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| Chapter XIII. The answer concerning the trampling down of shame, and the danger of one without contrition.
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Chapter XIII.
The answer concerning the trampling down of shame, and
the danger of one without contrition.
Moses: Just as all young
men are not alike in fervour of spirit nor equally instructed in
learning and good morals, so too we cannot find that all old men are
equally perfect and excellent. For the true riches of old men are not
to be measured by grey hairs but by their diligence in youth and the
rewards of their past labours. “For,” says one, “the
things that thou hast not gathered in thy youth, how shalt thou find
them in thy old age?” “For venerable old age is not that of
long time, nor counted by the number of years: but the understanding of
a man is grey hairs, and a spotless life is old age.”1186
And therefore we are not to follow in
the steps or embrace the traditions and advice of every old man whose
head is covered with grey hairs, and whose age is his sole claim to
respect, but only of those whom we find to have distinguished
themselves in youth in an approved and praiseworthy manner, and to have
been trained up not on self-assurance but on the traditions of the
Elders. For there are some,
and unhappily they form the majority, who
pass their old age in a lukewarmness which they contracted in youth,
and in sloth, and so obtain authority not from the ripeness of their
character but simply from the number of their years. Against whom that
reproof of the Lord is specially aimed by the prophet: “Strangers
have devoured his strength and he knew it not: yea, grey hairs also are
spread about upon him, and he is ignorant of it.”1187
These men, I say, are not pointed out
as examples to youth from the uprightness of their lives, nor from the
strictness of their profession, which would be worthy of praise and
imitation, but simply from the number of their years; and so the subtle
enemy uses their grey hairs to deceive the younger men, by a wrongful
appeal to their authority, and endeavours in his cunning craftiness to
upset and deceive by their example those who might have been urged into
the way of perfection by their advice or that of others; and drags them
down by means of their teaching and practice either into a baneful
indifference, or into deadly despair. And as I want to give you an
instance of this, I will tell you a fact which may supply us with some
wholesome teaching, without giving the name of the actor, lest we might
be guilty of something of the same kind as the man who published abroad
the sins of the brother which had been disclosed to him. When this one,
who was not the laziest of young men, had gone to an old man, whom we
know very well, for the sake of the profit and health of his soul, and
had candidly confessed that he was troubled by carnal appetites and the
spirit of fornication, fancying that he would receive from the old
man’s words consolation for his efforts, and a cure for the
wounds inflicted on him, the old man attacked him with the bitterest
reproaches, and called him a miserable and disgraceful creature, and
unworthy of the name of monk, while he could be affected by a sin and
lust of this character, and instead of helping him so injured him by
his reproaches that he dismissed him from his cell in a state of
hopeless despair and deadly despondency. And when he, oppressed with
such a sorrow, was plunged in deep thought, no longer how to cure his
passion, but how to gratify his lust, the Abbot Apollos,1188
| 1188 Apollos or
Apollonius was a most celebrated hermit of the fourth century, who
finally became the head of a monastery of five hundred brethren in the
Thebaid. Some account of him is given by Palladius (Hist. Laus. c.
lii.) and Rufinus (Hist. Monach. c. vii.). Cf. also Sozomen III. xiv.;
and VI. xx., whence we learn that his life was written by Timothy,
Bishop of Alexandria. Cassian relates another story of him in XXIV.
ix. | the most skilful of the Elders, met
him, and seeing by his looks and gloominess his trouble and the
violence of the assault which he was secretly revolving in his heart,
asked him the reason of this upset; and when he could not possibly
answer the old man’s gentle inquiry, the latter perceived more
and more clearly that it was not without reason that he wanted to hide
in silence the cause of a gloom so deep that he could not conceal it by
his looks, and so began to ask him still more earnestly the reasons for
his hidden grief. And by this he was forced to confess that he was on
his way to a village to take a wife, and leave the monastery and return
to the world, since, as the old man had told him, he could not be a
monk, if he was unable to control the desires of the flesh and to cure
his passion. And then the old man smoothed him down with kindly
consolation, and told him that he himself was daily tried by the same
pricks of desire and lust, and that therefore he ought not to give way
to despair, nor be surprised at the violence of the attack of which he
would get the better not so much by zealous efforts, as by the mercy
and grace of the Lord; and he begged him to put off his intention just
for one day, and having implored him to return to his cell, went as
fast as he could to the monastery of the above mentioned old
man—and when he had drawn near to him he stretched forth his
hands and prayed with tears, and said “O Lord, who alone art the
righteous judge and unseen Physician of secret strength and human
weakness, turn the assault from the young man upon the old one, that he
may learn to condescend to the weakness of sufferers, and to sympathize
even in old age with the frailties of youth.” And when he had
ended his prayer with tears, he sees a filthy Ethiopian standing over
against his cell and aiming fiery darts at him, with which he was
straightway wounded, and came out of his cell and ran about hither and
thither like a lunatic or a drunken man, and going in and out could no
longer restrain himself in it, but began to hurry off in the same
direction in which the young man had gone. And when Abbot Apollos saw
him like a madman driven wild by the furies, he knew that the fiery
dart of the devil which he had seen, had been fixed in his heart, and
had by its intolerable heat wrought in him this mental aberration and
confusion of the understanding; and so he came up to him and asked
“Whither are you hurrying, or what has made you forget the
gravity of years and disturbed you in this childish way, and made you
hurry about so rapidly”?
