in the bosom of his grace, whom to exercise in virtue before his eyes by the choice of free will; and yet he helps the one who labors, hears the one who calls, does not abandon the one who seeks, and rescues from danger sometimes even one who does not know it.

“By these things it is plainly shown that “the judgments of God are unsearchable and his ways past finding out,” by which he draws the human race to salvation. This we can also prove by the examples of calls in the gospels. For he chose Andrew and Peter and the other apostles, who were thinking nothing about the remedy of their salvation, by the free condescension of his grace. Zacchaeus, who faithfully stretched himself to see the Lord and made up for the shortness of his stature by the height of a sycamore, he not only receives but even honors with the blessing of his dwelling with him. Paul he draws unwilling and resisting. Another he commands to cling to him so inseparably that he does not grant him, when he asks, the briefest respite for his father’s burial. To Cornelius, persisting continually in prayers and alms, the way of salvation is shown as a kind of reward, and he is commanded by an angel’s visit to send for Peter and learn from him the words of salvation by which he would be saved with all his household. And so that manifold wisdom of God dispenses the salvation of men with manifold and unsearchable kindness, and imparts the grace of his bounty according to each one’s capacity, so that he chose to perform even his healings not according to the uniform power of his majesty but according to the measure of faith in which he found each one, or as he himself had apportioned to each. For the one who believed that the will of Christ alone was enough to cleanse his leprosy, he healed by the mere assent of his will, saying: “I will; be cleansed.” For another, who begged him to come and raise his dead daughter by the laying on of his hand, he entered his house and granted what was asked in the same way as he had hoped. For another, who believed that the whole of healing lay in his word of command and answered: “Only say the word, and my servant will be healed,” he restored the loosened limbs to their former strength by the command of his word, saying: “Go, and as you have believed, let it be done for you.” On others, who hoped for healing from touching the fringe of his garment, he bestowed the gifts of health abundantly. To some, when asked, he granted a cure for their diseases; to others he gave healing unasked; others he urged to hope, saying: “Do you want to be healed?” To others who did not hope he brought help of his own accord. The desires of some he examined before satisfying their will, saying: “What do you want me to do for you?” To another who did not know the way by which she might obtain what she desired, he kindly showed it, saying: “If you believe, you will see the glory of God.” Among some he poured out the power of healings so abundantly that the evangelist records of them: “And he healed all their sick”; but among others that immense abyss of Christ’s benefits was so blocked that it is said: “And Jesus could not do mighty works among them because of their unbelief.” And so the generosity of God is itself shaped according to the capacity of human faith, so that to one he says: “According to your faith be it done to you,” to another: “Go, and as you have believed, let it be done for you,” to another: “Let it be done for you as you will,” and again to another: “Your faith has saved you.”

“But let no one think that we have brought forward these things in an attempt to maintain that the sum of salvation lies in the power of our faith, according to the profane opinion of certain people who ascribe everything to free will and define that the grace of God is dispensed according to each one’s merit. On the contrary, we declare with an unqualified statement that the grace of God even overflows and sometimes passes beyond the narrow limits of human unbelief. We remember that this happened in the case of the official in the gospel, who, believing it easier for his sick son to be cured than for a dead one to be raised, hastily begged for the Lord’s presence, saying: “Lord, come down before my son dies.” Although Christ rebuked his unbelief with these words: “Unless you see signs and wonders, you do not believe,” yet he did not exercise the grace of his divinity according to the weakness of the man’s faith, nor did he drive out the deadly disease of fever by his bodily presence, as the man had believed, but by the word of his power, saying: “Go, your son lives.” We read that the Lord poured out this superabundance of grace also in the healing of the paralytic: when the man asked only for the cure of the sickness by which his body had been loosened, he first bestowed health on his soul, saying: “Take heart, son, your sins are forgiven.” After this, when the scribes did not believe that he could forgive men’s sins, to confound their unbelief he also bound together by the word of his power the man’s limbs loosened by paralysis, saying: “Why do you think evil in your hearts? Which is easier, to say, Your sins are forgiven, or to say, Rise and walk? But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins,” then he said to the paralytic, “Rise, take up your bed, and go into your house.” Likewise too in the case of the man who, lying in vain for thirty-eight years by the edge of the pool, had hoped for healing from the moving of its water, he showed the generosity of his spontaneous bounty. For when, wishing to stir him toward the remedies of health, he had said to him: “Do you want to be healed?” and the man complained of the lack of human help, saying: “I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is troubled,” pardoning his unbelief and ignorance, the Lord in his mercy restored him to his former health, not in the way he had hoped, but in the way the Lord willed, saying: “Rise, take up your bed, and go into your house.” And what wonder if such things are told as done by the Lord’s power, when divine grace has worked similar things through his servants too? For when Peter and John were entering the temple and the man lame from his mother’s womb, who knew nothing of walking, asked for alms, they gave him not the cheap coins that the sick man asked for but the use of walking, and enriched one who hoped for the comfort of the smallest coin with the reward of an unhoped-for health, as Peter said: “Silver and gold I have none; but what I have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise and walk.”

“By these examples, then, which we have brought forward from the records of the gospels, we can observe most plainly that God secures the salvation of the human race in diverse and countless ways and by unsearchable paths: that he spurs on to greater ardor the course of some who are willing and thirsting, and compels others even against their will and unwilling; that sometimes he helps so that what he sees we usefully desire may be fulfilled, and sometimes inspires the very beginnings of holy desire, and grants either the beginning of a good work or perseverance in it. Hence it is that in our prayers we proclaim the Lord not only protector and savior but also helper and upholder. For in that he calls us first and draws us to salvation without our knowing and against our will, he is protector and savior; but in that he is accustomed to bring aid to us when we strive, and to receive and shelter us when we flee to him, he is called upholder and refuge. Finally, the blessed apostle, turning over in his mind this manifold generosity of God’s dispensation, and seeing that he had fallen into a kind of immense and boundless ocean of God’s kindness, exclaimed: “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are the judgments of God and his ways past finding out! For who has known the mind of the Lord?” Whoever, then, believes that he can measure the depth of that inestimable abyss by human reason will be trying to make void the wonder at this knowledge before which so great a teacher of the Gentiles stood in awe. For whoever is confident that he can fully conceive in his mind or explain the dispensations of God by which he works salvation in men is certainly contradicting the truth of the apostle’s saying, and will declare with profane boldness that God’s judgments can be searched out and his ways traced. The Lord, then, wishing to express by a movement of human affection this dispensation and love of his which he deigns to give us with unwearied kindness, and finding in this creation no such feeling of love to which he could more worthily compare it, compared it to the most tender heart of a devoted mother; and he uses this example because nothing dearer can be found in human nature, saying: “Can a woman forget her infant, so as not to have pity on the son of her womb?” But not content with this comparison, he at once goes beyond it and adds: “And even if she should forget, yet I will not forget you.”

“By this it is plainly gathered by those who measure the greatness of grace or the small measure of human will, not with wordy talk but with experience as their guide, that “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the prudent, nor favor to the learned,” but “one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each as he wills.” And therefore it is proved by undoubting faith and, so to speak, by tangible experience that the God of the universe, like a most devoted father and a most kind physician, according to the apostle “works all in all” without distinction: now inspiring the beginnings of salvation and implanting in each the ardor of a good will, now granting the accomplishment of the work itself and the perfecting of the virtues; now calling back even the unwilling and unaware from ruin already near and a headlong fall, now offering occasions and opportunities of salvation and restraining headlong and violent efforts from deadly designs; receiving some who are willing and running, and dragging others who are unwilling and resisting, and compelling them to a good will. But that the whole is granted by the Godhead to us who do not always resist nor remain persistently unwilling, and that the sum of our salvation is to be ascribed not to the merit of our works but to heavenly grace, we are taught by the words of the Lord himself: “And you shall remember your ways and all your wicked deeds by which you have been defiled, and you shall be displeasing to yourselves in your own sight for all your evil deeds which you have done. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I have done good to you for my name’s sake, not according to your evil ways nor according to your most wicked deeds, O house of Israel.” And therefore it is defined by all the catholic fathers, who learned perfection of heart not by empty disputation of words but in reality and practice, first, that it belongs to the divine gift that each one should be kindled to desire all that is good, but in such a way that the choice of free will is fully open to either side; likewise, second, that it belongs to divine grace that the said exercises of the virtues can be carried out, but in such a way that the possibility of the will is not extinguished; third, that it pertains to the gifts of God that perseverance in the virtue acquired is kept, but in such a way that the freedom surrendered does not feel captivity. For thus the God of the universe must be believed to “work all in all,” that he stirs up, protects, and strengthens, not that he takes away the freedom of the will which he himself once granted. If anything gathered by more cunning human argument and reasoning seems to oppose this understanding, it should be avoided rather than brought forward to the destruction of faith (for we gain not faith from understanding but understanding from faith, as it is written: “Unless you believe, you will not understand”), since how God works all things in us and yet everything can be ascribed to free will cannot be fully grasped by human sense and reason.” With this food blessed Chaeremon strengthened us, so that we did not feel the labor of so pathless a journey.

The order of our promise and of our journey requires that the instruction of Abba Nesteros, a man outstanding in all things and of the highest knowledge, should follow. When he perceived that we had committed some parts of the Holy Scriptures to memory and desired to understand them, he addressed us with these words: “There are indeed many kinds of knowledge in this world, as many as there are varieties of arts and disciplines. But although all of them are either wholly useless or profit only the advantages of the present life, there is none that does not have its own order and method of teaching, by which it can be reached by those who seek it. If, then, those arts are directed by definite and proper lines to make themselves known, how much more does the discipline and profession of our religion, which tends to the contemplation of the hidden things of invisible mysteries and seeks not present gains but the reward of eternal prizes, rest on a definite order and method. Its knowledge is twofold: the first is praktikē, that is, practical, which is perfected by the amendment of conduct and the cleansing of vices; the other is theōrētikē, which consists in the contemplation of divine things and the knowledge of most holy meanings.

“Whoever, then, wishes to reach contemplative knowledge must first acquire practical knowledge with all effort and strength. For this practical knowledge can be possessed without the contemplative, but the contemplative can by no means be grasped without the practical. For there are certain steps, so ordered and distinct that human lowliness can climb to the heights; if they follow one another in the order we have described, one can reach the height, but if the first step is removed one cannot fly across to it. In vain, then, does one strive toward the sight of God who does not avoid the contagion of the vices; for “the spirit of God hates deceit” and “does not dwell in a body subject to sins.”

“This practical perfection rests on a twofold basis. Its first mode is that the nature of all the vices and the method of curing them be known. The second is that the order of the virtues be so discerned, and our mind so formed by their perfection, that it serves them no longer as though forced and subjected to a violent command, but delights in them and feeds on them as on a natural good, and climbs that steep and narrow way with pleasure. For how will one be able to reach either the understanding of the virtues, which is the second step in practical discipline, or the mysteries of spiritual and heavenly things, which lie in the higher step of contemplation, who has neither been able to understand the nature of his own vices nor striven to root them out? It will follow that one who has not conquered the plainer things cannot advance to the higher, and much less will he grasp what is outside him who has not been able to understand what is implanted within him. We must know, however, that we have to labor with a double intensity of effort in expelling vices compared with acquiring virtues. And this we do not take from our own conjecture, but are taught it by the saying of him who alone knows the powers and method of his own workmanship: “Behold,” he says, “I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to root up and to pull down, and to destroy and to scatter, and to build and to plant.” He indicated that four things are needed for driving out harmful things, namely to root up, to pull down, to destroy, and to scatter; but for perfecting the virtues and acquiring what belongs to righteousness, only to build and to plant. Hence it is plainly clear that the ingrown passions of body and soul are harder to tear up and uproot than spiritual virtues are to build up and plant.

“This practical knowledge, then, which rests on two modes as has been said, is divided among many professions and pursuits. For some set the whole aim of their intention on the secrecy of the desert and purity of heart, as we know that in former times Elijah and Elisha, and in our own times blessed Antony and other followers of the same purpose, clung most intimately to God through the silence of solitude. Some have given all the care of their effort to the instruction of the brothers and watchful care of coenobia, as we remember that recently Abba John, who presided over a great coenobium in the neighborhood of the city called Thmuis, and some men of the same merit, were renowned even for apostolic signs. Some are delighted by the devout service of the guest house and of hospitality, by which in former times the patriarch Abraham and Lot pleased the Lord, and recently blessed Macarius, a man of singular gentleness and patience, who presided over the guest house at Alexandria in such a way that he should be thought inferior to none of those who have pursued the secrecy of solitude. Some, choosing the care of the sick, others carrying out intercession on behalf of the wretched and oppressed, or applying themselves to teaching, or giving alms to the poor, have flourished among great and eminent men by their devotion and kindness.

“Therefore it is useful and fitting for each one to hasten, with the utmost zeal and diligence, to reach perfection in the work he has taken up, according to the purpose he has chosen or the grace he has received; and while praising and admiring the virtues of others, never to depart from the profession he has once chosen, knowing, according to the apostle, that the body of the church is indeed one but its members many, and that it has “gifts differing according to the grace given to us: whether prophecy, according to the proportion of faith; or ministry, in ministering; or he who teaches, in teaching; or he who exhorts, in exhortation; he who gives, in simplicity; he who presides, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.” For no members can claim for themselves the services of other members, since the eyes do not perform the office of the hands, nor the nostrils that of the ears. And therefore “not all are apostles, not all prophets, not all teachers, not all have the gift of healings, not all speak with tongues, not all interpret.”

“For those who are not yet grounded in the profession they have taken up are accustomed, when they hear some people praised for various pursuits and virtues, to be so fired by their praise that they at once long to imitate their way of life; and in this human frailty necessarily spends vain efforts. For it is impossible for one and the same man to shine at once with all the virtues I have listed above. If anyone wishes to aim at all of them together, he must fall into this: that while he follows all, he attains none fully, and gains loss rather than profit from this change and variety. For there are many ways by which one tends to God, and therefore let each one complete the one he has once taken up with the unwavering intention of his course, so that he may be perfect in whatever profession it is.

“Besides the loss which we have said strikes the monk who wishes through fickleness of mind to pass to different pursuits, there is also danger of death from this: that sometimes things done rightly by some are presumed upon by others with bad example, and what turned out well for some is felt to be ruinous by others. For, to give an example, suppose someone wished to imitate the virtue of that man whom Abba John is accustomed to bring forward not as a pattern for imitation but only for admiration. A certain man in secular dress came to the said elder and brought him some first fruits of his crops, and there he found a man seized by a most savage demon. This demon, despising the adjurations and commands of Abba John, declared that he would never leave at his command the body he had possessed; but, terrified at this man’s arrival, he departed, crying out his name with the greatest reverence. The old man, marveling not a little at such evident grace, and all the more astonished because he saw him in secular dress, began to inquire carefully about the course of his life and profession. When he said that he was a layman and bound by the tie of marriage, blessed John, considering in his mind the excellence of his virtue and grace, inquired more attentively what his way of life was. He testified that he was a peasant who sought his living by the daily work of his hands, and that he was aware of no good in himself, except that he never went out in the morning to do the work of the field, nor returned home in the evening, without first giving thanks in church to God, the giver of his daily provision; that he had never used any of his produce without first offering its first fruits and tithes to God; and that he had never led his oxen across the border of another’s harvest without first muzzling them, lest his neighbor suffer even a little loss through his carelessness. And since these things still did not seem to Abba John sufficient to account for such great grace, by which he saw the man preferred to himself, and he searched him, asking what it was that could be compared with the merits of such grace, the man, constrained by reverence for so earnest an inquiry, confessed that twelve years before, when he wished to profess as a monk, he had been compelled by the force and command of his parents to take a wife, whom, without anyone even now knowing it, he kept as a virgin in the place of a sister. When the old man heard this, he was moved to such admiration that he declared publicly in his presence that it was not without reason that the demon who had despised himself could not bear the presence of this man, whose virtue he himself would not dare to aim at, not only in the heat of youth but not even now without danger to his chastity. Although Abba John set forth this deed with the greatest admiration, he urged none of the monks to try it, knowing that many things done rightly by some have brought great ruin on others who imitated them, and that what the Lord has granted to a few by a special gift cannot be claimed by all.

“But let us return to the exposition of knowledge with which our discourse began. As we said above, practical knowledge branches into many professions and pursuits, but contemplative knowledge is divided into two parts, that is, historical interpretation and spiritual understanding. Hence Solomon too, when he had enumerated the manifold grace of the church, added: “For all who are with her are clothed double.” The kinds of spiritual knowledge are three: tropology, allegory, anagogy, of which it is said in Proverbs: “But you, write them for yourself threefold upon the breadth of your heart.” History, then, embraces the knowledge of past and visible things, which is set out by the apostle thus: “For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. But the one by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, while the one by the free woman was born through the promise.” What follows belongs to allegory, since the things that really happened are said to have prefigured the form of another mystery: “For these,” he says, “are two covenants, one from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery, which is Hagar. For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia, which corresponds to the present Jerusalem, and she is in slavery with her children.” Anagogy, rising from spiritual mysteries to certain higher and more sacred secrets of heaven, is added by the apostle thus: “But the Jerusalem above is free, which is our mother. For it is written: Rejoice, barren one who does not bear; break forth and cry, you who are not in labor; for many are the children of the desolate, more than of her who has a husband.” Tropology is the moral explanation that concerns the cleansing of life and practical instruction, as if we were to understand these same two covenants as practical and contemplative discipline, or indeed if we wished to take Jerusalem or Sion as the soul of man, according to the saying: “Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem; praise your God, O Sion.” So these four figures, if we wish, flow together into one, so that one and the same Jerusalem can be understood in four ways: according to history, the city of the Jews; according to allegory, the church of Christ; according to anagogy, that heavenly city of God, “which is the mother of us all”; according to tropology, the soul of man, which is often rebuked or praised by the Lord under this name. Of these four kinds of interpretation the blessed apostle says: “But now, brothers, if I come to you speaking in tongues, what shall I profit you unless I speak to you either in revelation, or in knowledge, or in prophecy, or in teaching?” For revelation belongs to allegory, by which what the historical narrative covers is laid open by spiritual sense and exposition; for example, if we try to explain how “all our fathers were under the cloud, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea,” and how “all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink from the rock that followed them; and the rock was Christ.” This exposition, compared with the prefiguration of the body and blood of Christ which we receive daily, contains the method of allegory. Knowledge, which the apostle likewise mentions, is tropology, by which we discern with prudent examination whether all things that belong to practical discernment are useful or honorable; as when we are commanded to judge among ourselves “whether it is fitting for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered.” This method, as has been said, contains the moral sense. Again prophecy, which the apostle put in the third place, signifies anagogy, by which the word is carried over to invisible and future things, as in this: “But we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, concerning those who have fallen asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For if we believe that Christ died and rose again, so also God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep through Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive at the coming of the Lord shall not precede those who have fallen asleep in Christ; for the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead who are in Christ will rise first.” In this kind of exhortation the figure of anagogy is displayed. But teaching unfolds the simple order of historical exposition, in which no more hidden meaning is contained than what sounds in the words, as in this: “For I delivered to you first of all what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose on the third day, and that he was seen by Cephas,” and: “God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law,” or this: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord.”

“Therefore, if you care to reach the light of spiritual knowledge, not through the vice of empty boasting but for the sake of cleansing, first be inflamed with desire for that beatitude of which it is said: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” so that you may also reach that of which the angel speaks to Daniel: “But those who are learned shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who instruct many in righteousness like the stars for ever and ever,” and in another prophet: “Light for yourselves the light of knowledge while there is time.” Keeping, then, the diligence in reading which I perceive you have, hasten with all zeal to grasp fully, as soon as possible, practical, that is, ethical discipline. For without it that contemplative purity we have spoken of cannot be grasped. It is attained, as a kind of reward after many wages of works and labors, only by those who have been made perfect not by the words of others who teach but by the virtue of their own actions. For gaining understanding not from meditation on the law but from the fruit of their work, they sing with the psalmist: “From your commandments I have understood,” and, all their passions refined away, they say with confidence: “I will sing, and I will understand in the blameless way.” For he who sings will understand what is sung who walks in the blameless way with the step of a pure heart. And therefore, if you wish to prepare in your heart the holy tabernacle of spiritual knowledge, cleanse yourselves from the contagion of all vices and strip yourselves of the cares of the present world. For it is impossible for a soul occupied even slightly with worldly distractions to merit the gift of knowledge, or to become a begetter of spiritual meanings or retentive of sacred readings. Observe, therefore, first of all, and especially you, John, whose still youthful age favors keeping what I am about to say, that you impose the greatest silence on your mouth, lest your zeal for reading and the labor of your desire be made void by vain elation. For this is the first entrance into practical discipline: to receive the instructions and sayings of all the elders with an attentive heart and, as it were, a mute mouth, and, storing them carefully in your breast, to hasten to carry them out rather than to teach them. From the latter the ruinous presumption of vainglory will spring up, but from the former the fruits of spiritual knowledge. So never dare to put forward anything in the conference of the elders unless either ignorance that would be harmful or the need for necessary knowledge drives you to ask, as some, distracted by love of vainglory, pretend to ask about what they know very well in order to show off their learning. For it is impossible for one who applies himself to reading with the purpose of gaining human praise to merit the gift of true knowledge. For whoever is bound by this passion must also be bound by other vices, especially pride; and so, overthrown in the practical and ethical contest, he will by no means attain the spiritual knowledge that is born of it. Be, then, in all things “quick to hear, but slow to speak,” lest there fall on you what is noted by Solomon: “If you see a man quick in words, know that a fool has more hope than he”; and do not presume to teach anyone in words what you have not first done in deed. For our Lord also established by his example that we must keep this order, of whom it is said: “what Jesus began to do and to teach.” Beware, then, lest, leaping to teach before acting, you be counted among those of whom the Lord speaks to the disciples in the gospel: “What they tell you, keep and do; but do not do according to their works, for they say and do not do. They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with their finger.” For if he who breaks one of the least commandments and teaches men so “will be called least in the kingdom of heaven,” it certainly follows that he who neglects many and greater ones and presumes to teach will be held no longer least in the kingdom of heaven but greatest in the punishment of hell. And therefore you must beware of being urged to teach by the examples of those who, having acquired skill in disputation and fluency of speech, because they can discourse ornately and at length on whatever they wish, are believed to possess spiritual knowledge by those who do not know how to discern its force and nature. For it is one thing to have facility of tongue and elegance of speech, and another to enter into the veins and marrow of the heavenly sayings and to contemplate the deep and hidden mysteries with the purest eye of the heart; this no human learning or worldly erudition will possess, but only purity of mind through the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

“You must hasten, then, if you would reach the true knowledge of the Scriptures, first to acquire an unshaken humility of heart, which will lead you, through the perfection of love, not to the knowledge that puffs up but to that which enlightens. For it is impossible for an unclean mind to obtain the gift of spiritual knowledge. And therefore avoid with every precaution that, through your zeal for reading, there should arise for you not the light of knowledge nor that everlasting glory which is promised through the enlightenment of teaching, but instruments of perdition from the vanity of arrogance. Next, you must strive in every way, all anxiety and earthly thought driven out, to give yourself assiduously, or rather continually, to sacred reading, until continual meditation imbues your mind and forms it, as it were, into its own likeness, making of it in a way the ark of the covenant, which has within it the two tablets of stone, that is, the lasting firmness of the twofold Testament; and the golden urn, that is, a pure and sincere memory, which keeps with lasting tenacity the manna hidden in it, that is, the everlasting and heavenly sweetness of spiritual meanings and of that bread of angels; and also the rod of Aaron, that is, the saving standard of our high and true High Priest, Jesus Christ, always putting forth leaves with the greenness of immortal remembrance. For this is the rod which, after it was cut off from the root of Jesse, grows green again, having been put to death, more vigorously. All these are covered by the two cherubim, that is, by the fullness of historical and spiritual knowledge; for cherubim is interpreted “multitude of knowledge.” They will continually protect the mercy seat of God, that is, the calm of your breast, and will overshadow it against all the assaults of the spiritual forces of wickedness. And so your mind, carried forward not only into the ark of the divine covenant but also into the royal priesthood, and in a way absorbed in spiritual disciplines through its indissoluble love of purity, will fulfil that command given to the high priest by the lawgiver: “And he shall not go out from the holy places, lest he pollute the sanctuary of God,” that is, his heart, in which the Lord promises that he will always dwell, saying: “I will dwell in them and walk among them.” Therefore the sequence of the sacred Scriptures must be diligently committed to memory and ceaselessly reviewed. For this continual meditation will give us a twofold fruit: first, that while the attention of the mind is occupied in reading and preparing the readings, it cannot be taken captive by any snares of harmful thoughts; and second, that the things which we have gone over with very frequent repetition while we labored to commit them to memory, but which at that time we could not understand because the mind was occupied, we afterward see more clearly when, freed from the allurements of all actions and sights, we turn them over silently, especially in meditation by night; so that the understanding of most hidden meanings, which we did not perceive even with the faintest notion while awake, is revealed to us while we rest and are sunk, as it were, in the stupor of sleep.

“As the renewal of our mind grows through this pursuit, the face of the Scriptures too will begin to be renewed, and the beauty of a more sacred understanding will in a way advance with the one who advances. For their appearance is adapted to the capacity of human understanding, and will appear earthly to the carnal and divine to the spiritual, so that those to whom it seemed before wrapped in thick clouds can neither grasp its subtlety nor bear its brightness. But so that what we are trying to establish may be made clearer by some example, let it be enough to bring forward one testimony of the law, by which we may prove that all the heavenly commandments extend to every kind of person according to the measure of our state. It is written in the law: “You shall not commit sexual immorality.” This is kept to one’s profit, according to the simple sound of the letter, by a man still bound by the passions of carnal obscenities. But by one who has already withdrawn from this filthy act and impure disposition, the same thing must be observed spiritually: namely, that he withdraw not only from the ceremonies of idols but also from all the superstition of the pagans, and from the observance of auguries, omens, all signs, days, and times, or at least that he not be entangled in conjectures from certain words or names, which pollute the sincerity of our faith. For by this sexual immorality Jerusalem too is said to have been defiled, “who committed sexual immorality on every high hill and under every leafy tree,” and whom the Lord again rebukes through the prophet: “Let the augurs of the heavens stand and save you, who gazed at the stars and reckoned the months, to announce from them what would come upon you.” Of this sexual immorality the Lord also says elsewhere, rebuking them: “A spirit of sexual immorality has deceived them, and they have committed sexual immorality against their God.” But whoever has withdrawn from this twofold sexual immorality will have a third to avoid, which is contained in the superstitions of the law and of Judaism. Of these the apostle says: “You observe days and months and times and years,” and again: “Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle.” There is no doubt that these things were said of the superstitions of the law, and whoever falls into them, having without doubt committed adultery against Christ, does not deserve to hear from the apostle: “For I have betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ”; but what follows will be directed to him by the voice of the same apostle: “But I fear lest, as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ Jesus.” And if he escapes the uncleanness of this sexual immorality too, he will have a fourth, which is committed by the adultery of heretical doctrine. Of this the same blessed apostle says: “I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among yourselves men will arise speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them.” And whoever has been able to avoid this too, let him beware lest by a subtler sin he fall into the vice of sexual immorality which consists in the wandering of the thoughts; for every thought, not only a shameful one but even an idle one and one departing even slightly from God, is reckoned by the perfect man as a most unclean sexual immorality.

At this, first moved by a hidden compunction and then groaning deeply, I said: “All these things that you have set out so abundantly have brought me greater increases of despair than I had borne until now. For besides those general captivities of the soul, by which I do not doubt that all the weak are assailed from outside, a special hindrance to salvation is added through that knowledge of literature which I seem to have touched slightly. In it either the insistence of my tutor or the attention of continual reading has so steeped me that now my mind, as if infected by those poems, meditates even at the time of prayer on those trifles of fables and stories of wars in which it was steeped from childhood by the first rudiments of study. While I sing psalms or pray for the pardon of sins, either the shameless memory of poems is suggested to me, or the image of warring heroes turns before my eyes, as it were; and the imagination of such phantasms, always mocking me, so prevents my mind from aspiring to heavenly contemplation that it cannot be driven out even by daily weeping.”

Nesteros: “From this very thing from which your greatest despair of purification arises, a quick and effective remedy can also spring up, if you are willing to transfer to the reading and meditation of the spiritual Scriptures the same diligence and persistence which you say you had in those secular studies. For your mind must be occupied with those poems as long as it does not acquire, with like zeal and assiduity, other things to turn over within itself, and bring forth spiritual and divine things in place of those fruitless and earthly ones. When it has conceived these deeply and profoundly and been nourished on them, the former can gradually be driven out or wholly abolished. For the human mind cannot be empty of all thoughts, and therefore, as long as it is not occupied with spiritual pursuits, it must be entangled in what it learned before. For as long as it has nothing to which to run back and on which to exercise its unwearied movements, it must fall back upon those things in which it was steeped from infancy, and always turn over what it took in by long use and meditation. So, that this spiritual knowledge may be strengthened in you with lasting firmness, and that you may not enjoy it only temporarily, like those who touch it not by their own effort but through others’ reports and perceive it, as it were, by the smell of the air, but that it may be stored up in your senses, as it were built into your very being, seen and handled, you must keep this with all care: even if you happen to hear brought forward in a conference things you know very well, do not receive them with scorn and disdain because they are already known to you, but commend them to your heart with the eagerness with which the desirable words of salvation ought either to be poured unceasingly into our ears or continually brought forth from our mouth. For however often the narration of holy things is repeated, satiety will never produce disgust in a soul that has a thirst for true knowledge; but, receiving them every day as new and desired, the more often it drinks them, the more eagerly it will hear or speak them, and will gain confirmation of the knowledge received from their repetition rather than any disgust from frequent conference. For it is a clear sign of a lukewarm and proud mind if it receives with disdain and negligence the medicine of saving words, even when applied with the zeal of great assiduity. For “a soul that is full mocks at honeycombs, but to a needy soul even bitter things seem sweet.” If, then, these things have been carefully received, stored in the recess of the mind, and sealed with silence, afterward, like certain sweet-smelling wines that “gladden the heart of man,” when they have been matured by the gray hairs of understanding and the age of patience, they will be brought forth with great fragrance from the vessel of your breast, and like a perennial fountain they will overflow from the veins of experience and the watered channels of the virtues, and will pour out continual streams as from an abyss of your heart. For there will come to pass in you what is said in Proverbs to one who has accomplished this in deed: “Drink waters from your own vessels, and from the spring of your own wells. Let the waters of your spring overflow for you, and let your waters pass through your streets”; and according to the prophet Isaiah: “You shall be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water whose waters shall not fail. And the places desolate for ages shall be built in you; you shall raise up the foundations of generation after generation; and you shall be called the builder of hedges, turning the paths into rest.” For that blessedness will come to you which the same prophet promises: “And the Lord will not make your teacher fly away from you any more, and your eyes shall see your teacher, and your ears shall hear the word of one admonishing behind your back: This is the way, walk in it, neither to the right nor to the left.” And so it will come about that not only every direction and meditation of your heart, but even all the wanderings and roamings of your thoughts, will be for you a holy and unceasing rumination on the divine law.

“But, as we said before, it is impossible for anyone without experience either to know or to teach these things. For how will one who is not even capable of receiving be fit to hand on? Even if he presumes to teach something about them, his words will certainly be ineffective and useless and will reach only the ears of his hearers; they will not be able to penetrate their hearts, betrayed as they are by the idleness of his works and the fruitlessness of his vanity, since they are brought forth not from the treasure of a good conscience but from the empty presumption of boasting. For it is impossible for an unclean soul, however much it toils at persistent reading, to obtain spiritual knowledge. For no one pours a noble ointment or the best honey or any precious liquid into a foul and corrupt vessel. For a jar once steeped in horrible stenches more easily contaminates even the most fragrant myrrh than takes on any of its sweetness or charm, since clean things are corrupted much more quickly than corrupt things are cleansed. So too the vessel of our breast, unless it has first been cleansed from every most foul contagion of the vices, will not deserve to receive that ointment of blessing of which it is said through the prophet: “Like the ointment on the head, which ran down upon the beard of Aaron, which ran down to the border of his garment,” nor will it keep undefiled that spiritual knowledge and the words of the Scriptures, which are “sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.” For “what partnership has righteousness with iniquity? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? And what agreement has Christ with Belial?””

Germanus: “This definition seems to us by no means supported by truth or based on probable reasoning. For since it is plain that all who either do not accept the faith of Christ at all or corrupt it by the impious perversity of their doctrines are of unclean heart, how is it that many Jews and heretics, and even catholics entangled in various vices, have attained perfect knowledge of the Scriptures and boast of the greatness of their spiritual learning, while on the other hand a countless multitude of holy men, whose hearts have been cleansed from all contagion of sins, content with the simple devotion of faith, know nothing of the secrets of deeper knowledge? How then will this statement stand, which ascribes spiritual knowledge to purity of heart alone?”

Nesteros: “One who does not carefully weigh all the words of a statement that has been made does not rightly examine the force of a definition. For we said before that such people have only skill in disputation and ornament of speech, but cannot enter into the veins of the Scriptures and the secrets of spiritual meanings. For true knowledge is possessed only by true worshipers of God; and that people certainly does not have it to whom it is said: “Hear, foolish people, who have no heart; who have eyes and do not see, and ears and do not hear,” and again: “Because you have rejected knowledge, I will also reject you, that you may not serve as priest to me.” For since in Christ “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” are said to be “hidden,” how can one who has scorned to find Christ, or who, having found him, blasphemes him with sacrilegious mouth, or who at least pollutes the catholic faith with unclean works, be believed to have attained true knowledge? For “the spirit of God will flee from deceit, and does not dwell in a body subject to sins.” Spiritual knowledge, then, is not reached otherwise than by this order, which one of the prophets elegantly expressed: “Sow for yourselves unto righteousness, reap the hope of life, light for yourselves the light of knowledge.” First, then, we must sow unto righteousness, that is, spread practical perfection by works of righteousness; then we must reap the hope of life, that is, gather the fruits of the spiritual virtues by expelling the carnal vices; and so we shall be able to light for ourselves the light of knowledge. The psalmist also decrees that this order must be kept, saying: “Blessed are the blameless in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who search his testimonies.” For he did not first say, “Blessed are those who search his testimonies,” and afterward add, “Blessed are the blameless in the way,” but first he said, “Blessed are the blameless in the way,” showing clearly by this that no one can rightly come to search out God’s testimonies unless he first walks blameless in the way of Christ by his practical way of life. Those you have mentioned, then, do not possess this knowledge, which the unclean cannot have, but pseudōnymos, that is, knowledge falsely so called, of which the blessed apostle says: “O Timothy, guard the deposit, avoiding profane novelties of words and the oppositions of knowledge falsely so called,” which in Greek is tas antitheseis tēs pseudōnymou gnōseōs. Of those, then, who seem to acquire some image of knowledge, or of those who, though they apply themselves diligently to reading the sacred books and memorizing the Scriptures, do not give up carnal vices, it is elegantly expressed in Proverbs: “Like a golden ring in the nose of a swine, so is beauty to an ill-conducted woman.” For what does it profit anyone to acquire the ornament of the heavenly words and that most precious beauty of the Scriptures, if by clinging to filthy works or thoughts he breaks it, as if by rooting in most unclean earth, or pollutes it in the muddy wallowing of his lusts? For it will come about that what is usually an adornment to those who use it rightly not only cannot adorn these people but is even soiled with the filth of greater mire. For “praise is not seemly in the mouth of a sinner,” to whom it is said through the prophet: “Why do you declare my righteous ordinances and take my covenant in your mouth?” Of souls of this kind, which by no means steadily possess the fear of the Lord (of which it is said: “The fear of the Lord is discipline and wisdom”) and yet try to acquire the sense of the Scriptures by continual meditation on them, it is quite properly said in Proverbs: “What use are riches to a fool? For one without heart cannot possess wisdom.” But this true and spiritual knowledge is so far removed from that worldly erudition which is polluted by the filth of carnal vices that we know it has sometimes flourished wonderfully in some who were ineloquent and almost illiterate. This is proved most clearly in the apostles and in many holy men too, who did not spread out in an empty luxuriance of leaves but were bent down by the true fruits of spiritual knowledge; of them it is written in the Acts of the Apostles: “And seeing the boldness of Peter and John, and finding that they were unlettered and ignorant men, they marveled.” And therefore, if you care to reach its unfading fragrance, labor first with all your efforts to obtain from the Lord the purity of chastity. For no one in whom the disposition of carnal passions, and especially of sexual immorality, still rules can possess spiritual knowledge. For “wisdom will rest in a good heart,” and: “He who fears the Lord will find knowledge with righteousness.” The blessed apostle also teaches that spiritual knowledge is reached by the order we have described. For when he wished not only to compose a list of all his virtues but also to set out their order, to express which follows which or which gives birth to which, after some others he added: “In vigils, in fastings, in chastity, in knowledge, in long-suffering, in kindness, in the Holy Spirit, in love unfeigned.” By this linking of virtues he wished to teach us most plainly that from vigils and fasts we come to chastity, from chastity to knowledge, from knowledge to long-suffering, from long-suffering to kindness, from kindness to the Holy Spirit, and from the Holy Spirit to the rewards of unfeigned love. When, then, by this discipline and this order you too have come to spiritual knowledge, you will without doubt have, as we have said, not a barren or idle teaching but a living and fruitful one; and the most abundant rain of the Holy Spirit following will make fruitful the seed of the saving word that you have committed to the hearts of your hearers, and, according to what the prophet has promised, “rain will be given to your seed wherever you sow in the land, and the bread of the fruits of your land will be most abundant and rich for you.”

“Beware also lest, when riper age has brought you forward to teach, you should, led astray by love of vainglory, thrust these things, which you have learned not so much by reading as by the sweat of experience, indiscriminately upon unclean people, and incur what the most wise Solomon forbade: “Do not bring the ungodly into the pastures of the righteous, and do not be led astray by fullness of the belly. For delights do not profit a fool, nor is wisdom needed where sense is lacking. For he is rather led by folly, since a hard servant will not be corrected by words; for even if he understands, he will not obey,” and: “Say nothing in the ears of a fool, lest he mock at your wise words,” and: “Do not give what is holy to dogs, nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn and tear you.” You should therefore, covering the mysteries of spiritual meanings from such people, sing effectively: “I have hidden your words in my heart, that I may not sin against you.” But perhaps you will say: “And to whom are the mysteries of the divine Scriptures to be dispensed?” The most wise Solomon teaches you: “Give strong drink to those who are in sorrow, and wine to drink to those who are in grief, that they may forget their poverty and remember their sorrows no more”; that is, to those who are weighed down with grief and sorrow in repentance for their former deeds, pour out abundantly the joy of spiritual knowledge like wine, “which gladdens the heart of man,” and refresh them with the fullness of the saving word, lest perhaps, sunk in continual grief and deadly despair, such people be swallowed up by overmuch sorrow. But of those who are in lukewarmness and negligence and are stung by no grief of heart, it is said: “For he who is easygoing and without grief will be in want.” Avoid, then, with all the caution you can, lest, distracted by love of vainglory, you should be unable to share in the lot of him whom the prophet praises, “who has not put out his money at interest.” For whoever dispenses the words of God (of which it is said: “The words of the Lord are pure words, silver tried by fire, proved, purified from the earth seven times”) for love of human praise puts out his money at interest, and will deserve for it not only no praise but even punishment. For he chose to squander the Lord’s money for this reason, that he himself might gain a temporal reward from it, not that the Lord, as it is written, might receive his own with interest when he comes.

“It is clear that the teaching of spiritual things is ineffective for two reasons: either the one who teaches, commending things he has not experienced, tries to instruct his hearer with an empty sound of words, or else the hearer, worthless and full of vices, does not receive with his hardened heart the saving and holy teaching of a spiritual man. Of these it is said through the prophet: “For the heart of this people has been blinded, and with their ears they have heard heavily, and they have closed their eyes, lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and be converted, and I should heal them.”

“Sometimes, however, by the generous liberality of God our dispenser, “who wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth,” it is granted that one who has not shown himself worthy of gospel preaching by a blameless way of life obtains the grace of spiritual teaching for the salvation of many. But in what ways the gifts of healing for driving out demons are also granted by the Lord, it follows that we should explain in a similar discussion, which let us reserve for the evening, rising now for our meal, since whatever is taught gradually and without excessive bodily strain is always taken in more effectively by the heart.”

After the evening synaxis we sat down together on our mats, as is the custom, intent on the promised account. When we had kept silence for a while out of reverence for the old man, he forestalled the silence of our modesty with these words: “The order of the preceding discussion had come to the point of setting out the explanation of spiritual gifts, which we have received by the tradition of the elders to be threefold. The first cause of healing is when the grace of signs accompanies certain chosen and righteous men for the merit of their holiness, as it is plain that the apostles and many of the saints performed signs and wonders according to the authority of the Lord, who says: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons; freely you have received, freely give.” The second is when, for the edification of the church, or for the faith of those who bring their sick or of those who are to be healed, the power of healing proceeds even from sinners and the unworthy. Of these the Savior says in the gospel: “Many will say to me on that day: Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name? And then I will declare to them: I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of iniquity.” And on the other hand, if the faith of those who bring the sick or of the sick themselves is lacking, it does not allow even those on whom the gifts of healing have been conferred to exercise the power of healing. Of this the evangelist Luke says: “And Jesus could not do mighty works among them because of their unbelief.” Hence the same Lord said: “There were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” The third mode of healing is feigned by the collusion and contrivance of demons, so that, when a man bound by manifest crimes is believed, because of admiration for his signs, to be holy and a servant of God, others may be persuaded to imitate his vices too, and so, the door opened to detraction, the holiness of religion itself may be defamed; or at least so that one who believes he has the gifts of healing may be lifted up by pride of heart and fall more heavily. Hence it is that, calling on the names of those whom they know to have no merits of holiness and no spiritual fruits, they pretend to be burned by their merits and to be put to flight from the bodies they possess. Of these it is said in Deuteronomy: “If there arises in your midst a prophet, or one who says he has seen a dream, and foretells a sign and a wonder, and what he said comes to pass, and he says to you: Let us go and follow strange gods which you do not know, and serve them, you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer; for the Lord your God is testing you, to make it plain whether you love him or not, with all your heart and with all your soul”; and in the gospel: “False Christs and false prophets will arise, and will give great signs and wonders, so as to lead into error, if possible, even the elect.”

“Therefore we should never admire those who aim at these things for such powers, but rather consider whether they have been made perfect by the expulsion of all vices and the amendment of their conduct; for this is granted, by the dispensation of God’s grace, not for another’s faith or for a variety of reasons, but for each one’s own effort. For this is practical knowledge, which by another name is called love by the apostle, and which by apostolic authority is preferred to all the tongues of men and angels, to fullness of faith that could even move mountains, to all knowledge and prophecy, to the giving away of all one’s goods, and finally to glorious martyrdom itself. For when he had listed all the kinds of gifts, and said: “To one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge, to another faith, to another the grace of healings, to another the working of miracles,” and the rest, notice in a few words how, when about to speak of love, he preferred it to all the gifts: “And yet,” he says, “I show you a more excellent way beyond measure.” By this it is plainly shown that the sum of perfection and blessedness lies not in working those wonders but in purity of love. And rightly. For all those things will be made void and destroyed, but love will remain for ever. And therefore we have seen that our fathers by no means aimed at such works of signs; on the contrary, though they possessed them by the grace of the Holy Spirit, they never wished to exercise them unless extreme and unavoidable necessity compelled them.

