In Which What Has Been Said Is Confirmed by Some Examples

IN the “Spiritual Meadow” it is said: “One of the Fathers of the Thebaid, who was the son of a priest of idols, related to us that, when he was quite a young lad, he used to be with his father in the temple, and often saw how his father offered sacrifices to his idol. One time he came in secretly behind his father, and saw Satan seated on a high platform, and all his hellish rabble around him, and one of his chief officers came and paid obeisance to him. Satan said to him: ‘Whence comest thou?’ He said: ‘I have been in such and such a province, and I have raised in it many wars and quarrels, along with much shedding of blood, and I have come to tell you.’ Satan asked him: ‘And how much time hast thou spent in doing this?’ He answered, “Thirty days.’ Satan then ordered him to be scourged, saying that he had spent much and done little. After that there came another, and made his obeisance to the infernal captain, who asked him: ‘And thou, whence dost thou come?’ He answered: ‘I have been at sea, and have raised many storms, and sunk many ships, and drowned many men, and have come to give thee an account of it.’ He asked: ‘How much time has thou taken to do that?’ He answered, ‘Twenty days.’ He ordered him to be scourged for having done so little in twenty days. A third came and paid his obeisance, and Satan asked him: ‘Thou, where hast thou been?’ He answered: ‘I have been to such and such a city, where there was a marriage being celebrated, and I set them by the ears, and many were killed, and among them the bridegroom himself.’ Satan said: ‘And how long didst thou take?’ ‘Only ten days.’ And notwithstanding all the mischief that he had made, he ordered him to be scourged, saying: ‘Thou oughtest to have done many more things in ten days.’ Things being at this, there came another, and paid obeisance to his evil chief, who asked him: ‘Whence comest thou?’ ‘I come from the desert, where for forty years I have been tempting and assailing one monk, and at the end of that time, only last night, I overcame him, and made him fall into the sin of fornication.” When he heard this, Satan rose up and kissed him, and took the crown that he wore and put it on his head, and made him sit on a seat by his side, and said to him: ‘Thou hast done a grand piece of work.’ When I heard this, I said: ‘Truly great and excellent is the religion and order of monks.’ So I left my parents’ house, and became a monk.” Here note, by the way, that from a source whence others conceive an ill opinion of religious, because some religious has fallen into some weakness, this man conceived, and rightly conceived, a higher opinion of religious life, and embraced it.

In the Lives of the Fathers we read that a holy hermit was carried by an angel to a place where there was a monastery of religious, and saw there a multitude of devils, fluttering about like flies in all the offices and places of the monastery. Then, going to the market place of the city, he saw only one solitary devil, and he had no work, but was sitting idle on the city gate. He asked the reason of this, and the angel, his guide, told him that those people in the city all did what the devil wanted, and therefore one devil was enough for all; but in the monastery all were doing their best to resist the devil, and that was the reason why so many devils were at them to tempt them and make them fall.

Palladius recounts a memorable example, which is related also in the Lives of the Fathers, of a monk who for many years had exercised himself in good works and holy exercises proper to a religious, and had made great progress. At the end of that time he gave way to vain complacency in himself and boasting. Wherefore God permitted him miserably to fall into a sin of impurity with the devil, who appeared to him in the form of a very handsome woman, who was wandering lost in the desert. He readily gave her welcome, and talked at length with her, laughing and holding her by the hand. Finally he quite gave himself up to sin with her; and when he would fain have put it in act, the figure disappeared in his arms with a loud shriek, over which were heard loud peals of laughter from many devils, floating in the air and saying to him: “O monk, monk, who didst raise and exalt thyself to the heavens, how hast thou sunk into the abyss; learn, then, more from today that he who exalts himself shall be humbled.” With these words it seemed that the devils were scoffing at him and making game of him. The wretched man stopped not there, but, having spent that night and the following day in loud lamentations and shame, he fell into despair, went back into the world, and gave reins to his vicious inclinations.

St. John Climacus tells the story, which we referred to above, of a youth of whom we read in the Lives of the Fathers that he attained so high a degree of virtue as to have empire over wild beasts, whom he made serve the monks in the monastery. St. Anthony likened him to a richly laden vessel on the high seas, whose end he could not answer for. Now this youth, so fervent and so holy, came to fall miserably. While he was weeping over his sin, he said to some monks who came that way: “Tell the old man,” that is, St. Anthony, “to pray to God for me that He will vouchsafe to grant me ten days to do penance.” On hearing this, the old man wept bitterly, and said with great grief of heart: “A great pillar of the Church has fallen today.” At the end of five days the monk above-mentioned died. Thus he who at first, says St. John Climacus, had empire over wild beasts, was in the end overthrown and mocked by most cruel savages, and he who a little before had for nourishment the bread of heaven, came afterwards to seek his nourishment in mire and filth. Father Anthony, in his great prudence, would not state clearly the nature of his fall, for he knew that it was fornication.

Father Master Avila quotes an instance of a holy hermit to whom God had granted to know the great danger to which he lay exposed in this life; and, considering that, he put over his head a hood of mourning and covered his face in such manner that he could see nothing but the ground he was about to tread upon, and never more would speak to man, and never more took his eyes off the ground, weeping to see himself in such danger as man lives in. And when there came many people to see him in his cell out of curiosity for the great change that had come over him, and asked the reason of this novelty and of the extreme course he had so suddenly taken, he never ee anything else but: “Let me alone, because I am a man.” Another saint used to say: ‘‘Woe is me, because I am still capable of ee God mortally.”

Smut TWENTY-FIRST TREATS Boones