The Letters Burned Unread

I think it no less necessary to tell of this act of a brother who was intent on purity of heart and deeply concerned for the contemplation of divine things. After fifteen years, a large number of letters was brought to him from his father and mother and many friends in the province of Pontus. He received the huge bundle of letters and turned the matter over in his mind for some time. “What thoughts,” he said, “will reading these suggest to me! They will stir me either to senseless joy or to useless sadness. For how many days will they draw the attention of my heart away from the contemplation I have set before me, by the memory of those who wrote them! How long will it take for the disturbance of mind they create to settle, and what effort will it cost to restore that former peace, once the mind is moved by the feelings the letters stir, and, recalling the words and faces of those it left so long ago, begins again in thought and spirit to visit them, to live among them and to be with them! And it will be of no use to have left them in the body if a man begins to look on them with the heart, and lets back in and revives the memory that everyone gave up, as though he were dead, when he renounced this world.” [a]

Turning this over in his mind, he decided not only not to read a single letter, but not even to open the bundle, for fear that at the sight of the writers’ names, or on recalling their faces, the purpose of his spirit might give way. So he threw it into the fire to be burned, all tied up just as he had received it, crying, “Away, thoughts of my home! Be burned up, and do not try any longer to call me back to the things I have fled.”