“So, we remember, a dead man was raised by Abba Macarius, who was the first to find a dwelling in the desert of Scetis. For when a certain heretic who followed the unbelief of Eunomius was trying to overthrow the sincerity of the catholic faith by the art of dialectic, and had already deceived a great multitude of people, blessed Macarius, asked by catholic men who were most gravely troubled by the ruin of so great a subversion, came to free the simplicity of all Egypt from the shipwreck of unbelief. When the heretic attacked him with the art of dialectic and wished to lead him, unskilled as he was, into Aristotelian thorns, blessed Macarius, cutting short his wordiness with apostolic brevity, said: “The kingdom of God is not in word but in power. Let us go, then, to the tombs and call the name of the Lord over the first dead man we find, and, as it is written, let us show our faith by works, so that the clearest proofs of the right faith may be declared by his testimony, and we may prove the evident truth not by an empty dispute of words but by the power of signs and by that judgment which cannot be deceived.” When he heard this, the heretic, constrained by shame before the people standing round, pretended for the moment to agree to the proposed condition and promised to be there the next day. But on the following day, while everyone was waiting, having gathered eagerly at the appointed place in their desire for this spectacle, he fled, terrified by the consciousness of his unbelief, and at once left the whole of Egypt. When blessed Macarius, having waited with the people until the ninth hour, saw that he had avoided it because of his conscience, he took the people who had been led astray by him and went to the appointed tombs. The flooding of the Nile has brought this custom to the Egyptians: since the whole breadth of that land is covered for no small part of the year by the usual overflow of waters, like an immense sea, so that no one then has any means of travel except by being carried in boats, the bodies of the dead, embalmed with fragrant spices, are laid in raised chambers. For the soil of that land, soaked with continual drunkenness, prevents the service of burial; if it receives any corpses buried in it, it is forced by the excess of the floods to vomit them up to its surface. When, then, blessed Macarius stood by a very ancient corpse, he said: “O man, if that heretic, the son of perdition, had come here with me, and in his presence I had cried out calling on the name of Christ my God, tell me whether you would have risen before these people who had almost been overthrown by his fraud.” Then the man rose and answered with a voice of assent. Abba Macarius asked him what he had once been when he enjoyed this life, in what age of men he had lived, and whether he had known the name of Christ at that time. He answered that he had lived under very ancient kings and declared that he had not heard the name of Christ in those times. Abba Macarius said to him again: “Sleep in peace with the others in your order, to be raised by Christ at the end of time.” This power and grace of his would perhaps always have remained hidden, as far as it depended on him, had not the need of the whole endangered province and his full devotion and sincere love toward Christ compelled him to perform this miracle. It was certainly not the display of glory but the love of Christ and the good of all the people that wrung it from him, as the reading of Kings shows that blessed Elijah also did, when he asked for fire to come down from heaven upon the victims laid on the pyre, in order to free the faith of the whole people, endangered by the deceits of false prophets.

“Why should I also recall the deeds of Abba Abraham, who is surnamed haplous, that is, “the simple,” for the simplicity and innocence of his conduct? When he had gone from the desert to Egypt during the days of Pentecost to help with the harvest, and was pressed with tearful prayers by a woman who held out her little child, already wasting away and half dead for lack of milk, he gave her a cup of water to drink, marked with the sign of the cross. As soon as she drank it, her breasts, which had been completely dry, wonderfully overflowed with an abundance of milk.

“Or when the same man, going to a village, was surrounded by mocking crowds, who in derision showed him a man with a contracted knee, who for many years had been deprived of the use of walking and crawled about from long-standing weakness, and, testing him, said: “Show us, Abba Abraham, if you are a servant of God, and restore this man to his former health, that we may believe that the name of Christ whom you worship is not empty.” Then at once, calling on the name of Christ, he bent down, took hold of the man’s withered foot, and pulled it. At his touch the dry and bent knee was immediately straightened, and the man went away rejoicing, having recovered the use of walking, which years of weakness had already consigned to oblivion.

“These men, then, claimed nothing for themselves for the power of such wonders, since they confessed that these were done not by their merit but by the Lord’s mercy, refusing human glory in the admiration of signs with the apostolic words: “Men, brothers, why do you marvel at this, or why do you look at us, as though by our own power or piety we had made this man walk?” Nor did they think that anyone should be praised for the gifts and wonders of God, but rather for the fruits of his own virtues, which are produced by the effort of the mind and the power of works. For often, as has been said above, “men corrupt in mind, reprobate concerning the faith,” both cast out demons and work very great miracles in the name of the Lord. When the apostles complained of them and said: “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we forbade him, because he does not follow with us,” although Christ answered them for the moment: “Do not forbid him; for he who is not against you is for you,” yet he declares that to those who say at the end, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?” he will answer: “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of iniquity.” And therefore he warns even those to whom he himself granted this glory of signs and miracles for the merit of their holiness not to be lifted up by them, saying: “Do not rejoice that the demons are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

“Finally, the author of all signs and miracles himself, when he called his disciples to the school of his teaching, showed plainly what his true and chosen followers should learn from him in particular: “Come,” he says, “and learn from me,” not, surely, to drive out demons by heavenly power, not to cleanse lepers, not to give light to the blind, not to raise the dead; for even if I work these things through some of my servants, the human condition cannot insert itself into the praises of God, nor can the minister and servant claim any share for himself in what is the glory of the Godhead alone. “But you,” he says, “learn this from me, that I am meek and humble of heart.” For this it is possible for all in general to learn and practise, whereas works of signs and miracles are neither always necessary, nor good for all, nor granted to all. Humility, then, is the teacher of all virtues; it is the firmest foundation of the heavenly building; it is the proper and magnificent gift of the Savior. For he performs all the miracles that Christ worked without danger of pride who follows the meek Lord not in the loftiness of signs but in the virtue of patience and humility. But whoever longs to command unclean spirits, or to give gifts of healing to the sick, or to show the people some wonderful sign, even though he calls on the name of Christ in his displays, is a stranger to Christ, because with a proud mind he does not follow the teacher of humility. For even when he was returning to the Father and, so to speak, making a kind of testament, he left this to his disciples: “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another,” and he added at once: “By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” He does not say, “if you do signs and miracles likewise,” but “if you have love for one another,” which it is certain only the meek and humble can keep. Therefore our elders never considered as upright monks, or free from the disease of vainglory, those who profess themselves exorcists before men and publish, with most boastful display among admiring crowds, this grace which they have either merited or presumed. But in vain. For “he who leans on lies feeds the winds; the same also chases flying birds.” For without doubt there will happen to them what is said in Proverbs: “As winds and clouds and rain are most evident, so are those who boast of a false gift.” And therefore, if anyone does any of these things in our presence, he ought to be praiseworthy among us not for the wonder of his signs but for the adornment of his conduct; and we should ask not whether demons are subject to him but whether he possesses the members of love that the apostle describes.

“And indeed it is a greater miracle to root out the tinder of lust from one’s own flesh than to drive unclean spirits out of the bodies of others, and it is a more magnificent sign to restrain the savage movements of anger by the virtue of patience than to command the princes of the air; and it is more to have shut out the most devouring bites of sadness from one’s own heart than to have expelled another’s sicknesses and bodily fevers. In short, it is in many ways a more glorious virtue and a higher progress to cure the diseases of one’s own soul than those of another’s body. For the higher the soul is than the flesh, the more excellent is its health; and the more precious and excellent its substance, the more grievous and ruinous is its fall.

“And of those healings it is said to the most blessed apostles: “Do not rejoice that the demons are subject to you.” For it was not their own power that did this but the power of the name invoked; and therefore they are warned not to dare to claim for themselves any blessedness or glory on this account, since it is accomplished only by God’s might and power, but on account of that inmost purity of their life and heart for which their names deserve to be written in heaven.

“And to prove what we have said by the testimonies of the ancients or by divine oracles, we shall better set forth in his own words and experiences what blessed Paphnutius thought about the admiration of signs and the grace of purity, or rather what he learned by the revelation of an angel. He had flourished for many years in such outstanding strictness that he believed himself wholly freed from the snares of carnal desire, because he felt that he had become superior to all the attacks of the demons with which he had long and openly contended. While he was preparing for some holy men who had come to him a dish of lentils, which they call athera, his hand, as often happens, was burned in the oven by a flame flaring over it. At this he was greatly saddened, and began to turn over silently within himself: “Why,” he said, “is fire not at peace with me, when the far more dreadful battles of the demons have given way to me? Or how will that unquenchable fire, which searches out all merits, not seize me as I pass through on that fearful day of examination, when this little temporal fire outside me has not spared me now?” While he was agitated by such thoughts and sadness, a sudden sleep came over him, and an angel of the Lord came and said: “Why are you sad, Paphnutius, that this earthly fire is not yet at peace with you, when there still remains in your members a stirring of carnal movements not yet refined to purity? As long as its roots live in your marrow, they will by no means allow this material fire to be at peace with you. You will not be able to feel it harmless unless you find by these signs that all inner movements have been extinguished in yourself: go, take hold of a naked and most beautiful virgin, and if, holding her, you feel that the tranquillity of your heart has remained unmoved and the heats of the flesh have stayed at peace within you, then the touch of this visible flame too will lick you gently and harmlessly, like that of the three young men in Babylon.” The old man, struck by such a revelation, did not indeed risk the dangers of the test divinely shown, but questioning his conscience and examining the purity of his heart, and judging that the weight of his chastity did not yet balance the weight of this test, he said: “It is no wonder if, though the battles of unclean spirits have given way to me, I still feel the burnings of fire raging against me, which I believed to be less than the most dreadful encounters with demons. For it is a greater virtue and a higher grace to extinguish the inner lust of the flesh than to subdue, by the sign of the Lord and the power of the Most High, the wickednesses of demons that rush in from outside, or to drive them out of possessed bodies by invoking the divine name.”” Thus far Abba Nesteros, completing his account of the true working of spiritual gifts, escorted us with his instruction as we hurried to the cell of the old man Joseph, which was about six miles away from him.

Blessed Joseph, whose instructions and precepts must now be set out, was one of the three whom we mentioned in the first conference. He was of a very distinguished family and a leading man of his city in Egypt, which is called Thmuis, and he was so carefully trained not only in Egyptian but also in Greek eloquence that he could discourse most elegantly with us, or with those who knew no Egyptian at all, not through an interpreter as the others did, but by himself. When he perceived that we desired his instruction, he first asked whether we were brothers by birth; and hearing from us that we were bound together by a brotherhood not carnal but spiritual, and that from the beginning of our renunciation we had always been united in an inseparable bond, both in the journey abroad which we had both undertaken for the sake of spiritual warfare and in the discipline of the coenobium, he began his discourse thus.

“There are many kinds of friendship and companionship which bind the human race together in a fellowship of love in various ways. For some a previous recommendation has led to enter into acquaintance first, and afterward into friendship too. In others some contract or bargain of giving and receiving has joined the bonds of affection. Some have been tied by the bonds of friendship through the likeness and sharing of business or military service, or of a craft or pursuit; by this even savage hearts grow gentle toward one another, so that even those who delight in robbery in forests and mountains and take pleasure in shedding human blood embrace and cherish the partners of their crimes. There is also another kind of love, which is joined by the instinct of nature itself and the law of kinship, by which fellow tribesmen, spouses, parents, brothers, and children are naturally preferred to others; and this is found to exist not only in the human race but in all birds and animals. For, moved by natural affection, they so protect and defend their chicks or cubs that they often do not fear to expose themselves even to dangers and death for them. Indeed even those kinds of beasts, serpents, or birds which unbearable ferocity and deadly venom separate and set apart from all, such as basilisks, unicorns, or griffins, though they are said to be destructive to all even by their very sight, nevertheless remain peaceful and harmless among themselves because of the fellowship of their origin and affection. But all these kinds of love we have described, just as we see them to be common to the bad and the good, and even to wild beasts and serpents, so it is certain that they cannot last to the end. For distance of place, forgetfulness over time, and the dealings of words, affairs, or business often interrupt and divide them. For as they are usually acquired from various partnerships of gain, desire, kinship, or various relationships, so they are dissolved when any occasion of separation intervenes.

“Among all these, then, there is one kind of love that cannot be dissolved, which is joined not by the favor of a recommendation, nor by the greatness of services or gifts, nor by the terms of any contract, nor by the necessity of nature, but only by likeness in virtue. This, I say, is the one that is never broken by any chances, which not only distances of place and time cannot separate or destroy, but which not even death itself tears apart. This is the true and unbroken love, which grows through the twofold perfection and virtue of the friends, and whose bond, once entered, neither variety of desires nor quarrelsome opposition of wills will break. But we have known many in this way of life who, though bound in the most ardent companionship for the love of Christ, could not keep it for ever or unbroken, because, although they relied on a good beginning of fellowship, they did not hold the purpose they had taken up with one and equal zeal, and there was between them a merely temporary affection, since it was kept not by the equal virtue of both but by the patience of one. However magnanimously and tirelessly it is kept by one, it must nevertheless be broken by the faint-heartedness of the other. For the weaknesses of those who seek the health of perfection lukewarmly, however much they are supported by the forbearance of the strong, are not borne by the weak themselves. For they have causes of irritation implanted in them that do not allow them to be at peace; as those who are held by bodily sickness are accustomed to blame the distaste of their stomach and their weakness on the negligence of cooks or servants, and, however much care those who wait on them take, nevertheless to ascribe to the healthy the causes of their irritation, which they do not feel to be in themselves through the fault of their illness. Therefore this, as we have said, is the faithful and indissoluble union of friendship, which is bound only by equality in virtues: for “the Lord makes those of one manner dwell in a house.” And therefore unbroken love can remain only in those in whom there is one purpose and will, one willing and not willing. If you too wish to keep it inviolate, you must hasten, first driving out the vices, to put to death your own wills, and with united zeal and purpose diligently to fulfil that in which the prophet greatly delights: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell in unity.” This must be understood not of place but spiritually. For it is of no use if those who disagree in conduct and purpose are joined in one dwelling, nor is it any harm for those grounded in equal virtue to be separated by distances of place. For with God it is sharing a dwelling in conduct, not in place, that joins brothers in a united dwelling, and the wholeness of peace can never be kept where there is diversity of wills.

Germanus: “What then? If one wants to do something that he sees to be profitable and wholesome according to God, and the other does not give his consent, should it be carried out even against the brother’s wish, or set aside at his discretion?”

Joseph: “That is why we said that the full and perfect grace of friendship cannot last except between perfect men of the same virtue, whom the same will and one purpose allow never, or at least rarely, to think differently or to disagree in what concerns progress in the spiritual life. But if they begin to seethe with heated disputes, it is certainly clear that they were never in accord according to the rule we have stated. But since no one can make a beginning from perfection unless he has started from its very foundation, and you are asking not how great it is but how it can be reached, I think it necessary to disclose to you in a few words its rule and a kind of path by which your steps may be directed, so that you may more easily obtain the good of patience and peace.

“The first foundations of true friendship, then, lie in contempt for worldly property and disregard for all the things we have. For it is most unjust and impious if, after renouncing the vanity of the world and all that is in it, the cheapest leftover furniture should be preferred to the most precious love of a brother. The second is that each one should so cut off his own wishes that he does not, judging himself wise and experienced, prefer to obey his own decisions rather than his neighbor’s. The third is that he should know that everything, even what he thinks useful and necessary, must be set after the good of love and peace. The fourth, that he should believe that one must never be angry at all, for just or unjust causes. The fifth, that he should wish to cure his brother’s anger against himself, even if conceived without reason, in the same way as his own, knowing that another’s resentment is as harmful to himself as if he himself were stirred against another, unless he drives it out of his brother’s mind as far as lies in him. The last is that which is undoubtedly the general destroyer of all vices: that he should believe that he will depart from this world any day. This conviction will not only allow no resentment to remain in the heart, but will also suppress all the movements of desires and of all sins. Whoever holds to these, then, will be able neither to suffer nor to inflict the bitterness of anger and discord. But when these fail, as soon as that enemy of love has gradually poured the poisons of resentment into the hearts of friends, it is inevitable that, love growing cold little by little through frequent quarrels, he will at some point separate the hearts of those who love, long ulcerated. For how can one who walks the path of the direction we have described ever disagree with his friend, when, claiming nothing as his own, he has cut off at the root the first cause of quarrels, which usually arises from small things and the cheapest matters, keeping with all his strength what we read in the Acts of the Apostles about the unity of the believers: “Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul, and no one said that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common”? Then, how will a seed of dissension spring up from one who, serving not his own will but his brother’s, has become an imitator of his Lord and maker, who, speaking in the person of the man he bore, said: “I have not come to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me”? And how will he stir up any tinder of contention who has resolved to trust, concerning his own understanding and opinion, not so much his own judgment as his brother’s examination, approving or disapproving his own ideas at his brother’s discretion, and fulfilling with humility of devout heart that gospel saying: “Yet not as I will, but as you will”? Or for what reason will he allow anything that saddens his brother, who judges nothing more precious than the good of peace, never losing the memory of that saying of the Lord: “By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another,” by which, as by a special seal, Christ willed that the flock of his sheep be recognized in this world and distinguished from others, so to speak, by this mark? And for what cause will he bear either to receive the rancor of resentment into himself or to let it remain in another, whose first principle is that there can be no just causes for anger, which is pernicious and unlawful, and that he cannot pray when his brother is angry with him any more than if he himself were angry with his brother, always keeping in a humble heart that saying of the Lord and Savior: “If you offer your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there at the altar and go first to be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift”? For it will profit you nothing if you claim that you are not angry and believe that you fulfil the command that says: “Let not the sun go down upon your anger,” and: “Whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment,” but with a stubborn heart despise another’s resentment, which you could have soothed by your gentleness. For you will be punished in the same way for transgressing the Lord’s command. For he who said that you should not be angry against another also said that another’s resentment should not be despised, since with God, “who wills all men to be saved,” it makes no difference whether you destroy yourself or someone else. For by the ruin of anyone the same loss comes to him; and likewise the one to whom the destruction of all is welcome gains one profit by the death either of you or of your brother. Finally, how can he keep even a slight resentment against his brother who believes that he will depart from this world any day, or rather at any moment?”

“So, just as nothing is to be preferred to love, so, on the other hand, nothing is to be set below anger or rage. For all things, however useful and necessary they seem, must be scorned in order to avoid the disturbance of anger, and all things, even those thought adverse, must be accepted and borne, in order to keep the tranquillity of love and peace unharmed; for nothing is to be believed more pernicious than anger and resentment, or more useful than love.

“For just as the enemy quickly separates brothers who are still carnal and weak over cheap and earthly property, so among spiritual men too he produces discord over differences of understanding, from which there very often arise without doubt those contentions and quarrels about words which the apostle condemns; and from these the envious and malicious enemy consequently introduces separations between brothers of one mind. For true is that saying of the most wise Solomon: “Contention stirs up hatred, but friendship will protect all who do not contend.”

“Therefore, to preserve lasting and inseparable love, it is of no use to have cut off the first cause of division, which usually arises from perishable and earthly things, and to have despised everything carnal and allowed our brothers to share indiscriminately in all the things we need for our use, unless we likewise cut off the second, which usually arises under the appearance of spiritual ideas, and acquire in all things a humble mind and harmonious wills.

“For I remember that when my younger age still urged me to cling to a companion, ideas of this kind often occurred to us, either in moral teaching or in the Holy Scriptures, so that we believed nothing truer or more reasonable than they. But when we came together and began to put forward our opinions, some of them, examined together, were first noted as false and harmful by the other, and soon, declared pernicious by our common judgment, were condemned; yet at first, poured in by the devil, they had shone as if with light to such a degree that they could easily have produced discord, had not a precept of the elders, kept like a divine oracle, called us back from all contention. By it they laid down, as by a kind of legal sanction, that neither of us should trust his own judgment more than his brother’s, if he never wished to be deceived by the cunning of the devil.

“For it has often been proved that what the apostle says happens: “For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light,” so as to spread deceitfully a dark and foul fog of ideas in place of the true light of knowledge. Unless these ideas are received with a humble and gentle heart and kept for the examination of a very mature brother or a most approved elder, and, carefully sifted by their judgment, are either rejected or accepted by us, we shall without doubt be struck with a most grievous ruin, venerating in our thoughts the angel of darkness in place of the angel of light. It is impossible for anyone who trusts his own judgment to escape this destruction, unless, becoming a lover and doer of true humility, he fulfils with all contrition of heart what the apostle earnestly begs: “If there is any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any compassion and mercy, fulfil my joy, that you may be of the same mind, having the same love, of one accord, thinking the same thing, doing nothing through contention or vainglory, but in humility each counting the other better than himself,” and this: “in honor preferring one another”; so that each, ascribing more knowledge and holiness to his companion, may believe that the sum of true discernment rests in the other’s judgment rather than his own.

“For it often happens, either through the delusion of the devil or through the intrusion of human error, by which there is no one in this flesh who, being human, cannot be deceived, that sometimes one who is of keener mind and greater knowledge conceives something false, while one who is of slower mind and less merit perceives something more rightly and truly. And therefore let no one, however learned, persuade himself with empty conceit that he has no need of conferring with another. For even if the devil’s delusion does not deceive his judgment, he will not escape the more grievous snares of elation and pride. For who could claim this for himself without great ruin, when the vessel of election, in whom Christ, as he himself declared, was speaking, asserts that he went up to Jerusalem only for this purpose, to confer in private examination with his fellow apostles about the gospel which he was preaching to the Gentiles by the Lord’s revelation and cooperation? By this it is shown that by these precepts not only are unanimity and concord preserved, but all the snares of the opposing devil and the traps of his delusions need not be feared.

“Finally, the virtue of love is exalted so far that the blessed apostle John declares it to be not only a thing of God but even God, saying: “God is love; he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” For we perceive that it is so divine that we feel most plainly that saying of the apostle to be in force in us: “For the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us.” This is as if he said: “For God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us.” He also, when we do not know what we ought to pray for, “intercedes for us with groanings that cannot be uttered; and he who searches the hearts knows what the Spirit desires, because he intercedes for the saints according to God.”

“That love, then, which is called agapē, can be shown to all. Of it the blessed apostle says: “So then, while we have time, let us do good to all, but especially to those of the household of faith.” It must be shown to all in general to such a degree that we are commanded by the Lord to give it even to our enemies: “Love your enemies,” he says. But diathesis, that is, affection, is shown to very few, and to those who are joined by likeness of character or fellowship in virtues; although this diathesis itself seems to have great differences within it. For parents are loved in one way, spouses in another, brothers in another, children in another; and even within the bond of these affections there is a great distance, nor is the love of parents toward their children found to be uniform. This is proved by the example of the patriarch Jacob, who, though he was the father of twelve sons and loved them all with a father’s love, yet loved Joseph with a special affection, so that Scripture records of him openly: “But his brothers envied him, because his father loved him”; not, of course, that that just man and father did not greatly love the rest of his offspring too, but that he clung to this one more sweetly and indulgently in his affection, because he bore the figure of the Lord. We read that this is most plainly indicated also of John the evangelist, when it is said of him: “that disciple whom Jesus loved,” although he certainly embraced the other eleven, chosen in the same way, with such special love that he indicates this too by the testimony of the gospel, saying: “As I have loved you, so you also love one another”; and of them it is said elsewhere: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” But this love of one did not express a lukewarmness of love toward the other disciples, but a more generous superabundance of love toward this one, which the privilege of virginity and the incorruption of his flesh conferred on him. It is therefore marked as more sublime by a kind of exception, because it is exalted not by comparison with hatred but by the more abundant grace of an overflowing love. Something of this kind we read also in the Song of Songs, in the person of the bride, who says: “Set love in order in me.” For this is truly love set in order, which, hating no one, loves some more by right of their merits, and which, while it loves all in general, nevertheless sets apart for itself from among them those whom it should embrace with special affection, and again, among those who are highest and foremost in its love, chooses some to be raised above the affection for the rest.

“On the other hand we know (would that we did not!) that some of the brothers are of such obstinacy and hardness that, when they have felt their own feelings stirred against a brother or a brother’s against themselves, in order to hide the resentment of their mind that has arisen from indignation at the mutual disturbance, they withdraw from those whom they ought to have soothed by humble apology and conversation and begin to sing some verses of the psalms. While they think they are soothing the bitterness conceived in their heart, they increase by this insult what they could have extinguished at once, had they chosen rather to be anxious and humble, so that timely compunction might both heal their own hearts and soothe the feelings of their brothers. For in that way they flatter and nourish the vice of their faint-heartedness, or rather of their pride, instead of rooting out the tinder of quarrels, forgetful of that command of the Lord in which he says: “Whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment,” and: “If you remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there at the altar and go first to be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”

“So far, then, does our Lord not want another’s resentment to be held in contempt that, if a brother has something against us, he will not accept our gifts, that is, he will not allow our prayers to be offered to him, until by speedy apology we remove from our brother’s mind the resentment he has conceived, justly or unjustly. For he does not say, “If your brother has a real complaint against you, leave your gift at the altar and go, first be reconciled to him,” but he says: “If you remember that your brother has something against you”; that is, even if it is something slight and trivial by which your brother’s feelings have been stirred against you, and this has struck your memory by a sudden recollection, know that you ought not to offer the spiritual gifts of your prayers unless you have first driven out of your brother’s heart, by kindly apology, the resentment that has arisen from whatever cause. If, then, the word of the gospel commands us to make amends to those who are angry even for a past and very small grudge arising from slight causes, what will become of us wretches, who with obstinate pretense disregard recent and very great causes committed by our own fault, and, puffed up with devilish swelling, while we are ashamed to be humbled, deny that we are the authors of our brother’s resentment, and, disdaining with rebellious spirit to be subject to the Lord’s commands, maintain that they by no means need to be observed or can be fulfilled? So it comes about that, judging that he has commanded impossible or unsuitable things, we become, according to the apostle, “not doers but judges of the law.”

“With what tears, too, must this be lamented: that some of the brothers, when they have been inflamed by an insulting word of anyone, and are pressed by the entreaties of someone else who wishes to soothe it, on hearing that resentment must by no means be conceived or kept against a brother, according to what is written: “Whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment,” and: “Let not the sun go down upon your anger,” at once cry out: “If some pagan or worldly man had done this or said these things, it ought rightly to be borne. But who could bear a brother who is guilty of so grave a fault, or who utters so insolent an insult from his mouth!” As if patience were to be shown only to unbelievers and the sacrilegious and not to all in general, or as if anger against a pagan were harmful but against a brother useful, when certainly the obstinate agitation of a disturbed mind does itself the same harm against whomever it is aroused. And how great an obstinacy, or rather madness, it is that with the stupor of a brutish mind they do not discern even the proper meaning of the words! For it does not say, “Everyone who is angry with a foreigner will be liable to judgment,” which perhaps, according to their understanding, could have excepted the sharers of our faith and way of life; but the word of the gospel says pointedly: “Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.” So although, according to the rule of truth, we ought to regard every man as a brother, yet in this place it is the believer and sharer of our way of life, rather than the pagan, who is designated by the very name of brother.

“And what of this, that sometimes we believe ourselves patient because, when provoked, we scorn to answer, but mock our brothers who are stirred up with bitter silence or with a scornful movement and gesture, so that by our silent look we provoke them to anger more than swelling insults could have done, thinking ourselves not at all guilty before God because we have uttered nothing with our mouth that could have branded or condemned us in the judgment of men? As if before God only words, and not chiefly the will, were called to account, and only the deed of sin and not also the wish and purpose were counted a crime, or as if in the judgment only what each one has done, and not also what he has intended to do, were to be examined. For not only the kind of provocation offered but also the purpose of the one who provokes is guilty; and therefore the true examination of our judge will inquire, not how a quarrel was stirred up, but by whose fault it blazed up. For the effect of the sin, not the order of its commission, must be considered. For what difference does it make whether someone killed his brother himself with a sword, or drove him to death by some fraud, when it is certain that he died by his guile or crime? As if it were enough not to have pushed a blind man over a precipice with one’s own hand, when he is equally guilty who, when he could, scorned to call back one already leaning over and on the edge of a pit; or as if only he who strangled someone with his own hand were guilty, and not also he who prepared or put on the noose, or at least, when he could, would not remove it. So silence is of no use if we impose silence on ourselves in order to do by silence what we would otherwise have done by insult, putting on certain gestures by which the one who should have been cured burns with more violent anger, while we, on top of all this, are praised for his loss and ruin; as if one were not the more guilty for this very reason, that he wished to gain glory for himself from his brother’s ruin. Such silence will be equally harmful to both, since just as it heightens resentment in the other’s heart, so it does not allow it to be extinguished in his own. Against such people that curse of the prophet is quite properly directed: “Woe to him who gives his friend drink, mixing his gall, and making him drunk, that he may look on his nakedness. He is filled with shame instead of glory.” And also what is said of such people by another: “For every brother will utterly supplant, and every friend will walk deceitfully, and a man will mock his brother, and they will not speak the truth. For they have bent their tongue like a bow of falsehood, and not of truth.” And often a pretended patience inflames to anger even more sharply than speech, and malicious silence surpasses the most atrocious insults of words, and the wounds of enemies are borne more easily than the sly flatteries of mockers. Of these it is properly said through the prophet: “His words are softer than oil, and yet they are darts,” and elsewhere: “The words of the crafty are soft, but they strike into the inner parts of the belly.” To them this too may be elegantly applied: “With his mouth he speaks peace with his friend, and secretly lays snares for him”; yet by these he who deceives is himself deceived rather. For “he who spreads a net before the face of his friend entangles his own feet in it,” and: “He who digs a pit for his neighbor will fall into it himself.” Finally, when a great multitude had come with swords and clubs to seize the Lord, no one showed himself a more bloodthirsty murderer of the author of our life than he who, anticipating all with the pretended honor of a greeting, offered the kiss of a treacherous love. To him the Lord said: “Judas, do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” That is: the bitterness of your persecution and hatred has taken on this covering by which the sweetness of true love is expressed. He also sets forth the force of this pain more openly and vehemently through the prophet: “For if my enemy had reviled me, I would have borne it; and if he who hated me had spoken great things against me, I would have hidden myself from him. But you, a man of one mind with me, my guide and my familiar friend, who took sweet food together with me; in the house of God we walked in agreement.”

“There is also another profane kind of resentment, which would not have been worth mentioning had we not known that it is committed by some brothers. When they are saddened or angry, they obstinately abstain even from food, so that (what we cannot say without shame) those who, when calm, say they cannot put off their meal until the sixth hour or at most the ninth, when they are filled with resentment or rage do not even feel two-day fasts, and sustain so great a lack of food by the fullness of their anger. In this they plainly incur the crime of sacrilege, enduring for the sake of devilish swelling the fasts that should be offered especially to God alone for humbling the heart and cleansing the vices. It is as if they offered prayers and sacrifices not to God but to demons, and deserved to hear that rebuke of Moses: “They sacrificed to demons and not to God, to gods whom they did not know.”

“We also know of another kind of madness, which is found in some brothers under the color of a painted patience. For them it is not enough to have stirred up quarrels unless they also provoke others to strike them with inciting words; and when they have been touched by even a slight blow, they offer another part of the body to be beaten too, as if by this they were going to fulfil perfectly that command which says: “If anyone strikes you on your right cheek, offer him the other also,” wholly ignorant of the force and purpose of Scripture. For they think they are practising gospel patience through the vice of anger, although, in order to cut out anger by the roots, not only is the retaliation of like for like and the provocation to strife forbidden, but we are even commanded to calm the fury of the one who strikes by tolerating a doubled injury.

Germanus: “How is he to be blamed who, obeying the gospel command, not only did not retaliate but was even ready for the injury to be doubled against himself?”

Joseph: “As was said a little before, we must consider not only the thing that is done but also the disposition of mind and the purpose of the one who does it. And therefore, if you weigh with the inner examination of the heart with what mind and from what disposition each thing a person does is done, you will see that the virtue of patience and gentleness can by no means be fulfilled in the opposite spirit, that is, of impatience and rage. For our Lord and Savior, teaching us the deep virtue of patience and gentleness, that is, that we should not merely display it on our lips but store it in the inmost sanctuaries of our soul, gave us this pattern of gospel perfection, saying: “If anyone strikes you on your right cheek, offer him the other also” (understood, without doubt, as the right; and this other right cheek cannot be taken except as, so to speak, on the face of the inner man). By this he wishes to root out every tinder of anger from the deep inner parts of the soul; that is, if your outer right cheek has received the blow of the striker, your inner man too should offer his right cheek to be struck by the consent of humility, suffering with the passion of the outer man and in a way yielding and submitting his own body to the striker’s injury, so that the inner man is not moved even silently within himself by the beating of the outer man. You see, then, that they are far from gospel perfection, which teaches that patience must be kept not in words but in the inner tranquillity of the heart, and commands us to guard it so, when something adverse happens, that we not only keep ourselves free from the disturbance of anger, but also, submitting to the injuries of those who have been stirred up by their own fault, compel them to calm once their appetite for striking is sated, overcoming their fury by our gentleness. And so we shall also fulfil that saying of the apostle: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” It is quite certain that this cannot be fulfilled by those who utter words of gentleness and humility in such a spirit and with such swelling that they not only do not calm the fire of rage that has been kindled, but rather make it blaze up both in their own mind and in that of the brother who has been stirred up. Yet even if they could somehow remain gentle and calm themselves, they would not reap any fruits of righteousness even so, since they claim for themselves the glory of patience at the cost of their neighbor’s loss, and by this are wholly strangers to that apostolic love which “does not seek its own,” but the things of others. For it does not desire riches in such a way as to make profit for itself from its neighbor’s loss, nor does it wish to acquire anything by another’s being stripped.

“We must know, in general, that he plays the stronger part who subjects his own will to his brother’s, rather than he who is found more obstinate in defending and holding to his own decisions. For the former, supporting and bearing with his neighbor, holds the place of one healthy and strong; the latter that of one weak and, as it were, sick, who must be humored and cared for in such a way that sometimes it is even wholesome to relax something of what is necessary for the sake of his quiet and peace. In this no one should believe that he has lessened anything of his own perfection, even if, in condescending, he has given up something of the strictness he had set himself; on the contrary, he should know that he has gained much more by the good of long-suffering and patience. For it is the apostle’s command: “You who are strong, bear the weaknesses of the weak,” and: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so you will fulfil the law of Christ.” For the weak never supports the weak, nor can one who is equally sick bear with or cure the sick; but he gives healing to the infirm who is not himself subject to infirmity. For it is rightly said to him: “Physician, heal yourself.”

“It must also be noted that the nature of the weak is always such that they are quick and ready to hurl insults and start quarrels, but themselves do not want to be touched even by the slightest suspicion of injury; and while they ride roughshod with thoughtless freedom in offering wanton insults, they are not content to bear even small and very slight ones. And therefore, according to the saying of the elders mentioned above, stable and unbroken love cannot last except between men of the same virtue and purpose. For it must be broken at some time, however carefully it is guarded by one of them.

Germanus: “In what, then, can the patience of a perfect man be praiseworthy, if it cannot always bear with the weak?”

Joseph: “I did not say that the virtue and forbearance of the one who is strong and robust will be overcome, but that the very bad condition of the weak man, nourished by the support of the one who is healthy and sliding daily into worse, will produce causes for which either he himself should no longer be borne, or else, thinking his neighbor’s patience a brand and disgrace on his own impatience, he will at some point prefer to go away rather than always be borne by another’s magnanimity. We think, then, that those who wish to keep the affection of companionship inviolate must observe these things above all. First, that when provoked by any injuries the monk should keep calm not only his lips but even the depths of his breast. But if he feels that these have been disturbed even slightly, let him hold himself in with complete silence and carefully observe what the psalmist records: “I was troubled, and I did not speak,” and: “I said: I will guard my ways, that I may not sin with my tongue. I set a guard on my mouth while the sinner stood against me. I was dumb and was humbled, and kept silence even from good things.” Let him not, considering the present state, bring out what furious rage suggests at the moment and an exasperated mind dictates, but let him either recall the grace of past love or look forward in mind to the restoring of peace to be renewed, and contemplate it, even in the very time of disturbance, as about to return at once. And while he keeps himself for the sweetness of the concord soon to come, he will not feel the bitterness of the present quarrels, and so he will answer above all with things for which, when love is restored, he could neither be guilty in his own eyes nor blamed by another; and thus he will fulfil that saying of the prophet: “In anger you will remember mercy.”

“We must therefore restrain all movements of anger and moderate them with discernment at the helm, lest we be carried away with headlong rage into what Solomon condemns: “The ungodly man brings out all his anger, but the wise man dispenses it by parts”; that is, the fool is inflamed by the disturbance of anger to avenge himself, but the wise man gradually weakens it and drives it out by the maturity of counsel and moderation. Of the same kind is what the apostle says: “Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to wrath”; that is, do not by any means move toward vengeance at anger’s compulsion, but give place to wrath, that is, let your hearts not be so narrowed by the straits of impatience and faint-heartedness that they cannot bear the violent storm of disturbance when it breaks upon them; but “be enlarged in your hearts,” receiving the hostile waves of anger in those broad bays of love which “bears all things, endures all things”; and so let your mind, enlarged by the breadth of long-suffering and patience, have within it saving recesses of counsel, in which the foulest smoke of anger, received and as it were spread out, may vanish at once. Or it may be understood thus: we give place to wrath whenever we yield with a humble and calm mind to another’s agitation and, as it were confessing ourselves deserving of any injury, give way to raging impatience. But those who bend the sense of the apostle’s perfection so as to think that those give place to wrath who go away from one who is angry seem to me not to cut off the tinder of dissensions but to feed it. For unless a neighbor’s anger is at once overcome by humble apology, one who flees provokes it rather than avoids it. Similar to this is what Solomon says: “Do not be quick in your spirit to be angry, for anger rests in the bosom of fools,” and: “Do not rush quickly into a quarrel, lest you repent at the last.” For he does not blame haste in quarreling or anger in such a way as to approve of slowness in them. Likewise we must take this: “A fool declares his anger at that very hour, but a prudent man conceals his shame.” For he does not decree that the shameful passion of anger should be hidden by the wise in such a way that, while blaming the quickness of anger, he does not forbid slowness in it; but if it breaks out through the necessity of human weakness, he judged it should be hidden so that, while it is wisely covered for the present, it may be blotted out for ever. For this is the nature of anger, that when it is given room it grows faint and perishes, but when it is let out it blazes up more and more. Our hearts, then, must be widened and enlarged, lest, narrowed by the straits of faint-heartedness, they be filled with the turbulent heats of anger, and we be unable with a narrow heart to receive that commandment of God which, according to the prophet, is “exceedingly broad,” or to say with the prophet: “I have run the way of your commandments, when you enlarged my heart.” For that long-suffering is wisdom we are taught by the clearest testimonies of Scripture: “For the long-suffering man is great in prudence, but the faint-hearted is very foolish.” And therefore Scripture records of him who laudably asked the Lord for the gift of wisdom: “And God gave Solomon wisdom and exceedingly great prudence, and breadth of heart like the sand of the sea, beyond number.”

“This too has been proved very often by many experiences: that those who have entered into the bond of friendship on the basis of a sworn compact have by no means been able to keep unbroken concord; either because they tried to keep it not out of desire for perfection nor at the command of apostolic love, but out of earthly love and through the necessity and bond of the agreement; or because that most cunning enemy, in order to make them transgressors of their oath, hastens all the more quickly to break the bonds of their friendships. That saying of the wisest men, then, is most certain: that true concord and inseparable fellowship cannot stand except between men of amended conduct and of the same virtue and purpose.” These things blessed Joseph set out about friendship in his spiritual discourse, and he stirred us more ardently to keep the lasting love of our companionship.

When, then, the previous conference was over, and the silence of night had come between, we were brought by the holy Abba Joseph to a separate cell to rest. But since his words had kindled a kind of fire in our hearts, we spent the whole night sleepless, and, leaving the cell and going about a hundred paces from it, we sat down in a more remote place. So, since the darkness of night gave us the opportunity of a private and familiar conversation, as soon as we sat down Abba Germanus, groaning deeply, said:

“What shall we do? For we see ourselves in great danger and bound in a most wretched condition. Reason itself and the way of life of the saints teach us effectively what is more wholesome for progress in the spiritual life, but the promise given to our elders does not allow us to choose what is expedient. For we could have been formed to a more perfect life and purpose by the examples of such great men, had not the terms of our promise compelled us to return quickly to the coenobium. If we return there, no opportunity of coming back here again will be given us. But if we choose to stay here and fulfil our desire, what shall we do about the faith of the oath which we know we gave our elders, promising a very speedy return, so that we might be allowed to go round the saints and monasteries of this province even hurriedly?” And as we were thus agitated and could by no means find what should be decided about the state of our salvation, we bore witness by groaning alone to the necessity of our very hard condition, blaming the softness of our countenance and detesting the bashfulness born in us; weighed down by its burden, we could not otherwise have resisted, even against our advantage and purpose, the entreaties of those who would keep us back than by promising a very early return. We lamented that we had suffered from the fault of that shame of which it is said: “There is a shame that brings sin.”

Then I said: “Let the counsel, or rather the authority, of the old man bring a short end to our anxieties. We should bring our troubles to him, and whatever his judgment decides, let it put an end to all our agitation like a divine and heavenly answer. Let us not doubt in the least that this will be given us by the Lord through the mouth of this holy man, both because of his merit and because of our faith. For by His gift the believing have often obtained wholesome counsel even from the unworthy, and the unbelieving from the saints, the Lord granting it either for the merit of those who answer or for the faith of those who consult.” The holy Abba Germanus received these words with such eagerness as though I had spoken them not of myself but by the Lord’s prompting. We waited a little for the old man’s arrival and the hour of the night synaxis, which was already at hand; and after we had received him with the customary greeting and the due number of prayers and psalms had been completed, we sat down again, as is the custom, on the same mats on which we had been settled for rest.

Then the venerable Joseph, seeing that we were rather downcast in mind and guessing that this had not happened to us without cause, addressed us in the words of the patriarch Joseph: “Why are your faces sad today?” We answered him: “We have not, like those imprisoned servants of Pharaoh, seen a dream with no one to interpret it; but we have spent a sleepless night, and there is no one to lift the weight of our agitation unless the Lord removes it by your discernment.” Then he, who recalled the patriarch both in virtue and in name, said: “Does not the healing of human thoughts come through the Lord? Let them be brought into the open; for the divine mercy is able, according to your faith, to give them a remedy through our counsel.”

To this Germanus said: “We believed that, abundantly filled not only with spiritual joy but also with progress by the sight of your blessedness, we would hurry back to our coenobium, and that after our return we would follow, even with slight imitation, what we had gained from your teaching. For our love for our elders also compelled us to promise them this, since we believed that we could imitate in some measure the sublimity of your life and teaching in that coenobium. Hence, although we thought that all joy would come to us from this, we are on the contrary consumed with unbearable grief, considering that in that way we cannot obtain what we know to be for our salvation. So now we are hemmed in on both sides. For if we wish to fulfil the promise that we made before all the brothers in the cave in which our Lord shone forth from the royal chamber of the virgin’s womb, with him as witness, we incur the greatest loss to the spiritual life; but if, forgetful of our promise and remaining in these regions, we choose to put those oaths below the benefit of our perfection, we dread the steep dangers of lying and perjury. And we cannot relieve our agitation even by this plan, that after the terms of our oath have been fulfilled by a very quick return, we come back here again by a quick journey. For although even a small delay is dangerous and harmful to those who are striving for progress in spiritual things and for virtue, we would nevertheless keep the promise of our faith, even by a tardy return, if we did not know that we would be bound inextricably not only by the authority but also by the love of our elders, so that the possibility of returning to these places would in no way be given us thereafter.”

To this blessed Joseph, after a short silence, said: “Are you sure that greater progress in spiritual things can be given you in this region?”

Germanus: “Although we ought to give the highest thanks to the teaching of those who taught us from childhood to attempt great things and, giving us a taste of their own good, implanted in our hearts a remarkable thirst for perfection, yet, if our judgment is to be trusted at all, we see no comparison between these institutions and those we received there, to say nothing of the inimitable purity of your way of life, which we believe is conferred on you not only by the strictness of your mind and purpose but also by the help of the places themselves. Hence we do not doubt that, for imitating the magnificence of your perfection, this teaching given in passing cannot suffice, unless we also have the help of living here, and long training by daily instruction somehow shakes off the torpor of our heart.”

Joseph: “It is indeed sound and perfect, and wholly befitting our profession, that we should carry out effectively what we decide under some promise. For this reason a monk ought to decide nothing hastily, lest he be either compelled to fulfil what he has promised incautiously, or, called back by the consideration of a better view, become a transgressor of his promise. But since our purpose now is to treat not so much of the state of health as of the cure of sickness, we must seek in wholesome counsel, not what you should have done in the first place, but how you can escape from the rock of this dangerous shipwreck. When, then, no bond constrains us and no condition binds us, and a choice is offered between advantages, let what is of greater benefit be chosen; but when some adverse loss stands in the way, then in the comparison of losses we must seek that which is subject to lighter damage. Accordingly, as far as your statement has shown, since an ill-considered promise has brought you to the point where you must suffer the loss of a serious disadvantage either way, the choice must incline to that side which either brings more tolerable losses or is more easily expiated by the remedy of satisfaction. If, then, you believe that greater gains will come to your spirit from staying here than those that came to you from the way of life of that coenobium, and the terms of your promise cannot be fulfilled without the loss of great advantages, it is better for you to undergo this loss of a lie, or of an unfulfilled promise, which, once past, can neither be repeated nor produce other sins of itself, than to fall into that by which the state of a more lukewarm life, as you say, would afflict you with a daily and endless loss. For an incautious decision will be changed pardonably, or rather even laudably, if it passes over to the more wholesome side; and whenever a faulty promise is corrected, it must be believed to be not a breach of constancy but the correction of rashness. All these things can also be proved most plainly by testimonies of the Scriptures: how many it has been deadly for to carry out what they had decided, and on the other hand how many it has been advantageous and wholesome to have drawn back from the same.

