Conferences

The answer to the question proposed.

John: I should absolutely maintain that one and the same man could not attain perfection in both lives unless I was hindered by the example of some few. And since it is no small matter to find a man who is perfect in either of them, it is clear how much harder and I had almost said impossible it is for a man to be thoroughly efficient in both. And if this has ever happened, it cannot come under any general rule. For a general rule must be based not on exceptional instances, i.e., on the experience of a very few, but on what is within the power of the many or rather of all. But what is attained to here and there by but one or two, and is beyond the capacity of ordinary goodness, must be kept out of general rules as something permitted outside the condition and nature of human weakness, and should be brought forward as a miracle rather than as an example. Wherefore I will, as my slender ability allows, briefly intimate what you want to know. The aim indeed of the Cœnobite is to mortify and crucify all his desires and, according to that salutary command of evangelic perfection, to take no thought for the morrow. And it is perfectly clear that this perfection cannot be attained by any except a Cœnobite, such a man as the prophet Isaiah describes and blesses and praises as follows: “If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your own will in my holy day, and glorify Him, while thou dost not your own ways, and your own will is not found to speak a word: then shall you be delighted in the Lord, and I will lift you up above the high places of the earth, and will feed you with the inheritance of Jacob your father. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.” But the perfection for a hermit is to have his mind freed from all earthly things, and to unite it, as far as human frailty allows, with Christ: and such a man the prophet Jeremiah describes when he says: “Blessed is the man who has borne the yoke from his youth. He shall sit solitary and hold his peace, because he has taken it upon himself;” the Psalmist also: “I have become like a pelican in the desert. I watched and became as a sparrow alone upon the housetop.” To this aim then, which we have described as that of either life, unless each of them attains, in vain does the one adopt the system of the Cœnobium, and the other of the hermitage: for neither of them will get the good of his method of life.