And when he owing to his guilty conscience and confused
by this disgraceful excitement fancied that the lust of his heart was
discovered, and, as
the
secrets of his heart were known to the old man, did not venture to
return any answer to his inquiries, “Return,” said he,
“to your cell, and at last recognize the fact that till now you
have been ignored or despised by the devil, and not counted in the
number of those with whom he is daily roused to fight and struggle
against their efforts and earnestness,—you who could not—I
will not say ward off, but not even postpone for one day, a single dart
of his aimed at you after so many years spent in this profession of
yours. And with this the Lord has suffered you to be wounded that you
may at least learn in your old age to sympathize with infirmities to
which you are a stranger, and may know from your own case and
experience how to condescend to the frailties of the young, though when
you received a young man troubled by an attack from the devil, you did
not encourage him with any consolation, but gave him up in dejection
and destructive despair into the hands of the enemy, to be, as far as
you were concerned, miserably destroyed by him. But the enemy would
certainly never have attacked him with so fierce an onslaught, with
which he has up till now scorned to attack you, unless in his jealousy
at the progress he was to make, he had endeavoured to get the better of
that virtue which he saw lay in his disposition, and to destroy it with
his fiery darts, as he knew without the shadow of a doubt that he was
the stronger, since he deemed it worth his while to attack him with
such vehemence. And so learn from your own experience to sympathize
with those in trouble, and never to terrify with destructive despair
those who are in danger, nor harden them with severe speeches, but
rather restore them with gentle and kindly consolations, and as the
wise Solomon says, “Spare not to deliver those who are led forth
to death, and to redeem those who are to be slain,”1189
and after the example of our Saviour,
break not the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax,1190
and ask of the Lord that grace, by means of
which you yourself may faithfully learn both in deed and power to sing:
“the Lord hath given me a learned tongue that I should know how
to uphold by word him that is weary:”1191
for no one could bear the devices of the enemy, or extinguish or
repress those carnal fires which burn with a sort of natural flame,
unless God’s grace assisted our weakness, or protected and
supported it. And therefore, as the reason for this salutary incident
is over, by which the Lord meant to set that young man free from
dangerous desires and to teach you something of the violence of their
attack, and of the feeling of compassion, let us together implore Him
in prayer, that He may be pleased to remove that scourge, which the
Lord thought good to lay upon you for your good (for “He maketh
sorry and cureth: he striketh and his hands heal. He humbleth and
exalteth, he killeth and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave
and bringeth up”)1192
, and may
extinguish with the abundant dew of His Spirit the fiery darts of the
devil, which at my desire He allowed to wound you. And although the
Lord removed this temptation at a single prayer of the old man with the
same speed with which He had suffered it to come upon him, yet He
showed by a clear proof that a man’s faults when laid bare were
not merely not to be scolded, but that the grief of one in trouble
ought not to be lightly despised. And therefore never let the
clumsiness or shallowness of one old man or of a few deter you and keep
you back from that life-giving way, of which we spoke earlier, or from
the tradition of the Elders, if our crafty enemy makes a wrongful use
of their grey hairs in order to deceive younger men: but without any
cloak of shame everything should be disclosed to the Elders, and
remedies for wounds be faithfully received from them together with
examples of life and conversation: from which we shall find like help
and the same sort of result, if we try to do nothing at all on our own
responsibility and judgment.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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