“The examples of the holy apostle Peter and of Herod testify to both most clearly. For the former, because he departed from the decision he had confirmed as with an oath, saying: “You shall never wash my feet,” gained the immortal fellowship of Christ, from the grace of which blessedness he would without doubt have been cut off had he persisted in the obstinacy of his word. But the latter, keeping faith with an ill-considered oath, became the most bloody murderer of the Lord’s forerunner, and through a vain fear of perjury plunged himself into damnation and the punishments of eternal death. In all things, then, the end must be considered, and the course of our purpose directed according to it; and if, when a more wholesome counsel comes, we see it turning toward the worse side, it is better to set aside the unsuitable decision and pass to a better judgment than, by clinging obstinately to what we decided, to be bound by graver sins.

Germanus: “As far as our desire is concerned, which we have taken up for the sake of spiritual benefit, we would wish to be edified by continual fellowship with you. For if we return to our coenobium, it is certain that we will not only fall away from so sublime a purpose, but will also be shaken by many losses because of the mediocrity of the way of life there. But that gospel command frightens us greatly: “Let your word be yes, yes; no, no; for whatever is more than these is from evil.” For we believe that the transgression of so great a precept cannot be compensated by any righteousness, and that what has once been begun with an evil beginning cannot turn out well in the end.”

Joseph: “In all cases, as we have said, it is not the outcome of the deed but the will of the doer that must be considered, and we must ask not at once what anyone has done but with what intention he has done it. So we find that some were condemned for deeds from which good afterward arose, and on the contrary that some reached the highest righteousness through blameworthy acts. The useful outcome of events did not profit the one who, undertaking the thing with the worst purpose, wished to accomplish not the benefit that followed but something contrary to it; nor did it harm the other to have begun blameworthily, who endured the necessity of a censurable beginning not out of contempt for God or a purpose of sinning, but in view of a necessary and holy end.

“And to illustrate these same things by examples from the Holy Scriptures: what more wholesome, what more useful could have been obtained for the whole world than the saving remedy of the Lord’s passion? And yet it not only did not profit the traitor by whose agency it is shown to have been accomplished, but even harmed him so much that it is declared of him absolutely: “It would have been good for that man if he had not been born.” For the fruit of his work is to be repaid to him not according to what came about, but according to what he wished to do or believed he would bring about. And again, what is more criminal than deceit and lying committed even against a stranger, not to say against a brother and father? And yet the patriarch Jacob not only incurred no condemnation or blame for these things, but was even enriched with the everlasting inheritance of the blessing. And rightly, since he desired the blessing destined for the firstborn not out of greed for present gain but out of faith in everlasting sanctification, while the other betrayed the redeemer of all to death not for the sake of human salvation but through the crime of avarice. And therefore to each of them the fruit of his action was ascribed according to the aim of his mind and the purpose of his will, by which neither did the one intend to commit fraud nor the other to work salvation. For what is justly repaid to each in reward is what he principally conceived in his mind, not what came of it afterward, whether well or ill, contrary to the wish of the doer. And therefore the most just judge considered the one who presumed to such a lie excusable, or rather praiseworthy, because without it he could not reach the blessing of the firstborn, and what arose from desire for the blessing ought not to be called a crime. Otherwise the said patriarch would have been not only unjust to his brother but also a deceiver of his father and sacrilegious, if, having another way by which he could reach the grace of that blessing, he had preferred to seek this one, which was damaging and harmful to his brother. You see, then, that with God it is not the outcome of the act but the aim of the mind that is examined. With these foundations laid, to return to the question put, for the sake of which all this has been said beforehand, I would like you first to answer me: for what reason did you bind yourselves with the bonds of that promise?”

Germanus: “The first cause, as we said, was that we were afraid to sadden our elders and to resist their commands; the second, that we believed, with a most ill-considered conviction, that if we had received anything perfect and magnificent from you by sight or hearing, we could practise it when we had returned to the coenobium.”

Joseph: “As we said before, the aim of the mind either rewards a man or condemns him, according to the saying: “their thoughts among themselves accusing or else defending them, on the day when God will judge the secrets of men,” and also this: “But I come to gather their works and thoughts, with all nations and tongues.” Therefore, as I see, you bound yourselves with the bond of this oath out of desire for perfection, believing that it could be grasped in that way; now, a fuller judgment having come, you perceive that its height cannot be reached in that way. Whatever, then, seems to have happened in disagreement with that arrangement is no prejudice, provided that no change in that principal purpose follows. For a change of tools is not desertion of the work, nor does the choice of a shorter and more direct road argue sloth in the traveler. So in this matter too the correction of an improvident arrangement must not be judged a transgression of the spiritual vow. For whatever is done for the love of God and devotion to godliness, which “has the promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come,” even if it seems to begin with hard and adverse beginnings, is worthy not only of no blame but even of the highest praise. And therefore the breaking of an incautious promise does no harm, if in whatever way the scopos, that is, the proposed goal of godliness, is kept. For we do everything for this, that we may be able to show God a clean heart; if its perfecting is judged easier in these places, the change of the agreement wrung from you will do you no harm, provided only that the perfection of that principal purity for which your promise was made is acquired more quickly, according to the Lord’s will.

Germanus: “As far as the force of your words, which have been set out reasonably and wisely, is concerned, the scruple of our promise could easily have been driven out of us, were it not that this frightens us most vehemently: that by such examples an occasion for lying seems to be opened to the weaker, if they learn that the faith of an agreement can in any way be lawfully dissolved, since this very thing is forbidden by such great and threatening words, as the prophet says: “You will destroy all who speak a lie,” and: “The mouth that lies kills the soul.”

Joseph: Occasions and causes of perdition cannot be lacking to those who are going to perish, or rather who wish to perish. For the testimonies of Scripture are not to be thrown away and scraped entirely off its body because by them the depravity of heretics is encouraged, or the unbelief of the Jews hardened, or the conceit of pagan wisdom offended; rather they are certainly to be believed with piety, held without wavering, and preached according to the rule of truth. And therefore we ought not, on the pretext of other people's unbelief, to disown the oikonomiai, that is, the dispensations of the prophets and saints which Scripture records, lest, while we think we ought to condescend to their weakness, we be defiled with the crime not only of lying but also of sacrilege. But, as we have said, we must both acknowledge them according to the history and explain how they were done piously. Besides, for those of perverse purpose the way to lying will not be blocked if we labour either to deny altogether or to weaken by allegorical interpretations the truth of the things we are going to bring forward or have brought forward. For what harm will the authority of these testimonies do to them, when the mere corruption of their will suffices for sinning?

So we must think of lying, and use it, as if it had the nature of hellebore: if it is taken when a deadly illness threatens, it becomes healthful, but if it is taken without the necessity of extreme danger, it brings instant death. For so we read that holy men, most approved by God, used lying to good effect, so that not only did they incur no guilt of sin from it, but even attained the highest righteousness. And if deceit could bring them glory, what would truth have brought them instead but condemnation? So Rahab: although Scripture records of her no memorials of virtue, but even of unchastity, yet for the lie alone by which she chose to hide the spies rather than betray them, she deserved to be joined to the people of God with an everlasting blessing. If she had chosen to speak the truth or to look to the safety of her fellow citizens, no doubt she would not have escaped, with her whole house, the destruction that threatened, nor, inserted among the ancestors of the Lord's birth and counted in the list of the patriarchs, would she have deserved to bring forth the Saviour of all through the succession of her offspring. Delilah, on the other hand, who looked to the advantage of her fellow citizens and betrayed the truth she had found out, obtained in return everlasting perdition and left to all only the memory of her crime. When, therefore, some grave danger threatens from confessing the truth, then we must take refuge in lies, yet in such a way that we are wholesomely pricked by the guilt of a humble conscience. But where no condition of extreme necessity presses, a lie must be avoided with all care as something deadly, as we said of drinking hellebore: it is healthful if it is taken only when an unavoidable and deadly sickness threatens, but if it is taken while the body is whole and undisturbed in health, its harmful force goes at once to seize the vital parts. This is plainly shown in Rahab of Jericho and in the patriarch Jacob: she could not have escaped death otherwise than by this remedy, nor could he have attained the blessing of the firstborn. For God is the examiner and judge not only of our words and acts but also the inspector of our purpose and intention. If he sees that something has been done or promised by anyone for the sake of eternal salvation and with a view to divine contemplation, even though it seems hard and unjust to men, he, looking at the inward piety of the heart, judges not the sound of the words but the wish of the will; for the end of the work and the disposition of the doer must be considered, by which, as was said above, one may be justified even through a lie, and another, by asserting the truth, incur the sin of eternal death. Looking to this end, the patriarch Jacob too did not fear to imitate the hairy appearance of his brother's body by wrapping himself in skins, and he laudably obeyed his mother, who urged him to this lie. For he saw that greater gains of blessing and righteousness would come to him by this than by keeping to simplicity. For he did not doubt that the stain of this lie would at once be washed away by the flood of his father's blessing, and quickly dispersed like a little cloud by the breath of the Holy Spirit, and that richer rewards of merit would be conferred on him through this assumed pretence than through that inborn truthfulness.

Germanus: It is not surprising that these dispensations were fittingly employed in the Old Testament, and that holy men sometimes lied laudably, or at least pardonably, since we see that much greater things were allowed them because of the rudimentary state of those times. For why should it be surprising that blessed David, fleeing from Saul, when the priest Abimelech asked him, “Why are you alone, and no one with you?”, answered thus: “The king,” he said, “has given me a command and said: Let no one know the matter for which you have been sent; for I have appointed the young men to such and such a place”; and again: “Have you here at hand a spear or a sword? For I have not brought my sword and my weapons with me, for the king's business was urgent”; or that, when he was brought to Achish king of Gath, he feigned madness and frenzy and changed his countenance before them, and fell down between their hands, and struck against the door of the gate, and his spittle ran down upon his beard? For they even lawfully enjoyed flocks of wives and concubines, and no sin was imputed to them on this account; moreover they often shed the blood of their enemies with their own hand, and this was believed to be not only not blameworthy but even praiseworthy. Now that the gospel shines, we see these things so wholly forbidden that none of them can be done without great crime and sacrilege. In the same way we believe that no lie, however covered with a pious colour, can be used by anyone, I will not say fittingly, but not even pardonably, since the Lord says: “Let your speech be yes, yes; no, no; whatever is more than these is from evil”, and the apostle agrees with this: “And do not lie to one another.”

Joseph: That ancient freedom of many wives and concubines, now that the end of the times was approaching and the multiplication of the human race was complete, was rightly to be cut off by gospel perfection as no longer so necessary. For until the coming of Christ the blessing of that primordial sentence had to remain in force, in which it was said: “Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” And therefore it was most just that from that root of human fruitfulness, which flourished usefully in the synagogue according to the dispensation of the time, the little flowers of angelic virginity should spring, and the sweet-smelling fruits of continence should be produced in the church. But that lies were condemned even then the whole text of the Old Testament plainly shows, saying: “You will destroy all who speak a lie”; and again: “The bread of lying is sweet to a man, but afterwards his mouth will be filled with gravel”; and the lawgiver himself says: “You shall flee a lie.” But we said that it was fittingly used only when some necessity or saving dispensation was joined to it, on account of which it ought not to be condemned. Such is what you mentioned about King David, when, fleeing Saul's unjust persecution, he used lying words to the priest Abimelech, not with the aim of any gain or with the wish to harm anyone, but only to save himself from his most wicked persecution; for he would not defile his hands with the blood of the hostile king, though God had so often delivered him to him, saying: “God be merciful to me, that I should not do this thing to my lord, the Lord's anointed, to lay my hand upon him, for he is the Lord's anointed.” And therefore these dispensations, which we read that holy men carried out in the Old Testament either because of God's will, or to prefigure spiritual mysteries, or for the salvation of certain persons, we too cannot disown when necessity presses, so much so that we see that not even the apostles themselves avoided them where the consideration of some benefit required it. We shall postpone these for a little while, and first set out what we still intend to bring forward from the Old Testament; afterwards we shall add them more fittingly, so that it may be more easily proved that just and holy men, both in the New Testament and in the Old, agreed with one another in all respects in these economies. For what shall we say of that pious pretence of Hushai toward Absalom for the safety of King David? Although it was put forward wholly with the intention of deceiving and circumventing, and fought against the benefit of the one seeking counsel, it is approved by the testimony of divine Scripture, which says: “By the will of the Lord the good counsel of Ahithophel was defeated, that the Lord might bring evil upon Absalom.” For what was done with right purpose and pious judgment for the just side, and devised by a religious pretence for the safety and victory of him whose piety pleased God, could not be blamed. What shall we pronounce also about the deed of that woman who received those who had been sent to King David by the aforesaid Hushai, hid them in a well, spread a covering over its mouth, and pretended that she was roasting barley, and said: “They have passed on, after tasting a little water”; and by this fiction freed them from the hands of their pursuers? Answer me, therefore, I beg you: what would you have done if a similar situation had arisen for us, now set under the gospel? Would you rather have hidden them by a like lie, saying in the same way, “They have passed on, after tasting a little water,” and so fulfilled the command, “Rescue those who are led to death, and do not spare to redeem those who are being killed”; or would you have betrayed those in hiding to those who would kill them by confessing the truth? And where is that saying of the apostle: “Let no one seek his own, but what is another's”; and: “Love does not seek its own things, but those of others”; and of himself: “I do not seek what is profitable to me, but what is profitable to many, that they may be saved”? For if we seek our own things and wish obstinately to keep what is profitable to us, we must speak the truth even in necessities of this kind and become guilty of another's death; but if, putting what is salutary for others before our own advantage, we satisfy the apostle's command, then without doubt we must accept the necessity of lying. And therefore we shall be able neither to possess the heart of love entire nor to seek what is others', according to the apostolic discipline, unless we relax a little what befits our own strictness and perfection and prefer to condescend with a ready affection to the advantage of others, and so with the apostle become weak to the weak, that we may be able to gain the weak.

Taught by these examples, blessed James the apostle too, and all the chief leaders of that primitive church, urged the apostle Paul to descend to a feigned pretence because of the weakness of the weak, and compelled him to be purified according to the observance of the law, to shave his head, and to offer vows. They counted as nothing the present loss that arose from this hypocrisy, and looked rather to the gains that would come from his long preaching. For the apostle Paul would not have gained as much from his strictness here as all the nations would have lost by his swift death. And this would without doubt have happened then to the whole church, had not this useful and salutary hypocrisy preserved him for the preaching of the gospel. For then we may necessarily and pardonably accept the loss of a lie, when, as we have said, a greater loss threatens from confessing the truth, and the benefit that the truth brings us cannot outweigh the harm that would follow. The same blessed apostle testifies in other words that he always kept to this measure everywhere. For when he says: “I became to the Jews as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to those who were under the law as if I were under the law, though I myself was not under the law, that I might gain those who were under the law; to those without law as if I were without law, though I was not without the law of God but was in the law of Christ, that I might gain those who were without law; I became weak to the weak, that I might gain the weak; I became all things to all, that I might save all”, what else does he show but that he always condescended according to the weakness and measure of those being taught, and relaxed something of the rigour of perfection, and did not hold to what strictness seemed to require, but preferred what the benefit of the weak demanded? And to trace these same things more carefully and set out one by one the marks of the apostle's virtues, someone will ask how the blessed apostle is shown to have adapted himself to all in all things. Where did he become to the Jews as a Jew? Surely there, where, while keeping in his inmost heart the sentence he had declared to the Galatians, “Behold, I Paul say to you that if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing,” he nevertheless in the circumcision of Timothy took on in a way the appearance of Jewish superstition. And again, where did he become to those under the law as if he were under the law? Surely there, where James and all the elders of the church, fearing lest that multitude of believing Jews, or rather of judaizing Christians, who had received the faith of Christ in such a way that they were still bound by the rite of the legal ceremonies, should fall upon him, came to his aid in his danger with this counsel and persuasion, saying: “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews who have believed, and all these are zealous for the law. They have heard of you that you teach the Jews who are among the Gentiles to depart from Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their children”; and below: “Do therefore what we tell you. We have four men who have a vow on them; take them and purify yourself with them, and pay for them so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that the things they have heard about you are false, but that you yourself also walk keeping the law.” And so, for the salvation of those who were under the law, trampling for a little while on the strictness of his own sentence in which he had said, “For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God,” he is compelled to shave his head, to be purified according to the law, and to offer vows in the temple by the Mosaic rite. You will also ask where, for the salvation of those who were wholly ignorant of God's law, he became as if he himself were without law. Read what opening of preaching he used in the city of Athens, where pagan impiety flourished: “As I passed by,” he says, “I saw your images and an altar on which was written: To the unknown God.” And having begun from their superstition, as if he too were without law, he brought in the faith of Christ on the occasion of that profane inscription, saying: “What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.” And a little later, as if he were wholly ignorant of the divine law, he chose to bring forward a verse of a pagan poet rather than a saying of Moses or of Christ: “As some,” he says, “of your own poets have said: For we are also his offspring.” And when he had approached them with their own testimonies, which they could not refute, confirming true things from false, he added: “Since then we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, the sculpture of art and man's device.” He became weak to the weak when, by way of concession, not of command, he allowed those who could not contain themselves to come together again; or when, giving the Corinthians milk to drink and not solid food, he says that he was among them in weakness and fear and much trembling. And he became all things to all, that he might save all, when he says: “Let him who eats not despise him who does not eat, and let him who does not eat not judge him who eats”; and: “He who gives his virgin in marriage does well, and he who does not give her does better”; and elsewhere: “Who is weak,” he says, “and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I do not burn?” And in this way he fulfilled what he had commanded the Corinthians, saying: “Give no offence to Jews and Greeks and to the church of Christ, just as I also please all in all things, not seeking what is profitable to me but what is profitable to many, that they may be saved.” For it would doubtless have been profitable not to circumcise Timothy, not to shave his head, not to undertake the Jewish purification, not to practise going barefoot, not to offer the legal vows; but he does all these things because he does not seek what is profitable to himself, but what is profitable to many. And though this was done with a view to God, yet it was not without pretence. For he who through the law of Christ had died to the law, that he might live to God, and who had counted as loss and as dung that righteousness of the law in which he had lived blamelessly, that he might gain Christ, could not offer the things of the law with the true affection of his heart; nor is it right to believe that he who had said, “For if I build up again the things I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor,” fell into what he himself had condemned. And so much is the disposition of the doer weighed, rather than the thing done, that on the contrary truth is found to have harmed some and a lie to have helped. For Doeg the Edomite, when King Saul complained before his servants about David's flight and said, “Will the son of Jesse give all of you fields and vineyards, and make you all tribunes and centurions, that you have all conspired against me, and there is no one to inform me?”, what did he reveal but the truth, saying: “I saw the son of Jesse in Nob with Abimelech the son of Ahitub the priest, who consulted the Lord for him and gave him provisions, and also gave him the sword of Goliath the Philistine”? For this truth he deserved to be rooted out of the land of the living, and it is said of him through the prophet: “Therefore God will destroy you for ever; he will pluck you out and remove you from your tent, and your root from the land of the living.” He, then, is torn out with everlasting uprooting, for disclosing the truth, from that very land in which Rahab the harlot, for a lie, is planted with her kindred. So too we remember that Samson most ruinously betrayed to his wicked wife the truth he had long hidden by a lie; the truth, most imprudently disclosed, brought deception upon him because he neglected to keep that prophetic command: “From her who sleeps in your bosom, guard the doors of your mouth.”

And to bring forward some examples from our own unavoidable and almost daily necessities, which, however watchful we are, we can never so guard against that we are not forced, willing or unwilling, to run into them: what, I ask, is to be done when we have decided to put off our meal, and a brother arrives towards evening and asks whether we have eaten? Is our fast to be concealed and the virtue of abstinence covered, or disclosed by professing the truth? If we conceal it, so as to satisfy the Lord's command in which it is said, “Do not appear to men as fasting, but to your Father who is in secret”; and again, “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,” we certainly lie. If we make known our virtue of abstinence, the gospel sentence will rightly strike us: “Truly I say to you, they have received their reward.” And what if someone decidedly refuses a cup offered by a brother, absolutely denying that he will accept what the brother, rejoicing at his arrival, humbly begs him to take? Is it right that he should yield, even at the cost of his own effort, to a brother who has thrown himself at his knees and prostrated himself on the ground, and who believes that only by these services can he fulfil the affection of love; or should he persist in the obstinacy of his word and resolution?

Germanus: In the first example there is no doubt, we believe, that it is better to hide our abstinence than to disclose it to those who ask; and in cases of this kind we too admit that a lie is unavoidable. But in the second no necessity of lying presses upon us: first, because we can refuse what is offered by the brothers' service in such a way as not to bind ourselves by any tie of a decision; and then, because once we have refused we can hold to our judgment without wavering.

Joseph: There is no doubt that these decisions belong to those monasteries in which, as you say, the rudiments of your renunciation were formed, whose leaders are accustomed to put their own wills before the refreshment of the brothers and most obstinately carry out whatever they have once conceived in their minds. But our elders, to whose faith the signs of apostolic powers have borne witness, and who did everything by the judgment and discernment of the Spirit rather than by rigid obstinacy of mind, held that those who yielded to the weaknesses of others reaped far richer fruits than those who persisted in their own decisions; and they declared that it was a sign of higher virtue to conceal abstinence by this necessary and, as has been said, humble lie than to disclose it by a proud revelation of the truth.

In fact abba Piamun, after twenty-five years, when grapes and wine were offered him by a certain brother, accepted them without hesitation and at once tasted what had been set before him, contrary to his custom, rather than make known the virtue of a continence unknown to all. For if we wish also to consider what we remember our elders doing without hesitation, who, when it was necessary to bring forward in conference the wonders of their own virtues or their own deeds for the instruction of the younger, used to disguise them under the persons of others, what else can we judge of these things but that they were plain lies? And would that we too had something worthy that could be put before the younger to stir up their faith! We would certainly not fear to follow such fictions of theirs. For it is more right to lie under the colour of such a figure than, for the sake of observing this unreasonable truthfulness, either to cover by unfitting silence what could edify the hearers, or, if they are told truthfully in our own person, to incur the boasting of harmful vanity. The teacher of the Gentiles too plainly instructs us in this by his teaching, for he preferred to bring out the greatness of his revelations in the person of another, saying: “I know a man in Christ, whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows, caught up to the third heaven. And I know that such a man was caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.”

It is impossible for us to run through everything briefly. For who could count almost all the patriarchs and innumerable saints who, so to speak, took up the protection of a lie: some to safeguard life, some from desire for a blessing, some from mercy, some to conceal a mystery, some from zeal for God, some to test the truth? As they cannot all be counted, so they ought not all to be passed over entirely. For love compelled blessed Joseph to charge his brothers with a false crime, even with an oath by the king's life, saying: “You are spies; you have come to look at the weaker parts of the land”; and below: “Send one of you,” he says, “and bring your brother here; but you will be kept here until your words are made plain, whether you speak the truth or not; otherwise, by the life of Pharaoh, you are spies.” For if he had not frightened them by this merciful lie, he could not have seen his father and brother again, nor fed them in such dangers of want, nor finally cleansed his brothers' consciences from the guilt of selling him. So it was not so much blameworthy to have struck fear into his brothers by a lie, as holy and praiseworthy to have driven his enemies and sellers to salutary repentance on the occasion of a feigned danger. Indeed, when they were pressed by the odium of a most grave accusation, they were broken not by the conscience of what was falsely charged but of their earlier crime, saying to one another: “We deserve to suffer this, because we sinned against our brother, because we disregarded the distress of his soul when he pleaded with us, and we did not listen to him; therefore all this distress has come upon us.” This confession, we believe, with most wholesome humility, atoned for so great a crime, not only before the brother against whom they had sinned with ungodly cruelty, but also before God. What of Solomon, who showed the gift of wisdom he had received from God in his first judgment only by taking up a lie? For in order to extract the truth that was hidden by a woman's lie, he himself used the help of a lie, certainly most cleverly devised, saying: “Bring me a sword, and divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other.” When this pretended cruelty had moved the heart of the true mother, and was praised by the one who was not the mother, then at last, by a most sagacious disclosure of the truth, he pronounced the sentence which no one doubted was inspired by God: “Give the living child to this one,” he said, “and let it not be killed; she is its mother.” Accordingly, we are taught more fully by other testimonies of the Scriptures that we neither ought nor are able to carry out everything that we decide, whether with a calm or a disturbed mind; for we often read that holy men, or angels, or almighty God himself, changed what they had decided. For blessed David decreed with the resolution of an oath, saying: “May God do so to the enemies of David, and more also, if I leave of all that belongs to Nabal, by morning, one who pisses against the wall.” And at once, when Abigail his wife interceded and pleaded for him, he remits his threats, softens his sentence, and prefers to be judged a breaker of his purpose rather than to keep faith with his oath by carrying out cruelty, saying: “As the Lord lives, if you had not come quickly to meet me, there would not have been left to Nabal by morning light one who pisses against the wall.” As we judge that the rashness of that headlong oath, which came from the agitation of a disturbed mind, is by no means to be imitated, so we decide that the remission and correction of his resolution is to be followed. The vessel of election, writing to the Corinthians, promises his return with an absolute decision, saying: “But I will come to you when I have passed through Macedonia, for I shall pass through Macedonia; and I shall stay with you, or even winter, so that you may send me on my way wherever I go. For I do not wish to see you now in passing; for I hope to stay with you some time.” He recalls this in the second letter too: “And in this confidence I wished to come to you first, that you might have a second grace, and to pass through you into Macedonia, and again come from Macedonia to you and be sent on by you into Judaea.” But when a more salutary counsel came upon him, he most plainly confesses that he did not carry out what he had promised: “When I wished this,” he says, “did I act lightly? Or do I plan what I plan according to the flesh, so that with me there is yes, yes and no, no?” Then he declares, even with the solemnity of an oath, why he preferred to go back on the decision of his word rather than bring burdensome sorrow on his disciples by his coming: “But I call God as witness upon my soul that it was to spare you that I did not come again to Corinth. For I decided this with myself, that I would not come to you in sorrow.” When the angels refused to enter Lot's house in Sodom, saying to him, “We will not enter, but will remain in the street,” they are at once compelled by his prayers to change their fixed word, as Scripture adds: “And Lot pressed them, and they turned in to him.” If they knew that they would turn in to him, they refused the request of the one inviting them with a feigned excuse; but if they excused themselves truthfully, they are plainly proved to have changed their decision. We believe that the Holy Spirit placed these things in the sacred books for no other reason than that we might be taught by these examples not to persist obstinately in our decisions, but to subject them to our judgment and so to keep our judgment free from every bond of law, so that it may be ready to follow wherever salutary counsel calls, and may not delay or refuse to pass without any hesitation to what salutary discernment has found more useful. And to rise to still higher examples: when King Hezekiah lay on his bed, suffering from a grave illness, Isaiah the prophet addressed him in the person of God, saying: “Thus says the Lord: Set your house in order, for you will die and not live. And Hezekiah turned his face to the wall,” it says, “and prayed to the Lord and said: I beseech you, Lord, remember, I pray, how I have walked before you in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done what is good in your eyes. And Hezekiah wept with great weeping.” After this it is said again to the same prophet: “Go back, and say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Thus says the Lord, the God of David your father: I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tear; and behold, I will add fifteen years to your days, and I will deliver you from the hand of the king of the Assyrians, and I will protect this city for my own sake and for the sake of David my servant.” What is plainer than this testimony, in which the Lord, out of regard for mercy and pity, prefers to annul his word and to extend the life of the one who prays by fifteen years beyond the appointed limit of death, rather than to be found inexorable by the unchangeableness of his decree? Likewise the divine sentence says to the Ninevites: “Yet three days, and Nineveh will be overthrown”; and soon, by their repentance and fasts, so threatening and abrupt a sentence is softened, and with ready kindness is turned aside to the side of mercy. But if someone maintains that the Lord, foreknowing their conversion, threatened them with the overthrow of the city in order to provoke them to salutary repentance, it follows that those who are over the brothers may, if need be, threaten those who need correction with even stricter things than they intend to do, without blame for lying. But if he says that God revoked that severe sentence of his in view of their repentance, according to what he says through Ezekiel, “If I say to the wicked, You shall surely die, and he repents of his sin and does justice and righteousness, he shall surely live and not die,” we are likewise taught that we ought not to persist obstinately in our decisions, but to soften with merciful compassion a threat made out of necessity. And lest it be thought that the Lord granted this specially to the Ninevites alone, he declares through Jeremiah that he will always do the same generally towards all, and will, when necessary, change his sentence without hesitation according to our deserts. He promises, saying: “Suddenly I will speak against a nation and against a kingdom, to root up and pull down and destroy it. If that nation repents of its evil, which I have spoken against it, I too will repent of the evil which I thought to do to it. And suddenly I will speak of a nation and a kingdom, to build and plant it. If it does evil in my sight and does not listen to my voice, I will repent of the good which I said I would do to it.” And to Ezekiel: “Do not hold back a word, if perhaps they will hear and turn each from his evil way; and I will repent of the evil which I thought to do to them because of the wickedness of their doings.” By these testimonies it is declared that we ought not to cling obstinately to our decisions, but temper them by reason and judgment, always choose and prefer the better things, and pass without any hesitation to the side that has been judged more useful. Above all, that inestimable judgment of God teaches us this: that although the end of each person is foreknown to him before birth, he so orders all things by a common order and reason and, in a way, by human affections, that he judges everything not by his power nor according to the ineffable knowledge of his foreknowledge, but according to the present acts of men, and either rejects or draws each one, and either pours in his grace daily or turns it away. That this is so is shown also by the choice of Saul. Although God's foreknowledge could not be ignorant of his blameworthy end, he chose him out of so many thousands of Israel and anointed him king, rewarding the merit of his present life, not looking to the sin of his future transgression; so that, after he had become reprobate, God, as if repenting of his choice, complains of him in a way with human words and feelings, saying: “I repent that I made Saul king, for he has forsaken me and has not fulfilled my words in deed”; and again: “But Samuel mourned for Saul, because the Lord repented that he had made Saul king over Israel.” Then what he had carried out in deed the Lord later declares through the prophet Ezekiel as well, that he will deal with all men by daily judgment: “Even if I say to the righteous that he shall surely live, and he, trusting in his righteousness, does iniquity, all his righteousnesses will be forgotten, and in the iniquity which he has done, in that he shall die. But if I say to the wicked, You shall surely die, and he repents of his sin and does justice and righteousness, if that wicked man restores the pledge and gives back what he has robbed, walks in the commandments of life and does nothing unjust, he shall surely live and not die. None of the sins which he has committed shall be imputed to him.” Again, when the Lord had turned away the regard of his mercy from that people whom he had adopted out of all nations, because of their sudden transgression, the lawgiver intervenes for it and cries out: “I beseech you, Lord, this people has sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold. And now, if you forgive their sin, forgive; but if not, blot me out of your book which you have written.” To him the Lord says: “Whoever has sinned before me, I will blot him out of my book.” David too, lamenting in the prophetic spirit about Judas and the persecutors of Christ, says: “Let them be blotted out of the book of the living.” And because they did not deserve to come to salutary repentance for the guilt of so great a crime, he adds: “And let them not be written with the righteous.” In the end the force of the prophetic curse was plainly fulfilled in Judas himself. For when he had completed the crime of betrayal he killed himself by hanging, lest after the blotting out of his name he should turn to repentance and deserve to be written again with the righteous in heaven. So we must not doubt that the name of Judas too, at the time when he was chosen by Christ and received the rank of the apostolate, was written in the book of the living, and that he heard with the rest: “Do not rejoice that the demons are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” But because, corrupted by the plague of love of money, he was thrown down from the heavenly enrolment to earthly things, it is fittingly said through the prophet of him and those like him: “Lord, let all who forsake you be put to shame; let those who depart be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters”; and elsewhere: “They shall not be in the council of my people, nor be written in the register of the house of Israel, nor shall they enter the land of Israel.”

Nor should the usefulness of this precept be passed over: that even if, at the prompting of anger or any other passion, we have bound ourselves by some oath (which indeed no monk ought ever to do), the case for each course must still be weighed with sound judgment of mind; the thing we resolved on must be compared with the one to which we are compelled to pass, and we must pass without hesitation to the one that, on sounder consideration, has been judged more just. For it is more right to go back on our word than to suffer the loss of a more wholesome and pious thing. In short, we never remember reasonable and approved fathers being hard or unbending in decisions of this kind; rather, like wax by heat, they were softened by reason, and when a more wholesome counsel intervened they yielded without hesitation to the better side. But whomever we saw clinging obstinately to their decisions, we always found to be unreasonable and without discernment.

Germanus: As far as this reasoning is concerned, which has been set out clearly and fully, a monk should decide nothing, lest he be found either a transgressor or obstinate. And where shall we put that saying of the Psalmist: “I have sworn and resolved to keep the judgments of your righteousness”? For what else is it to swear and resolve than to keep one's decisions without wavering?

Joseph: We are not deciding these things about the principal commandments, without which our salvation cannot stand at all, but about those which we can either relax or keep without danger to our state: for example, the unremitting rigour of fasting, perpetual abstinence from wine or oil, keeping altogether from going out of one's cell, the unceasing continuance of reading or meditation. These can be practised when one pleases, without loss to our profession and purpose, and can be omitted without blame when necessary. But concerning the observance of those principal commandments we must resolve most firmly, and for them even death, if necessary, is not to be avoided; for them we must say without wavering: “I have sworn and resolved.” This must be done for the keeping of love, for which all things are to be despised, lest the good and perfection of that tranquillity be stained. Likewise we must swear for the purity of chastity; and we must do no differently for faith, for sobriety and for righteousness. All these are to be held with unchanging perseverance, and to depart from them even a little is damnable. But concerning those bodily exercises which are said to be of little profit, we must resolve, as we have said, in such a way that, if some surer occasion of piety arises which advises relaxing them, we are held by no law about them, but may freely leave them and pass to more useful things. For in those bodily exercises there is no danger if they are left for a time; but to turn aside from these even for a moment is deadly.

This too must be looked after with similar caution: if some word you wish to keep secret has perhaps slipped from your mouth, do not trouble the hearer with any instructions to keep it hidden. For it will stay hidden better if it is passed over carelessly and simply, because no brother will be so tormented by temptation to divulge it, reckoning it a trivial thing brought out in passing conversation, and all the lighter because it was not commended to the hearer's mind with a most careful command of silence. For if you bind his faith with some solemn oath, you need not doubt that it will be betrayed all the sooner; for a greater force of diabolical temptation will rise up against him, so as both to grieve or expose you and to make him a breaker of his oath as quickly as possible.

And therefore a monk ought to decide nothing abruptly, at least about things that belong to bodily exercises, lest, by rousing the adversary all the more to attack what he keeps as if under the observance of law, he be compelled to break it all the sooner. For whoever, though set under the grace of liberty, prescribes a law for himself binds himself by a harmful slavery, so that what he could have taken lawfully, and even laudably with thanksgiving, he is compelled, if necessity perhaps forces him, to take as a transgressor, with the guilt of sin. “For where there is no law, there is no transgression.” Strengthened by this instruction and teaching of the most blessed Joseph as by a divine oracle, we chose to stay in Egypt. But although after this we were little anxious about our promise, yet when the number of seven years was completed we gladly fulfilled our pledge. For hastening to our monastery at the time when we were confident of obtaining our return to the desert, we first paid due honour to our elders; then we restored the former love in the minds of those who, in the ardour of their love, had by no means been soothed by the many apologies in our letters; and at last, with the sting of our pledge fully drawn, and with them too sending us on our way with joy, we returned to the secret places of the desert of Scetis. This knowledge and teaching of illustrious fathers, O holy brothers, our ignorance has worked out as well as it could. Even if our unpolished speech has perhaps confused rather than set it in order, I beg that the censure of our rusticity may not empty the praise of these distinguished men. For it seemed safer to us, in the sight of our Judge, to publish the magnificence of this teaching even in unpolished words than to keep silent; since the fact that the reader is offended by the unskilfulness of our speech cannot hinder his progress, if he looks to the loftiness of the thoughts, and our concern is more for usefulness than for praise. I warn all into whose hands these little works come that whatever pleases them in them belongs to the fathers, but they should know that what displeases is ours.

After we had seen and conversed with those three elders whose conferences we have set down as best we could at the urging of our holy brother Eucherius, we longed with still greater ardor to visit the farther parts of Egypt, where a larger and more perfect number of saints lived. We came to a village called Diolcos, which lies on one of the seven mouths of the river Nile, drawn there not so much by the needs of the journey as by the desire of seeing the saints who lived in that place. For when, like the most eager merchants, we had heard that very many famous coenobia had been founded there by the ancient fathers, we at once undertook what was, so to speak, a voyage of uncertain inquiry, persuaded by the hope of greater gain. There, as we drifted about for a very long time and turned our curious eyes on every side toward those mountains conspicuous for the loftiness of their virtues, the first thing the gaze of our searching caught sight of, like a very high lighthouse, was Abba Piamun, the eldest of all the anchorites who lived there and their presbyter. For like that city of the Gospel, set on the summit of a high mountain, he at once shone out before our eyes. His virtues and wonders, which divine grace worked through him even in our sight, bearing witness to his merits, we think we must pass over in silence, so as not to exceed either the form of our plan or the measure of this volume. For we promised to hand down to memory not the wonders of God but some of the practices and pursuits of the saints, as far as we are able to remember them, so as to offer our readers only the instruction necessary for the perfect life, not a useless and superfluous admiration that brings no amendment of faults. So when blessed Piamun had received us with the greatest joy and refreshed us with fitting kindness, he understood that we were not of that region. He first asked carefully where we came from and why we had sought Egypt, and when he learned that we had come there from a coenobium in Syria out of desire for perfection, he began thus.

“My sons, anyone who longs to gain skill in any art will wish in vain, with empty desires, to attain the likeness of those whose care and industry he declines to imitate, unless he gives himself with all care and watchfulness to the study of the discipline he wants to learn and keeps the precepts and practices of the most accomplished masters of that craft or knowledge. For we know that some have come to these places from your regions only in order to go round the monasteries of the brothers for the sake of getting to know them, not in order to take up these rules and practices for which they had traveled here, nor to withdraw into cells and try to put into practice what they had learned by sight or by teaching. Keeping the habits and pursuits in which they had been trained, they were thought, as some are wont to reproach them, to have changed provinces not for the sake of their own progress but from the necessity of escaping poverty. For through the obstinacy of a stubborn mind they not only could gain no learning, they could not even stay long in these parts. Since they had changed neither their manner of fasting nor their order of psalms, nor even the style of their clothing, what else could they be believed to seek in this region but the mere securing of their livelihood?”

“Therefore, if, as we believe, it is for God’s sake that you have been drawn to imitate our understanding, then utterly renounce all the practices with which your beginnings were formed there, and follow with the greatest humility whatever you see our elders do or teach. Do not let it disturb you or turn you aside and draw you back from imitating them, even if for the present the reason or cause of some thing or deed is not clear to you. For those who think well and simply about everything, and are eager faithfully to imitate rather than to debate whatever they see handed down or done by the elders, will come to the knowledge of all things as well through the experience of practice. But whoever begins to be taught by debating will never enter into the reason of the truth. For the enemy, seeing him trust his own judgment rather than that of the fathers, will easily drive him to the point where even things that are most useful and wholesome seem to him superfluous and harmful. So the cunning foe will make sport of his presumption, so that, clinging obstinately to his own unreasonable definitions, he persuades himself that only that is holy which in the error of his own obstinacy he has judged right and most just.”

“So you must first learn the order and origin of our profession: how and from where it has come down. For a person can gain the discipline of the art he desires more effectively, and be spurred more ardently to practice it, when he has learned the dignity of its authors and founders. There are three kinds of monks in Egypt, of which two are excellent and the third lukewarm and to be avoided in every way. The first is that of the cenobites, who live together in a community and are governed by the judgment of one elder; the greatest number of monks throughout Egypt live in this way. The second is that of the anchorites, who were first trained in coenobia and, having been made perfect in the active life, chose the secrecy of solitude; we too long to share in this profession. The third, blameworthy, is that of the Sarabaites. We shall discuss each of them more fully in order. As I said, then, you must first learn the founders of these three professions. For from this very knowledge may arise either hatred of the profession that is to be avoided or desire for the one that is to be followed, since every way must draw its follower to the same end which its author and discoverer reached.”

“The discipline of the cenobites took its beginning at the time of the apostles’ preaching. For such was that whole multitude of believers in Jerusalem, which is described in the Acts of the Apostles as follows: ‘The multitude of believers was of one heart and soul, and none of them said that anything he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common. They sold their possessions and goods and divided them to all, as each had need.’ And again: ‘For there was no one in need among them; for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the prices of what they sold and laid them at the feet of the apostles; and it was distributed to each as each had need.’ Such, I say, was the whole church then, as it is now hard to find even a very few in the coenobia. But after the death of the apostles the multitude of believers began to grow lukewarm, especially that part of it which flowed together into the faith of Christ from foreigners and various nations. Because of their rudimentary faith and their long-rooted pagan habits, the apostles asked nothing more of them than that they abstain from things sacrificed to idols, from sexual immorality, from what is strangled, and from blood. This liberty, granted to the Gentiles because of the weakness of their first belief, gradually began to taint the perfection of the church at Jerusalem as well; and as the number of natives and newcomers grew daily, the fervor of that first faith cooled, and not only those who had streamed into the faith of Christ but even the leaders of the church relaxed that strictness. For some, thinking that what they saw conceded to the Gentiles because of weakness was lawful for them too, believed they would suffer no loss if they followed the faith and confession of Christ while keeping their property and wealth. But those in whom the apostolic fervor still lived, mindful of that former perfection, left their cities and the company of those who thought the negligence of a laxer life lawful for themselves and for the church of God, and began to live in places near the towns and more secluded, and to practice privately and on their own what they remembered the apostles had established for the whole body of the church in general. So grew up this discipline of which we have spoken, of the disciples who had separated themselves from the contagion of the others. As time went on they were gradually set apart from the crowds of believers; and because they abstained from marriage and separated themselves from the company of their relatives and from the life of this world, they were called monks, or monazontes, from the strictness of their single and solitary life. Hence it followed that, from their sharing a common life, they were called cenobites, and their cells and lodgings coenobia. This alone, then, was the most ancient kind of monks, first not only in time but also in grace, and it lasted unbroken for very many years until the age of Abba Paul and Abba Antony; and even now we see traces of it remaining in the strict coenobia.”

“From this number of the perfect, and, if I may so call it, this most fruitful root of saints, there were afterward brought forth the flowers and fruits of the anchorites as well. We know that the founders of this profession were those whom we mentioned a little earlier, namely Saint Paul and Antony. They sought the secrecy of solitude not, as some do, out of faintheartedness or the disease of impatience, but from the desire of higher progress and of divine contemplation, although the first of them is said to have gone into the desert under the pressure of necessity, while avoiding the plots of his kinsmen in a time of persecution. So there came forth from the discipline we have spoken of another kind of perfection, whose followers are rightly called anchorites, that is, those who withdraw. For they are by no means content with the victory by which they have trodden down the hidden snares of the devil among men, but long to meet the demons in open combat and plain battle, and so they do not fear to go into the vast recesses of the desert, in imitation of John the Baptist, who remained in the desert all his life, and of Elijah and Elisha, and of those of whom the apostle speaks thus: ‘They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, in distress, afflicted, in want, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes of the earth.’ Of them too the Lord speaks figuratively to Job: ‘Who has let the wild ass go free, and loosed his bonds? I have made the desert his dwelling and the salt land his tents. He scorns the multitude of the city and does not hear the cry of the taskmaster. He will look over the mountains of his pasture and seeks after every green thing.’ And in the Psalms: ‘Let them now say, who have been redeemed by the Lord, whom he redeemed from the hand of the enemy’; and a little after: ‘They wandered in the wilderness, in a waterless place; they did not find the way to a city of habitation. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted within them. And they cried to the Lord when they were in trouble, and he delivered them from their distresses.’ Jeremiah too describes them thus: ‘Blessed is he who has borne the yoke from his youth; he will sit alone and keep silence, because he has taken it upon himself’; and they sing in feeling and in deed that word of the Psalmist: ‘I have become like a pelican of the wilderness. I have watched, and have become like a sparrow alone on the housetop.’”

