The Conferences 24.18–24.26

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.