Who Should Seek the Desert

Further, it is those who are perfect and purified from all faults who ought to seek the desert. When they have completely destroyed all their faults while living among the brothers, they should enter it, not by way of cowardly flight, but for divine contemplation and out of a desire for deeper insight into heavenly things, which only the perfect can gain in solitude. For whatever faults we bring with us uncured into the desert, we will find still hidden in us and not got rid of. Just as solitude can open the purest contemplation to a character that has been improved, and reveal the knowledge of spiritual mysteries to its clear gaze, so it usually not only preserves but intensifies the faults of those who have undergone no correction.

For a man seems to himself patient and humble just as long as he meets nobody in his dealings; but he will soon go back to his former nature whenever an occasion for any kind of passion arises. I mean that the faults that lay hidden will at once rise to the surface and, like unbridled horses well fed through too long a time of idleness, will burst out of the starting gates all the more eagerly and fiercely, to the destruction of their driver. For when the opportunity to practice our faults among men is taken away, they will grow in us more and more, unless we have first been purified from them. And the mere shadow of patience that we seemed, in our imagination, to have when we mixed with our brothers, at least out of respect for them and because others were watching, we lose altogether through sloth and carelessness.