“While the Christian religion rejoiced in these two professions of monks, this order too gradually began to fall back into a worse state. There then emerged that worst and faithless kind of monks, or rather, that harmful plant sprang up again which had sprouted at the beginning of the church in Ananias and Sapphira and was cut down by the severity of the apostle Peter. Among monks it was judged detestable and accursed and was taken up by no one for as long as the dread of that very severe sentence remained fixed in the memory of the faithful, the sentence by which the blessed apostle did not allow the founders of that new crime to be healed by repentance or by any satisfaction, but cut off the most pernicious shoot by swift death. So when that example, the apostolic severity with which Ananias and Sapphira were punished, had gradually faded from some people’s view through long neglect and forgetfulness over time, there emerged this kind of Sarabaites. They are called Sarabaites in the idiom of the Egyptian language because they separated themselves from the communities of the coenobia and each looked after his own needs. They come from the number of those we mentioned before, who preferred to feign the perfection of the Gospel rather than take hold of it in truth, spurred by rivalry with, or by the praise of, those who prefer the perfect poverty of Christ to all the riches of the world. So while with a feeble mind they aim at something of the highest virtue, or are driven by necessity to come to this profession while hastening only to be counted by the name of monks without any zeal for its pursuits, they by no means seek the discipline of the coenobia. They do not submit to the judgment of the elders, nor, trained in their traditions, do they learn to overcome their own wills, nor do they receive any rule of sound discernment through proper instruction. They renounce the world only publicly, that is, before the eyes of men, and either stay in their own houses, under the privilege of this name, bound up in the same occupations as before, or build themselves cells, call them monasteries, and live in them at their own discretion and liberty. They never submit to the precepts of the Gospel, that is, to be occupied with no anxiety about daily food and no distractions of household affairs. Only those fulfill this, without any faithless doubt, who, freed from all the goods of this world, have so subjected themselves to the superiors of the coenobia that they do not even confess themselves to be masters of themselves. But those who, as we said, decline the strictness of the coenobium and live two or three together in cells, not content to be governed by the care and command of an abbot, but seeing to this above all, that, freed from the yoke of the elders, they may have liberty to do their own wills, to go out or wander wherever they please, and to do whatever they like, are worn out with daily work day and night even more than those who live in the coenobia, but not with the same faith and purpose. For they do this not in order to submit the fruit of their labor to the judgment of a steward, but to acquire money to store up. Notice what a difference there is between them. The one group, taking no thought for tomorrow, offer to God the most welcome fruits of their sweat; the other extends its faithless anxiety not only to tomorrow but to a span of many years, and believes God either false or poor, as if he either could not or would not provide them the sufficiency of daily food and clothing he has promised. The one group longs with all its prayers to possess aktēmosynē, that is, destitution of all things and perpetual poverty; the other, to obtain an abundance of all supplies. The one labors eagerly at daily work so as to exceed the fixed amount, so that whatever is left over from the holy uses of the monastery may be distributed at the abbot’s discretion to prisons, to the guesthouse, to the hospital, or to the needy; the other, so that whatever is left over from the daily gluttony may either serve extravagant desire or at any rate be stored up through the vice of avarice. Finally, even if we grant that what these gather with no excellent purpose might be distributed better than we have said, not even so do they aspire to the merit of that virtue and perfection. For the first, while bringing such returns to the monastery and renouncing them daily, persevere in such humble subjection that they are deprived of power over what they gain by their own sweat, just as over themselves, and continually renew the fervor of their first renunciation as they strip themselves daily of the fruits of their labor. The others, precisely because they give something to the poor, are lifted up and fall headlong every day. The patience and strictness with which the first so devoutly persevere in the profession they have once embraced, never fulfilling their own wills, make them daily crucified to this world and living martyrs; the lukewarmness of their own choice plunges the others into hell. These two kinds of monks, then, are nearly equal in number in this province. But in other provinces, which the needs of the catholic faith forced me to travel through, we found that this third kind, of Sarabaites, abounds and is almost the only one. For in the time of Lucius, who was bishop of the Arian unbelief, under the emperor Valens, when we were bringing aid to our brothers, namely those who had been banished from Egypt and the Thebaid to the mines of Pontus and Armenia for their steadfastness in the catholic faith, although we saw the discipline of the coenobia, very rarely, in some cities, we found that not even the name of the anchorites had been heard among them.”

“There is indeed yet another, a fourth kind, which we have lately seen emerge among those who flatter themselves with the appearance and image of anchorites. At their beginning, with a certain brief fervor, they seem to seek the perfection of the coenobium, but soon grow lukewarm. Scorning to cut off their former habits and vices, unwilling to bear the yoke of humility and patience any longer, and disdaining to be subject to the command of the elders, they seek separate cells and wish to sit alone, so that, provoked by no one, they may be thought by men patient, gentle, or humble. This way of life, or rather this lukewarmness, never lets those whom it has once infected come to perfection. For in this way their vices are not only not cut off but grow stronger for the worse, since, provoked by no one, like some deadly internal poison, the more they are hidden the more deeply they creep and produce an incurable disease in the sick man. For out of respect for the solitary cell no one dares to rebuke the faults of the solitary any longer, faults he preferred to keep unknown rather than to have cured. But virtues are brought forth not by hiding vices but by conquering them.”

Germanus: “Is there any difference between a coenobium and a monastery, or is one thing meant by both names?”

Piamun: “Although some commonly call coenobia monasteries without distinction, there is this difference: monastery is the name of a dwelling and means nothing more than the place, that is, the habitation of monks, whereas coenobium also indicates the character and discipline of the profession itself. Even the dwelling of a single monk can be called a monastery; but a place cannot be called a coenobium unless a united community of many living together dwells there. Indeed, places where groups of Sarabaites live are also called monasteries.”

“Therefore, since I see that you have taken up the beginnings of this profession from the best kind of monks, that is, that you are striving from the praiseworthy training-ground of the coenobia toward the lofty heights of the anchoritic discipline, pursue with true feeling of heart the virtue of humility and patience, which I do not doubt you learned there. Do not feign it, as some do, by a false humbling of words, or by an affected and superfluous bowing of the body in certain services. Abba Serapion once wittily mocked this pretense of humility. A certain man came to him who displayed the greatest self-abasement in dress and words. When the old man, according to custom, urged him to offer the prayer, he would not agree to the request, but declared that he was entangled in such crimes that he did not deserve even to breathe this common air; he even refused to sit on the mat and sat on the ground instead. And when he agreed still less to the washing of his feet, then Abba Serapion, after the meal, when the custom of the conference gave occasion, began to admonish him kindly and gently not to run about everywhere idle and wandering with unstable levity, especially as he was a young man and so strong, but to sit in his cell according to the rule of the elders and choose to be supported by his own work rather than by the generosity of others. For even the apostle Paul would not fall into this, and although this support was rightly owed to him as one who labored in the Gospel, he preferred to work night and day so as to provide daily food with his own hands for himself and for those who ministered to him and could not do the work. At this the man was filled with such sadness and resentment that he could not hide even in his face the bitterness conceived in his heart. The old man said to him: ‘Until now, my son, you were loading yourself with every weight of crime, not fearing to incur a mark on your reputation by confessing such dreadful sins. What is it, I ask, that at our simple little admonition, which not only contained no reproach but carried the feeling of edification and love, I see you so moved with indignation that you could not hide it even in your face or disguise it with a calm brow? Or were you perhaps, while humbling yourself, expecting from our mouth the verdict, “The righteous man is his own accuser at the beginning of his speech”?’ True humility of heart, then, is to be kept, which comes not from an affected humbling of body and words but from an inward humbling of the mind. It will shine with the clearest signs of its patience when a person does not boast about himself of crimes that others would not believe, but disregards those arrogantly heaped on him by another, and bears the injuries inflicted on him with a gentle equanimity of spirit.”

Germanus: “We long to know how this tranquillity may be acquired or kept, so that, just as we close the doors of our mouth when silence is imposed on us and restrain the license of words, so we may also guard the gentleness of the heart, which sometimes loses its calm within even when the tongue is bridled. And so we think that no one can keep the good of meekness except by the seclusion of the cell and a solitary dwelling.”

Piamun: “True patience and tranquillity are neither acquired nor kept without deep humility of heart. If they come from this spring, they will need neither the help of the cell nor the refuge of solitude. For what is upheld inwardly by the virtue of humility, its mother and guardian, seeks the protection of nothing outside. But if we are disturbed when someone provokes us, it is certain that the foundations of humility are not firmly laid in us, and so at the onset of even a small storm our building is shaken with a ruinous tremor. For patience would not be praiseworthy or admirable if it kept its purpose of tranquillity when struck by no darts of enemies; it is splendid and glorious in this, that it stands unmoved when the storms of temptation rush on it. For in the very thing by which it is thought to be troubled and broken by adversity, it is rather strengthened; and it is sharpened more in the very thing by which it is thought to be blunted. For everyone knows that patience takes its name from suffering and endurance, and so it is clear that no one can be called patient except one who bears without indignation everything inflicted on him. And so it is not without reason that Solomon praises him: ‘Better is the patient man than the strong, and he who restrains his anger than he who takes a city’; and again: ‘For the long-suffering man is great in prudence, but the fainthearted is very foolish.’ So when someone, overcome by an injury, is set on fire with anger, the harshness of the insult offered is not to be thought the cause of his sin, but rather the revealing of a hidden weakness, according to the parable of the Lord and Savior about the two houses, one founded on the rock and the other on the sand. He says that the storms of rain and floods and winds beat equally on both, but that the one founded on the solid rock felt no harm at all from so violent a shock, while the one built on the shifting sand at once collapsed. It is plain that it fell not because it was struck by the flood of rains or torrents, but because it was foolishly built on the sand. For the holy man differs from the sinner not in that he is not tempted in the same way, but in that he is not overcome even by a great assault, while the other is overcome even by a small temptation. For, as we said, the fortitude of a righteous man would not be praiseworthy if he conquered without being tempted, since there can surely be no place for victory without the opposition of combat. ‘For blessed is the man who endures temptation, for when he has been tried he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.’ According to the apostle Paul too, strength is made perfect not in ease and pleasures but in weakness. ‘For behold,’ it says, ‘I have made you this day a fortified city, and an iron pillar, and a bronze wall, over all the land, against the kings of Judah and its princes and its priests and all the people of the land. And they will fight against you and will not prevail, for I am with you, says the Lord, to deliver you.’”

“I want to set before you at least two examples of this patience. The first is of a certain devout woman who pursued the virtue of patience so eagerly that she not only did not avoid the onsets of temptation but even procured for herself occasions of trouble, so that, provoked more often, she might not give way. She lived in Alexandria, was born of no obscure ancestors, and served the Lord devoutly in the house her parents had left her. She came to Athanasius, the bishop of blessed memory, and begged him to give her one of the widows supported at the church’s expense to look after. To express her request in her own words, she said, ‘Give me one of the sisters to care for.’ The bishop praised the woman’s purpose, seeing that she was most ready for the work of mercy, and ordered that a widow be chosen from all of them who surpassed all in honesty of character, seriousness, and discipline, lest the desire to give be overcome by the fault of the one receiving, and she who sought a reward should, offended by the bad character of a needy woman, suffer harm to her faith. She took the widow home and served her with every attention, but experienced the virtue of her modesty and gentleness and saw that she was honored by her every moment with thanks for her kindness. After a few days she went back to the bishop and said, ‘I had asked you to have someone given me whom I might refresh and serve with obedient attentions.’ He did not yet understand the woman’s purpose and desire, and thought that her request had been neglected through the carelessness of the official in charge. Inquiring, not without some displeasure, into the reasons for the delay, he at once learned that the most respectable of the widows had been assigned to her. He secretly ordered that the one who was worst of all be given her, namely the one who surpassed all those ruled by these vices in anger, quarreling, drunkenness, or talkativeness. This one was found much more easily and given to her. She began to keep her at home and to serve her with the same diligence as the former widow, or even more zealously, and received from her this sole thanks for such services: she was continually subjected to shameful insults and vexed by constant abuse and reproaches, the widow charging her and berating her with slanders that she had asked the bishop for her not for her refreshment but rather for her torment and humiliation, and had moved her from rest to toil rather than from toil to rest. When the constant quarreling went so far that the insolent woman did not even keep her hands off her, she only redoubled her offices of humbler service, and learned to overcome the raging woman not by resisting but by subjecting herself more humbly, so that, provoked by all manner of indignities, she softened the madness of the quarreler by gentle kindness. Fully strengthened by these exercises, and having attained the perfect virtue of the patience she desired, she went to the bishop to thank him both for his judgment in the choice and for the benefit of her training, because according to her desire he had at last provided her with a most worthy teacher of patience, by whose constant insults, strengthened daily as with the oil of the wrestling-school, she had reached the height of patience. ‘At last,’ she said, ‘you have given me someone to care for; for the former one rather honored and refreshed me with her services.’ Let this be enough to have said about the female sex, so that by this remembrance we may not only be edified but also put to shame, we who cannot keep our patience unless we are shut up in the cages of our cells like wild beasts.”

“Now let us set out another example, that of Abba Paphnutius. He always kept to the secret places of that famous and everywhere celebrated desert of Scete, where he is now presbyter, with such zeal that the other anchorites gave him the nickname ‘Buffalo,’ because with an inborn, so to speak, desire for solitude he always delighted in living alone. When in his boyhood he was of such virtue and grace that even the eminent and greatest men of that time admired his seriousness and unshakable constancy, and, though he was younger in age, put him on a level with the elders for the merit of his virtues and thought he should be admitted to their rank, that envy which once roused the brothers’ minds against the patriarch Joseph set one of the brothers on fire with the flame of jealousy. Wishing to disfigure his beauty with some blemish and stain, he devised this kind of malice: he watched for an opportunity when Paphnutius would be away from his cell going to church on the Lord’s day, secretly slipped into it, and hid his own book among the plaited mats which Paphnutius used to weave from palm leaves. Then, secure in the plot he had contrived, he too came to church as though his conscience were pure and simple. When the whole service had been celebrated as usual, he brought a complaint before all the brothers to Saint Isidore, who was presbyter of that desert before this same Paphnutius, declaring that his book had been stolen from his cell. This complaint so disturbed the minds of all the brothers, and especially of the presbyter, that they did not know what to suspect first or what to decide, all being struck with the greatest amazement at the novelty of a crime unheard of there; for no one remembered such a thing done in that desert before that time, nor was it ever committed afterward. The accuser who had raised the matter pressed that all should be kept in the church while chosen men were sent to search the cells of all the brothers one by one. When this had been assigned by the presbyter to three elders, they turned over everyone’s bedding and at last found the book in Paphnutius’s cell, hidden among the palm mats, which they call siras, just as the plotter had concealed it. When the searchers at once brought it to church and produced it before all, Paphnutius, although he was secure in the sincerity of his conscience, yet, as one who acknowledged the crime of theft, gave himself wholly to making satisfaction and humbly asked for a place of penance. In this he was looking to his modesty and shame, lest, if he tried to wash away the stain of theft by words, he should also be branded with lying, since no one suspected anything other than what had been found. He at once left the church, not so much downcast in mind as trusting in the judgment of God; and with tears poured out constantly in prayer and with fasts tripled, he prostrated himself with the greatest humility of mind even in the sight of men. When for nearly two weeks he had subjected himself with every contrition of flesh and spirit, so that on Saturday and Sunday he came early in the morning not to receive holy communion but to prostrate himself at the threshold of the church and humbly ask for pardon, he who is the witness and knower of all hidden things would by no means allow him to be crushed any longer by himself or defamed by others. For what that inventor of the crime, the shameless thief of his own property, the cunning defamer of another’s good name, had committed with no human witness, he made public through the devil, who had been the instigator of that very crime. He was seized by a most cruel demon and laid bare all the plots of his secret scheme, and the same man became the betrayer of the charges and frauds who had devised them. He was so severely and for so long tormented by that unclean spirit that he could not be cleansed even by the prayers of the saints who lived there, who by the merit of divine gifts had command over demons. Not even the singular grace of the presbyter Isidore himself drove out his most cruel tormentor, though so great a power had been given him by the Lord’s bounty that no possessed person brought even to his threshold was ever slow to be healed. For Christ was reserving this glory for the young Paphnutius, that the man should be cleansed only by the prayers of the one he had plotted against, and that, calling on the name of the one from whose praise the envious enemy had thought he could take something away, he should receive pardon for his offense and an end to his present punishment. So Paphnutius in his youth, already showing signs of his future character, traced, while still in his boyhood years, some outlines of that perfection which was to grow with maturity of age. If, then, we wish to reach the height of his virtues, we must lay such foundations at the beginning.”

“A twofold reason moved me to tell this story. First, that weighing this man’s steadiness and constancy, we may take up a greater disposition of tranquillity and patience in proportion as the snares with which the enemy attacks us are smaller. Second, that we may hold as a firm principle that we cannot be safe from the storms of temptation and the assaults of the devil if we place all the defense of our patience and all our confidence not in the strength of our inner man but in the enclosure of our cells, the retreat of solitude, the company of the saints, or the protection of anything outside ourselves. For unless he who says in the Gospel, ‘The kingdom of God is within you,’ strengthens our mind by the power of his protection, we believe in vain that we can overcome the snares of the enemy of the air by the help of the men who live with us, or avoid them by distance of place, or shut them out by the defense of roofs. For although none of these things was lacking to holy Paphnutius, the tempter nevertheless did find a way to attack him, and neither the enclosure of walls, nor the solitude of the desert, nor the merits of so many saints in that community drove off that most wicked spirit. But because the holy servant of God had fixed the hope of his heart not on things outside but on the judge of all hidden things himself, he could not be moved by the engines of so great an assault. On the other hand, did not the man whom envy hurled into so great a crime enjoy the benefit of solitude, the protection of a more remote dwelling, and the company of the blessed abba and presbyter Isidore and the other saints? Yet because the devil’s whirlwind found him built on the sand, it not only struck his house but overthrew it. Let us not, then, seek our peace outside ourselves, nor think that another’s patience can help the faults of our impatience. For just as the kingdom of God is within us, so ‘a man’s enemies are those of his own household.’ For no one opposes me more than my own mind, which is truly the most intimate member of my household. So if we are watchful, we can by no means be harmed by enemies within. For where the members of our own household do not oppose us, there the kingdom of God too is gained in tranquillity of mind. For if you examine the matter carefully, I cannot be harmed by any man, however malicious, if I do not fight against myself with an impatient heart. If I am harmed, the fault is not in another’s attack but in my own impatience. For just as heavy and solid food is useful to the healthy but harmful to the sick, it cannot harm the one who takes it unless the weakness of the one receiving it gives it the power to do harm. If, then, a similar temptation ever arises among the brothers, let us by no means be shaken from the course of our tranquillity and open the way to the blasphemous slanders of worldly people; nor let us wonder that some perverse and detestable men lurk hidden among the number of holy men. For while we are trodden and threshed on the threshing floor of this world, it must be that chaff destined for eternal fire is mixed in with the choicest wheat. Finally, if we remember that Satan was chosen among the angels, Judas among the apostles, and Nicolaus, the inventor of a most depraved heresy, among the deacons, it cannot be surprising that the most wicked men are found enrolled in the ranks of the saints. For although some say that this Nicolaus was not the one who was chosen by the apostles for the work of ministry, they still cannot deny that he was of the number of the disciples, all of whom, it is clear, were at that time such and so perfect as we now scarcely find a very few in the coenobia. Let us then set before ourselves not the fall of the brother mentioned above, who slipped so lamentably in that desert, nor that horrible stain, which he afterward washed away with great tears of repentance, but rather the example of blessed Paphnutius. Let us not be destroyed by the overthrow of the one whose old vice of envy an affected piety only made worse, but let us follow with all our strength the humility of the other, which the quiet of the desert did not suddenly produce in him, but which, acquired among men, solitude perfected and refined. It must be recognized, indeed, that the disease of envy comes to a cure with more difficulty than other vices. For I might almost say that one whom it has once corrupted with the plague of its poison is without remedy. For this is the plague of which it is said figuratively through the prophet: ‘Behold, I will send among you basilisk serpents, which cannot be charmed, and they shall bite you.’ Rightly, then, does the prophet compare the bites of envy to the deadly poison of the basilisk, by which the first author and prince of all poisons both perished and caused others to perish. For he destroyed himself before the one he envied, and ruined himself before he poured the poison of death into man; ‘for through the envy of the devil death entered into the world, and those who are on his side imitate him.’ For as he who was first corrupted by the plague of this evil admitted neither the remedy of repentance nor the salve of any cure, so those who have given themselves up to be struck by the same bites shut out all the help of the holy charmer. For since they are tormented not by the fault of those they envy but by their prosperity, they are ashamed to reveal the truth itself and look outside themselves for superfluous and foolish causes of offense. Since these are altogether false, curing them is in vain, while that deadly poison which they will not reveal lies hidden in their marrow. Of them that wisest man fittingly said: ‘If a serpent bites without hissing, there is no advantage for the charmer.’ For these are the silent bites for which alone the medicine of the wise is of no help. For this ruin is so incurable that it is aggravated by kindness, swollen by services, and provoked by gifts, since, as the same Solomon says, ‘Jealousy endures nothing.’ The more another advances in humble submission, in the virtue of patience, or in the praise of generosity, the more is the envious man spurred by greater stings of envy, since he desires nothing but the ruin or death of the one he envies. So the jealousy of those eleven patriarchs could not be softened by any submission of their innocent brother, so that Scripture records of them: ‘His brothers envied him because his father loved him, and they could not speak anything peaceable to him,’ until their jealousy, which could bear no kindnesses from an obedient and submissive brother, desiring his death, could scarcely be satisfied by the crime of selling their brother. It is clear, then, that envy is more pernicious than all the vices and harder to purge, since it is inflamed by the very remedies that extinguish the others. For example, one who grieves at a loss inflicted on him is cured by generous compensation; one who is indignant at an injury is appeased by humble satisfaction. What can you do with one who is offended precisely because he feels you are humbler and kinder, whom neither covetousness, which is soothed by a reward, nor the hurt of an injury or the love of revenge, which is overcome by kind services, moves to anger, but only the success of another’s happiness provokes? Who is there who would wish, in order to satisfy one who envies him, to fall from his goods, or be deprived of his prosperity, or be involved in some calamity? Therefore, lest the basilisk kill with one bite of so great an evil all that is alive in us and, as it were, animated by the life-giving vigor of the Holy Spirit, let us constantly implore the divine help, to which nothing is impossible. For the other poisons of serpents, that is, carnal sins or vices, in which human frailty is as quickly entangled as it is easily purged, leave some traces of their wounds in the flesh; and although the earthly body swells with them most perniciously, yet if some most skilled charmer of divine songs applies the remedy of an antidote or the medicine of saving words, the virulent evil does not come to the eternal death of the soul. But the poison of envy, as though poured out by the basilisk serpent, destroys the very life of religion and faith before any wound is felt in the body. For the one who carps at nothing in his brother but his happiness is lifted up in blasphemy not against a man but plainly against God, and finds fault not with the man’s guilt but only with God’s judgments. This, then, is that root of bitterness springing up, which, raising itself on high, reaches to the insult of the very author who bestows good things on man. Nor let it disturb anyone that God threatens to send basilisk serpents to bite those by whose crimes he is offended. For although it is certain that God cannot be the author of envy, it is still just and worthy of the divine judgment that, when good gifts are bestowed on the humble and denied to the proud and reprobate, envy, as though sent by him, should strike and consume those who, according to the apostle, deserve to be handed over to a reprobate mind, according to the word: ‘They provoked me to jealousy with what is not God, and I will provoke them to jealousy with what is not a nation.’” With this discourse blessed Piamun inflamed more ardently our desire, by which we had begun to strive from the first school of the coenobium toward the second grade of anachoresis. For it was under his instruction that we first took up the beginnings of the solitary life, whose knowledge we afterward gained more fully in Scete.

After a very few days, drawn by the desire for greater teaching, we went back with the greatest eagerness to the coenobium of Abba Paul. Although more than two hundred brothers lived there, a countless crowd of monks from other coenobia too had streamed together in honor of a festival being held at that time; for the anniversary of the burial of the former abbot who had governed that coenobium was being solemnly kept. We have mentioned this gathering in order briefly to describe the patience of a certain brother, which shone out with unshaken gentleness in the presence of the whole assembly. For although the aim of this work tends elsewhere, namely to set out the words of Abba John, who left the desert and submitted himself to that coenobium with the greatest virtue of humility, we think it by no means out of place if, without any roundabout words, great edification is offered, as we believe, to all who are eager for the virtues. So while that multitude of monks sat in a huge open court, divided into circles of twelve, one of the brothers brought in a dish he had taken up a little too slowly. The aforesaid Abba Paul, who was hurrying anxiously about among the crowds of brothers serving, saw it, and, stretching out his hand, struck him a blow in the sight of all, so that the sound of the slap echoed even in the ears of those who sat with their backs turned or farther off. But the young man of memorable patience received it with such gentleness of mind that not only did no word slip from his mouth, nor even the faintest murmur shown by a silent movement of the lips, but not even the modesty and calm of his face or his color changed in the least. This deed seemed so wonderful not only to us, who had recently come from a monastery in Syria and had not learned the virtue of this patience from such clear examples, but to all who were not inexperienced in such pursuits, that even the greatest men received special instruction from it: namely, that although the fatherly rebuke had not moved his patience, not even the sight of so great a multitude had tinged his face with any sign of a blush.

In this coenobium we found a very old man named John, whose words, and the humility in which he surpassed all the saints, we decided we must by no means pass over in silence. We knew that he was strong above all in this perfection, which, though it is the mother of all virtues and the most solid foundation of the whole spiritual building, is utterly banished from our own practice. So it is no wonder that we cannot climb to their height, for, I will not say we cannot remain in the discipline of the coenobium until old age, but, scarcely willing to bear the yoke of subjection for two years, we at once fly off to the presumption of a harmful liberty; and even in that short time we appear to be subject to the command of an elder only after a fashion, not according to the rule of strictness but according to the liberty of our own will. When we had seen this old man in the coenobium of the aforesaid Abba Paul, we first admired his age and the grace with which he was endowed, and then, with our faces bent to the ground, began to beg him to be so good as to tell us why he had left the liberty of the desert and that lofty profession, in which a most famous reputation commended him above the other men of the same way of life, and had chosen to come under the yoke of the coenobium. He said that he had returned to the school of the juniors because he was unequal to the anchoritic discipline and unworthy of the summit of so great a perfection, if only he could fulfil even their practices as the profession deserves. When the resistance of our entreaty would not accept the humility of this answer, at last he began thus.

“The anchoritic discipline, which you wonder that I have left, I not only do not reject or refute, but rather embrace and take up with all veneration. After the thirty years I had spent living in a coenobium, I rejoice that I completed another twenty in it in such a way that I was not altogether marked as slothful among those who pursued it even moderately. But because its purity, once tasted, was sometimes soiled by being interrupted with anxiety about carnal things, it seemed better to run back to the coenobium, so that I might more readily achieve the fulfilment of the plainer purpose I had taken up, and run less danger from the humility of having presumed on the loftier profession. For it is better to be found devout in lesser promises than undevout in greater. And so, if I perhaps say something rather lofty, or rather rather free, I ask you to judge that it has been brought out not from the vice of boasting but from zeal for your edification; and since I think nothing of the truth should be kept back from you who ask so earnestly, put it down to love rather than to boasting. For I think something of instruction may be offered you if, laying humility aside for a little, I simply lay open the whole truth of my purpose. For I trust that I shall incur neither the mark of vainglory with you for the freedom of what I say, nor, in my own conscience, the guilt of lying for suppressing the truth.”

“If anyone else, delighting in the secret places of the desert, has been able to forget human company and to say with Jeremiah, ‘I have not desired the day of man, you know,’ I too confess that by the Lord’s gracious gift I either attained it or at least strove to attain it. And so I remember that by the loving gift of our Lord I was often caught up into such an ecstasy that I forgot I was clothed with the burden of bodily frailty, and my mind so suddenly rejected all the outward senses and was so utterly banished from all material things that neither my eyes nor my ears performed their proper function. My soul was so filled with divine meditations and spiritual contemplations that often at evening I did not know whether I had taken food, and on the following day was quite uncertain whether I had broken my fast the day before. For this reason, too, a week’s food, that is, seven pairs of paxamatia, is put by on the Saturday in a prochirion, that is, a basket kept at hand, so that a missed meal may not go unnoticed. By this custom the error of that forgetfulness is also excluded, so that the number of loaves used up shows that the course of the week is complete and the festival day has come round, and the feast of the holy day and the gathering of the community cannot escape the solitary. And if that ecstasy of mind we spoke of should perhaps upset even this order, the measure of daily work, marking the number of the days, still keeps off error. And to pass over the other virtues of the desert in silence (for we are to treat not of their number and multitude but of the end of the solitary life and of the coenobium), I will briefly explain the reasons why I chose to leave it, which you too wished to know, and will touch in a short discourse on all those fruits of solitude I have mentioned which, on the other hand, I judged must be set below higher merits.”

“As long, then, as the fewness of those who lived in the desert at that time charmed us with a broader liberty in the wider expanse of the solitude, as long as, withdrawn into deeper seclusion, we were very often caught up into those heavenly ecstasies, and no great crowd of visiting brothers burdened our senses with the distractions of huge cares through the need of providing hospitality, I pursued with insatiable desire and all the ardor of my soul the peaceful seclusion of solitude and that way of life comparable to the blessedness of the angels. But when, as I said, a greater number of brothers began to seek to live in that solitude, and, having narrowed the liberty of the vaster desert, not only made that fire of divine contemplation grow cold but also fettered the mind in many ways with the chains of carnal things, I chose to fulfil in some fashion the purpose of this discipline rather than grow sluggish in that so lofty profession through providing for carnal needs. So if that liberty and spiritual ecstasies are denied me, yet, having cast away all anxiety for tomorrow, the fulfilment of the Gospel command may console me, and what is taken from me of that contemplative height may be made up by this subjection of obedience. For it is a wretched thing for anyone to profess the discipline of any art or study and never reach its perfection.”

“So I will briefly explain how great are the advantages I now enjoy in this way of life. Weigh for yourselves, from what I have set out, whether those gains of solitude can be offset by these benefits; from it you can also judge whether I chose to be confined within the narrow bounds of the coenobium out of distaste for that solitary purity or out of desire for it. In this way of life, then, there is no providing for the day’s work, no distraction of selling or buying, no unavoidable care for the year’s bread, no anxiety about bodily things by which necessities are prepared not only for one’s own use but for the use of many visitors; finally, none of the arrogance of human praise, which is more unclean than all these in the sight of God and sometimes makes void even the great labors of the desert. But to pass over those waves of spiritual pride in the anchoritic discipline and the dangers of deadly vainglory, let us return to this burden common to all, that is, the shared anxiety of preparing food. This has gone so far beyond the measure, I do not say of that ancient strictness which knew nothing at all of the use of oil, but even of the relaxation of our own time, with which it is no longer content. In our time one sextarius of oil and likewise one modius of lentils, prepared for the use of visitors, supplied the needs of a whole year’s meals; now, with twice and three times the amount, the need for food can scarcely be met. And the force of this harmful relaxation has grown so much among some that, when they mix vinegar and brine, they do not add that single drop of oil which our predecessors, who followed the practices of the desert with greater virtue of abstinence, used to let fall only to ward off vainglory; instead they break in Egyptian cheese in place of salt and pour over it more oil than is needed, and so take two foods, distinct in their own flavor, each of which could most pleasantly have refreshed a monk separately and at different times, under the pleasure of a single taste. Indeed this hylikē ktēsis, that is, possession of material things, has grown so much that they have even begun to keep a blanket in their cells, which I cannot mention without shame, on the pretext of hospitality and of receiving visitors to this anchorite. And I pass over those things by which the soul, rapt and always intent on spiritual contemplations, is especially burdened: the gatherings of brothers, the duties of receiving and escorting guests, mutual visits, and the endless care of various conversations and occupations. Even at the times when these hindrances seem to cease, the very expectation of them distracts the mind, kept in suspense by the constancy of its habitual restlessness. So it comes about that the liberty of anachoresis, hindered by such bonds, never at all rises to that ineffable eagerness of heart and loses the fruit of the hermit’s profession. If that fruit is now denied me, placed as I am in a community and among crowds, at least rest of soul and tranquillity of heart, freed from all occupations, will not be lacking. Unless those who live in solitude also have this, they will bear the labors of anachoresis but be cheated of its fruit, which is gained only by the quiet stability of the mind. Finally, even if, placed in the coenobium, something is taken away from me of that purity of heart, I shall be content with the compensation of the Gospel precept alone, which certainly cannot be ranked below all those fruits of the desert: namely, to take no thought for tomorrow and, subject to an abbot to the end, to seem in some measure to imitate him of whom it is said, ‘He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death,’ and to be worthy to say humbly in his words, ‘For I did not come to do my own will, but the will of the Father who sent me.’”

Germanus: “Since it is clear that you have reached not merely the beginnings of both professions, as many have, but their very summits, we long to know what is the end of the cenobite and what is the end of the hermit. For no one doubts that none can discuss these things more faithfully or more fully than one who, having attained both perfections by long practice and with experience as his teacher, can make known their merit and their end by truthful teaching.”

John: “I could have declared absolutely that one and the same man cannot be perfect in both professions, were I not held back by the example of a very few. It is a great thing for anyone to be found complete in either of them; how much more is it clear that it is hard, and, I might almost say, impossible for a man to fulfil both fully. Yet if this does happen sometime, it cannot at once be made a general formula. For a universal rule must be set forth not from a very small part, that is, from considering a few, but from what lies within the power of many, or rather of all. Whatever is attained very rarely and by very few, and exceeds the capacity of common virtue, as though granted above the condition and nature of human frailty, must be kept apart from general precepts and brought forward not so much as an example as a miracle. So I will briefly set out what you ask according to the modest measure of my understanding. The end of the cenobite is to mortify and crucify all his own wills and, according to the saving command of Gospel perfection, to take no thought for tomorrow. It is quite certain that no one but a cenobite can fulfil this perfection. Describing this man, the prophet Isaiah blesses and praises him thus: ‘If you turn away your foot from the sabbath, from doing your will on my holy day, and glorify it while you do not go your own ways, and your will is not found, so as to speak a word: then you will delight in the Lord, and I will lift you up above the heights of the earth, and will feed you with the inheritance of Jacob your father. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’ The perfection of the hermit, on the other hand, is to have a mind stripped of all earthly things and, as far as human weakness can, to unite it thus with Christ. Describing this man, the prophet Jeremiah says, ‘Blessed is the man who has borne the yoke from his youth; he will sit alone and keep silence, because he has taken it upon himself.’ And the Psalmist: ‘I have become like a pelican of the wilderness. I have watched, and have become like a sparrow alone on the housetop.’ Unless each of them reaches this end, which we have said belongs to each profession, the one seeks the discipline of the coenobium and the other that of anachoresis in vain; for neither has fulfilled the virtue of his profession.”

“But this is merikē, that is, not whole perfection complete in all things, but a part of perfection. Perfection, then, is rare and granted by the gift of God to very few. For he is truly perfect, and not in part, who bears with equal greatness of soul both the squalor of solitude in the desert and the weakness of the brothers in the coenobium. And so it is hard to find anyone complete in every respect in both professions, because neither can the anchorite fully attain aktēmosynē, that is, contempt and deprivation of material things, nor the cenobite the purity of contemplation; although we know that Abba Moses and Paphnutius and the two Macarii possessed both perfectly. They were thus perfect in both professions. While they withdrew farther than all the dwellers of the desert and fed insatiably on the secrecy of solitude, and, as far as lay with them, never sought human company, they yet so bore with the crowds and weaknesses of those who flocked to them that, when a countless multitude of brothers streamed to them for a visit or for their own progress, they endured with unshaken patience the almost constant disturbance of receiving guests, so that they were thought to have learned or practiced nothing else in all their lives than to serve the common duties toward visitors. So it was uncertain to all in which profession their diligence was greater, that is, whether their greatness of soul was more wonderfully suited to that hermit’s purity or to this common life.”

“Some, however, are made so wild by the long silence of solitude that they utterly dread human company, and when they are drawn even a little from the habit of their seclusion by a visit from the brothers, they boil with noticeable anguish of mind and plain signs of faintheartedness. This happens above all to those who were not perfectly trained in the coenobia and, before their former vices were burned out, moved to the solitary life with an unripe desire. Imperfect in both respects, always fragile, they lean whichever way the breeze of disturbance drives them. For just as they boil over impatiently at the company or interruption of the brothers, so when they live in solitude they cannot bear the vastness of the very silence they seek, since they do not know even the reason for which solitude should be desired or sought, but think that this is the virtue and the sum of this profession: to shun the company of the brothers and simply flee and loathe the sight of men.”

Germanus: “By what remedy, then, can help be given to us, or to others of the same weakness and measure, who, thinly trained in the disciplines of the coenobium, began to aim at living in solitude before the expulsion of all our vices? Or how shall we be able to lay hold of the constancy of an untroubled mind and the unshaken firmness of patience, we who have untimely left the community of the coenobium and abandoned, as it were, the very school and training-ground of this exercise, in which our beginnings ought to have been fully taught and perfected? How, then, now living alone, shall we attain perfect long-suffering and patience, or how will our conscience, the searcher of inner movements, discover whether these virtues are in it or lacking, lest perhaps, because we are separated from human company and provoked by no irritations from men, we are deceived by a false opinion and believe that we possess an unshaken tranquillity of mind?”

John: “Remedies for healing cannot be lacking from that truest physician of souls to those who seek medicine in truth, especially to those who have not despised their illnesses by despairing or neglecting them, nor concealed the dangers of their wounds, nor rejected the medicine of repentance with an insolent mind, but for weaknesses contracted through ignorance, error, or necessity have fled to the heavenly physician with a humble and yet careful mind. And so we must know that if we withdraw into solitude or hidden places with our vices not yet cured, only their effect is repressed; their affection is not extinguished. For the root of all sins that has not been pulled out lies hidden within us, or rather even creeps on, and we discover that it still lives in us by these signs. For example, if, living in solitude, we receive the arrival of the brothers, or even their very brief stay, with a certain anxiety of a seething mind, let us know that the tinder of a most lively impatience is still in us. When we are expecting some brother’s arrival, if, when he perhaps delays a little from some necessity, the silent indignation of our mind blames his slowness and anxiety over the untimely waiting disturbs our mind, the examination of our conscience will prove that the vices of anger and dejection clearly remain in us. Again, if a brother asks for a book to read or some other thing to use, and either his request saddens us or our refusal repels him, there is no doubt that we are still fettered by the snares of avarice or covetousness. If a sudden thought or the course of a sacred reading brings to our mind the memory of a woman, and we feel ourselves struck by a certain titillation in it, let us know that the heat of sexual immorality is not yet extinguished in our members. And if, comparing our strictness with another’s laxity, even the faintest pride tempts our mind, it is certain that we are corrupted by the dreadful plague of pride. When, therefore, we discover these signs of vices in our heart, let us plainly recognize that what we lack is not the affection for sin but only its effect. These passions, if we ever mix with human society, at once come out of the caverns of our senses and prove that they are not born only when they break out, but only then made public because they have long lain hidden. And so even the solitary, if he is eager not to display his purity to men but to present it unblemished to the sight of him from whom no secrets of the heart can be hidden, will discover by sure signs that the roots of each vice are fixed in him.”

Germanus: “We have grasped clearly and plainly enough the proofs by which the signs of weaknesses are gathered, and the method of distinguishing diseases, that is, how the vices hidden in us can be detected; for we see everything just as it has been said, in daily experience and in the daily movements of our thoughts. It remains, then, that just as the proofs and causes of the diseases have been laid open to us by most evident reasoning, so the medicine of cures should also be shown. For no one doubts that he can discuss most correctly the remedy of evil illnesses who has first detected their causes and origins, with the conscience of the sick bearing witness. And so, although the teaching of your blessedness has laid bare the secrets of our wounds, so that we dare to hope for something from the remedies, since so plain a statement of the disease promises hope of a remedy, yet because, as you say, the beginning of health is gained first in communities, and none can be healthy in solitude but those whom the medicine of the coenobia has first healed, we fall again into ruinous despair, lest perhaps we who left the coenobium imperfect may never be able to be perfect in the desert.”

John: “A saving remedy cannot be lacking to those who are anxious about the cure of their diseases, and so remedies must be sought in the same way in which the signs of each vice are detected. For just as we said that the vices of human society are not lacking to solitaries, so we do not deny that the pursuit of virtues and the instruments of health are available to all who are separated from human society. When, then, anyone has discovered by the signs we showed above that he is being assailed by disturbances of impatience or anger, let him always exercise himself with the opposite provocations. Setting before himself many kinds of injuries and losses as if inflicted on him by another, let him accustom his mind to yield with perfect humility to everything that wickedness can inflict; and, frequently confronting himself with every harsh and intolerable thing, let him meditate continually with all contrition of heart on how great the gentleness is with which he ought to meet them. And so, looking to those sufferings of all the saints, or of the Lord himself, and declaring that every kind not only of insults but also of punishments is less than his deserts, he will prepare himself to bear every pain. And when at some time he is called back to a gathering of the brothers by some invitation, which cannot fail to happen, if only rarely, even to the strictest dwellers in the desert, if he finds that his mind has been silently disturbed even over trivial things, let him at once, as a most severe censor of his hidden movements, reproach himself with those harshest kinds of injury with which he used to train himself for perfect endurance in daily meditation, and so address himself with rebuke and reproof: ‘Are you that fine fellow who, while you were training in the wrestling-school of your solitude, most confidently assumed that you would overcome every evil? Who not long ago, when you were setting before yourself not only the extremes of bitter insults but even unbearable tortures, believed yourself strong enough and unshaken against all storms? How is it that your invincible patience has been thrown into confusion by the prelude of the lightest word? How has a light breeze shaken your house, built, as you thought, with such a mass upon that most solid rock? Where is what you used to proclaim with empty confidence, longing for war in time of peace, “I am ready, and I am not troubled,” and what you often said with the prophet, “Prove me, O Lord, and try me; burn my reins and my heart,” and, “Prove me, O Lord, and know my heart; question me and know my paths, and see if there is a way of iniquity in me”? How has a slight shadow of the enemy terrified so great a preparation for battle?’ So, condemning himself by such punishment of compunction, let him not allow the stealthy approach of his disturbance to go unpunished, but, chastising his flesh with the stricter correction of fasting and vigils and tormenting the fault of his instability with continual penalties of self-restraint, let him, now settled in solitude, consume by this fire of exercise what he ought to have fully burned out in the life of the coenobium. To obtain constant and stable patience, indeed, this must be held constantly and unshakably: it is not lawful for us, to whom by the divine law not only the avenging but even the remembering of injuries is forbidden, to be moved to anger on the pretext of any loss or provocation. For what graver loss can befall the soul than that, deprived by the sudden blindness of anger of the brightness of the true and eternal light, it should depart from the contemplation of him who is gentle and humble of heart? What, I ask, is more pernicious or more shameful than that someone should lose the judgment of what is honorable and the rule and discipline of right discernment, and, sane and sober, commit what not even a drunk man or one out of his senses could have done excusably? Whoever weighs these and similar losses will easily despise not only every kind of damage but also whatever injuries and punishments the cruelest can inflict, judging nothing more costly than anger and nothing more precious than tranquillity of mind and the perpetual purity of his heart; for its sake the advantages not only of carnal things but even of those that seem spiritual are to be scorned, if they cannot otherwise be acquired or achieved except with the disturbance of this tranquillity.”

Germanus: “Just as a remedy has been shown for the other wounds, that is, anger, dejection, and impatience, by setting the opposite things before oneself, so we wish to be taught what kind of cure we ought to apply against the spirit of sexual immorality: that is, whether the fire of lust can be put out, as there, by setting before oneself greater increases of provocation. We believe this is quite contrary to chastity, if the incitements of lust are not only heaped up in us but even touched on by the mind’s passing glance.”

John: “Your shrewd question has anticipated a matter that would have followed our account even if you had said nothing, and so I do not doubt that your minds will take it in effectively, since the sharpness of your understanding has run ahead of our teaching. For the obscurity of any question is cleared up without effort when the inquiry, anticipating its solution, goes ahead to where it must be led. For the remedies of the vices we spoke of above, human company not only does no harm but helps a great deal. For the more often it lays bare one’s impatience and the more it brings constant sorrow of compunction on those who are overcome, the more quickly it brings health to those who labor. For this reason, even when we live in solitude, where the tinder and matter of provocations cannot arise from men, we ought still to go over their incitements deliberately, so that, fighting against them with a constant wrestling of the thoughts, we may be given a readier cure. But against the spirit of sexual immorality the reasoning is different and the case unlike. For just as the practice of lust and nearness to the flesh must be wholly withdrawn from the body, so must its very memory be withdrawn from the mind. For it is quite pernicious for hearts still weak and sick to admit even the faintest recollection of this passion, so much so that sometimes the goad of harmful titillation is stirred in them even by recalling holy women or by the narrative of a sacred reading. For this reason our elders very prudently pass over such readings in the presence of the young. For the perfect, indeed, and those made complete in the disposition of chastity, there cannot be lacking tests by which they can examine themselves, by which the perfect integrity of their heart may be proved by the incorrupt judgment of their conscience. There will therefore be, for the fully mature man only, a similar test in the case of this passion too: one who knows that he has utterly pulled out the roots of this disease may, for the sake of testing his chastity, form some image in his mind of an enticing kind. But it is by no means fitting for those who are still weak to attempt this examination (for it would be more harmful to them than useful), that is, to dwell in their hearts on union with a woman and on a caress that is, as it were, tender and very soft. When, then, one who is grounded in perfect virtue finds in himself, at the enticement of the most alluring touches he has imagined in thought, no consent of the mind and no stirring of the flesh roused up, he will have the surest proof of his purity. Training himself to this firmness of purity, he will not only possess the good of chastity and incorruption in his mind, but will even abhor bodily contact with a woman, if any necessity should bring it about.” With this Abba John, perceiving that the ninth-hour meal was at hand, brought the conference to an end.

As I am about to relate the precepts of that eminent and remarkable man, Abba Pinufius, on the end of repentance, I think I should be cutting off a large part of the material if, to spare the reader weariness, I passed over here in silence the praise of his humility, which I touched on briefly in the fourth book of the Institutes, the one entitled “On the training of those who renounce the world”; especially since many who do not know that little work may come upon this reading, and the whole authority of what is said would waver if the merit of the speaker were withheld. When he was abbot and presbyter, presiding over a huge coenobium not far from Panephysis, a city of Egypt, as was said there, and the whole province had so raised him up by the glory of his virtues and miracles that he seemed to himself already to have received the reward of his labors in the payment of human praise, he feared that the emptiness of popular favor, which he especially hated, would make void the fruit of his eternal reward. So he secretly fled his monastery and made his way to the innermost retreats of the monks of Tabennesi. There he chose not the solitude of the desert, nor the security of the solitary life, which even imperfect men who cannot bear the labor of obedience in the coenobia sometimes seek with proud presumption, but to be put under the yoke of a very famous coenobium. There, so as not to be betrayed by any sign of his habit, he dressed in secular clothes and, as is the custom there, lay weeping before the gates for many days. He threw himself at the knees of all, and after the long disdain of those who, to test his desire, said that in his extreme old age he was seeking the holiness of that purpose not sincerely but as if driven by want of bread, he at last obtained admission. There he was assigned as helper to a young brother who had charge of cultivating the garden. He not only carried out, to the admiration of all at such holy humility, everything this superior ordered or the care of the work entrusted to him required, but also did by stealthy labor at night certain necessary tasks that the others avoided because of their unpleasantness, so that at daybreak the whole community marveled at such useful work and did not know who had done it. When he had spent nearly three years there in this way, rejoicing in the labors of such humiliating subjection that he had longed for, it happened that a brother who knew him arrived from the parts of Egypt he had left. For a long time this brother hesitated and held back from a ready recognition because of the meanness of his clothes and his work; but after a very clear examination he threw himself at his knees, and first struck all the brothers with amazement, and then, when his name too was revealed, which the fame of his outstanding holiness had spread among them as well, with the grief of compunction that they had assigned a man of such merit and priesthood to such humiliating tasks. But after he had been brought back to his own monastery, weeping abundantly and blaming the grievous mishap of his betrayal on the devil’s envy, with an honorable guard of brothers around him, he stayed there only a short time. Again offended by the very deference paid to his honor and rank, he secretly boarded a ship and crossed to the province of Palestine in Syria. There he was received as a beginner and novice in the dwelling of the monastery where we were living, and was told by the abbot to stay in our cell. But not even there could his virtues and merits long remain hidden. For he was discovered through a similar betrayal and was called back to his monastery with great honor and praise.

So when, not long afterward, the desire for holy instruction drove us too to seek Egypt, we searched for him with the greatest affection and longing and were received by him with such grace and kindness that he honored us, as his former cell-mates, with lodging even in his own little cell, which he had built at the far end of his garden. There, when he had given before all the brothers in the synaxis to a certain brother who was taking on the rule of the monastery those very hard and lofty precepts which, as we said, I have gathered in the fourth book of the Institutes as briefly as I could, the heights of true renunciation seemed to us so incomprehensible and so wonderful that we believed our lowliness could by no means climb there. So, cast down by despair and not hiding even in our faces the inner bitterness of our thoughts, we ran back to the blessed old man with very anxious minds. When he at once asked the cause of so great sadness, Abba Germanus, groaning heavily, answered thus.

“The more splendid and lofty the discourse of a teaching unknown to us, which opened the steep road of the highest renunciation and, as if the mist had been removed from our eyes, showed its summit hidden in heaven, the greater the weight of despair that presses us down. For when we measure its immensity by the smallness of our strength and compare the great lowliness of our ignorance with the boundless height of the virtue shown us, we feel that our littleness not only cannot advance to it but can even fall away from what it is. For, crushed by the weight of excessive despair, we somehow slip from the lowest to still lower. One single help, then, can bring healing to our wounds: that we learn something about the end of repentance and above all about the sign of satisfaction, so that, certain of the forgiveness of our past offenses, we may be encouraged to climb even the heights of the perfection just described.”

Pinufius: “I am indeed greatly delighted by the abundant fruits of your humility, which I observed with no careless attention even when I was received long ago as a lodger in that cell of yours. And I greatly rejoice that you receive with such admiration what is taught by us, the least of all Christians, perhaps only with freedom of words, although, if I am not mistaken, you carry it out no less diligently than we speak it, and, as I remember, the labor of your practice almost matches the weight of what is said; yet you hide the merit of your virtue as though no breath of what you practice daily had reached you. But because this very thing is most worthy of the highest praise, that you declare, as though still untaught, that these practices of the saints are unknown to you, we shall briefly set out as best we can what you earnestly ask of us. For we must obey the command of our old friendship beyond our capacity and strength. Many, then, have published a great deal, not only in speech but also in writing, about the power of repentance to obtain pardon, and about its merit, showing how great is its usefulness, how great its power and how great its grace, so that, when God has been offended by past crimes and is already inflicting a most just punishment for such great crimes, it in some way, if one may say so, withstands him and, as it were, restrains the right hand of the avenger against his will. But I do not doubt that all this is so well known to you, whether by natural wisdom or by tireless study of the sacred writings, that the first planting of your conversion came from it. Finally, anxious not about the nature of repentance but about its end and the sign of satisfaction, you are inquiring with most shrewd questioning into what others have passed over.”

“So, to satisfy the desire of your question with all brevity and conciseness: the full and perfect definition of repentance is that we never again commit the sins for which we are doing penance or for which our conscience pricks us. And the sign of satisfaction and pardon is to have driven out of our hearts even the affection for them. For let each one know that he is not yet absolved of his former sins as long as, while he is engaged in satisfaction and groaning, the image either of the very things he did or of similar crimes plays before his eyes, and, I do not say the delight, but even the memory of them troubles the secret places of his mind. So the one who keeps vigil for satisfaction may know that he is absolved of his crimes and has received pardon for past offenses when he feels that his heart is by no means touched by the allurements of those same vices or by their imagination. Therefore a most truthful examiner of repentance and judge of pardon resides in our conscience, which, while we still dwell in this flesh and before the day of recognition and judgment, reveals the absolution of our guilt and shows the end of satisfaction and the grace of forgiveness. And to express the same thing more pointedly: only then are the past contagions of our vices to be believed forgiven us when the desires and passions of present pleasures have alike been driven out of our heart.”

Germanus: “And where will that so holy and saving compunction of humility come to us from, which is described thus in the person of a penitent: ‘I have made my sin known, and I have not covered my injustice. I said: I will declare my injustice against myself to the Lord’; so that we may be worthy to say effectively what follows too, ‘And you forgave the impiety of my heart’? Or how shall we be able, prostrate in prayer, to rouse ourselves to the tears of confession, by which we may be worthy to obtain pardon for our offenses, according to the word, ‘Every night I will wash my bed; I will water my couch with my tears,’ if we drive out of our hearts the memory of our sins, which on the contrary we are commanded to keep tenaciously, as the Lord says, ‘And I will not remember your iniquities; but you, remember’? For this reason, not only while working but also while praying, I strive deliberately to call my mind back to the remembrance of my sins, so that, more effectively bent to true humility and contrition of heart, I may dare to say with the prophet, ‘See my humility and my toil, and forgive all my sins.’”

Pinufius: “Your question, as was said above, was put not about the nature of repentance but about its end and the sign of satisfaction, and it has, I think, been answered fittingly and consistently. But what you said about remembering sins is useful enough and necessary, but for those still doing penance, so that with constant beating of the breast they may cry out, ‘For I acknowledge my iniquity, and my sin is always before me,’ and also, ‘And I will think about my sin.’ While, then, we are doing penance and are still stung by the memory of vicious acts, the shower of tears that springs from confessing our faults must put out the fire of our conscience. But when, in someone fixed in this humility of heart and contrition of spirit and persevering in labor and groaning, the memory of these things has been lulled to sleep, and the thorn of conscience has been pulled out of the marrow of the soul by the grace of the merciful God, it is certain that he has reached the end of satisfaction and the merit of pardon and has been cleansed from the stain of the crimes he committed. Yet this forgetting is reached in no other way than by the blotting out of the former vices and affections and by a perfect and complete purity of heart. Without doubt none of those who, through sloth or contempt, have neglected to purge their vices will attain it, but only one who, continuing with sorrowful constancy in groans and sighs, has burned out every stain of former filth and has cried to the Lord with strength of soul and in deed, ‘I have made my offense known, and I have not covered my injustice,’ and, ‘My tears have been my bread day and night,’ so that he may deserve to hear in consequence, ‘Let your voice cease from weeping and your eyes from tears, for there is a reward for your work, says the Lord.’ Likewise let this too be addressed to him by the voice of the Lord: ‘I have blotted out your iniquities like a cloud, and your sins like a mist,’ and again, ‘I am, I am he who blots out your iniquities for my own sake, and I will no longer remember your sins.’ And so, freed from the cords of his sins by which each one is bound, he will sing to the Lord with all thanksgiving: ‘You have broken my bonds; to you I will offer the sacrifice of praise.’”

“For after that general grace of baptism and that most precious gift of martyrdom, which is gained by the washing of blood, there are many fruits of repentance by which one comes to the expiation of crimes. For eternal salvation is promised not only by the simple name of repentance, of which the blessed apostle Peter says, ‘Repent and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out,’ and John the Baptist and the Lord himself, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near’; but the mass of sins is also buried by the disposition of love: ‘for love covers a multitude of sins.’ Likewise healing is given to our wounds by the fruit of almsgiving, because ‘as water puts out fire, so almsgiving puts out sin.’ So too the washing away of offenses is gained by the pouring out of tears: ‘for every night I will wash my bed; I will water my couch with my tears.’ Then he adds, showing that they were not poured out in vain: ‘Depart from me, all you who work iniquity, for the Lord has heard the voice of my weeping.’ Again, the washing away of crimes is granted through confessing them: ‘For I said: I will declare my injustice against myself to the Lord, and you forgave the impiety of my heart’; and again: ‘Tell your iniquities first, that you may be justified.’ Forgiveness of crimes committed is likewise obtained through affliction of heart and body: ‘For see,’ it says, ‘my humility and my toil, and forgive all my sins’; and above all through amendment of conduct: ‘Take away,’ it says, ‘the evil of your thoughts from my eyes. Cease to act perversely; learn to do good; seek justice, help the oppressed, judge for the orphan, defend the widow. And come, argue with me, says the Lord: and if your sins are like scarlet, they will be made white as snow; if they are red like crimson, they will be like clean wool.’ Sometimes too the pardon of offenses is obtained by the intercession of the saints: ‘For he who knows that his brother is sinning a sin not unto death, let him ask, and he will give him life, for one who sins not unto death’; and again: ‘Is any among you sick? Let him bring in the presbyters of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he is in sins, they will be forgiven him.’ Sometimes the stain of vices is burned away by the merit of mercy and faith, according to the word, ‘By mercy and faith sins are purged.’ Often it is through the conversion and salvation of those who are saved by our warnings and preaching, since ‘he who causes a sinner to be converted from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.’ Pardon for our own misdeeds is also reached through our forgiving and remitting: ‘For if you forgive men their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you your offenses.’ You see, then, how many ways to mercy the Savior’s clemency has opened, so that no one who desires salvation may be broken by despair when he sees himself invited to life by so many remedies. For if you plead that, because of the weakness of the flesh, you cannot abolish your sins by the affliction of fasting, and cannot say, ‘My knees are weakened through fasting, and my flesh is changed for want of oil,’ ‘For I ate ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping,’ then redeem them by generous almsgiving. If you have nothing to share with the needy (although the constraint of want and poverty excludes no one from this work, since the widow’s two mites alone are preferred to the huge gifts of the rich, and the Lord promises to pay a reward for a cup of cold water), you can certainly be cleansed by amendment of conduct. But if you cannot attain the perfection of the virtues by extinguishing all vices, spend a devout care on the good of another’s salvation. And if you complain that you are not fit for this ministry, you can cover your sins by love. If some sloth of mind has made you weak in this too, at least, humbly and with a lowly disposition, implore remedies for your wounds by prayer and the intercession of the saints. Finally, who is there who cannot say in supplication, ‘I have made my sin known, and I have not covered my injustice,’ so that by this confession he may deserve to add, ‘And you forgave the impiety of my heart’? But if shame holds you back and you blush to reveal them before men, do not cease to confess them with constant supplication to him from whom they cannot be hidden, and to say to him, ‘I acknowledge my iniquity, and my sin is always before me; against you only have I sinned and done evil before you’; for he is wont to heal without the publication of any shame and to forgive sin without reproach. And beyond this so ready and certain help, the divine condescension has granted us yet another, still easier, and has entrusted the very help of the remedy to our own choice, so that we may count on the pardon of our crimes according to our own disposition, saying to him, ‘Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.’ Whoever, then, desires to come to the pardon of his crimes, let him be eager to fit himself with these instruments. Let the obstinacy of a hardened heart turn no one away from the saving remedy and from the fountain of such great goodness; for even if we do all these things, they would not suffice to expiate our crimes unless the goodness and clemency of the Lord blotted them out. When he sees the services of our devout effort offered with a suppliant mind, he follows our small and slight efforts with immense generosity, saying, ‘I am, I am he who blots out your iniquities for my own sake, and I will no longer remember your sins.’ Whoever, then, strives toward the state we have described will attain the grace of satisfaction by daily fasts and by the mortification of heart and body, because, as it is written, ‘Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.’ And not without reason; for ‘flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God.’ And so whoever will hold back from the shedding of this blood the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, will without doubt be struck by that curse of Jeremiah: ‘For cursed,’ he says, ‘is he who holds back his sword from blood.’ For this is the sword which, shedding for our health that blood of ours by which the matter of sins is given life, cuts away and cuts off whatever carnal or earthly growth it finds in the members of our soul, and makes us, dead to vices, live to God and flourish in spiritual virtues. And so he will begin to weep no longer from the memory of old wrongdoing but from hope of the joys to come; and, thinking not so much of past evils as of good things to come, he will pour out tears not from grief for sins but from eagerness for that eternal gladness, and, forgetting the things that are behind, that is, carnal vices, he will stretch forward to the things that are before, that is, spiritual gifts and virtues.”

“But as for what you said a little earlier, that you deliberately go over the memory of your past sins, this ought not to be done at all; rather, if it creeps in by force, let it be thrust out at once. For it draws the mind far back from the contemplation of purity, especially the mind of one who lives in solitude, entangling it in the filth of this world and choking it with the stench of vices. For while you recall what you committed according to the prince of this world through ignorance or wantonness, even if I grant that no delight creeps in while you are occupied with this thought, still the mere contagion of the old rottenness must corrupt the mind with a foul stench and shut out the spiritual fragrance of the virtues, that is, the sweetness of a good odor. When, then, the memory of past vices knocks at the mind, we must spring back from it as an honorable and serious man flees if he is accosted in public by the conversation or embraces of a shameless and wanton woman. Unless he quickly draws himself away from her touch and allows even the shortest delay of shameful talk, even if he rejects consent to the disgraceful pleasure, he will not escape the mark of infamy and reproach in the judgment of all who pass by. So we too, when we are led to such thoughts by a pestilent memory, must quickly depart from contemplating them and fulfil what Solomon commands: ‘But spring away,’ he says, ‘do not linger in her place, nor fix your eye on her,’ lest the angels, seeing us entangled in unclean and base thoughts, should be unable to say of us as they pass, ‘The blessing of the Lord be upon you.’ For it is impossible for the mind to dwell on good thoughts when the governing part of the heart has sunk down to base and earthly views. For that saying of Solomon is true: ‘When your eyes see a strange woman, then your mouth will speak perverse things, and you will lie as in the heart of the sea and like a pilot in a great storm. But you will say: They struck me, but I did not feel pain; they mocked me, but I did not know it.’ So, abandoning not only all base thoughts but also all earthly ones, the attention of our mind must always be raised to heavenly things, according to the saying of our Savior: ‘For where I am,’ he says, ‘there my servant also will be.’ For it often happens that, while some inexperienced person goes over his own falls or those of others with a feeling of pity, he himself is grazed by the consent to pleasure of a most subtle dart, and a beginning that arose under the appearance of piety ends in an obscene and harmful end. ‘For there are ways that seem right to men, but their end comes to the depth of hell.’”

“Therefore we must strive to rouse ourselves to praiseworthy compunction by longing for the virtues and by desire for the kingdom of heaven rather than by harmful memories of vices; for a man must be choked by the most pestilent stench of a sewer as long as he chooses to stand over it or stir up its filth.”

“Let us know, as we have often said, that we have made satisfaction for past sins only when the very movements and affections through which we committed what must be repented of have been cut off from our hearts. Yet let no one believe he can attain this unless he has first cut down, with all the fervor of his spirit, the very causes and occasions through which he fell into those crimes. For example, if he fell into sexual immorality or adultery through harmful familiarity with women, let him with the greatest haste avoid even the sight of them; or if he was inflamed by an abundance of wine and an excess of feasting, let him chastise with the greatest strictness the surfeit of enticing foods. Again, if, corrupted by the desire and love of money, he fell into perjury, theft, murder, or blasphemy, let him cut off the matter of avarice that lured him into his deception. If he is driven into the vice of anger by the passion of pride, let him tear out the tinder of arrogance itself by the highest virtue of humility. And so, in order that each sin may be extinguished, the cause and occasion through which or on account of which it was committed must first be cut off. For by this remedy of cures one comes without doubt to the forgetting of the crimes committed as well.”

“But let this definition of forgetting be established only for the capital crimes, which are also condemned by the law of Moses. Just as their affections are cast off or consumed by good living, so repentance for them also comes to an end. But for those small faults in which, as it is written, ‘the righteous man falls seven times and rises again,’ repentance will never be lacking. For every day, whether unwilling or willing, we often fall into them through ignorance, forgetfulness, thought, speech, surprise, necessity, or the frailty of the flesh and pollution in sleep. For these David too, praying to the Lord, begs purification and pardon, saying, ‘Who understands his offenses? Cleanse me from my hidden faults, and spare your servant from those of others’; and the apostle, ‘For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I do not want, that I do’; and for these the same apostle cried out, lamenting, ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ For we slip into these so easily, as if by a law of nature, that however great the watchfulness and care with which they are guarded against, they cannot be entirely avoided. Of these one of the disciples, the one whom Jesus loved, declares with a sharp definition: ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and his word is not in us.’ So it will not greatly profit one who longs to reach the summit of perfection to have come to the end of repentance, that is, to refrain from what is unlawful, unless he also stretches himself always with unwearied course in those virtues by which one comes to the signs of satisfaction. For it will not be enough for anyone to have abstained from the foul filth of crimes which the Lord abhors, unless he also possesses, through purity of heart and the perfection of apostolic love, that good fragrance of the virtues in which the Lord delights.” Thus far Abba Pinufius discussed the sign of satisfaction and the end of repentance. Although he begged us with anxious affection to choose to stay in his coenobium, he let us go, since he could not keep us, drawn as we were by the fame of the desert of Scete.

Before we begin to unfold the words of this conference held with that eminent man Abba Theonas, I think it necessary to touch briefly on the beginning of his conversion, since from it both the merit and the grace of the man will be able to appear more clearly to the reader. When he was quite a young man, then, he was bound by the bond of marriage through the zeal and command of his parents. For, taking thought for his chastity with devout care and fearing the dangerous fall of a slippery age, they believed that the stirrings of youth should be forestalled by the lawful remedy of marriage. When he had spent five years with his wife, he came to Abba John, who at that time, chosen for the merit of his wonderful holiness, presided over the diaconia. For no one is raised to this rank by his own will or ambition, but only one whom the assembly of all the elders judges more excellent and more exalted than all, by the privilege of age and the testimony of his faith and virtues. When the aforesaid young man, I say, had come to this blessed John with devout zeal, bringing pious gifts, among the other landowners who vied in offering the old man tithes or first fruits of their crops from their property, the old man saw that they had flocked to him with many gifts and wished to repay their devotion in turn. He began, according to the apostle, to sow spiritual things among them whose carnal gifts he was reaping. So he began his word of exhortation thus.

“I am indeed delighted, my sons, by the devout generosity of your gifts, and I gratefully welcome the devotion of this offering, whose distribution has been entrusted to me, because you faithfully offer your first fruits and tithes, which will serve the needs of the poor, as a sacrifice of sweet savor to the Lord. You believe that by offering them the fullness of your crops and of all your property, from which you have set these aside for the Lord, will be richly blessed, and that, according to the faith of that command, you will be heaped with a manifold abundance of all good things even in this world: ‘Honor the Lord from your just labors, and offer him of the fruits of your righteousness, that your barns may be filled with abundance of wheat, and your presses overflow with wine.’ Know that by faithfully carrying out this devotion you have fulfilled the righteousness of the old law. Those who were then under it incurred guilt inescapably when they transgressed it, and when they fulfilled it could not reach the summit of perfection.”

“For by the Lord’s command tithes were consecrated to the use of the Levites, and offerings and first fruits to the priests. The measure of first fruits was that a fiftieth part of the crops or animals should be given for the service of the temple and the priests. The more lukewarm faithlessly reduced this measure and the more devout increased it, the former paying a sixtieth, the latter a fortieth part of their produce. For the righteous, for whom the law is not laid down, are shown not to be under the law in this, that they strive not only to fulfil the righteous requirements of the law but even to surpass them, and their devotion is greater than the law’s command, heaping up the observance of the precepts and adding voluntary gifts to what is owed.”

“Thus we read that Abraham went beyond the precepts of the law to come. When he had defeated the four kings, he would not agree to touch anything at all of the spoils of Sodom, which were rightly owed to him as the victor, even though the king himself whose spoils he had brought back humbly offered them; and he declared, calling the divine name to witness, ‘I stretch out my hand to the Lord most high, who made heaven and earth, that I will not take from a thread of the woof to a shoe-latchet of all that is yours.’ Thus we know that David went beyond the precepts of the law. When Moses commanded that like for like be paid back to enemies, he not only did not do this but even embraced his persecutors with love, and, praying devoutly to the Lord for them, even wept for them mournfully and avenged them when they were killed. Thus too we prove that Elijah and Jeremiah were not under the law, since, though they could have used lawful marriage without blame, they chose rather to remain virgins. Thus we read that Elisha and other men of the same purpose surpassed the commands of Moses, men of whom the apostle speaks thus: ‘They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, in distress, afflicted, in want, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes of the earth.’ What shall I say of the sons of Jonadab the son of Rechab, who, as we read, answered the prophet Jeremiah when he offered them wine by the Lord’s command: ‘We do not drink wine, because Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us, saying: You shall not drink wine, you and your sons for ever; and you shall not build a house, nor sow seed, nor plant vineyards, nor have them; but you shall dwell in tents all your days’? For this they deserved to hear from the same prophet: ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: There shall not fail a man of the stock of Jonadab the son of Rechab standing before me all the days.’ All these, not content with offering tithes of their possessions but rejecting the estates themselves, offered rather themselves and their souls to God, for which no exchange can be given by man, as the Lord testifies in the Gospel: ‘What exchange will a man give for his soul?’”

“So we must know that we, from whom the command of the law is no longer required, but to whom the word of the Gospel thunders daily, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me,’ when we offer tithes from our property to God, are still in some way held under the burden of the law and have not yet reached that height of the Gospel which rewards those who obey it not only with benefits in the present life but also with future rewards. For the law promised those who keep it not the rewards of the heavenly kingdom but the comforts of this life, saying, ‘He who does these things shall live in them.’ But the Lord says to his disciples, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,’ and, ‘Everyone who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or land for my name’s sake will receive a hundredfold and will possess eternal life.’ And rightly so. For it is not so praiseworthy to refrain from unlawful things as to refrain even from lawful ones, and not to use them out of reverence for him who permitted us to use them because of our weakness. So if even those who faithfully offer tithes of their produce and serve the older precepts of the Lord cannot yet climb the summit of the Gospel, you see most clearly how far from it those are who do not even do this. For how can they share in the grace of the Gospel who scorn to fulfil even the lighter precepts of the law? Their ease is shown by the commanding words of the lawgiver, which even set a curse before those who do not fulfil them: ‘For cursed,’ it says, ‘is he who does not continue in all that is written in the book of the law, to do them.’ Here, however, because of the height and excellence of the commands it is said, ‘He who can receive it, let him receive it.’ There the forceful compulsion of the lawgiver shows the smallness of the precepts: ‘For I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that if you do not keep the commandments of the Lord your God, you will perish from the face of the earth.’ Here the grandeur of the lofty commands is marked by the very manner of one who does not so much command as exhort: ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, do this or that.’ There Moses lays an inescapable burden even on the unwilling; here Paul meets only the willing and those hastening to perfection with counsel. For what cannot be grasped by everyone everywhere because of its wonderful height was not to be commanded generally, nor, so to speak, required of all as a rule; rather, all are invited to grace by counsel, so that those who are great may rightly be crowned with the perfection of the virtues, while those who are small and cannot fill up the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ, although they seem to lie hidden, overshadowed by the brightness of the greater as by stars, yet, being strangers to the darkness of the curses that are in the law, may neither be given over to the calamities of present evils nor be struck with eternal punishment. Christ, then, does not bind anyone by the necessity of a command to those lofty heights of the virtues, but invites them by the power of free will and kindles them by the wholesomeness of counsel and the desire for perfection. For where there is a command, there is necessity, and consequently punishment. Those who keep the things to which they are compelled by the severity of the law laid down escape the punishment it threatened rather than obtain a reward or prizes.”

“So just as the word of the Gospel lifts the strong to lofty and exalted things, it does not allow the weak to sink to the depths, granting the fullness of blessedness to the perfect and giving pardon to those overcome by frailty. For the law placed those who fulfil its precepts in a kind of midpoint between the two merits, separating them as far from the condemnation of transgressors as from the glory of the perfect. How low and wretched that is, see even from the state of the present life and a comparison with it: in it a man is thought most wretched who strives and labors only so as not to be held guilty among honest men, and not also to be counted rich, honored, and glorious.”

“Therefore it lies in our power today whether we wish to stand under the grace of the Gospel or under the terror of the law; for each must be joined to one side or the other according to the character of his conduct. Either the grace of Christ receives those who go beyond the law, or the law keeps those who fall below it as its debtors and liable to it. For one who is guilty under the precepts of the law will never be able to attain the perfection of the Gospel, however vainly he boasts that he is a Christian and freed by the grace of the Lord. For not only is he to be thought still under the law who declines to fulfil what the law commands, but also he who is content to observe only what the law orders and by no means brings forth fruits worthy of the calling and grace of Christ, where it is not said, ‘You shall offer your tithes and first fruits to the Lord your God,’ but, ‘Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me’; where, because of the grandeur of perfection, not even the briefest space of an hour is granted to a disciple who asks it for his father’s burial, and the duty of human love is set aside by the power of divine love.”

When he had heard this, blessed Theonas, kindled with an unquenchable desire for the perfection of the Gospel, took the seed of the word into a fruitful heart and buried it, as it were, in the deep and tilled furrows of his breast. He was especially humbled and pricked to the heart because the old man had said that he had not only failed to reach the perfection of the Gospel but had scarcely fulfilled even the commands of the law itself. For though he had been accustomed to pay tithes of his crops to the diaconia every year, he lamented that he had never even heard of the rule of first fruits; and even if he had fulfilled it likewise, he humbly confessed that, according to the old man’s judgment, he would still be far from the perfection of the Gospel. So he went home sad, affected by that sorrow which works repentance leading to a firm salvation. No longer in doubt about his own will and decision, he turned all the anxiety and care of his mind to the salvation of his wife, and began to rouse her with similar exhortation to the desire with which he himself had been fired, and to urge her with tears day and night that they should serve God together in holiness and chastity. He said that conversion to a better life must by no means be delayed, since the vain hope of youthful age does not forestall the necessity of sudden death, which snatches away boys, adolescents, and young men with the same lot as old men.

When his wife, very hard, would not consent though he persisted constantly in such entreaties, and said that in the flower of her age she could not do without the comfort of a husband altogether, and that therefore, if she were deserted by him and committed some sin, it should rather be ascribed to him who had broken the covenant of marriage, he answered her. He had long urged the condition of human nature, so frail and uncertain that it was dangerous to be entangled any longer in carnal desires and works; and he added that it was not lawful for anyone to exile himself from the good to which he had learned he must cleave in every way, and that it was a greater danger to despise a goodness once known than not to love one unknown. So he would already be involved in the guilt of transgression if, having found such splendid and heavenly goods, he preferred earthly and sordid ones. The grandeur of perfection, he said, belongs to every age and each sex, and all the members of the church are invited to climb the height of lofty merits, as the apostle says, ‘So run that you may obtain’; nor should the ready and eager stand still because of the delays of the slow and sluggish, since it is more right that the idle be spurred on by those who run ahead than that those who hurry be held back by those who sit still. So he had determined and decreed to renounce the world and die to the world, so that he might live to God; and if he could not obtain the blessedness of passing into the fellowship of Christ together with his partner, he would rather be saved even with the loss of one member, and enter the kingdom of heaven as if maimed, than be condemned with his body whole. He added this too: ‘If Moses permits wives to be dismissed because of hardness of heart, why should Christ not allow it for the desire of chastity? Especially since the same Lord, among the other affections, those for fathers, mothers, and children, to whom not only the law but he himself had commanded all reverence to be shown, decrees that for his name and for the desire of perfection they must not simply be disregarded but even hated, and joins to them likewise the name of wives, saying: “And everyone who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children for my name’s sake will receive a hundredfold and will possess eternal life.” So far does he allow nothing to be compared with the perfection he preaches that he commands even that bond of father and mother to be loosed, which according to the apostle holds first place among the commandments with a promise (“Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with a promise, “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth”), and to be disregarded for love of him. Clearly, then, just as the word of the Gospel condemns those who break the bonds of marriage without the crime of adultery intervening, so it promises even hundredfold rewards to those who have cast off the carnal yoke for the love of Christ and the desire of chastity. Therefore, if it can be that, accepting reason at last, you may be bent toward this part which I so greatly desire, namely that serving the Lord together we may escape the punishment of Gehenna, I do not reject the love of marriage; rather I embrace it with still greater affection. For I recognize and revere the helper assigned to me by the Lord’s decree, and I do not refuse to cleave to her in Christ by an unbroken covenant of love, nor do I separate from myself what the Lord joined to me by the law of the first creation, provided that you yourself are what the Creator wished you to be. But if you will not be a helper but a deceiver, and prefer to show yourself a support not to me but to the adversary, and think that the sacrament of marriage was granted for this, that, cheating yourself of the salvation offered to you, you may also draw me back from discipleship to the Savior, then I will manfully lay hold of that sentence uttered by the mouth of Abba John, or rather of Christ, so that no carnal affection can tear me from the spiritual good: “For he who does not hate,” he says, “father and mother and children and brothers and sisters and wife and lands, and his own soul besides, cannot be my disciple.”’ When the woman’s resolve was not bent by these and similar words and she remained in the same hardness of obstinacy, blessed Theonas said, ‘If I cannot draw you away from death, neither will you separate me from Christ; and it is safer for me to be divorced from a human being than from God.’ So, with the grace of God breathing on him, he at once set about carrying out his decision and did not allow the ardor of his desire to cool through any delay. For immediately, stripped of all worldly wealth, he flew to the monastery. There in a short time he shone with such splendor of holiness and humility that when John of blessed memory departed from this light to the Lord, and holy Elijah, a man no less than his predecessor, likewise died, Theonas was chosen third by the judgment of all and succeeded them in the administration of the diaconia.

Let no one think that we have composed this in order to encourage the dissolving of marriages. We not only do not condemn marriage at all, but, following the apostle’s sentence, we say, ‘Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled.’ We have done it in order to set out faithfully to the reader the beginning of the conversion by which that great man was dedicated to God. I ask this first of the reader, with his good leave: whether this pleases him or displeases him, let him grant in any case that I am free from blame, and let him praise or blame this deed in the one who did it. For I have not put forward my own opinion on this matter but have given the history of what was done in a simple narrative; so it is fair that, just as I claim nothing for myself from the praise of those who approve this deed, so I should not be attacked by the ill will of those who disapprove of it. Let each, then, as we said, have his own judgment of it. But I advise him to restrain the verdict of his examination so as not to believe himself fairer or holier than the divine judgment, by which even the signs of apostolic powers were conferred on him, not to mention the judgment of such great fathers, by whom it is clear that his deed was not only by no means blamed but praised so highly that they preferred him to the greatest and most exalted men in the election to the diaconia. And I think that the judgment of so many spiritual men, given with God as its author, did not err, since so great a wonder of signs, as has been said above, also confirmed it.

But it is now time to follow the order of the discussion we promised. When Abba Theonas had visited us in our cell during the days of Pentecost, and the evening solemnity of prayers was over, we sat down for a little on the ground and began to ask him carefully why among them such scrupulous care was taken that no one, during the whole fifty days of Pentecost, should either bend his knees in prayer or presume to fast until the ninth hour. We inquired into this all the more carefully because we had by no means seen it kept with such care in the monasteries of Syria.

To this Abba Theonas began his discourse thus: “We ought indeed to yield to the authority of the fathers and the custom of our forebears, prolonged through so long a series of years down to our own time, even without understanding its reason, and to keep it, as it was handed down of old, with constant observance and reverence. But since you wish to know the causes and reason of this, hear briefly what we have learned was handed down by our elders concerning this practice. But before the authority of divine Scripture is brought forward, let us, if you like, say a few things about the nature and character of fasting itself, so that the authority of the Scriptures may follow and confirm our discussion. Divine wisdom, through Ecclesiastes, has marked out a proper time for everything, that is, for all things, whether prosperous or those thought adverse and sad, saying, ‘For all things there is a time, and a time for everything under heaven: a time to give birth and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to destroy and a time to build; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to cast stones and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace and a time to be far from embracing; a time to acquire and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast out; a time to tear and a time to sew; a time to keep silence and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace’; and below, ‘For there is a time,’ he says, ‘for every matter and every deed.’ So he has defined none of these as good forever, but only when one of them is carried out at the right and fitting moment; so that these same things, which turn out well when done at the right time, are found useless and harmful if they are undertaken at an unsuitable or unfitting time. The exceptions are those things that are in themselves chiefly good or evil and can never be turned into their opposite, such as justice, prudence, fortitude, temperance, and the other virtues, or on the other hand the vices, whose definitions cannot at all fall to the other side or be changed. But whatever things can at times pass over to either effect, so as to be found either good or bad according to the character of those who use them, these are felt to be sometimes useful and sometimes harmful not absolutely according to their nature but according to the disposition of the doer and the fitness of the time.”

“So we must now ask what we ought to decide about the status of fasting: whether it too is good in the way we said justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance are, which cannot at all pass over to the opposite side, or something intermediate, which may sometimes be of benefit when done and cannot condemn when omitted, and which it is sometimes blameworthy to have done and sometimes praiseworthy to have omitted. For if we count fasting within that definition of the virtues, so that abstinence from food is placed among the principal goods, then eating food will certainly be evil and sinful. For whatever is contrary to a principal good must without doubt be judged a principal evil. The authority of the holy Scriptures does not allow us to define it so. For if we fast with such a mind and purpose that we believe sin is contracted by partaking of food, we shall not only gain no fruit from our abstinence, but shall even, according to the apostle, contract the greatest guilt and the crime of sacrilege, abstaining from foods ‘which God created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful and those who have known the truth; for every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving.’ For ‘to him who thinks something common, it is common.’ And so we read of no one condemned merely for taking food, unless perhaps something was joined to it or followed afterward for which he deserved to be condemned.”

“So that fasting is something intermediate is shown most clearly from this too: just as it justifies when kept, it does not condemn when broken, unless perhaps it is the transgression of a command, rather than the taking of food, that is punished. But there ought to be no time empty of a principal good, so that no one is allowed to be without it, since one who neglects it must fall into evil when it ceases. Nor again is any time granted to a principal evil, since what is always harmful can never fail to harm if it is admitted, or ever be changed into something praiseworthy. And so it is clear that those things are intermediate for which we see fixed conditions and times, and which sanctify when observed in this way but do not defile when omitted: for example, marriage, agriculture, riches, withdrawal into solitude, vigils, the reading and meditation of the sacred books, and fasting itself, with which our discourse began. The divine command and the authority of the holy Scriptures have not decreed that all these must be held and kept so unceasingly and constantly that it is wicked to interrupt them a little. For whatever is decreed as a command brings death if not fulfilled; but whatever is urged rather than ordered does good when done and does not punish when not done. And so our forebears told us to do all these things, or at least some of them, circumspectly and to observe them prudently according to cause, place, manner, and time; for it is clear that if any of them is done fittingly it is suitable and appropriate, if unfittingly, unsuitable and harmful. If someone, at the arrival of a brother, in whom he ought to refresh Christ with kindness and embrace him with a most welcome reception, wishes to keep the austerity of his fast, does he not incur the charge of unkindness rather than gain the praise or merit of religion? Or if, when the weakness and frailty of the flesh demands the restoring of its strength by taking food, someone will not agree to relax the rigor of abstinence, is he not to be thought a cruel murderer of his own body rather than one providing for his health? So too, when the time of a festival allows a fitting comfort of food and the refreshment of a necessary relaxation, if anyone insists on keeping the rigid observance of fasts without a break, he must be thought not so much devout as boorish and unreasonable. But fasts will likewise be found adverse to those who hunt human praise by fasting and gain a reputation for holiness by an empty display of pallor, whom the word of the Gospel declares to have received their reward in the present, and whose fast the Lord abhors through the prophet. Having first put in their mouth the objection, ‘Why have we fasted, and you did not look? Why have we humbled our souls, and you did not know?’ he at once added the reasons why they do not deserve to be heard: ‘Behold,’ he says, ‘in the days of your fast your own will is found, and you exact payment from all your debtors. Behold, you fast for lawsuits and quarrels, and you strike with the fist wickedly. Do not fast as you have until this day, so that your cry may be heard on high. Is such the fast that I have chosen, for a man to afflict his soul for a day? Is it to twist his head like a hoop and spread sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the Lord?’ Then he goes on, teaching how the self-restraint of one who fasts becomes acceptable, and declares plainly that fasting by itself alone can do no good unless it is followed by the conditions he goes on to add: ‘Is not this the fast that I have chosen?’ he says. ‘Loose the bonds of wickedness, undo the burdens that weigh down, let those who are broken go free, and break every yoke. Break your bread for the hungry, and bring the needy and the wanderers into your house; when you see the naked, cover him, and do not despise your own flesh. Then your light will break forth like the morning, and your health will spring up more quickly, and your righteousness will go before your face, and the glory of the Lord will gather you. Then you will call, and the Lord will hear you; you will cry, and he will say: Here I am.’ You see, then, that fasting is by no means judged by the Lord a principal good, since it becomes good and well-pleasing to God not through itself but through other works; and again, from accompanying causes it is judged not only vain but even hateful, as the Lord says, ‘When they fast, I will not hear their prayers.’”

“For mercy, patience, and love, or the precepts of the virtues already mentioned, in which the principal good truly lies, are not to be kept for the sake of fasts, but rather fasts for the sake of them. We must labor so that those virtues which are truly good may be acquired by fasts, not so that those exercises of the virtues may aim at fasting as their end. The affliction of the flesh is useful for this reason, and the medicine of hunger must be applied to it for this reason: that through it we may be able to reach love, in which there is a good that is unchangeable and perpetual without any exception of time. For the disciplines of medicine, goldsmithing, or the other arts in this world are not practiced for the sake of the instruments belonging to their work; rather, the tools are prepared for the practice of the art. Just as these are useful to the skilled, so they are superfluous to those who do not know the discipline of the art itself; and just as they are of great help to those who are supported by their service in carrying out their work, so they can be of no help at all to those who do not know what they were made for and are content merely to possess them, since they place the sum of their usefulness only in keeping them, not in completing the work. That, then, is chiefly best for the sake of which intermediate things are done, while that chief good itself is done for no other reason than for its own goodness.”

“This good is distinguished from the other things we called intermediate in these ways: if it is good through itself and not through something else; if it is necessary for its own sake and not for the sake of something else; if it is good unchangeably and always, keeping its quality perpetually and never able to pass over to the opposite side; if its removal or cessation cannot fail to bring the greatest ruin; and if what is contrary to it is likewise a principal evil and can never pass over to the good side. These definitions, by which the nature of the principal goods is distinguished, cannot at all be ascribed to fasts. For they are neither good in themselves nor necessary for their own sake, since they are practiced wholesomely in order to acquire purity of heart and body, so that, the goads of the flesh being blunted, the peaceful mind may be reconciled to its Maker. Nor are they unchangeably and always good, since we are often not harmed by interrupting them; indeed, when kept at the wrong time they sometimes even turn to the ruin of the soul. Nor is what seems to be opposed to fasting, that is, the naturally pleasant taking of food, a principal evil; it cannot be defined as evil unless intemperance, luxury, or some other vices follow, ‘for what enters the mouth does not defile a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.’ So whoever does the principal good not for its own sake but for the sake of something else detracts from it and does not carry it out perfectly or without sin. For all things are to be done for its sake, but it alone is to be sought for its own sake.”

“Holding constantly to this definition of the nature of fasting, then, let us seek it with all the strength of our soul, yet in such a way that we know it is fitting for us only if in it the right ordering of times, its manner, and its measure are kept; and not so as to fix the end of our hope in it, but so that through it we may reach purity of heart and apostolic love. From this very fact, then, that fasting has not only special times fixed for practicing or relaxing it but also a manner and measure prescribed, it is clear that it is not a principal good but something intermediate. But the things that by the authority of a command are either enjoined as good or forbidden as harmful are never subject to exceptions of time, so that sometimes what is forbidden ought to be done or what is commanded omitted. For no limit has been set to justice, patience, sobriety, chastity, and love, nor again has liberty ever been permitted to injustice, impatience, rage, unchastity, envy, and pride.”

“Having set out these things about the nature of fasting, it seems we should now add the authority of the holy Scriptures, by which it may be proved more clearly that fasting neither should nor can be kept perpetually. In the Gospel, when the Pharisees were fasting together with the disciples of John the Baptist, while the apostles, as friends and guests of that heavenly Bridegroom, were not yet keeping the observance of fasts, John’s disciples, who believed they possessed the sum of righteousness through fasting (being followers of him who, as the outstanding preacher of repentance, so gave a pattern to all peoples by his example that he not only refused the various kinds of food supplied for human use but did not even know the common eating of bread itself), complained to the Lord, saying, ‘Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?’ Answering them, the Lord clearly showed that fasting is not fitting or necessary at all times, when either the festive character of the season or an occasion of love that arises allows the indulgence of refreshment: ‘Can the sons of the bridegroom mourn,’ he said, ‘as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast.’ Although he spoke these words before the resurrection of his body, they properly point to the season of Pentecost, in which, after the resurrection, when the Lord ate with his disciples for forty days, the joy of his daily presence did not allow them to fast.”

Germanus: “Why, then, do we relax the rigor of abstinence at our midday meals during the whole of Pentecost, when Christ stayed with his disciples only forty days after the resurrection?”

Theonas: “Your question is not unfitting and deserves to learn the reason of the most complete truth. After the ascension of our Savior, which took place on the fortieth day after his resurrection, the apostles returned from the Mount of Olives, where he let himself be seen as he went to the Father, as the reading of the Acts of the Apostles also testifies, and entering Jerusalem they are said to have waited ten days for the coming of the Holy Spirit; when these were completed, they received him with joy on the fiftieth day. In this way the number of this festival was clearly fulfilled, which we read was also foreshadowed figuratively in the Old Testament, where, when seven weeks were completed, the bread of the first fruits was commanded to be offered to the Lord by the priests. This is proved to have been most truly offered to the Lord through the preaching of the apostles, who we read addressed the people on that day: the true bread of first fruits, which, brought forth by the teaching of a new doctrine, fed five thousand men with the gift of its food and consecrated to the Lord the first-fruit people of Christians from among the Jews. And so these ten days too are to be celebrated with the same solemnity and gladness as the preceding forty. The tradition of this festival, handed down to us by apostolic men, is to be kept in the same way. For this reason in these days the knees are not bent in prayer, because bending the knees is a kind of sign of repentance and mourning. So in all respects we keep in them the same solemnity as on the Lord’s day, on which our forebears handed down that neither should a fast be kept nor a knee be bent, out of reverence for the Lord’s resurrection.”

Germanus: “Can this flesh, enticed by the unaccustomed indulgences of so long a festival, fail to put out some thorny growth from that tinder of vices, even though it has been cut away? Or can the mind, burdened with food taken beyond its custom, fail to relax the rigor of its rule over its servant the body? Especially since in us a younger age can quickly drive the subject members to rebellion, if we take our usual food more abundantly or unaccustomed food more freely.”

Theonas: “If we weigh everything we do by the reasonable examination of the mind, and always consult not the judgments of others but our own conscience about the purity of our heart, it is certain that this interval of refreshment cannot hinder a just strictness, provided, as has been said, that the uncorrupted mind, weighing indulgence and self-restraint in an equal balance, checks excess on either side alike, and discerns with true discernment whether the weight of pleasures is pressing down our spirit, or whether greater austerity of abstinence is weighing down the other side, that is, the body; restraining or relieving the part it feels to be either lifted up or burdened. For our Lord wants nothing done for his worship and honor without the moderation of judgment, since ‘the honor of the king loves judgment.’ And so the most wise Solomon, that we may not lean to either side by a swerving judgment, warns us, saying, ‘Honor God from your just labors, and offer him of the fruits of your righteousness.’ For there sits in our conscience an uncorrupted and true judge, who sometimes alone is not deceived about the state of our purity when all others err. So let the attention of a continually watchful heart be kept with all caution and skill, lest in some way, when the judgment of our discernment errs, either kindled by the craving for an ill-considered abstinence or enticed by the desire for too great relaxation, we weigh the substance of our strength on an unjust scale. Rather, placing the purity of the soul in one pan and the strength of the body in the other, let us weigh both by the true judgment of conscience, so that, perverted by the preponderating affection for one thing, we do not tip the balance of fairness too far to either side, either to immoderate strictness or to excessive relaxation, and there should be said to us, whether for excess of relaxation or of strictness, ‘If you offer rightly but do not divide rightly, have you not sinned?’ For those victims of fasting, which we wring from ourselves inconsiderately by a violent convulsion of the bowels and believe we offer rightly to the Lord, he who loves mercy and judgment abhors, saying, ‘I the Lord love judgment and hate robbery in the burnt offering.’ And those who take the chief part of their offerings, that is, of their duties and acts, for the comfort of the flesh and their own uses, and bring the Lord the remnants and the smallest portion, the divine word condemns as fraudulent workmen: ‘Cursed is he who does the works of the Lord fraudulently.’ Not without reason, then, does the Lord rebuke one who deceives himself by such an unjust weighing, saying, ‘But the sons of men are vain, the sons of men are liars in the scales, so as to deceive.’ And so the blessed apostle, that we may keep the moderation of discernment and not be drawn by excess to either side, warns us, saying, ‘your reasonable service.’ The lawgiver also forbids this in the same way, commanding, ‘Let the balance be just and the weights equal, the modius just and the sextarius equal’; and Solomon too gives a like sentence on this: ‘A great weight and a small, and double measures, both are unclean before the Lord, and he who makes them will be entangled in his own devices.’ So we must strive not only in the way we have described but also in this: not to have unjust weights in our hearts or double measures in the storehouses of our conscience. That is, we must not take for ourselves a more abundant indulgence of relaxation, softening what belongs to the rule of strictness, while we crush those to whom we preach the word of the Lord with stricter precepts and heavier weights than we ourselves can bear. When we do this, what are we doing but weighing or measuring out the merchandise and produce of the Lord’s precepts with a double weight and measure? For if we dispense them one way to ourselves and another way to our brothers, we are rightly rebuked by the Lord for having deceitful scales and double measures, according to that saying of Solomon: ‘A double weight is an abomination to the Lord, and a deceitful balance is not good in his sight.’ We also clearly incur the guilt of a deceitful weight and a double measure if, from desire of human praise, we display before the brothers practices stricter than those we are accustomed to keep privately in our cells, wishing to appear more abstinent and holy to human eyes than to God’s. This disease must be not only avoided but abhorred by us above all. But meanwhile, having wandered a little too far from the question put, let us return to the point from which we departed.”

“The solemnity of those days, then, must be kept in such a way that the relaxation allowed helps rather than harms the care of body and soul; for neither does the joy of any festival blunt the goads of the flesh, nor does that merciless adversary know how to be softened by reverence for the days. So that on feast days the customary solemnity may be kept and yet the most wholesome measure of frugality not be exceeded, it is enough to let the indulgence of relaxation go only so far that the food which was to be taken at the ninth hour of the day is taken a little earlier, that is, at the sixth hour, because of the festive season; but only on condition that the usual amount and kind of food is not changed. Otherwise the purity of body and integrity of mind gained by the abstinence of Lent may be lost by the relaxation of Pentecost, and what we have obtained by fasting may do us no good if careless satiety forces us soon to lose it; especially since the well-known cunning of our enemy attacks the fortress of our purity above all when he feels that its guard has been relaxed by the celebration of some solemnity. So we must take the most watchful care that the vigor of our mind is never weakened by pleasant seductions, and that, as has been said above, we do not lose in the rest and security of Pentecost the purity of chastity sought by the continuous labor of Lent. And so let no addition at all be admitted in the kind or amount of food, but let us refrain on the most solemn days likewise from the foods by abstaining from which we guarded the integrity of our chastity on ordinary days, lest the gladness of the festival, stirring up a most pernicious battle of carnal incitements, be turned into mourning and snatch from us that more excellent festival of the mind which exults in the joy of incorruption, and we begin, after the brief vanity of carnal gladness, to weep with the long grief of repentance for the chastity of heart we have lost. Rather we must strive that the warning of the prophet’s exhortation be not addressed to us in vain: ‘Celebrate your festivals, O Judah, and pay your vows.’ For if the solemnity of the intervening days does not change the constancy of our self-restraint, we shall enjoy spiritual holidays continually; and so, as we cease from servile work, there will be ‘month after month, and sabbath after sabbath.’”

Germanus: “Why is Lent kept for six weeks (though in some provinces a perhaps more zealous care for religion seems to have added a seventh week as well), when neither number, once Sundays and Saturdays are subtracted, makes up the total of forty days? For only thirty-six days are contained in those weeks.”

Theonas: “Although the devout simplicity of some would cut short the question on this matter, yet since you examine scrupulously even what another would have thought unworthy of a question, and wish to know the whole truth of our observance and its mystery, hear a most clear reason for this too, so that you may see more plainly that our forebears handed down nothing unreasonable. In the law of Moses a general command was issued to the whole people: ‘You shall offer your tithes and first fruits to the Lord your God.’ So we who are commanded to offer tithes of our property and of all our produce must much more offer tithes of our very way of life, of our human activity and our works; and this is clearly fulfilled in the reckoning of Lent. For the number of all the days in which the circling year is contained is tithed by the number of thirty-six and a half days. In seven weeks, if Sundays and Saturdays are subtracted, thirty-five days remain assigned to fasting. But when that day of the vigil is added, on which the Saturday fast is prolonged until cockcrow as Sunday dawns, not only is the number of thirty-six days completed, but, for the tithe of the five days which seemed left over, nothing will be lacking to the full total if the space of the night that was added is reckoned in.”

“And what shall I say of the first fruits, which it is certain are offered daily by all who serve Christ faithfully? For when, woken from sleep and rising with an eagerness as if revived after slumber, before they conceive the movement of any feeling in their heart or admit any memory or care of household affairs, they consecrate the rise and beginnings of their thoughts as divine burnt offerings, what are they doing but truly paying the first fruits of their produce, through the high priest Jesus Christ, for the use of this life and as an image of the daily resurrection? And when, roused from sleep, they likewise offer God the victim of their jubilation, calling on him with the first movement of their tongue and celebrating his name and praises, and, unlocking the first bars of their lips to sing hymns to him, sacrifice to God the service of their mouth, to him they also bring in the same way the first offerings of their hands and steps, when they rise from their beds and stand in prayer. Before they use the service of their members for their own affairs, they take nothing of their service for themselves first, but move their steps to his honor and fix them in his praise; and so they pay the first fruits of all their movements by stretching out their hands, bending their knees, and prostrating their whole body. For we cannot otherwise fulfil what is sung in the psalm, ‘I came before at the dawn and cried out,’ and, ‘My eyes came before you at daybreak, that I might meditate on your words,’ and, ‘In the morning my prayer shall come before you,’ except by daring, after the rest of sleep, when we are called back to this light as if, as we said above, from darkness and death, to take nothing at all of all the services of mind and body for our own needs. For there is no other whom either the prophet came before in the morning or whom we ought likewise to come before, except either ourselves, that is, our occupations and mortal affections and cares, without which we cannot be, or the most subtle suggestions of the enemy, which he tries to bring upon us while we are still resting and sunk in sleep, through the fantasies of empty dreams, so as to seize and entangle us with them as soon as we wake, and so be the first to pluck and carry off the best of our first fruits. So we must take care with all caution, if we wish to fulfil in practice the force of the verse just mentioned, that skilful watchfulness guards the first rise of our morning thoughts, lest the hasty presumption of the envious enemy defile any of them and cause our first fruits to be rejected by the Lord as already cheap and common. If we do not come before him with the watchful circumspection of the mind, he will not give up his habit of most wicked anticipation and will not cease to come before us daily with his frauds. And so, if we long to offer God first fruits from the produce of our mind that are pleasing and acceptable, we must spend no small care to keep all the senses of our body, especially in the morning hours, as most holy burnt offerings of the Lord, unblemished and untouched in every way. Many even of those in the world keep this kind of devotion with the greatest care: rising before light or at daybreak, they by no means become entangled in the familiar and necessary business of this world before they run to church and hasten to consecrate the first fruits of all their actions and works in the sight of God.”

“As for what you say, that in some provinces Lent is kept in different ways, that is, for six or for seven weeks, one reckoning and the same measure of fasting are contained in the different observance of weeks. For those have fixed on the observance of six weeks who think one should fast on Saturday as well. So they keep six fasts in the week, which, repeated six times, make up the same thirty-six days. So, as we said, there is one reckoning and the same measure of fasting, although they seem to differ in the number of weeks.”

“But when human neglect had wiped out the reason for this, this season, in which, as has been said, yearly tithes are offered to God by thirty-six and a half fasts, received the name of Quadragesima. Perhaps it seemed it should be called by this name because Moses, Elijah, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself are recorded to have fasted forty days. To the mystery of this number are also not unfittingly fitted those forty years during which Israel stayed in the wilderness, and likewise the forty stations by which it is described as mystically passing through it. Or perhaps the tithing itself rightly took the name Quadragesima as if from the custom of the toll? For so that public levy is commonly called, from which as large a portion of the profit is assigned to the king’s revenue as is also required of us, as the lawful tax of Quadragesima, by the King of all ages for the use of our life. And indeed, though it does not belong to the question put, yet since the occasion of the narrative has offered itself, I think I should not pass over this either: that our elders very often testified that in those days every kind of monk is especially attacked, by an ancient custom of the hostile race, and is pressed more sharply to move from his dwelling. For after the likeness in which the Egyptians then oppressed the children of Israel with violent afflictions, the spiritual Egyptians now also try to bow down the true Israel, that is, the people of the monks, with hard and muddy works, so that we may not leave the land of Egypt through the quiet that is dear to God and pass over with profit into the desert of the virtues; so that Pharaoh roars against us, saying, ‘They are idle, and therefore they cry out, saying: Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord our God. Let them be oppressed with labors, and be busy with their works, and not be busy with vain words.’ For to him the holy sacrifice of the Lord, which is not offered except in the desert of a free heart, is evidently the height of vanity; ‘for religion is an abomination to the sinner.’”

“The righteous and perfect man, then, is not bound by this law of Lent, nor is he content to be subject to this small rule. The leaders of the churches established it, of course, for those who are entangled in pleasures or worldly business throughout the whole year, so that, constrained by this quasi-legal necessity, they might be forced to give themselves to the Lord at least in these days, and dedicate to the Lord at least a tithe of the days of their life, all of which they were going to devour like produce. But the righteous, for whom the law is not laid down, and who spend on spiritual duties not that small portion, that is, a tenth, but the whole time of their life, are free from paying the legal tithes; and so, if an honorable and holy necessity presses them unexpectedly, they dare to relax this station of fasting without any dispute. For the smallness of a tithe is not reduced by those who have offered all that is theirs to the Lord together with themselves. One who offers nothing voluntarily to God and is compelled by the necessity of the law to pay his tithes without excuse could certainly not do this without the gravest guilt of fraud. It is therefore clearly proved that a servant of the law cannot be perfect, whether he avoids what is forbidden or carries out what is commanded, but that those are truly perfect who do not use even what is permitted by the law. And for this reason, although it is said of the law of Moses, ‘For the law brought nothing to perfection,’ we read that some of the saints in the Old Testament were perfect, because, going beyond the command of the law, they lived under the perfection of the Gospel, knowing that ‘the law is not laid down for the righteous, but for the unrighteous and insubordinate, for the impious and sinners, for the wicked and defiled,’ and so on.”

“It should be known, indeed, that this observance of Lent did not exist at all as long as the perfection of that primitive church remained unbroken. For those who enclosed the whole year in an equal fast were not shut in within the narrowest limits of fasts, bound by the necessity of this command or by a quasi-legal sanction. But when the multitude of believers, falling away daily from that apostolic devotion, began to brood over its wealth and not to divide it for the use of all the faithful according to the institutions of the apostles, but, looking privately to its own expenses, strove not only to keep but even to increase it, not content with following the example of Ananias and Sapphira, then it pleased all the priests of that time to call men bound up in worldly cares, and, I might almost say, ignorant of self-restraint or compunction, back to holy work by the canonical appointment of fasts, and to compel them, as it were, by the necessity of legal tithes. This can indeed help the weak but cannot prejudice the perfect, who, placed under the grace of the Gospel, go beyond the law by voluntary devotion, so that they may reach that blessedness of the apostle’s sentence: ‘For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under the law but under grace.’ For sin truly cannot exercise dominion over one who stands faithfully in the freedom of grace.”

Germanus: “Since this sentence of the apostle cannot be false, and it promises security not only to monks but to all Christians in general, it seems very obscure to us. For if he declares that all who believe the Gospel are free from and strangers to the yoke and dominion of sin, how is it that the dominion of sins is strong in almost all the baptized, according to the Lord’s sentence in which he says, ‘Everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin’?”

Theonas: “Your inquiry again stirs up a very large question for us. Although I know that its force can neither be handed on nor received by the inexperienced, I will try to resolve it in words and explain it briefly as far as I can, provided that your understanding follows what we say with deeds as well. For whatever is learned not by teaching but by experience cannot be handed on by one without experience, and likewise cannot be grasped or held in mind by one who has not been grounded in similar zeal and training. And so I think it necessary first to inquire carefully what is the purpose or will of the law, and what is the discipline and perfection of grace, so that from these we may then recognize either the dominion of sin or its expulsion. The law, then, commands above all that the union of marriage be sought, saying, ‘Blessed is he who has seed in Zion and a household in Jerusalem,’ and, ‘Cursed is the barren woman who has not given birth.’ Grace, on the contrary, invites us to the purity of perpetual incorruption and the chastity of blessed virginity, saying, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the breasts that have not given suck,’ and, ‘He who does not hate father and mother and wife cannot be my disciple,’ and that word of the apostle: ‘It remains that those who have wives be as though they had none.’ The law says, ‘You shall not delay to offer your tithes and first fruits’; grace, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell all that you have and give to the poor.’ The law does not forbid retaliation for insults and vengeance for injuries, saying, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Grace wishes our patience to be proved by the doubling of the injuries or blows inflicted, and commands us to be ready to bear a double loss, saying, ‘Whoever strikes you on your right cheek, offer him the other also; and to him who wishes to go to law with you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.’ The law decrees that enemies are to be hated; grace, that they are to be loved so much that it judges that God should always be prayed to even for them.”

“Whoever, then, has climbed this summit of Gospel perfection, raised by the merits of such great virtues above all law and despising as small everything commanded through Moses, knows that he is under the grace of the Savior alone, by whose help he understands that he has reached that most exalted state. So sin does not have dominion over him, because ‘the love of God which has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us’ shuts out all affection for anything else; nor can he desire what is forbidden or despise what is commanded, since all his zeal and all his desire, always intent on divine love, is so little captured by delight in worthless things that he does not use even what is permitted. But under the law, in which the rights of marriage are kept, although the wandering of lust is restrained and bound to one woman only, the goads of carnal desire cannot fail to be strong; and it is hard for a fire to which fuel is even deliberately supplied to be so confined within fixed limits that it does not also stray outside and burn whatever it touches. Even if the barrier set against it always meets it so that it is not allowed to blaze outside, still it burns even while it is restrained, since the will itself is culpable, and the habit of intercourse is swept on to the swiftest excesses of adultery. But those whom the grace of the Savior has set aflame with a holy love of incorruption consume all the thorns of carnal desires with the fire of the Lord’s love, so that not even a warm ember of vices lessens the coolness of their integrity. So the servants of the law slip from the use of what is lawful into what is unlawful; those who share in grace, while they despise what is lawful, do not know what is unlawful. And just as sin lives in the lover of marriage, so too in him who is content merely to pay his tithes and first fruits. For while he delays or neglects, he must sin in their quality, their quantity, or their daily distribution. For one who is commanded to minister what is his own tirelessly to the needy, however great the faith and devotion with which he dispenses it, will hardly fail to fall often into the snares of sins. But in those who have not spurned the Lord’s counsel, but, giving all their property to the poor beforehand, have taken up their cross and follow the giver of grace, sin cannot have dominion. For no faithless care of keeping a livelihood will bite the one who dispenses in devout distribution wealth already consecrated to Christ and money as if it were another’s, nor will sad hesitation drive away the cheerfulness of his almsgiving. For what he has once offered wholly to God he now scatters as another’s, without remembering his own need or fearing a scanty livelihood, since he is sure that when he has reached the poverty he desired he will be fed by God much more than the birds of the air. On the other hand, one who keeps his worldly property and, bound by the sanction of the old law, distributes the tithes of his produce and first fruits or a part of his money, although he largely quenches the fire of his sins with this dew of almsgiving, yet, however generously he dispenses his wealth, cannot possibly rescue himself fully from the dominion of sin, unless perhaps through the grace of the Savior he lays aside the very desire to possess along with the thing itself. In the same way, whoever prefers, by the precept of the law, to tear out eye for eye and tooth for tooth, or to hate his enemy, cannot fail to serve the bloody rule of sin; for while he wishes to avenge his injury by like retaliation and keeps the bitterness of hatred against his enemies, he must always be inflamed with the disturbance of rage and anger. But whoever lives in the light of Gospel grace, and overcomes evil not by resisting but by bearing it, and does not hesitate willingly to offer the other cheek also to one who strikes his right, and lets one who wants to go to law with him over his tunic have his cloak as well, and loves his enemies and prays for those who slander him, has thrown off the yoke of sin and broken its chains. For he does not live under the law, which does not destroy the seeds of sins (so that the blessed apostle not without reason says of it, ‘There is a setting aside of the former commandment because of its weakness and uselessness, for the law brought nothing to perfection,’ and the Lord says through the prophet, ‘And I gave them precepts that were not good, and ordinances by which they shall not live’), but under grace, which not only lops off the branches of wickedness but pulls out the very roots of the harmful will.”

“Whoever, then, has been eager to hold the perfection of the Gospel teaching, being placed under grace, is not oppressed by the dominion of sin; for to be under grace is to fulfil what is commanded by grace. But whoever will not submit to the fullness of Gospel perfection, let him know that, although he seems to himself baptized and a monk, he is not under grace but, still hampered by the chains of the law, is weighed down by the burden of sin. For the purpose of him who takes up all by whom he is received with the grace of adoption is not to destroy but to build upon, not to make void but to fulfil, the sanctions of Moses. Some, utterly ignorant of this and neglecting the grandeur of Christ’s counsels and exhortations, are so relaxed by the security of a presumptuous liberty that not only do they not touch Christ’s precepts as too hard, but they even despise as out of date the very things commanded to them as beginners and little ones by the law of Moses, saying, with a harmful liberty, what the apostle abhors: ‘We have sinned, because we are not under the law but under grace.’ One, then, who is neither under grace, because he has by no means climbed the summit of the Lord’s teaching, nor under the law, because he has not accepted even those small commands of the law, is oppressed by a double dominion of sins, and believes he has received the grace of Christ only in order to become estranged from him through a harmful liberty. He falls into what the apostle Peter warns us not to incur: ‘Act as free,’ he says, ‘and not as having liberty as a cloak for malice.’ The blessed apostle Paul also says, ‘For you were called to liberty, brothers,’ that is, to be freed from the dominion of sin, ‘only do not give your liberty as an occasion for the flesh,’ that is, do not believe that the setting aside of the precepts of the law is license for vices. And the apostle Paul teaches that this liberty is nowhere except only where the Lord dwells, saying, ‘The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.’ So I do not know whether I have been able to express and make clear this meaning of the blessed apostle as those who have experienced it understand it. One thing I know most plainly: it is opened even without anyone’s explanation to all who have perfectly held the praktikē, that is, the active discipline. For they will not labor to understand by argument what they have already learned by doing.”

Germanus: “You have most plainly revealed a very obscure question, and one, we think, unknown to many. So we beg you to add this too to our progress, and explain carefully why sometimes, even when we are fasting more strictly and are exhausted and weak, more violent struggles of the body are stirred up. For often, when on waking from sleep we find that we have suffered the contamination of an unclean fluid, we are so downcast in conscience that we do not dare to rise with confidence even to prayer itself.”

Theonas: “Your zeal, by which you long to reach the way of perfection not superficially but fully and perfectly, spurs us to keep at this discussion tirelessly. For you are inquiring carefully not about outward chastity and visible circumcision but about that which is in secret, knowing that the fullness of perfection does not lie in this visible continence of the flesh, which can be had even by unbelievers, whether through necessity or hypocrisy, but in that voluntary and invisible purity of heart which the blessed apostle proclaims thus: ‘For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision what is outward in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is of the heart, in the spirit, not the letter; his praise is not from men but from God,’ who alone searches the secrets of hearts. Yet since your desire cannot be fully satisfied (for the short space of night that remains is not enough to investigate this most obscure question), I think it fitting that it be put off for now. For these things must be brought forth by us, and impressed on your minds, gradually and with a heart wholly freed from all the noise of thoughts; and just as they must be inquired into for the sake of our common purification, so they cannot be handed on and assigned except by one who has experienced the gift of integrity. For what is sought is not what arguments of empty words, but what the inner faith of conscience and the greater force of truth impress on us. And so nothing of the knowledge and teaching of this cleansing can be brought forth except by one who has experienced it, nor poured into anyone except a most eager and very anxious lover of truth itself, who wishes to reach it not by asking with empty and bare words, but by striving with all the strength of his soul; that is, not with a zeal for fruitless talk, but with a desire for inner purification.”

About seven days later, when the festival of Pentecost was over, we entered the cell of holy Theonas at the very beginning of the night, that is, after the evening synaxis, in suspense with expectation of the promised discussion. The old man, eager and with a cheerful face, spoke to us first with gentle words: “I was wondering,” he said, “that your most ardent zeal could put off for these seven days the solution of the question proposed, and grant so long a delay to your debtor, especially when he did not ask for it. So it is most just that, since your kindness has freely granted me so generous a respite, I too should make no delay in paying the debt. For the business of this loan is pleasant: while it is being repaid it gains greater increase, and it not only enriches the one who receives but does not diminish the one who gives. For the dispenser of spiritual things gathers a double profit: he gains the greatest advantage not only in the progress of his hearer but also in his own discourse, kindling himself no less to the desire of perfection while he instructs the listener. So your ardor is my progress, your anxiety is my compunction. For I myself would now be sluggish in mind and would turn over in my heart nothing of what you have asked, if your ardor and expectation did not rouse me, as if I were asleep, to the remembrance of spiritual things. And so let the question, if you please, be brought forward, whose solution we preferred to postpone the other day for lack of time.”

“Your inquiry, if I am not mistaken, comprised this: why sometimes, when we indulge ourselves more freely, we are titillated by milder goads of this flesh, and sometimes, when we abstain more strictly, with the body afflicted and exhausted, we are pressed by sharper incitements, so that, as your confession disclosed, on waking we find ourselves wet with the discharge of natural fluids.”

“Our forebears declared that this trouble, which breaks through the measure of its appointed time with untimely excesses, has a threefold cause. It is either accumulated by a superfluous excess of food, or it slips out through carelessness of mind, or it is provoked by the snares of the mocking enemy. First, then, the vice of gastrimargia, that is, voracity or gluttony, pushes out this overflow of unclean fluid. For even when it defiles the state of purity in a time of stricter abstinence, it is poured out not, as you think, from the present hunger but from the excess of past satiety. For what had been accumulated in the marrow through the gorging of voracity must be expelled, through itching or at any rate unawares, from a body however wasted by great fasting. So we must abstain not only from richer dishes but also refrain with equal self-restraint from cheaper foods; indeed, we must beware of being filled even with bread and water, so that the purity of body we have acquired may remain in us long and in some way imitate the undefiled chastity of the spirit. We must admit, indeed, that sometimes some, even without any effort of mind, through the temperament of their bodies or the maturity of their age, are more rarely soiled, or not polluted by the discharge of this flux at all. But one who obtains peace by an idle good fortune has one merit, and one who earns a triumph by glorious virtues has another. For the power of the latter, which has conquered all the vices, is worthy of wonder; the former, whom the necessity of a good he did nothing for protects in his sloth, I would call worthy of pity rather than praise. The second cause of that impure flow is when the mind, empty of spiritual pursuits and exercises and not trained in the disciplines of the inner man, has drawn over itself, through the habit of continual torpor, a kind of rust of sloth; or when, not guarding against the small beginnings of unclean thoughts, it desires that most sublime purity of heart so lazily that it believes the whole sum of perfection and chastity consists in the chastisement of the outer man alone. Through the fault of this error and sluggishness it will follow that not only will a many-sided wandering of thoughts break shamelessly and insolently into the secret place of the mind, but the seeds of all its former passions will remain within it. As long as these lie hidden in its inner chambers, however much the body is chastised with rigid fasting, they still disturb it in sleep with enticing phantasms, by which unclean fluids are drawn out before the course of the natural time, no longer from the necessity of nature but still from the deceit of wickedness. If these cannot be wholly checked, they are at least brought, with the help of God’s grace, to that simple kind of discharge, not so much by emptiness of the flesh as by the watchfulness and strength of the mind. So, first of all, the wanderings of the senses must be restrained, lest the mind, grown used to these excesses, be drawn in dreams to fouler incitements of lust. The third cause is when, by an ordered and careful discipline of self-restraint, through contrition of heart and body, we long to acquire the lasting purity of chastity, and, while we are excellently caring for the good of flesh and spirit, the envy of the most deceitful enemy so attacks us that, trying to cast down the confidence of our conscience and to humble us as if with some guilt, he defiles us, especially on the days on which we most desire to please the divine sight by greater merit of integrity, without any itching of the flesh or consent of the mind and not through the illusion of any phantasm, but by a simple discharge of that flux, in order to frighten us away from the holy communion. It is believed, indeed, that in the case of some beginners, whose bodies have not yet been thinned by the long chastisement of fasts, this illusion comes about by the devil’s scheming for this purpose: when he learns that they are applying themselves to more intense fasts, he overturns all their efforts by this trick, so that, feeling that they have not only made no progress in purity of body by stricter fasting but have even been assailed more heavily, they come to dread strictness of abstinence, the teacher of incorruption and nurse of purity, as if it were an enemy. So we must know that we ought to be purged of each vice not only because it occupies our mind with its disturbances, but because it is not content to rule alone without the company of others, but, bringing in the more dreadful fellowship of all the vices, it lays waste the mind subject to it with manifold captivity. And so gastrimargia must be conquered not only for its own sake, lest it corrupt us with burdensome voracity, nor only lest it set us on fire with carnal desire, but lest it also make us slaves of anger, rage, dejection, and all the other passions. For when food and drink are served us too little, too late, or too carelessly, if we are held down by the dominion of the belly, it follows that we are also spurred by the goads of anger. Again, we cannot be soothed by pleasant flavors without the plague of covetousness, through whose superfluous preparations luxury delights in great expense. And covetousness, vainglory, pride, and the whole multitude of vices are joined in an inseparable fellowship; so each vice, if it begins to be strong in us even alone, supplies growth to the others as well.”

Germanus: “We believe it is by God’s dispensation that this question has been brought forward, so that what we could never be taught, because shame held back our confidence to ask, we may now, spurred on by the occasion of the conference and the order of the matter itself, dare to ask with confidence. If, then, at the time when we ought to approach the holy mysteries, we find that we have been polluted by an illusion in sleep, should that holy reception of the saving food be ventured or avoided?”

Theonas: “We ought indeed to strive with all diligence, as far as lies in us, to keep the spotless purity of chastity above all at the time when we wish to stand at the venerable altars, and we must take care with the most watchful circumspection that the integrity of the flesh, kept through the preceding time, is not stolen from us especially on the night in which we are preparing ourselves for communion in the saving banquet. But if that most wicked enemy, in order to take from us the medicine of the heavenly remedy, has mocked the guard of the mind while it slept, only in such a way that we are defiled by no blameworthy itching intervening and no consent of delight, but he has put forward, as a hindrance to our sanctification, some discharge forced by necessity according to nature, or at any rate drawn out by the devil’s assault without any feeling of pleasure, then we can and ought to approach the grace of the saving food with confidence. But if this accumulation has been discharged by our own fault, let us, examining our conscience, fear that word of the apostle: ‘Whoever eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks the bread and cup of the Lord unworthily eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the body’; that is, by no means distinguishing that heavenly food from the cheapness of common foods, nor judging it to be such that it may not be taken except with a pure mind and flesh. Then he adds, ‘That is why many among us are weak and sick, and many sleep,’ saying that spiritual weakness and death are produced chiefly by this presumption. For many who take it by unlawful usurpation are weak in faith and feeble in mind, entangled in the illnesses of the passions, and sleep the sleep of sin, never rising from this deadly slumber with saving anxiety. Then it follows: ‘But if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged’; that is, if, whenever we are overtaken by the wound of sin, we judged ourselves unworthy of receiving the sacraments, we would certainly apply ourselves to approach them worthily through the amendment of repentance, and would not be chastised by the Lord with the severest scourges of sicknesses as unworthy, so that, pricked at least in this way, we run back to the remedies for our wounds, lest, not being thought worthy of the very brief correction of the present age, we be condemned in the future together with the sinners of this world. This is also commanded with a plain declaration in Leviticus: ‘Everyone who is clean shall eat the flesh; and whatever soul eats of the flesh of the sacrifice of peace offering, which is the Lord’s, while there is uncleanness on it, shall perish before the Lord.’ In Deuteronomy too the unclean man is likewise mystically separated from the spiritual camp: ‘If there is any man among you,’ it says, ‘who has been polluted by a dream at night, he shall go out of the camp and shall not return until he is washed with water in the evening; and after sunset he shall return into the camp.’”

“But that it may be proved more plainly that this impurity is sometimes drawn out by the scheming of the enemy: we knew a brother who continually possessed chastity of heart and body, won by the greatest circumspection and humility, and was never tempted by nightly mockeries; yet whenever he had prepared himself to receive the Lord’s communion, he was defiled in sleep by an unclean flux. When he had for a long time kept himself away from the holy mysteries in fear, he at last brought this question to the elders, trusting that he would obtain a remedy for his assaults and his grief through their healing counsel. The teaching of those spiritual physicians first examined the first cause of this disease, which usually comes from an abundant taking of food, and they found that it was not present in this brother; it was plain that this illusion did not arise from the fault of satiety, since neither the known strictness of the brother nor the special exception of the feast days on which that pollution occurred allowed them to think so. They at once moved their search on to the second cause of this illness, examining whether perhaps, through a fault of the soul, the flesh, though exhausted by fasting, was pressed by impure illusions, by which even the strictest men, when they have been a little lifted up about the purity of their body, are polluted through the vice of pride, since they have believed that they obtained by human virtues that special gift of God, the chastity of the body. When, then, he was asked whether he believed himself so capable of this virtue by his own effort that he did not need divine help, he rejected this impious thought with the greatest abhorrence and humbly declared that he could not have kept purity of body even on the other days unless divine grace had helped him in everything. At once they turned to the third cause and saw through the hidden snares of the devil’s scheming. Judging that the fault was neither of soul nor of flesh, they decided most confidently that he ought to take part in the holy banquet, lest, if he persisted in this obstinacy, he should be bound by the cunning snares of the malignant enemy and be unable to share in sanctification and the body of Christ, and through this fraud be cheated forever of the medicine of the saving remedy. When this was done, the whole scene of the devil’s scheming was so exposed that soon, with the power of the Lord’s body protecting him, that habit of the former illusion ceased. In this the enemy’s trick was clearly revealed, and the judgment of the elders was set out and proved alike, which taught that this most impure flux is very often forced out not by a fault of the flesh or of the soul but by the scheming mockery of the adversary. So that the deceptive imagination of dreams, the enticer of impure discharge, may be unknown either forever or at least, to speak of the humbler or common state, for certain months, we must, after that faith by which we should constantly hope for the gift of purity especially from the grace of God, chastise excess of food and drink. For from their abundance such fluids must be produced more readily; and since, once accumulated, they cannot fail to be discharged and are pushed out by the very law of nature, they come out on the occasion of any itching or illusion. But when fullness of food is removed, it follows that those unclean discharges too are produced more slowly. So it comes about that, as their flux, so too the illusion disturbs sleepers either more rarely or more lightly, since the discharge does not so much come from the imagination as the imagination from an excess of discharge. So if we wish to be freed from the enticements of these illusions, we must strive with all our strength: first, that, the passion of sexual immorality being conquered, according to the blessed apostle, sin may not reign in our mortal body so that we obey its desires; second, that, the enticing movement of the body itself being wholly calmed and put to sleep, we may by no means present our members to sin as weapons of iniquity; third, that, our inner man too being mortified in every way and to the marrow from that titillation of lust, we may present ourselves to God as living from the dead; and so, coming by this progress to the lasting quiet of our body, we may present our members to God as weapons no longer of lust but of righteousness. Founded in this purity of chastity, sin will not have dominion over us. For we are not under the law, which, while it commends the lawful rights of marriage, also feeds and keeps in our marrow that heat by whose service the work of unlawful sexual immorality is accomplished; but under grace, which, while it instills the incorruption of virginity, destroys even this harmless and simple movement of the body and the pleasure even of lawful intercourse. And so, when all the fluids of that most impure flood are dried up, we shall become those excellent and praiseworthy eunuchs proclaimed by Isaiah and shall deserve to possess the blessedness promised them: ‘For thus says the Lord to the eunuchs: Those who keep my sabbaths, and choose what I have willed, and hold fast my covenant, I will give them in my house and within my walls a place and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not perish.’ Who are these sons and daughters, to whom these eunuchs are so preferred that they are even said to be going to receive a better place and name, if not those saints who, remaining in the union of marriage under the Old Testament, rightly came to the adoption of the sons of God by keeping the commandments? And what is that name which is promised them as something special by way of the highest reward, if not this, that we are counted by the name of Christ? Of this name the same prophet also says elsewhere, ‘And he will call his servants by another name, in which he who is blessed on the earth shall be blessed in God, Amen; and he who swears on the earth shall swear by God, Amen’; and again, ‘And a new name shall be called for you, which the mouth of the Lord shall name.’ And for this purity of heart and body they will also enjoy that special and singular blessedness of continually singing that song which no other of the saints can sing but these alone, ‘who follow the Lamb wherever he goes; for they are virgins, and have not defiled themselves with women.’ So if we wish to reach this most exalted glory of virgins, let us cultivate with all our strength the incorruption of mind and spirit, lest we fall into the number of those foolish virgins to whom virginity was not reckoned, because they only kept themselves free from carnal intercourse; and so they are called virgins indeed, but foolish, because when the oil of inner purity failed in their vessels, the brightness and splendor of bodily virginity was extinguished. For chastity must be supplied to the outer man too by the nourishment and fuel of inner purity, and constantly quickened to persevere in lasting incorruption. And so the foolish, though virgins, do not deserve to enter the glorious bridal chamber of the Bridegroom with those wise ones who kept their spirit and soul and body whole and blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. For those are true and incorrupt virgins of Christ, those are reckoned admirable and excellent eunuchs, not those who are afraid or do not wish to commit sexual immorality, nor those who restrain the reins of unchastity, but those who have conquered even the smallest titillation of the mind and the faintest incitements of lust, and have so weakened, so to speak, that sense of the flesh that they are touched by no delight from its stirring, nor even by a slight titillation.”

“But we ought to fence our heart with such a guard of humility that we hold this conviction with constant steadiness of mind: that we can by no means reach such merit of purification that, even if by the grace of God we have done everything I spoke of above, we should not believe ourselves unworthy of the communion of the holy body. First, because the majesty of that heavenly manna is so great that no one clothed in this clay flesh receives it by his own merit, and not by the free generosity of the Lord. Then, because no one can be so circumspect in the conflict of this world that the darts of sins, however rare or light, do not strike him; for it is impossible not to sin through ignorance, negligence, surprise, thought, necessity, forgetfulness, or sleep. For even if someone has climbed so splendid a summit of virtues that he can cry out, without boasting, that word of the apostle, ‘But to me it is a very small thing to be judged by you or by any human day; indeed, I do not judge myself; for I am conscious of nothing against myself,’ let him still know that he cannot be without sin. For not in vain did the same teacher add, ‘But I am not justified by this’; that is, I shall not at once possess the glory of true righteousness if I believe myself righteous, nor am I stained by no contagion of filth because my conscience pricks me with the reproach of no sin; for many things are hidden even from my conscience which, though unknown or obscure to me, are known and plain to God. And so he adds, ‘But he who judges me is the Lord’; that is, the examination of true judgment on me is given only by him from whom the secrets of hearts are not hidden.”

Germanus: “It was said above that only saints ought to share in the heavenly sacraments; now it is added that it is impossible for a man to be wholly free from fault. If, then, no one is free from guilt, no one is holy; and if no one is holy, it follows that a man who lacks holiness cannot share in the mysteries of Christ, and ought not even to hope for the kingdom of heaven, which the Lord promises to the saints alone.”

Theonas: “We cannot deny that there are many holy and righteous men; but there is a great difference between holy and spotless. For it is one thing for someone to be holy, that is, consecrated to divine worship; for this name, as Scripture testifies, is common not only to men but also to places and to the vessels and basins of the temple. It is another thing to be without sin, which belongs uniquely to the majesty of our one Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the apostle too declares, as something special and peculiar, ‘who did no sin.’ For he would have ascribed to him a rather cheap praise, unworthy of his glory, as if it were something incomparable and divine, if we too could achieve a life untouched by any sin. Again the apostle, to the Hebrews: ‘For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one tempted in all things according to our likeness, without sin.’ If, then, our earthly lowliness can have this in common with that exalted and divine high priest, that we too are tempted without any offense of sin, why did the apostle, looking up to this in him as unique and singular, separate his merit from all men by so great a distinction? He is distinguished from all of us by this one exception, that it is clear we are tempted not without sin, while he was tempted without sin. For what man, however brave and warlike, is not often exposed to the enemy’s darts? Who, as though clothed in impenetrable flesh, can mingle in the dangers of such battles without danger? But he alone, ‘beautiful in form above the sons of men,’ taking on the condition of human death with all the frailty of the flesh, was never stained by the touch of any filth.”

“For he was tempted according to our likeness first by the vice of gastrimargia, when that cunning serpent, in the same order in which he had earlier deceived Adam, tried to mock him, when he was hungry, with the desire for food, saying, ‘If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.’ But he contracted no sin from this temptation; although he undoubtedly had the power, he rejected the food that the craftsman of deceptions offered, saying, ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ He was also tempted by vainglory according to our likeness, when it was said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.’ But he was not caught by the devil’s crafty suggestion, and, refuting the most vain seducer by quoting the Scriptures, he said, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’ He was also tempted by the swelling of pride according to our likeness, when all the kingdoms of the world and their glory were promised him by the devil; but the vanity of the tempter was mocked and rebuked. For he answered him, ‘Get behind me, Satan; it is written: You shall worship the Lord your God and serve him alone.’ By these testimonies we are taught that we too must likewise resist the deceitful suggestions of the enemy by the remembrance of the Scriptures. Again he was tempted by pride according to our likeness, when the same craftsman of snares tried to force on him through men the kingdom he had earlier rejected when offered by the devil himself. But he mocked the tempter’s snares without sin: ‘For when Jesus knew that they were about to come and take him by force and make him king, he fled again to the mountain by himself alone.’ He was tempted according to our likeness when he was beaten with scourges, struck with slaps, spattered with the horror of spitting, and at last endured all the most refined tortures. But he was driven by no insults, I will not say ever, nor even by tortures, to the swelling of even the slightest indignation; set on the cross, he cried out mercifully, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.’”

“And how will we take that other saying, where the apostle records that he came in the likeness of sinful flesh, if we too can have flesh stained by no taint of sin? For this too is recorded as unique of him who alone is without sin: ‘God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh’; because, taking the true and complete substance of human flesh, he must be believed to have taken in it not sin itself but the likeness of sin. For ‘likeness’ is to be referred not to the reality of the flesh, according to the perverse view of certain heretics, but to the image of sin. For there was in him true flesh, but without sin; like, that is, to sinful flesh. The one pertains to the reality of human substance; the other refers to vices and conduct. He had the likeness of sinful flesh when, like a man who did not know and was concerned about food, he asked, ‘How many loaves do you have?’ But just as his flesh was by no means subject to sin, so his soul was not subject to ignorance. Then the evangelist at once adds, ‘Jesus said this to test them, for he himself knew what he would do.’ He had flesh like sinful flesh when, as if thirsty, he asked the Samaritan woman for a drink. But it was not stained by the filth of sin, for on the contrary the woman was moved to ask for living water, which would never let her thirst but would become in her a spring of water welling up to eternal life. He had the reality of this flesh when he slept in the boat; but so that those sailing with him might not be deceived by the likeness of sin, ‘he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm.’ He seemed subject to sin by the common lot of all when it was said of him, ‘If this man were a prophet, he would surely know who and what kind of woman has touched his feet.’ But he did not have the reality of sin, for he refuted the Pharisee’s blasphemous thought and at once forgave the woman’s sins. He was thought to bear flesh sinful like the rest when, like a man placed in the danger of death and struck with terror at the tortures hanging over him, he prayed, ‘Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me,’ and, ‘My soul is sorrowful even to death.’ But that sorrow knew no contagion of sin, since the author of life could not fear death. For he says, ‘No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of myself; I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.’”

“In this, then, that man who was born of a virgin is separated by a great distance from all who are produced by the union of both sexes: that while all of us bear in the flesh not the likeness but the reality of sin, he took on, in assuming true flesh, not the reality but the likeness of sin. Finally, although the Pharisees remembered very clearly what was written of him in the prophet Isaiah, ‘who did no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth,’ they were still so deceived by the likeness of sinful flesh that they said, ‘Behold, a man who is a glutton and a wine-drinker, a friend of tax collectors and sinners,’ and to the blind man who had been given sight, ‘Give glory to God; for we know that this man is a sinner,’ and to Pilate, ‘If this man were not a sinner, we would not have handed him over to you.’ Whoever, then, dares to profess that he is without sin will claim for himself, with the crime of blasphemous pride, equality with the thing that belongs uniquely and properly to him alone. For it follows that he says that he has the likeness of sinful flesh and not the reality of sin.”

“But Scripture plainly declares that righteous and holy men are not free from fault, saying, ‘For the righteous man falls seven times and rises again.’ For what else is falling but sinning? And yet, though he is said to fall seven times, he is nonetheless called righteous, and the fall of human frailty does not prejudice his righteousness, because there is a great difference between the fall of a holy man and that of a sinner. For it is one thing to commit a mortal sin, and another to be overtaken by a thought that is not without sin, or to offend through the error of ignorance or forgetfulness, or through the ease of an idle word, or to hesitate for a moment in inner contemplation through the fault of unbelief, or to be struck by a subtle titillation of vainglory, or to fall back a little from the highest perfection through the necessity of nature. These are the seven kinds of falls in which, though a holy man sometimes falls, he does not cease to be righteous. However light and small they seem, they still make it impossible for him to be without sin. For he has faults for which, doing penance daily, he must truly ask pardon and pray unceasingly for his sins, saying, ‘Forgive us our debts.’ And to prove by the clearest examples that some of the saints erred and yet did not depart from their righteousness: surely that most blessed and outstanding apostle Peter must be believed to have been nothing but holy, especially at the time when the Lord said to him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona, because flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven also.’ What could be more splendid than this praise from the Lord, what more exalted than this power and blessedness? And yet a little later, when, not knowing the mystery of the passion, he unwittingly opposed so great a benefit to the human race, saying, ‘Far be it from you, Lord; this shall not happen to you,’ he deserved to hear, ‘Get behind me, Satan; you are a stumbling block to me, because you do not think the things of God but the things of men.’ When justice itself rebuked him with these words, must he be believed either not to have fallen at all or not to have remained in holiness and righteousness? And at that other time, when under the threat of fear of his persecutors he was driven to deny the Lord three times, must it be denied that he plainly suffered a fall? But at once, with repentance following, washing away the stain of so great a crime with most bitter tears, he did not lose the merits of holiness and righteousness. Of him, then, and of saints like him we must take what is sung by David: ‘The steps of a man are directed by the Lord, and he will greatly delight in his way. When the righteous man falls, he will not be troubled, for the Lord puts his hand under him.’ Whose steps can be directed by the Lord but a righteous man’s? And yet of this very man it is said, ‘When he falls, he will not be dashed.’ What is ‘when he falls,’ if not when he incurs the fall of some sin? ‘He will not be dashed,’ he says; that is, he will not be crushed for long by the onset of sin, but, though for the present he seems struck down, yet, raised up by the divine help he implores, he will not lose the steadiness of righteousness because of a swift rising again; or, even if he loses it for the present through the frailty of the flesh, he will recover it by the placing of the Lord’s hand beneath him. For he does not cease to be holy after a fall who, knowing that he cannot be justified by trust in his own works, and believing that he must be freed from such great bonds of sins by the grace of the Lord alone, does not cease to cry out with the apostle: ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.’”

“For when the apostle Paul, recognizing that the immeasurable abyss of purity cannot be penetrated by man while the surges of thoughts resist, had long been tossed as if through the deep, he had said earlier, ‘For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I hate, that I do,’ and again, ‘But if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me,’ and, ‘I delight in the law of God according to the inner man, but I see another law in my members fighting against the law of my mind and leading me captive in the law of sin which is in my members.’ Having wholly perceived the frailty, whether his own or of nature itself, and terrified by the vastness of so immense a height, he fled to the safest harbor of divine help; and, as if despairing, because of natural weakness, of his ship weighed down with the cargo of mortality, he begged the remedy for shipwreck from him to whom nothing is impossible, crying out with a pitiful wail, ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ And at once he confidently counted on the release, which he despaired of from the weakness of nature, from the goodness of God, adding with confidence, ‘The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.’”

Germanus: “Many hold that this passage of the apostle should be understood in such a way that they maintain he said it not in his own person but in that of sinners: namely, those who wish to abstain from bodily enticements and pleasures, but, bound by their former vices and captivated by the delight of carnal passions, cannot restrain themselves, since, crushed by the ingrained habit of vices as by the dominion of a harsh tyranny, they cannot breathe again to the freedom of chastity. For how can this fit the blessed apostle, who certainly reached the highest summit of all perfection: ‘For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I hate, that I do’; and what he adds, ‘But if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me’; and also this: ‘For I delight in the law of God according to the inner man, but I see another law in my members fighting against the law of my mind and leading me captive in the law of sin which is in my members’? In what way can these be fitted to the person of the apostle? For what good is there that he could not fulfil, and on the other hand what evil is there that he committed against his will, not wanting it and hating it, under the compulsion of nature? To what law of sin could the chosen vessel, in whom Christ the Lord spoke, be led captive? When he had taken captive all disobedience and every height that exalts itself against God, he declared of himself with confidence, ‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; for the rest there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day.’”

Theonas: “As I enter the safest harbor of silence, you try to call me back again to the immense sea of a most profound question. But, embracing the opportunity of a safe anchorage, having run the course of so long a conference, we will cast here for the present the anchor of silence, so that tomorrow, if no force of storm prevents it, having tested the breeze of a favorable wind, we may spread the sails of discussion.”

When daylight returned and the old man was pressed by us with the greatest urgency to search into the depth of the apostle’s question, he spoke thus. “The testimonies by which you try to prove that the apostle Paul spoke not in his own person but on behalf of sinners, ‘For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I hate, that I do,’ or, ‘But if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me,’ or what follows, ‘For I delight in the law of God according to the inner man, but I see another law in my members fighting against the law of my mind and leading me captive in the law of sin which is in my members,’ show on the contrary that these things can by no means fit the person of sinners, but that what is said belongs only to the perfect and suits only the chastity of those who follow the merits of the apostles. For how can this fit the person of sinners: ‘For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I hate, that I do’? Or this either: ‘But if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me’? For which offender defiles himself with adulteries and sexual immorality against his will? Who lays snares for his neighbor unwillingly? Who is forced by unavoidable necessity to crush a man by false witness, or to cheat him by theft, to covet another’s goods, or to shed blood? On the contrary, as it is written, the human race is diligently intent on wickedness from its youth. For all who burn with love of vices so long to fulfil what they desire that, watching with sleepless care for an opportunity to commit crime, they even fear that they may be too slow to enjoy their lusts to the full; and, glorying in their disgrace and the heap of their crimes, according to the sentence of the rebuking apostle, they seek a kind of praise for themselves from their shame. The prophet Jeremiah too declares that they commit their shameful crimes not only not unwillingly, nor with rest of heart and body, but that they sweat with such laborious efforts to accomplish them that they are not called back from the deadly appetite for crimes even by the steep difficulties that stand in their way, saying, ‘They labored to act wickedly.’ And who would say that this fits sinners: ‘So then I myself with the mind serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin,’ when it is plain that they serve God neither with the mind nor with the flesh? Or how can those who sin with the body serve God with the mind, when the flesh conceives the tinder of vices from the heart, and the author of both natures himself declares that the source and origin of sins flows from there, saying, ‘From the heart proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, acts of sexual immorality, thefts, false witness,’ and so on? So it is clearly shown that this can in no way be understood of the persons of sinners, who not only do not hate evil but love it, and serve God so little with either mind or flesh that they sin in the mind before the flesh, and before they fulfil the pleasure of the body are overtaken by the sin of their mind and thoughts.”

“It remains, then, that we measure the force of the meaning by the inmost disposition of the speaker, and examine what the blessed apostle called good, and what by comparison with it he declared evil, not by the bare meaning of the words but with the same insight as he, and search out his understanding according to the dignity and merit of the one speaking. For we shall be able to grasp sayings uttered by God’s inspiration according to his purpose and will only when, weighing the state and merit of those by whom they were delivered, we put on, not in word but by experience, a disposition like theirs, according to whose character all meanings are without doubt conceived and sayings uttered. So let us inquire more carefully what is chiefly the good which the apostle could not accomplish when he wished. For we know many goods which we cannot deny that the blessed apostle and all men of his merit both had by nature and acquired by grace. Chastity is good, self-restraint praiseworthy, prudence admirable, kindness generous, sobriety circumspect, temperance modest, mercy devout, justice holy. There is no doubt that all these were so full and perfect in the apostle Paul and his companions that religion was taught by them through mastery of virtues rather than of words. What of the fact that they were always consumed by constant care and sleepless anxiety for all the churches? How great a good of mercy this is, how great a perfection, to burn for those who are made to stumble, to be weak with the weak! Since, then, the apostle abounded in such goods, we shall not be able to recognize what that good is whose perfection he lacked unless we advance into the disposition in which he himself spoke. So all the virtues we said he had, though they are like most splendid and precious gems, yet, if they are compared with that splendid and outstanding pearl which the merchant of the Gospel, seeking it, longs to buy by selling all that he possesses, their worth becomes so cheap and despised that, when they are sold without hesitation, the possession of a single good enriches the seller of innumerable goods.”

“What, then, is that one thing which is so incomparably preferred to those so great and innumerable goods that, when all are scorned and cast away, it alone should be possessed? It is surely that best part, whose grandeur and perpetuity is proclaimed by the Lord when Mary had chosen it, leaving the duty of hospitality and service: ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; but few things are needed, or even one. Mary has chosen the good part, which will not be taken away from her.’ The one thing, then, is theoria, that is, the contemplation of God, in comparison with whose merit all the merits of righteous acts and all the pursuits of virtues are set lower. And all those things which we said shone in the apostle Paul are not only good and useful but also great and splendid. But just as, for example, the metal tin, which was thought to be of some use and beauty, becomes very cheap when silver is seen, and again the worth of silver vanishes in comparison with gold, and gold itself is despised when compared with gems, and a multitude of gems, however remarkable, is surpassed by the brightness of a single pearl, so all those merits of holiness, though they are not only good and useful for the present but also gain the gift of eternity, will yet be counted cheap and, so to speak, saleable if compared with the merits of divine contemplation. And so that the authority of the Scriptures may confirm this same comparison: does not Scripture declare of all things created by God in general, ‘And behold, all things that God made were very good,’ and again, ‘All things that God made are good in their time’? These things, then, which are declared in the present not only simply good but, with an addition, very good (for they are truly suited to us while we live in this world, either for the use of life or for the healing of the body or for some purpose of usefulness unknown to us; or indeed they are very good in this too, that they make us see the invisible things of God, understood from the creation of the world through the things that have been made, and contemplate his eternal power and divinity from the so great and so ordered building of the world’s fabric and of all things that exist in it), all these will still not keep the name of good if they are compared with that future age, where there is no change of goods and no corruption of true blessedness to be feared. The blessedness of that world is described thus: ‘The light of the moon will be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun will be sevenfold, as the light of seven days.’ So these things, great and splendid and wonderful to behold, if compared with the promises of the future held by faith, will at once appear as vanity, as David says: ‘They will all grow old like a garment, and like a cloak you will change them, and they will be changed; but you are the same, and your years will not fail.’ Since, therefore, nothing is stable in itself, nothing unchangeable, nothing good except the Godhead alone, and every creature obtains the blessedness of eternity or unchangeableness not by its own nature but by participation in its Creator and by his grace, created things cannot keep the merit of goodness when compared with their Creator.”

“And if we wish to establish the reason of this sentence by still plainer testimonies: although we read that many things are called good in the Gospel, a good tree, a good treasure, a good man, and a good servant (‘for a good tree cannot bear bad fruit,’ and ‘a good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things,’ and ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’), and there is no doubt that all these are good in themselves, yet if we look to the goodness of God, none of them will be called good, as the Lord says, ‘No one is good but God alone.’ In view of this even the apostles themselves, who by the merit of their election had surpassed the goodness of the human race in many ways, are said to be evil, when the Lord says to them, ‘If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him.’ Finally, just as our goodness is turned to evil in view of the heavenly goodness, so our righteousness too, compared with the divine righteousness, is reckoned like a menstrual rag, as the prophet Isaiah says: ‘All our righteousnesses are like a menstrual rag.’ And to bring in something still clearer: even the life-giving precepts of the law itself, which is said to have been given through angels by the hand of a mediator, and of which the same apostle says, ‘So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good,’ are declared by the divine oracle to be not good at all if compared with the perfection of the Gospel. For he says, ‘And I gave them precepts that were not good, and ordinances by which they shall not live.’ The apostle too declares that the glory of the law is so dimmed by the light of the New Testament that in comparison with the brightness of the Gospel it should not even be called glorious, saying, ‘For what was made glorious is not glorious in this respect, because of the surpassing glory.’ Scripture keeps this comparison on the opposite side as well, that is, in weighing the deserts of sinners, so that it justifies those who have sinned much less by comparison with the impious, saying, ‘Sodom is justified by you,’ and again, ‘For what did your sister Sodom sin?’ and, ‘Faithless Israel has justified her soul in comparison with treacherous Judah.’ In the same way, then, the merits of all the virtues I listed above, though good and precious in themselves, are darkened by comparison with the brightness of contemplation. For they draw back and delay the saints, however much engaged in good works, if still in earthly pursuits, from the contemplation of that sublime good.”

“For who, while rescuing the needy from the hand of those stronger than he, and the poor and destitute from those who plunder him, who, while breaking the jaws of the unjust and wresting the plunder from their teeth, can look up with a quiet mind, in the very work of intercession, to the glory of the divine majesty? Who, while supplying food to the poor or receiving crowds of visitors with kindly hospitality, can at the very moment when he is distracted with anxious mind by the needs of the brothers gaze on the immensity of the heavenly blessedness, and, while he is shaken by the distresses and cares of the present life, look forward to the state of the world to come with a heart raised above earthly contagions? So blessed David, defining this as the only good for man, longs to cleave continually to God, saying, ‘But it is good for me to cleave to God, to put my hope in the Lord.’ Ecclesiastes too declares that this cannot be accomplished by any of the saints without fault: ‘For there is no righteous man on earth who does good and does not sin.’ For who, however eminent among all the righteous and holy, bound with the chains of this body, can be believed ever to have possessed this highest good in such a way that, never departing from divine contemplation, he could be thought never to have been drawn away even for a short time by earthly thoughts from him who alone is good? Who has never had any care for food, clothing, or other carnal things, never been anxious about receiving brothers, changing his place, or building his cell, never desired any help from human assistance, or, troubled by the barrenness of want, never incurred that sentence of the Lord’s rebuke, ‘Do not be anxious for your soul, what you will eat, nor for your body, what you will put on’? Finally, we confidently maintain that even the apostle Paul himself, who surpassed the labor of all the saints by the number of his sufferings, could by no means fulfil this, as he himself testifies to his disciples in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my needs and to those who are with me’; or when, writing to the Thessalonians, he testifies that he worked in labor and weariness night and day. Although great rewards of merit were being prepared for him by these things, still his mind, however holy and exalted, could not fail to be torn away at times from that heavenly contemplation by attention to earthly work. Then, when he saw himself enriched with such great fruits of action, and on the other hand weighed in his heart the good of contemplation, and, as it were, weighed in one pan the gain of such great labors and in the other the delight of divine contemplation, after he had long, as it were, adjusted the balance in his breast, while on this side the immense rewards of labor delighted him, and on that side the desire of union and of inseparable fellowship with Christ invited him even to the release of the flesh, he at last cried out in anxiety, ‘What I shall choose I do not know. I am hard pressed between the two, having the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for your sake.’ So although he had in many ways preferred the excellence of this good even to all the fruits of his preaching, he yet submits out of consideration of love, without which no one earns the Lord, and for the sake of those to whom, like a nurse, he was still giving milk from the breasts of the Gospel, he does not refuse a separation from Christ harmful to himself but necessary for others. For he is driven to choose this above all by that exceeding power of devotion by which, for the salvation of his brothers, he wishes, if it were possible, to incur even the ultimate evil of anathema: ‘For I could wish,’ he says, ‘that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites’; that is, I would wish to be given over not only to temporal but even to eternal punishments, provided that all men, if it could be, enjoyed the fellowship of Christ; for I am sure that the salvation of all is more profitable to Christ and to me than my own. So, that the apostle might perfectly attain this highest good, that is, to enjoy the sight of God and to cleave to Christ continually, he longs to be released from this body, which, weak and hindered by the many needs of its frailty, cannot fail to be torn from the fellowship of Christ. For it is impossible for a mind distracted by such frequent cares and hindered by such varied and troublesome anxieties always to be fixed on the divine vision. For what zeal of the saints can be so persistent, what purpose so steep, that that cunning plotter does not sometimes mock it? Who has so sought out the secret places of solitude and shunned the company of all mortals that he never slipped into superfluous thoughts and never fell away, through the sight of things or the occupation of earthly affairs, from that contemplation of God which alone is truly good? Who has ever been able to keep such fervor of spirit that he was not sometimes carried away by slippery thoughts even from the very attention of prayer and suddenly fell from heavenly things to earthly? Which of us, to pass over other times of wandering, does not, even at the very moment when he raises his mind on high in supplication to God, sink into a kind of stupor and so, even unwillingly, offend by the very thing by which he hoped for pardon of his offenses? Who, I say, is so alert and watchful that, while he sings a psalm to God, his mind is never drawn away from the meaning of Scripture? Who is so familiar with God and so joined to him that he can rejoice at having carried out even for one day that apostolic command by which he bids us pray without ceasing? Although all these things may seem light and almost free from sin to some who are wrapped in grosser vices, yet to those who know the good of perfection even a multitude of the smallest things is very heavy.”

“Suppose we put into some large house, crowded with many bundles, tools, and vessels, two men together: one keen-sighted with the full sharpness of his vision, the other whose eyesight has been dulled by bleary eyes. Will not the one whose dim sight prevents him from seeing everything declare that there is nothing there but cupboards, beds, benches, and mangers, and whatever meets not so much the eyes of one looking as the hands of one groping; while on the other hand the one who, with the brightest light of the eyes, has searched out even hidden things, will declare that there are many very small things there, which could scarcely be counted, and which, if they were gathered into one heap, would equal or even perhaps exceed by their number the size of the few things the other had felt? So too the saints, those who, so to speak, see, whose highest zeal is for perfection, shrewdly detect in themselves and most sharply condemn even those things which the dark gaze of our mind does not see; so much so that those who, as it seems to our carelessness, have not darkened the whiteness of their, as it were, snowy body with even a slight blemish of sin, see themselves spattered with many stains, if, I will not say the wickedness of an idle thought has crept into the halls of the mind, but even the memory of a psalm that is to be said turns aside the attention of one praying at the time of prayer. ‘For if,’ they say, ‘when we petition some exalted man, I will not say for our life and safety but even for the sake of some gain, we fix on him the whole sharpness of flesh and mind and hang on his nod in anxious expectation, fearing greatly lest some unsuitable or unfitting word turn away the mercy of the hearer; and then, if, when we stand in the forum and before the tribunals of secular judges, with our adversary standing opposite, in the very midst of the prosecution and conflict a cough, a spitting, a laugh, a yawn, or sleep creeps upon us, with what ill will will the most watchful enemy stir up the judge’s severity to our ruin: how much more, when we petition that knower of all hidden things in the imminent danger of eternal death, especially when the cunning seducer and accuser stands on the other side, must the mercy of the judge be implored with intent and anxious prayer! And not unjustly will one be bound, not with a light sin but with the gravest crime of impiety, who, while pouring out prayer to God, suddenly departs from his presence, as if from the eyes of one who neither sees nor hears, following the vanity of a wicked thought.’ But those who cover the eyes of their heart with a thick veil of vices, and, according to the Savior’s saying, seeing do not see and hearing do not hear nor understand, scarcely see in the recesses of their breast even the great and capital crimes. They cannot see with purified vision any stealthy approaches of thoughts, nor those slippery and hidden itchings in themselves that prick the mind with a fine and subtle suggestion, nor the captivities of their soul. Always wandering with shameless thoughts, they neither know how to grieve when they are drawn away from that contemplation which is unique, nor have anything they grieve to have lost, since, opening their mind to thoughts that rush in as they please, they have no purpose that they hold chiefly or desire in every way.”

“The cause that hurls us into this error is that, being utterly ignorant of the virtue of anamartēsia, that is, sinlessness itself, we think we can contract no fault at all from these idle and slippery wanderings of thoughts. Stupefied by dullness and as if struck with blindness of the eyes, we see nothing in ourselves but capital crimes, and believe that only those are to be avoided which are also condemned by the severity of secular laws; and if we feel ourselves even a little free from these, we at once think there is no sin in us. So, separated from that number of those who see, because we do not see the small particles of the many kinds of filth heaped up within us, we are by no means stung with wholesome compunction if the illness of dejection has disturbed our mind; nor do we grieve at being struck by the suggestion of vainglory; nor do we weep over a prayer offered too slowly or too lukewarmly; nor do we count it a fault that, while we were singing psalms or praying, something other than the prayer or psalm itself came to mind; nor do we shudder that we do not blush to conceive in the heart, even for an hour, many things which we are ashamed to say or do before men, though we know it lies open to the divine sight; nor do we cleanse the pollution of shameful dreams with an abundant washing of tears; nor do we mourn that in the very devotion of almsgiving, when we help the needs of the brothers or supply food to the poor, a covetous hesitation clouds the serenity of our cheerfulness; nor do we believe we are struck by any loss when, forgetting God, we think of what is temporal and corruptible. So that saying of Solomon fits us quite well: ‘They struck me, but I did not feel pain; and they mocked me, but I did not know it.’”

“On the contrary, those who place the sum of all their pleasure, joy, and blessedness in the contemplation of divine and spiritual things alone, when they are drawn away from it even a little against their will by violent thoughts, punish it with the penalty of immediate repentance as a kind of sacrilege. Lamenting that they have preferred to their Creator the very cheap creature to which the gaze of their mind was turned aside, they charge themselves, I might almost say, with the crime of impiety. And although they turn the eyes of their heart with the greatest eagerness to behold the brightness of the divine glory, yet, unable to bear even the briefest darkness of carnal thoughts, they abhor whatever draws the gaze of the mind away from that true light. Finally, when the blessed apostle John wished to instill this disposition in all, he said: ‘Little children, do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of God is not in him; for all that is in the world is the desire of the flesh and the desire of the eyes and the pride of life, which is not from the Father but from the world. And the world is passing away, and its desire; but he who does the will of God abides forever.’ The saints, then, loathe all the things by which this world subsists, but it is impossible that they should not be carried off to them by a brief excursion of thoughts; and no man as yet, except our Lord and Savior, has kept the natural wandering of the mind so always fixed in the contemplation of God that he never sinned by being carried away from it by love of some worldly thing. For Scripture says, ‘Even the stars are not clean in his sight,’ and again, ‘If he does not trust in his saints, and found wickedness in his angels’; or, as the more correct translation has it, ‘Behold, among his saints none is unchangeable, and the heavens are not clean in his sight.’”

“I would rightly say, then, that the saints, who, holding steadily to the remembrance of God, are carried along as if with a suspended step on lines stretched high, are to be compared with schoenobatae, whom people commonly call rope-walkers. They place the whole of their safety and life on the very narrow path of that little rope and do not doubt that they will at once meet a most dreadful death if their foot strays with even a slight stumble or goes beyond the measure of that saving straightness. While, by a wonderful art, they make their airy steps through empty space, if they do not keep that path, narrower than their footprint, with cautious and careful control, the earth, which is as it were the natural base for all and the most solid and safest foundation for everyone, becomes for them an immediate and certain ruin; not because its nature is changed, but because they fall headlong to it by the weight of the flesh. So too that unwearied goodness and unchangeable substance of God harms no one itself; but we, by turning away from the heights and tending to the depths, bring death upon ourselves; indeed, the very turning away becomes death to the one who turns away. For ‘woe to them,’ he says, ‘because they have gone away from me; they will be laid waste, because they have transgressed against me’; and again, ‘Woe to them when I depart from them.’ ‘For your own wickedness will reprove you, and your turning away will rebuke you. Know and see how evil and bitter it is to have forsaken the Lord your God.’ ‘For each one is bound by the cords of his own sins.’ To them the Lord’s rebuke is addressed quite fittingly: ‘Behold, all you who kindle a fire, girded with flames, walk in the light of your fire and in the flames that you have kindled’; and again, ‘He who kindles wickedness,’ he says, ‘will perish by it.’”

“Since, then, the saints feel themselves daily weighed down by the burden of earthly thought and falling from that height of mind, and being carried over, unwillingly or even unknowingly, into the law of sin and death, and, to pass over other things, being called away from the sight of God at least by those works I listed above, good and righteous indeed but still earthly, they certainly have reason to groan continually to the Lord. They have reason, truly humbled and pricked to the heart, to declare themselves sinners not only in words but in disposition, and, constantly asking pardon from the grace of the Lord for all that they incur daily when overcome by the frailty of the flesh, to pour out unceasingly true tears of repentance. For they see themselves entangled even to the very end of life in the same surges for which they are troubled with constant grief, and unable to offer even their very supplications without anxiety of thoughts. Having learned by experience, then, that by human strength, with the burden of the flesh resisting, they cannot reach the end they long for, nor be joined to that chief and highest good according to the desire of their heart, but are led away captive from its sight to worldly things, they fly to the grace of God, who justifies the ungodly, and protest with the apostle: ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ For they feel that they cannot accomplish the good they want, but always fall into the evil they do not want and hate, that is, the movements of thoughts or cares for carnal things.”

“And they delight in the law of God according to the inner man, which, going beyond all visible things, strives always to be united to God alone; but they see another law in their members, that is, implanted in the nature of the human condition, which, fighting against the law of their mind, drags their mind captive by the violent law of sin, forcing it, that is, to leave that chief good and submit to earthly thought. Although this may seem necessary and useful when it is spent in the management of some religious necessity, yet in comparison with that good which delights the gaze of all the saints it is judged by them evil and to be fled, because through it they are in some way, even for a short time, drawn back from the joy of that perfect blessedness. For truly it is the law of sin which the transgression of its author brought upon the human race, through the fault of him on whom that sentence of the most just judge was passed: ‘Cursed is the ground in your works; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and in the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread.’ This, I say, is the law implanted in the members of all mortals, which fights against the law of our mind and keeps it from the divine vision; and this ground, cursed in our works after the knowledge of good and evil, began to bring forth thorns and thistles of thoughts, by whose prickles the natural seeds of the virtues are choked, so that we cannot eat without the sweat of our face that bread of ours which came down from heaven and strengthens the heart of man. The whole human race, then, is subject to this law generally, without any exception. For there is no one, however holy, who does not receive the bread just mentioned with the sweat of his face and anxious attention of heart. But many rich men, as we see, eat that common bread without any sweat of their face.”

“The blessed apostle also declares this law spiritual, saying, ‘For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin.’ For this law which commands us to eat that true bread which came down from heaven in the sweat of our face is spiritual; but that selling under sin makes us carnal. What, I ask, is this sin, and whose? Without doubt Adam’s, by whose transgression, and, so to speak, ruinous bargain and fraudulent trade, we have been sold. For, seduced by the serpent’s persuasion, he sold all his offspring by taking the forbidden food and delivered them to the yoke of perpetual slavery. For this custom is usually kept between seller and buyer: one who wishes to hand himself over to another’s ownership receives from his buyer a price for the loss of his own liberty and his delivery into perpetual slavery. We see this most plainly fulfilled between Adam and the serpent. For, receiving from the serpent, as the price of his liberty, the eating of the forbidden tree, he departed from his natural liberty and chose to give himself up in perpetual slavery to the one from whom he had received the deadly price of the forbidden fruit. Bound thereafter by this condition, he not without reason subjected the whole offspring of his posterity to perpetual service to the same one whose slave he had become. For what else can a slave marriage produce but slaves? What then? Did that cunning and crafty buyer snatch the right of ownership from the true and lawful Lord? Not so. For he did not so seize all God’s property by the trickery of a single fraud that the true Lord lost the power of his dominion, who holds down under the yoke of slavery even that buyer himself, fugitive and rebel though he is. But since the Creator had granted freedom of choice to all rational creatures, he ought not to call back against their will to their inborn liberty those who had sold themselves, against what is right, by the transgression of greedy desire. For whatever is contrary to goodness and fairness is abhorrent to that author of justice and devotion. It would have been evil if he had revoked the benefit of the liberty he had granted; unjust if, crushing and capturing free man by his power, he had not allowed him to exercise the right of the liberty he had received. He reserved his salvation for ages to come, so that the fullness of the appointed time might be completed in right order. For his offspring had to remain under their ancestral condition until the grace of their former Lord, freeing them from their original bonds, restored them to their ancient state of liberty at the price of his own blood. He could have saved them even then, but would not, because fairness did not allow him to break the sanction of his own decree. Do you wish to know the cause of your sale? Hear your Redeemer himself proclaiming it most plainly through the prophet Isaiah: ‘What is the bill of your mother’s divorce, with which I put her away? Or who is my creditor, to whom I sold you? Behold, you were sold for your iniquities, and for your crimes I put away your mother.’ Do you also wish to know plainly why he would not redeem you by the power of his might when you had been delivered to the yoke of slavery? Hear what he added to the preceding words, in which he reproaches those same slaves of sins with the cause of their voluntary sale: ‘Is my hand shortened and made small, so that I cannot redeem? Or is there no power in me to deliver?’ But the same prophet shows what has always stood in the way of his most powerful mercy: ‘Behold,’ he says, ‘the hand of the Lord is not shortened, so that it cannot save, nor is his ear dulled, so that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have made a division between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he does not hear.’”

“Since, then, that first curse of God made us carnal and condemned us to thorns and thistles, and our father sold us by such an unjust bargain that we cannot do the good we want, since, torn from the remembrance of the most high God, we are forced to think of the things of human frailty, and, while burning with love of purity, we are often pricked even against our will by natural incitements which we would wish to know nothing of at all, ‘we know that good does not dwell in our flesh,’ that is, the lasting and continual tranquillity of the contemplation and purity we have spoken of. Instead, there has come about in us this most evil and mournful divorce: though we wish to serve the law of God with the mind, never, of course, wishing to turn our gaze from the divine brightness, yet, surrounded by carnal darkness, we are forced by a kind of law of sin to be torn away from what we know to be good, falling from that height of mind to earthly cares and thoughts, to which the law of sin, that is, the sentence of God which the first offender received, has not without reason condemned us. And so the blessed apostle, while he confesses most plainly that he and all the saints are bound by the inescapable necessity of this sin, yet boldly declares that none of them is to be condemned for it, saying, ‘There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed me from the law of sin and death’; that is, the daily grace of Christ absolves all his saints from this law of sin and death, into which they are constantly forced to fall against their will, when they pray to the Lord for the forgiveness of their debts. You see, then, that the blessed apostle uttered this sentence not in the person of sinners but in that of those who are truly holy and perfect: ‘For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I hate, that I do. I see another law in my members fighting against the law of my mind and leading me captive in the law of sin which is in my members.’”

Germanus: “We say that this cannot fit the persons either of those who are entangled in capital crimes or of the apostle and those who have advanced to his measure; but we think it should properly be understood of those who, after the grace of God and the knowledge of the truth, wishing to abstain from carnal vices, are still dragged to the ingrained desire of their passions by their old habit, which rules most violently in their members like a natural law. For the practice and frequency of sinning becomes as it were a natural law, which, implanted in the members of human weakness, carries off captive to vices the affections of a soul not yet trained in the full pursuit of the virtues but still of a raw and, so to speak, tender chastity; and, subjecting them to death by the old law, delivers them to the yoke of reigning sin, not allowing them to attain the good of purity they love, but rather forcing them to do the evil they abhor.”

Theonas: “Your opinion has made no small progress, since you yourselves have now begun to maintain that this cannot stand at all in the person of those who are altogether sinners, but properly fits those who strive to abstain from carnal vices. Since you have now separated these from the number of sinners, it follows that you will gradually place them among the companies of the faithful and holy. For what kinds of sins do you say these can commit from which, if they are entangled in them after the grace of baptism, they are freed again by the daily grace of Christ? Or of what body of death is the apostle to be believed to have said, ‘Who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord’? Is it not plain, as the truth has forced you yourselves to admit, that he speaks not of those members of capital crimes by which the wages of eternal death are earned, that is, murder, sexual immorality, adulteries, drunkenness, thefts, and robberies, but of that body just mentioned which the daily grace of Christ helps? For whoever, after baptism and the knowledge of God, falls into that body of death, let him know that he must be cleansed not by the daily grace of Christ, that is, by the easy forgiveness which our Lord, when entreated, is wont to grant our errors at every moment, but either by the long affliction of repentance and penal sorrow, or else be delivered for them to the punishments of eternal fire in the future; as the same apostle declares: ‘Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor men who lie with males, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will possess the kingdom of God.’ Or what is this law at war in our members, which fights against the law of our mind, and, when it has led us away resisting and captive in the law of sin and death and made us serve it with the flesh, nonetheless allows us to serve the law of God with the mind? For I do not think that the law of sin here means shameful deeds, or can be understood of the crimes mentioned above; whoever commits these does not serve the law of God with the mind, since he must first fall away from it in spirit before he commits any of them in the flesh. For what is it to serve the law of sin but to fulfil what sin commands? What kind of sin is it, then, by which such holiness and perfection feels itself taken captive, and yet does not doubt that it is to be freed by the grace of Christ, saying, ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord’? What law, I say, will you assert is in our members which, drawing us away from the law of God and taking us captive in the law of sin, makes us wretched rather than guilty, so that we are not delivered to eternal punishments, but sigh as if over an interrupted joy of blessedness, and, seeking a helper to draw us back to it, cry out with the apostle, ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ For what else is being led captive in the law of sin but remaining in the effect and work of sin? Or what other chief good will be given which the saints cannot fulfil, except that in comparison with which, as we said above, all things are not even good? We know indeed that there are many goods in this world, especially chastity, self-restraint, sobriety, humility, justice, mercy, temperance, and devotion; but all these cannot equal that highest good, and can be accomplished, I will not say by the apostles, but even by ordinary men; and those by whom they have not been fulfilled are either punished with eternal punishment or, as was said above, freed by the great labor of repentance, not by the daily grace of Christ. It remains, then, that we must admit that this sentence of the apostle rightly fits the person of the saints alone, who, falling daily into this law, as we said, of sin, not of crimes, are not hurled into wickedness, being sure of the state of their salvation, but, as has often been said, rolled down from divine contemplation to the misery of bodily thoughts, are often cheated of the good of that true blessedness. For if they felt themselves bound by daily crimes through this law of their members, they would surely complain not of the loss of happiness but of innocence; and the apostle Paul would not say, ‘Wretched man that I am,’ but, ‘impure’ or ‘wicked man that I am’; nor would he wish to be freed from the body of this death, that is, from the mortal condition, but from the shameful deeds and crimes of this flesh. But because he felt himself taken captive through the condition of human frailty, that is, drawn away to the anxieties and carnal cares that the law of sin and death produces, groaning over this law of sin into which he had fallen against his will, he runs back at once to Christ and is saved by the ever-present redemption of his grace. Whatever of anxiety, then, that law of sin, which naturally produces the thorns and thistles of thoughts and mortal cares, has sprouted even in the soil of the apostle’s breast, this law of grace at once plucks out. ‘For the law,’ he says, ‘of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed you from the law of sin and death.’”

“This, then, is the inescapable body of death, in which all the perfect who have tasted how sweet the Lord is, rolled back daily, feel with the prophet how evil and bitter it is for them to depart from the Lord their God. This is the body of death which, drawing them back from the heavenly vision, leads them down to earthly things; which makes them, while they sing psalms or lie prostrate in prayer, go over human images, or words, or business, or superfluous acts. This is the body of death by which, though they emulate the holiness of the angels and wish to cleave to the Lord continually, they cannot find the perfection of this good, because the body of death stands in the way; but they do the evil they do not want, that is, they are carried away in mind even to things that do not belong to the progress of the virtues and perfection. Finally, so that the blessed apostle might plainly show that he said this of the saints and the perfect and those like himself, pointing, as it were, with his finger at himself alone, he at once adds, ‘So then I myself’: that is, I who declare these things lay open the hidden places of my own conscience, not another’s. The apostle is accustomed to use this form of speech when he wishes to point to himself especially, as there: ‘I myself, Paul, beseech you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ’; and again, ‘except that I myself did not burden you’; and again, ‘But be it so; I myself did not burden you’; and elsewhere, ‘I myself, Paul, say to you: if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing’; and to the Romans, ‘For I myself could wish to be anathema from Christ for my brothers.’ It can also, not absurdly, be taken so that ‘So then I myself’ is spoken more expressly and with emphasis: that is, I whom you know to be the apostle of Christ, whom you revere with all respect, whom you believe to be the highest and perfect, and in whom Christ speaks, though I serve the law of God with the mind, yet confess that I serve the law of sin with the flesh; that is, through the distraction of the human condition I am sometimes rolled down from heavenly to earthly things, and the height of my mind slips down to cares of lowly things. Through this law of sin I feel myself taken captive at every moment, so that, although I persevere in an unshaken desire for the law of God, I feel I can in no way escape the force of this captivity unless I always flee to the grace of the Savior.”

“And so all the saints, pricked with daily sighs over this frailty of their substance, as they search the varieties of their thoughts and the hidden places and inner chambers of their conscience, cry out in supplication, ‘Do not enter into judgment with your servant, for no one living will be justified in your sight’; and, ‘Who will boast that he has a chaste heart? Or who will be confident that he is clean from sin?’; and again, ‘There is no righteous man on earth who does good and does not sin’; and also, ‘Who understands his offenses?’ And they have judged human righteousness so weak and imperfect and always in need of God’s mercy that one of them, whose iniquities and sins God cleansed by sending the burning coal of his word from the altar, said, after that wonderful contemplation of God, after the sight of the exalted Seraphim and the revelation of heavenly mysteries: ‘Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people that has unclean lips.’ As I think, he would perhaps not have felt the uncleanness of his lips even then, had he not been counted worthy to know the true and complete purity of perfection through the contemplation of God, at the sight of which he suddenly recognized his uncleanness, unknown to him before. For when he says, ‘Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips,’ what follows shows that he confessed this of the uncleanness of his own lips, not the people’s: ‘and I dwell in the midst of a people that has unclean lips.’ But even when, praying, he confesses the uncleanness of sins as though universal, he embraces in a general supplication the people not of the wicked only but also of the righteous, saying, ‘Behold, you were angry, and we sinned; in them we have always been, and we shall be saved. We have all become like one unclean, all our righteousnesses like a menstrual rag.’ What, I ask, can be plainer than this sentence, in which the prophet embraced not one but all our righteousnesses, and, looking around at all things judged either unclean or horrible, because he could find nothing filthier or more impure in human life, chose to compare them to a menstrual rag? In vain, then, is the point of a thorny objection set against the plainest truth, as you said a little while ago: if no one is without sin, no one is holy; if no one is holy, then no one will be saved. For the knot of this question can be untied by this testimony of the prophet: ‘Behold,’ he says, ‘you were angry, and we sinned’; that is, when, turning away from the pride or negligence of our heart, you stripped us of your help, at once the whirlpool of sins swallowed us, as if someone were to say to the most brilliant element of the sun, ‘Behold, you have set, and at once dark obscurity has covered us.’ And yet, though he says here that the saints sinned, and not only sinned but always remained in their sins, he does not despair of salvation altogether, but adds, ‘In them we have always been, and we shall be saved.’ I will compare this sentence, ‘Behold, you were angry, and we sinned,’ to that of the apostle, ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ Again, what the prophet adds, ‘In them we have always been, and we shall be saved,’ agrees with the apostle’s following words, ‘The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ Likewise that saying of the same prophet, ‘Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people that has unclean lips,’ seems to mean the same as the words above, ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ And what follows in the prophet, ‘And behold, one of the Seraphim flew to me, and in his hand was a live coal (or a pebble), which he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: Behold, this has touched your lips, and your iniquity will be taken away, and your sin will be cleansed,’ is such that it seems to have been uttered by the mouth of Paul, who says, ‘The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ You see, then, how all the saints truly confess themselves sinners, not so much in the person of the people as in their own, and yet by no means despair of their salvation, but count on the fullness of justification, which, because of the condition of human frailty, they do not trust they can attain, from the grace and mercy of the Lord.”

“The teaching of the Savior also shows us that no one in this life, however holy, is free from the debts of sins. Handing on to his disciples the form of perfect prayer, among those other sublime and most sacred commands, which, since they were given only to the holy and perfect, cannot fit the wicked and unbelievers, he ordered this to be inserted: ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.’ If, then, this prayer is offered truly by the saints too, as we must believe without doubt, who can be found so stubborn and presumptuous, so puffed up with the pride of diabolical madness, that, declaring himself to be without sin, he not only believes himself greater than the apostles but even accuses the Savior himself, as it were, of ignorance or vanity, as if either he did not know that some could be free from debts, or he taught in vain those whom he knew did not need the remedy of this prayer? But since all the saints without exception, keeping the precepts of their King, say daily, ‘Forgive us our debts,’ if they speak the truth, truly no one is free from fault; and if they pretend, it is equally true that they are not free from the sin of lying. And so that most wise Ecclesiastes, running over in mind all human actions and pursuits, declares without any exception, ‘For there is no righteous man on earth who does good and does not sin’; that is, no one on this earth so holy, so diligent, so intent, has ever been or will ever be found who can cleave so continually to that true and unique good that he does not feel daily that he has sinned by being distracted from it. Yet though he is declared unable to be free from fault, he is not denied to be righteous.”

“Whoever, then, ascribes anamartēsia, that is, sinlessness, to human nature, let him contend with us not with empty words but with the testimony and proof of his own conscience; and only then let him declare himself without sin, when he feels that he has not been torn away from this highest good. Or rather, whoever, considering his conscience, finds that he has celebrated, not to say more, even one synaxis without any interruption of word, deed, or thought, let him declare himself without sin. So, since we admit that the swift excursions of the human mind cannot be free from all these idle and superfluous things, we therefore truly confess, as a consequence, that we are not without sin. For with whatever circumspection each one strives to keep his heart, he will never guard it according to the desire of his spirit, since the condition of the flesh resists. For the more the human mind advances and reaches a purer contemplation, the more unclean it will see itself, as in the mirror of its purity; for it must be that, while the soul stretches itself to a more sublime vision and, looking forward, longs for greater things than it does, it always despises the things in which it is as lower and cheaper. For a purer gaze marks more things, and an irreproachable life produces for itself a greater sorrow of self-reproach, and amendment of conduct and an attentive emulation of the virtues multiply groans and sighs. For no one can be content with the stage he has reached; and the purer someone is in mind, the filthier he sees himself and the more he finds reasons for humility rather than pride; and the more swiftly he has climbed to higher things, the more he sees there is still left for him to reach toward. Finally, that outstanding apostle whom Jesus loved, lying on his breast, uttered this sentence as if from the Lord’s heart: ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.’ So if, when we say that we have no sin, we do not have the truth, that is, Christ, in us, what else do we gain but to prove ourselves, by this very profession, from sinners to be criminals and impious?”

“Finally, if you wish to explore more truly whether it is possible for human substance to possess sinlessness, from whom could we learn this more plainly than from those who have crucified their flesh with its vices and desires, and to whom the world is truly crucified? Although they have not only torn all vices out of their hearts by the roots but are even trying to shut out the thoughts and memory of sins, they nevertheless faithfully profess every day that they cannot be free from the stain of sin even for one hour.”

“Yet we ought not to keep ourselves away from the Lord’s communion because we recognize that we are sinners; rather, we should hasten to it more and more eagerly for the healing of the soul and the purification of the spirit, but with such humility of mind and faith that, judging ourselves unworthy to receive so great a grace, we seek rather remedies for our wounds. Otherwise not even a yearly communion could be worthily ventured, as some do who, living in monasteries, measure the dignity, sanctification, and merit of the heavenly sacraments in such a way that they think they should be received only by the holy and spotless, and not rather that they make us holy and clean by our sharing in them. Such people incur a greater presumption of arrogance than they seem to themselves to avoid, since, at least when they receive them, they judge themselves worthy of receiving them. It is much more right that, with the humility of heart by which we believe and confess that we can never touch those holy mysteries by our merit, we should take them every Lord’s day as a remedy for our illnesses, than that, puffed up by the vain persuasion of the heart, we should believe ourselves worthy to share in them even after a year. So that we may understand these things and hold them fruitfully, let us implore more earnestly the mercy of the Lord to help us to carry them out. For these things are learned not, like the other human arts, by a preceding theory of words, but rather with action and experience going before; and unless they are both frequently examined and polished in the conferences of spiritual men and anxiously sifted by proofs and daily experience, they either grow obsolete through neglect or perish through idle forgetfulness.”

This twenty-fourth conference, of Abba Abraham, is now brought forth with Christ’s favor, closing the traditions and precepts of all the elders. When it has been completed through your prayers, corresponding mystically to the number of those twenty-four elders who are said in the holy Apocalypse to offer their crowns to the Lamb, we believe we shall be released from the debts of all our promises. So if these twenty-four elders of ours have been crowned with any glory for the merit of their teaching, they will offer it with bowed heads to the Lamb who was slain for the salvation of the world. For it is he who, for the honor of his name, deigned to give both them so excellent a meaning and us such speech as we have, by which so great a depth is attained. And the merits of his gift must be referred to the author of all good things, to whom more is owed the more is paid. To this Abraham, then, we brought with anxious confession the assault of our thoughts, by which we were pressed with daily surges of soul to go back to our province and see our relatives again. For the greatest occasion of these desires arose from this: we remembered that our relatives were endowed with such devotion and piety that we presumed they would by no means hinder our purpose; and we kept turning over in our minds that we would gain more progress from their constant support, and would be occupied with no anxiety for bodily things and no distraction of providing food, since they would gladly and amply supply everything our needs required. Besides this, we were feeding our souls with the hope of empty joys, believing that we would reap the greatest fruit from the conversion of many who would be directed to the way of salvation by our example and warnings. Then, too, the situation of the very places where our forebears had their ancestral property, and the pleasant charm of those regions, was painted before our eyes: how pleasantly and suitably it stretched out in expanses of solitude, so that the secret places of the woods could not only delight a monk but also provide a very great supply of food. When we had simply laid all this before the old man, in keeping with the faith of our conscience, and had testified with abundant tears that we could no longer bear the force of the assaults unless God’s grace helped us through his medicine, he was silent for a long time and hesitated, and at last, groaning deeply, said:

“The weakness of your thoughts shows that you have not yet renounced worldly desires, nor mortified your former longings. For as the wandering of your desires bears witness to the sloth of your heart, so you are enduring this exile and absence from your relatives only in the flesh, when you ought rather to have taken it up in the mind. For all these things would long since have been buried and wholly torn out of your hearts if you had grasped either the meaning of renunciation itself or the chief reason for the solitude in which we live. And so I perceive that you are suffering from that sickness of idleness which is marked thus in Proverbs: ‘Every idle man is full of desires,’ and again, ‘Desires kill the sluggard.’ For we too could have had these advantages of carnal comfort that you have mentioned, if we had believed they suited our purpose, or had judged that such fruit could come to us from those pleasant delights as is gained from the squalor of these places and the contrition of the body. Nor are we so bereft of the support of relatives that we lack those who would gladly sustain us from their property, if that sentence of the Savior did not meet us and exclude whatever belongs to the comfort of this flesh: ‘He who does not leave (or hate) father and mother and children and brothers cannot be my disciple.’ And even if we were wholly deprived of the protection of relatives, we could not lack the services of the powerful of this world, who would gladly supply our needs with most ready generosity and with every thanksgiving. Supported by their munificence, we would be free of the anxiety of providing food, if that prophetic curse did not strongly deter us: ‘For cursed,’ it says, ‘is the man who puts his hope in man,’ and, ‘Do not trust in princes.’ We could also have placed our cells at least on the bank of the river Nile and had water at our doors, instead of being forced to carry it on our necks from four miles away, did not the blessed apostle make us untiring in bearing this labor and continually encourage us with this saying: ‘Each will receive his own reward according to his labor.’ Nor are we unaware that there are also some pleasant retreats in our own regions, where an abundance of fruit and the charm or richness of gardens would supply the needs of our food with the least bodily labor, did we not fear that reproach addressed to the rich man in the Gospel being flung at us: ‘For you received your consolation in your life.’ But, despising all these things and scorning them together with all the pleasure of this world, we delight only in this squalor, and prefer the dreadful vastness of this solitude to all delights, and do not compare the riches of any fertile soil, however great, with the bitterness of these sands, pursuing not the temporal gains of this body but the eternal profits of the spirit. For it is too little for a monk to have renounced once, that is, to have despised present things at the beginning of his conversion, unless he persists in renouncing them daily. For to the very end of this life we must say with the prophet, ‘And I have not desired the day of man, you know.’ So the Lord too says in the Gospel, ‘If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.’”

“And so one who keeps watchful care over the purity of the inner man must seek places which do not, by the fertility of their richness, tempt his mind to the distraction of cultivation, nor drive him from the fixed and unmoving station of his cell and compel him to go out to some open-air work, and so, his thoughts being poured out as it were into the open, scatter in different directions all the direction of his mind and that most subtle view of his goal. No one at all, however careful and watchful, can guard against these things or even see them, except one who keeps his body and soul continually shut within the enclosure of the walls. So, like an excellent fisherman providing his food by the apostolic art, intent and motionless he may catch the shoals of thoughts swimming in the most tranquil depth of his heart, and, as if looking carefully into the depths from a projecting rock, judge with shrewd discernment which he should draw to himself with the saving hook, and which he should neglect and reject as bad and harmful fish.”

“Persevering continually in this watch, each will effectively fulfil what is very clearly expressed through the prophet Habakkuk: ‘I will stand upon my watch and climb upon the rock, and I will look out to see what he will say in me, and what I shall answer to him who reproves me.’ How laborious and difficult this is, is most plainly proved by the experience of the mind of those who live in the desert of Calamus or Porphyrion. For although they are separated from all cities and human dwellings by a longer stretch of solitude than the desert of Scete (for, penetrating the wastes of a most vast solitude by seven or eight stages, they scarcely reach the secret places of their cells), yet, because there they give themselves to agriculture and are by no means kept within enclosures, when they come to these squalid places where we live, or to those of Scete, they are troubled by such surges of thoughts and such anxiety of mind that, like raw beginners who have never even lightly touched the exercises of solitude, they cannot bear living in a cell and the silences of quiet, and, at once thrown out of them, are driven away like the inexperienced and novices. For they have not learned to calm the movements of the inner man and to meet the storms of their thoughts with constant care and persevering attention, since, sweating every day at open-air work, they fly about all day in the empty air not only with the flesh but also with the mind, and pour out their thoughts everywhere into the open along with the movement of their bodies. And so they neither perceive the many-desiring vanity of their soul nor can restrain its slippery wanderings; and, unable to bear contrition of spirit, they think the constancy of their own silence unbearable, and, untiring in the laborious work of the fields, they are overcome by idleness and wearied by the length of their rest.”

“It is no wonder if one sitting in his cell, with his thoughts gathered as into a very narrow enclosure, is choked by a multitude of anxieties, which, bursting out with the man from the prison of his dwelling, at once fly about in all directions like unbridled horses. While for the present they wander from their stables, as it were, some brief and sad comfort is at once found; but when the body returns to its own cell and the whole troop of thoughts runs back again as to its own home, the very habit of long-standing license stirs up sharper goads. So those who cannot yet, or do not know how to, struggle against the instigations of their own wills, when they are distressed in their cells as acedia assails their unaccustomed breast more violently, if they grant themselves the liberty of going out more often, relaxing the law of strictness, will stir up against themselves by this supposed remedy a sharper plague; just as some believe they can quench the force of internal fevers by drinking very cold water, when in fact it is clear that the fire is kindled rather than calmed by this, since a much heavier affliction follows that momentary relief.”

“So every monk’s attention must always be fixed on one thing, and the rise and circuit of all his thoughts must be strenuously called back to that very thing, that is, to the remembrance of God. It is like one who wishes to close in on high the vault of a rounded apse: he continually draws around it the line from that most precise center and, by its most certain rule, brings together by his skill the whole evenness of the round structure. But whoever tries to complete it without the test of that midpoint, however great his presumption of art or talent, cannot possibly keep the evenness of its circuit without error, or discover by sight alone how much he has taken away by his error from the beauty of true roundness, unless he always runs back to that indicator of truth, and, correcting the inner and outer curve of his work by its judgment, encloses the mass of so great a height by the law of a single point. So too our mind, unless it moves about the love of the Lord alone, as a center fixed immovably, through all the moments of our works and undertakings, and, by the tested compass, so to speak, of love, either fits or rejects the quality of all our thoughts, will by no means build with tested skill that structure of the spiritual building of which Paul is the architect, nor possess the beauty of that house which blessed David longed to present to the Lord in his heart, saying, ‘Lord, I have loved the beauty of your house and the place of the dwelling of your glory.’ Instead, it will foolishly raise in its heart a house unseemly and unworthy of the Holy Spirit and soon to fall, not to be glorified by the hospitality of the blessed Indweller, but to be crushed mournfully by the ruin of its own building.”

Germanus: “This kind of work that can be done within the cell is commanded by a very useful and necessary rule. For we have often learned its advantage not only from the example of your blessedness, grounded in the imitation of apostolic virtues, but also from the testimony of our own experience. But why the nearness of relatives, which you yourselves have not greatly rejected, should be so much avoided by us is not clear enough. For since we see that you, walking blamelessly in every way of perfection, not only live in your own regions but some of you have not even withdrawn far from your own villages, why should what does you no harm be thought harmful to us?”

Abraham: “Sometimes we see bad examples taken from good things. For if someone ventures to do the same things without the same disposition and purpose, or with unequal virtue, he will certainly fall into snares of deception and death from the very things by which others gain the fruit of eternal life. That boy strong of hand, matched in combat with that most warlike giant, would undoubtedly have suffered this if he had been clothed with Saul’s manly and very strong armor; and the arms with which a sturdier age had laid low countless troops of enemies could have brought certain destruction on the young man, had he not, with prudent discernment, chosen the kind of arms suited to his youth and armed himself against the most hideous enemy not with the breastplate and shield with which he saw the others equipped, but with those weapons with which he himself could fight. So each of us should first weigh carefully the measure of his strength and take up whatever discipline he chooses according to its capacity; for although all are useful, all cannot be suitable for all. For we do not approve anachoresis as suitable for everyone just because it is good; for many find it not only fruitless but even harmful. Nor, because we rightly declare the institution of the coenobia or the care of the brothers holy and praiseworthy, do we therefore think that everyone should seek it. So too the fruit of the guesthouse is very rich, but it cannot be sought by everyone without loss of patience. So, first, the practices of your region and of this one must be weighed against each other; then the strength of men, formed by the continual practice of virtues or vices, must be weighed in different scales. For it can happen that what is hard and impossible for a man of one nation, ingrained custom has somehow turned into nature for others: just as some nations, separated by the great difference of their regions, bear great cold or the heat of the sun without any covering of the body, which others, not experienced in that harshness of climate, cannot endure, however strong they are. So you too, who in this region, at any rate, try with the utmost effort of mind and body to fight against the nature, as it were, of your homeland in many things, consider carefully whether in those regions, sluggish, as is said, and bound as it were by the cold of great unbelief, you could sustain this, so to speak, nakedness. For the antiquity of holy life has instilled this strength of purpose in our people as if by nature; if you see that you are equal to their constancy and virtue, you need not flee the nearness of your relatives and brothers either.”

“So that you may measure the amount of your strength with a fitting estimate against a sure test of strictness, I will briefly tell you what a certain old man, Abba Apollo, did. If the inmost examination of your heart judges that you are not inferior to his purpose and virtue, you may venture to live in your homeland and near your relatives without loss to your purpose and danger to your profession, sure that neither the affection of kinship nor the delight of places can overcome the strictness of this humility, which in this province not only your will but also the necessity of living in a foreign land wrings from you. To this old man, then, his brother came in the dead of night, imploring him to come out of his monastery for a little while and help him pull out an ox which, he complained tearfully, was stuck in the mud of a marsh some way off, because he could by no means drag it out alone. Abba Apollo said to him as he persistently begged, ‘Why did you not ask our younger brother, whom you passed on your way and who was nearer to you than I?’ The man, thinking that he had forgotten the death of their brother, long since buried, and was as it were out of his mind from the excessive constancy of his self-restraint and solitude, answered, ‘How could I call from the tomb one who died fifteen years ago?’ Abba Apollo said, ‘Do you not know, then, that I too have been dead to this world for twenty years and can no longer give you from the tomb of this cell any comforts that belong to the state of the present life? Christ does not allow me to relax even a little from the purpose of mortification I have taken up in order to pull out your ox, when he did not grant even the briefest moment’s respite for the burial of a father, which would certainly have been a far quicker, more honorable, and more devout thing to do.’ So now search the secrets of your breast and judge prudently whether you too could keep such strictness of mind continually near your relatives. When you feel that you are like him in this mortification of soul, then at last know that the nearness of relatives and brothers will likewise be no harm to you: that is, that you believe yourselves as dead to them, though they live close by, so that you neither let them be cherished by your comforts nor let yourselves be relaxed by their services.”

Germanus: “On this you have left no further room for doubt. For we are sure that we could by no means practice near them either the meanness of our present dress or this daily going barefoot, nor would we provide what is needed for food there with similar labor, as here we are forced to carry even our water daily on our necks from three miles away. For neither our shame nor theirs would allow us to do these things before them at all. But what harm will it do our purpose if, with them supplying everything and ourselves wholly freed from all anxiety of providing food, we give ourselves only to reading and prayer, so that, with this labor by which we are now distracted removed, we may apply ourselves more intently to spiritual pursuits alone?”

Abraham: “I will set against this not my own opinion but that of blessed Antony, by which he refuted the sloth of a certain brother languishing in the lukewarmness you speak of, in such a way that he also cut the knot of your proposal. For when, as I said, someone came to that old man and said that the anchoritic discipline was not at all to be admired, declaring that it was of greater virtue if someone practiced the things of perfection among men rather than in the desert, blessed Antony asked where he himself lived. When he said that he lived near his relatives, and boasted that, freed by their provision from all the care and anxiety of daily work, he applied himself unceasingly to reading and prayer alone without any distraction of spirit, blessed Antony said again, ‘Tell me, my friend, whether you are saddened by their losses or misfortunes, and likewise rejoice at their prosperity.’ He admitted that he shared in both. The old man said to him, ‘Know that in the world to come too you will be reckoned with the lot of those with whom in this life you are shaken with joy or sorrow in sharing their gain or loss.’ Not content with this sentence, blessed Antony entered a still wider field of discussion, saying: ‘This way of life and this most lukewarm state strike you not only with the loss I have mentioned (although you do not feel it now, saying in a way, according to that parable of Proverbs, “They struck me, but I did not feel pain; and they mocked me, but I did not know it,” or what is said in the prophet, “And strangers devoured his strength, and he did not know it”), namely that, changing your mind daily with the variety of events, they plunge it unceasingly into earthly things; but also they cheat you of the fruit of your hands and the just reward of your own labor, not allowing you, propped up by their provision, to prepare your daily food with your own hands according to the rule of the blessed apostle. When he was delivering his last precepts to the leaders of the church of Ephesus, he recalled that, even while he was occupied with the holy pursuits of Gospel preaching, he had provided it not only for himself but also for those who were hindered by the necessary services of his ministry, saying, “You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my needs and to those who are with me.” And to show that he did this as a pattern for our benefit, he says elsewhere, “We were not idle among you, nor did we eat anyone’s bread for nothing, but in labor and toil we worked night and day, so as not to burden any of you; not because we did not have the right, but to give ourselves as a pattern to you, that you might imitate us.”’”

“‘And therefore, although we too did not lack the support of relatives, we preferred this poverty to all riches, and chose to prepare the daily food of the body by our own sweat rather than be propped up by the secure provision of relatives, setting below this most laborious poverty that idle meditation of the Scriptures and fruitless persistence in reading which you proclaim. We would without doubt most gladly follow it if apostolic authority had handed it down by its examples as more useful, or the practices of the elders had wholesomely defined it so. But know that you are struck by no lighter loss in this too than in the one we mentioned above: that, although you are of sound and strong body, you are supported by another’s alms, which rightly belong to the weak alone. For certainly the whole human race, except only that kind of monks who, according to the apostle’s command, live by the daily labors of their hands, waits for the agape of another’s mercy. Hence it is certain that not only those who boast that they are fed by the wealth of their relatives, or the labors of their servants, or the produce of their estates, but even the kings of this world are sustained by agape. This, finally, is the definition of our forebears, who decreed that whatever is spent on the necessity of daily food that has not been produced and gained by the work of our hands must be counted as agape, according to the apostle, who, wholly forbidding the idle the help of another’s generosity, says, “He who does not work, let him not eat.”’ With these words blessed Antony, speaking against a certain man, also taught us by the example of his teaching to avoid the most pernicious flatteries of relatives and the agape of all who supply what is needed for food, and further the charm of a pleasant dwelling; and to prefer to all the riches of this world sands rough with natural bitterness and regions scorched by salt floods and for that very reason subject to no man’s right and ownership; so that we may not only avoid crowds of men on the pretext of a trackless solitude, but also that the nature of a fertile soil may by no means tempt us to the distraction of any kind of cultivation, by which the mind, drawn away from that chief watch over the heart, would be made barren for spiritual pursuits.”

“As for your confidence that you can save others too, and your haste to see your homeland again in the hope of greater gain, hear on this too a story of Abba Macarius, most charmingly and aptly framed, which he offered to someone burning with similar desires as the medicine of a most timely narrative. ‘There was,’ he said, ‘in a certain city a very skilled barber who, shaving each man for three denarii and so earning a thin and cheap reward for his work, bought from that same amount what he needed for food each day, and, when every care of the body had been met, put a hundred denarii into his purse every day. But while he was steadily storing up this profit, he heard that in a certain far-off city men paid a barber a solidus each. When he learned this, he said, “How long shall I be content with this beggary, earning a pittance of three denarii with toil, when I could go there and gather riches from a huge profit in solidi?” So he at once took the tools of his trade, spent on travel everything he had collected and kept here over a long time, and with the greatest toil reached that most profitable city. There, on the very day he entered, he received from each man the reward for his work as he had learned, and in the evening, seeing that he had gained a great number of solidi, he went happily to the market to buy the food needed for his meal. When he began to buy it at a great price in solidi, he spent all the solidi he had earned on a very small meal and did not bring home the profit of even one denarius. When he saw that his earnings were used up each day in such a way that he could not only save nothing but could scarcely meet the very needs of daily sustenance, he reflected within himself and said, “I will go back to my city and seek again that very thin profit, from which, when every care of the body had been met, a daily surplus gave me what would grow into support for my old age. Although it seemed small and thin, it produced no small sum by constant increase. That profit in coppers was in fact more profitable to me than this imaginary profit in solidi, from which not only is there no surplus to be stored, but even the very need of daily food is scarcely met.”’ And so it is more right for us to pursue with unbroken constancy this very thin fruit of this solitude, which no worldly cares, no worldly distractions, no pride of vainglory and vanity gnaws away, and no anxieties of daily necessity diminish (‘for a little is better to the righteous than the great riches of sinners’), than to aim at those greater gains which, even if they are obtained by the most profitable conversion of many, will still be consumed by the necessity of worldly life and the daily diminutions of distractions. For, according to the sentence of Solomon, ‘better is one handful with rest than two handfuls with toil and presumption of spirit.’ All who are quite weak must be entangled in these illusions and losses: while they are still unsure of their own salvation and still need another’s teaching and training, they are driven by diabolical illusions to convert and rule others; and even if they could gain some profit from the conversion of some, they will squander whatever they have gained by their impatience and undisciplined conduct. For what the prophet Haggai describes will happen to them: ‘And he who gathers wages puts them into a bag with holes.’ For truly he stores his gains in a bag with holes who loses, through the intemperance of his heart and the daily distraction of his soul, whatever he seems to gain through the conversion of others. So it comes about that, while they believe they are gaining richer profits by teaching others, they are deprived even of their own correction. ‘For there are some who make themselves out rich though having nothing, and some who humble themselves in great riches,’ and, ‘Better is a man in obscurity who serves himself than one who gains honor for himself and lacks bread.’”

Germanus: “By these comparisons your discussion has shown us quite fittingly the errors of our illusions. We likewise long to know their causes and cures, and wish also to be taught where this deception came to us from. For no one doubts that no one can apply remedies to evil illnesses unless he has first declared the very origins of the diseases.”

Abraham: “There is one source and origin of all vices, but according to the character of the part, or, so to speak, the member of the soul that has been corrupted, it receives different names of passions and corruptions. This is sometimes proved by the example of bodily diseases too: though their cause is one, it is distinguished into different kinds of illness according to the character of the members affected. For when the force of a harmful humor has seized the citadel of the body, that is, the head, it produces the complaint of headache; when it has invaded the ears or eyes, it turns into an ear or eye disease; when it has spread to the joints and the extremities of the hands, the illness is called arthritis and chiragra; and when it has flowed down to the lowest part of the feet, it is called gout, its name changed. So the one and same origin of a harmful humor is distinguished by as many names as the parts of the members it has seized. In the same way, passing from visible to invisible things, let us believe that the force of each vice is in the parts and, so to speak, members of our soul. Since all the wisest define it as of threefold power, it must be that either its logikon, that is, the rational part, or its thymikon, that is, the irascible part, or its epithymētikon, that is, the concupiscible part, is corrupted by some assault. When, then, the force of a harmful passion has seized any of these faculties, the vice too is given a name according to its corruption. For if the plague of vices has infected its rational part, it will produce the vices of vainglory, conceit, envy, pride, presumption, contentiousness, and heresy. If it has wounded the irascible faculty, it will give birth to rage, impatience, dejection, acedia, faintheartedness, and cruelty. If it has corrupted the concupiscible part, it will generate gluttony, sexual immorality, covetousness, avarice, and harmful and earthly desires.”

“So if you wish to know the source and origin of this vice, know that the rational part of your mind and soul has been corrupted, from which the vices of presumption and vainglory usually sprout. So this member of the soul, so to speak, must first be healed by you through the judgment of right discernment and the virtue of humility. Because it is corrupted, while you believe that you have not only reached the heights of perfection but can even teach others, and judge yourselves sufficient and fit for the instruction of the rest, you are carried away through the pride of vainglory by the vanity of wandering which your confession revealed. You will be able to cut these off hereafter without difficulty if, grounded, as I said, in the humility of true discernment, you learn with contrition of mind how laborious and difficult it is for each of us to save his own soul, and recognize with the inmost disposition of your heart not only that you are far removed from that presumption of teaching, but that you still need the help of a teacher.”

“Apply, then, to this member or part of your soul, which we have said is especially wounded, the medicine of true humility; since in you, as far as appears, it is weaker than the other virtues of the soul, it must be the first to give way to the devil’s attack. It is as usually happens in human bodies when certain harms strike, arising either from added labor or from corruption of the air: those parts that are weaker are the first to yield and give way to these misfortunes, and when the disease has settled more particularly in them, it wastes the healthy parts of the body too with the same plague. So too the soul of each of us, as the pestilent breath of vices blows, must be tempted most by that passion in which its more tender and weaker part resists the strong thrusts of the enemy less bravely, and must run the danger of captivity in those places where careless watch opens an easier approach to betrayal. So Balaam concluded by sure reasoning that the people of God could be deceived, advising that deadly snares be laid for the children of Israel from the side where he knew them to be weak, not doubting that, when an abundance of women was offered, they would at once fall into the ruin of sexual immorality, because he knew that the concupiscible parts of their souls were corrupt. So the spiritual powers of wickedness test each of us with cunning malice, laying treacherous snares especially for those affections of the soul in which they perceive it to be sick. For example, when they see that the rational parts of our soul are corrupted, they try to deceive us in the way in which Scripture records King Ahab was deceived by those Syrians who said, ‘We know that the kings of Israel are merciful; so let us put sackcloth on our loins and ropes on our heads, and go out to the king of Israel and say to him: Your servant Benhadad says, Let my soul live, I pray.’ Moved not by true devotion but by the vain praise of mercy, he said, ‘If he is still alive, he is my brother.’ By this example they make us too, deceived by an error of that rational part, incur God’s displeasure from the very thing by which we believed we would gain a reward and receive the prize of devotion; and a like rebuke is spoken to us: ‘Because you let go out of your hand a man worthy of death, your life shall be for his life, and your people for his people.’ Or when the unclean spirit says, ‘I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets,’ he undoubtedly lays the snares of deception through the rational faculty, which he knew to lie open to deadly plots. The same spirit thought this of our Lord too; when he had tempted him in these three affections of the soul, in which he knew the whole human race is taken captive, he gained nothing by his so cunning snares. For he attacked the concupiscible part of his mind, saying, ‘Command that these stones become bread’; the irascible, when he tried to spur him to seek the power of the present age and the kingdoms of this world; the rational, when he said, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.’ His illusion gained nothing in these because he found nothing corrupted in him, according to the guess he had conceived by false opinion. So no part of his soul, when tempted by the enemy’s snares, gave consent. ‘For behold,’ he says, ‘the prince of this world comes, and he will find nothing in me.’”

Germanus: “Among the other kinds of illusions and errors which, as your blessedness perceived with the keen insight of your mind, had inflamed us with longing for our homeland through the vain promise of spiritual advantages, this too was one of the greatest causes: that, being sometimes visited by brothers, we can by no means cling to continual seclusion and long silence as we desire. Through this, the course and measure of our daily self-restraint, which we wish to keep unbroken for ever for the chastising of the body, must be interrupted when some brothers arrive. We believe this would certainly not happen in our province, where it is possible to find either no man of this profession or very few.”

Abraham: “Never to be visited by people is a sign of an unreasonable and ill-considered strictness, or rather of the greatest lukewarmness. For it is fair that one who walks with very slow steps on the way he has taken up, and lives according to the former man, should be visited, I will not say by none of the saints, but by none of men at all. But if you burn with a true and perfect love of our Lord and follow God, who is love, with full fervor of spirit, then to whatever inaccessible places you flee, they must be visited by people; and the nearer the ardor of divine love has brought you to God, the greater the multitude of holy brothers that will flow to you. For, according to the Lord’s sentence, a city set on a mountain cannot be hidden; for ‘those who love me,’ says the Lord, ‘I will glorify, but those who despise me shall be without honor.’ But you should know that this is the most subtle cunning of the devil, this the most hidden pit into which he hurls all the wretched and careless: while promising them greater things, he steals from them the necessary profits of daily fruit, persuading them that more remote and vaster solitudes should be sought, and painting them in their hearts as if planted with wonderful delights. He even invents certain unknown places, which do not exist anywhere at all, as if known and prepared and already given into our power and to be possessed without any difficulty. He also lies that the people of that region are tractable and ready to follow the way of salvation, so that, while promising richer fruits for the soul there, he may fraudulently snatch away present gains. For when anyone, separated by this vain hope from the company of the elders, has been deprived of all that he had vainly painted for himself in his heart, he will wake up as if rising from the deepest sleep and find nothing of what he dreamed. And so the devil will never allow him, entangled in greater necessities of this life and inextricable snares, even to breathe again toward what he had promised himself; and, bound no longer by those rare and spiritual visits of brothers that he had avoided before, but by the daily incursions of worldly people, he will never let him return even to a moderate quiet and discipline of anachoresis.”

“That most welcome interval of relaxation and kindness which usually comes with the arrival of brothers, too, though it may seem to you troublesome and to be avoided, hear patiently in a few words how useful and wholesome it is for both our body and our spirit. It often happens, I will not say to novices and the weak, but even to the most experienced and perfect, that unless the direction and severity of their mind is softened by some relaxations in turn, it falls either into lukewarmness of spirit or into a harmful illness of the body. And so, when even frequent visits of brothers occur, the prudent and perfect should not only bear them patiently but embrace them gladly. First, because they spur us always to long more eagerly for the secrecy of solitude (for while it is thought in a way to hold back our course, it keeps it untiring and continual; if it were never slowed by some obstacle, it could not run to the end with unwearied speed); then, because it grants the necessity of refreshing our poor body together with the fruit of kindness, conferring on us, with a most pleasant relaxation of the body, greater gains than those which were to be acquired through the weariness of abstinence. On this I will briefly give a most apt comparison, well known from an ancient story.”

“It is told that the most blessed John, while gently stroking a partridge with his hands, suddenly saw a certain philosopher coming to him in hunting dress. He was surprised that a man of such reputation and fame should lower himself to such small and humble amusements, and said, ‘Are you that John whose remarkable and most celebrated fame drew me too with the greatest desire to know you? Why then are you occupied with such cheap amusements?’ Blessed John said to him, ‘What is it that you are carrying in your hand?’ He said, ‘A bow.’ ‘And why,’ he said, ‘do you not carry it about everywhere always strung?’ He answered him, ‘One must not, lest by constant bending the strength of its stiffness be loosened, softened, and lost, and when stronger arrows must be aimed at some beast, a more violent shot cannot be sent because the stiffness has been lost through the excess of continual tension.’ ‘Nor, young man,’ said blessed John, ‘let this so small and brief relaxation of our mind offend you; for unless it sometimes eases and loosens the rigor of its tension by some relaxation, it will grow slack from unrelieved strain and will not be able to obey the power of the spirit when necessity demands.’”

Germanus: “Since you have given us remedies for all our illusions, and the devil’s snares by which we were shaken have been uncovered for us by your teaching, the Lord granting it, we likewise beg you to explain to us what is said in the Gospel: ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.’ For it seems quite contrary to that sentence of the prophet which says, ‘Because of the words of your lips I have kept hard ways,’ especially since the apostle too says, ‘All who wish to live godly in Christ suffer persecutions.’ But whatever is hard and full of persecutions can be neither light nor easy.”

Abraham: “We shall prove by the easy proof of experience itself that the sentence of our Lord and Savior is most true, if we enter on the way of perfection lawfully and according to the will of Christ, and, mortifying all our desires and cutting off our harmful wills, we not only let nothing remain to us of the substance of this world, through which the enemy will certainly find power to lay us waste and tear us apart whenever he pleases, but also feel that we are not masters even of ourselves, truly fulfilling that word of the apostle: ‘I live, yet no longer I, but Christ lives in me.’ For what can be heavy, what hard, for one who has taken up the yoke of Christ with his whole mind, who, grounded in true humility and always looking to the sufferings of the Lord, rejoices in all the injuries inflicted on him, saying, ‘Therefore I take pleasure in weaknesses, in insults, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong’? By what loss of property, I say, will he be tormented who, glorying in perfect poverty, has willingly rejected for Christ all the pomps of this world and counts all its desires together as dung, that he may gain Christ, despising and shutting out the heat of all losses by continual meditation on that precept of the Gospel: ‘For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but suffers the loss of his soul? Or what exchange will a man give for his soul?’ Over the loss of what will he be saddened who knows that all things that can be taken away by others are not his own, and proclaims with unconquered strength, ‘We brought nothing into this world; no doubt we cannot take anything out either’? By the necessity of what want will the fortitude of one be overcome who knows nothing of having a bag for the road or money in his belt, but glories with the apostle ‘in many fasts, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness’? What labor, what command of an elder however hard, can disturb the tranquillity of the breast of one who, having no will of his own, meets everything commanded of him not only patiently but gladly, and, after the example of our Savior, seeks to do not his own will but the Father’s, saying himself too to his Father, ‘Yet not as I will, but as you will’? By what injuries, again, by what persecution will he be frightened, or rather, what punishment can fail to be even pleasant to one who always rejoices with the apostles in all stripes and longs to be counted worthy to suffer insult for the name of Christ?”

“But that, on the contrary, the yoke of Christ does not seem light or easy to us must more justly be ascribed to our own stubbornness. Cast down by distrust and unbelief, we fight with foolish perversity against the command, or rather the counsel, of him who says, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell (or give up) all that you have, and come, follow me,’ keeping, that is, the substance of our earthly wealth. Since the devil holds our mind bound by its ties, what remains but that, when he wishes to separate us from spiritual joys, he saddens us by its diminution and loss? He works at this with cunning frauds, so that, when the sweetness of that yoke and the lightness of that burden have been made heavy for us by the perversity of vicious desire, he may, keeping us entangled in the chains of the very wealth and property we reserve for our rest and comfort, torment us always with the whips of worldly cares, carving out from ourselves the means of our being torn apart. For ‘each one is bound by the cords of his own sins,’ hearing through the prophet, ‘Behold, all you who kindle a fire, girded with flames, walk in the light of your fire and in the flames that you have kindled.’ For, as Solomon testifies, ‘by the things through which one sins, by those he is also punished.’ For the very pleasures we use are our torment, and the delights and luxuries of this flesh turn back like executioners on their author; for one who is propped up by his former wealth and riches cannot take up either complete humility of heart or full mortification of harmful pleasures. But with these instruments of the virtues protecting us, all the distresses of the present life and all the losses the enemy can inflict are borne not only most patiently but most gladly; whereas, when they are exiled, so pernicious a pride grows up that we are wounded with the deadly blows of impatience even for the lightest insult, and it is said to us through the prophet Jeremiah: ‘And now what do you want with the way of Egypt, to drink muddy water? And what have you to do with the way of the Assyrians, to drink the water of the river? Your own wickedness will reprove you, and your turning away will rebuke you. Know and see that it is evil and bitter to have forsaken the Lord your God, and that the fear of me is not in you, says the Lord.’ That the wonderful sweetness of the Lord’s yoke is felt as bitter, then, what is it but that the bitterness of our turning away corrupts it? That the so pleasant lightness of the divine burden grows heavy, what is it but that we despise with stubborn presumption him by whom it was borne? For Scripture clearly testifies to this very thing, saying, ‘For if they had walked in right paths, they would surely have found the paths of righteousness smooth.’ It is plain, I say, that it is we who roughen the right and smooth paths of the Lord with the crooked and hard rocks of our desires; who most foolishly leave the royal road, paved with apostolic and prophetic stones and leveled by the footsteps of all the saints and of the Lord himself, and follow every trackless and thorny way; and, blinded by the enticements of present pleasures, crawl through dark paths tangled with the briars of vices, with torn legs and that wedding garment rent, to be not only pierced by the sharpest thorns of brambles but also laid low by the stings of venomous serpents or scorpions lurking there. ‘For thorns and snares are in crooked ways; but he who fears the Lord will keep himself from them.’ Of such the Lord says elsewhere too through the prophet: ‘My people have forgotten, offering in vain, and stumbling in their ways, in the paths of the world, to walk in them in an untrodden way.’ For, according to the sentence of Solomon, ‘the ways of those who do nothing are strewn with thorns, but those of the strong are well trodden.’ And so, straying from the royal road, they will not be able to reach that metropolis toward which our course must always be directed without turning aside. Ecclesiastes too expressed this quite significantly, saying, ‘The labor of fools afflicts those who have not known how to go to the city,’ namely that heavenly Jerusalem which is the mother of us all. But whoever, truly renouncing this world, has taken on himself the yoke of Christ, and, trained by the daily exercises of injuries, has learned from him that he is gentle and humble of heart, will always remain unmoved in all temptations, and all things will work together for his good. For, according to the prophet Obadiah, the words of God are good with him who walks rightly; and again, ‘For the ways of the Lord are right, and the righteous will walk in them; but transgressors will fall in them.’”

“The kind grace of the Savior, then, has conferred on us greater rewards of praise through the struggle of temptations than if it had taken from us all necessity of combat. For it is of a higher and more excellent virtue to remain always unmoved when surrounded by persecutions and hardships, to persevere faithful and fearless in the protection of God, and, girded against human attacks as with the arms of unconquered virtue, to triumph most gloriously over impatience and, in a way, to gain strength from weakness, since strength is made perfect in weakness. ‘For behold,’ says the Lord, ‘I have made you an iron pillar and a bronze wall over all the land, against the kings of Judah and its princes and its priests and all the people of the land. And they will fight against you and will not prevail, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.’ So, according to the Lord’s pure teaching, the royal road is easy and light, though it is felt to be hard and rough. For those who serve devoutly and faithfully, when they have taken the Lord’s yoke upon them and learned from him that he is gentle and humble of heart, already in a way laying down the burden of earthly passions, will find, by the Lord’s gift, not labor but rest for their souls, as he himself testified through the prophet Jeremiah, saying, ‘Stand upon the ways and see, and ask about the ancient paths, which is the good way, and walk in it; and you will find refreshment for your souls.’ For at once the crooked will become straight for them and the rough ways smooth, and they will taste and see that the Lord is sweet; and hearing Christ crying out in the Gospel, ‘Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you,’ they will lay down the weight of vices and understand what follows: ‘For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’ The way of the Lord, then, has refreshment if it is kept according to his law. But it is we who procure pains and torments for ourselves by turbulent distractions, since we prefer to follow the crooked and perverse ways of this world even with the greatest danger and difficulty. And when we have made the Lord’s yoke heavy and hard for ourselves in this way, with a blasphemous spirit we complain of the hardness and harshness of the yoke itself, or of Christ who imposes it, according to the word, ‘The folly of a man corrupts his ways, but he blames God in his heart’; and, according to the prophet Haggai, when we say that the way of the Lord is not right, the Lord fittingly answers us: ‘Is my way not right? Are not rather your ways crooked?’ And truly, if you will compare the sweet-smelling flower of virginity and the most tender purity of chastity with the foul and stinking wallowing-places of lusts; the quiet and security of monks with the dangers and hardships in which the people of this world are entangled; the rest of our poverty with the gnawing sadness and sleepless cares of the rich, in which they are consumed day and night not without the greatest danger to life, you will most easily prove the yoke of Christ most sweet and the burden most light.”

“In the same sense, then, that repayment of rewards by which the Lord promised a hundredfold in this life to those who renounce perfectly is rightly and most truly received without any disturbance of faith: ‘And everyone who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands for my name’s sake will receive a hundredfold in the present and will possess eternal life.’ For many, taking occasion from this sentence, with a gross understanding assert that these things will be restored to the saints carnally in that time of a thousand years, although they admit that that age, which they say will come after the resurrection, cannot be understood as the present one. It is much more credible and much plainer, then, that one who, at Christ’s urging, has despised any worldly affections or goods receives even in this life a love a hundred times more welcome from the brothers and companions of his purpose, who are bound to him by a spiritual glue. For it is clear that the love which fellowship or the bond of blood unites between parents and children, brothers, spouses, or relatives is quite short and fragile. Indeed, even good and dutiful sons, when they grow up, are sometimes shut out of their parents’ houses and property; the fellowship of the marriage union is sometimes torn apart, even for an honorable reason; a contentious division breaks up brothers’ property. Monks alone keep a perpetual unity of union and possess all things in common, believing that all that belongs to the brothers is theirs, and all that is theirs belongs to the brothers. If, then, the grace of our love is compared with those affections by which carnal love is united, it is certainly a hundred times sweeter and more sublime. Indeed, a sweetness more than a hundred times greater will be received from marital continence than that which was afforded them mutually through the union of the sexes. In place of the joy one had in owning one field and house, he who passes into the adoption of the sons of God will enjoy a hundred times greater joy of riches, possessing as his own all that belongs to the eternal Father, and will proclaim, in disposition and virtue, in imitation of that true Son, ‘All that the Father has is mine’; no longer with that penal care of distraction and anxiety, but secure and glad he will succeed everywhere as to his own, hearing the apostle preach to him daily, ‘For all things are yours, whether the world or things present or things to come,’ and Solomon, ‘The whole world of riches belongs to the faithful man.’ You have, then, this repayment of a hundredfold expressed in the greatness of the merit and in the distinction of so incomparable a quality. For if someone gave back, for a certain weight of bronze or iron or some cheaper metal, the same weight but of gold, would he not seem to have restored even more than a hundredfold? So when spiritual joy and the delight of most precious love are repaid for contempt of earthly pleasures and affections, even if the number is the same, this is still a hundred times greater and more splendid. And to make this plainer by frequent repetition: I once possessed a wife in the wanton passion of desire; I possess the same wife in the honor of sanctification and in true love of Christ. The woman is one, but the merit of love has grown a hundredfold. And if you weigh, in place of the disturbance of anger and rage, the constant gentleness of patience; in place of the anguish of anxiety and distraction, the quiet of security; in place of the fruitless and penal sadness of this world, the fruit of saving sadness; in place of the vanity of temporal gladness, the abundance of spiritual joy, you will see a hundredfold repayment in the exchange of these affections. And if the merits of the opposite virtues are compared with the brief and slippery pleasure of each vice, the multiplied delight will prove that these are a hundred times better. For the number one hundred passes from the left hand to the right, and although in reckoning on the fingers it seems to keep the same figure, it grows greatly in the size of its quantity. For it will come about that we, who seemed to bear the form of a kid on the left, when transferred to the right will gain the merit of a sheep. Now let us pass to the quantity of the things which Christ restores to us in this age in return for contempt of worldly advantages, especially according to the Gospel of Mark, which says: ‘There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or children or lands for my sake and for the Gospel who will not receive a hundred times as much now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.’ For whoever, having scorned for the name of Christ the love of one father or mother or son, passes into the most sincere love of all who serve Christ, will receive a hundredfold number of brothers and parents, beginning to have instead of one so many fathers and brothers, bound to him by a more fervent and excellent affection. He will also be enriched by a multiplied possession of houses and lands who, having rejected one house for love of Christ, will possess innumerable dwellings of monasteries as his own, entering them, in whatever part of the world, as by the right of his own house. For how does he not receive a hundredfold, and, if it is lawful to add anything to our Lord’s sentence, more than a hundredfold, who, leaving the untrustworthy and forced service of ten or twenty slaves, is supported by the willing service of so many free and noble men? You have been able to prove that this is so by your own experience too: having left one father and mother and house each, into whatever part of the world you have gone, you acquire without any toil of anxiety innumerable fathers and mothers and brothers, and houses and lands and most faithful servants, who receive, embrace, cherish, and honor you with the highest services as their own masters. But the saints, I say, will enjoy this service deservedly and confidently who have first subjected themselves and all that is theirs with willing devotion to the service of the brotherhood. For, according to the Lord’s sentence, they will freely receive what they themselves have paid out to others. But whoever has not first offered these things with sincere humility to his companions, how will he patiently allow them to be offered to him by others, since he will understand that he is burdened rather than cherished by their services, because he prefers to receive the service of the brothers rather than to render it? Yet he will receive all these things not with relaxed security nor with idle delight, but, according to the Lord’s word, with persecutions, that is, with the pressures of this world and the greatest anguish of sufferings; since, as that wisest man testifies, ‘he who is soft and without pain will be in want.’ For the kingdom of heaven is seized not by the slothful, not the relaxed, not the delicate, not the tender, but by the violent. Who, then, are these violent? Surely those who inflict a splendid violence not on others but on their own soul, who, cheating it by a praiseworthy seizure of every pleasure of present things, are declared by the Lord’s voice excellent seizers, and by such plunder violently take the kingdom of heaven. For, according to the Lord’s sentence, ‘the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent seize it.’ These surely are the praiseworthy violent, who do violence to their own destruction. For a man, as it is written, ‘labors for himself in pains and does violence to his own destruction.’ Our destruction is the delight of the present life and, to put it more plainly, the carrying out of our desires and wills. If anyone withdraws these from his soul and mortifies them, he certainly does a glorious and useful violence to his destruction, denying it, that is, its most pleasant wills, which the divine word often accuses through the prophet, saying, ‘For in the days of your fast your own will is found’; and again, ‘If you turn away your foot from the sabbath, from doing your will on my holy day, and glorify it while you do not go your own ways, and your will is not found, so as to speak a word.’ How great a blessedness is promised him he adds at once through the prophet: ‘Then,’ he says, ‘you will delight in the Lord, and I will lift you up above the heights of the earth, and will feed you with the inheritance of Jacob your father. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’ And so our Lord and Savior, to give us a pattern for cutting off our own wills, says, ‘I did not come to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me,’ and again, ‘Not as I will, but as you will.’ This virtue is especially practiced by those who live in coenobia and are ruled by the command of an elder, who do nothing at all by their own choice, but whose will hangs on the will of the abbot. Finally, to close the discourse of this discussion: do not those who serve Christ faithfully most evidently obtain a hundredfold grace in this too, I beg you, that for his name they are honored by the highest rulers, and, though they themselves do not seek human glory, they become venerable to all judges and powers even in the straits of persecutions; whereas their lowliness might perhaps have been despicable even to ordinary people, whether for the obscurity of their birth or for their servile condition, if they had remained in secular life? But through the service of Christ no one will dare to raise a charge about status of nobility, no one will dare to object obscurity of family; rather, the servants of Christ are more gloriously ennobled by the very reproaches of the most lowly condition by which others are usually confounded and dishonored. We can prove this more evidently in Abba John, who lives in that desert which lies near the town of Lyco. Born of very obscure ancestors, he has become so admirable to almost the whole human race for the name of Christ that even the lords of present affairs, who hold the helm of this world and empire and are a terror even to all the powerful and to kings, revere him as a lord, and, seeking his oracles from such distant regions, entrust the summit of their empire, the state of their safety, and the outcome of their wars to his prayers and merits.” Thus blessed Abraham discoursed on the origin and cure of our illusion, laid bare, as it were before our eyes, the snares of the thoughts which the devil had instigated, and kindled in us the desire of true mortification. By it we believe many too will be set on fire, although all this has been set down in unpolished speech. For although the tepid ash of our eloquence has covered the most burning meanings of the highest fathers, yet we think the coldness of very many will be warmed who are willing to clear away the ashes of the words and stir up the liveliness of the hidden meanings. But to you, holy brothers, I have not sent this fire, which the Lord came to cast on the earth and greatly desires to burn, puffed up with a spirit of presumption, as though to kindle your most fervent purpose by the addition of this heat, but so that your authority with your sons may be greater, if what you yourselves teach, not by the dead sound of words but by living example, is confirmed also by the precepts of the highest and most ancient fathers. It remains that the spiritual breeze of your prayers accompany me, tossed until now in a most dangerous storm, to the safest harbor of silence.