Preface to the Conferences

The promise I made to the blessed Pope Castor, in the preface to the volumes I composed with God’s help in twelve books on the Institutes of the coenobia and the remedies for the eight principal faults, has now been fulfilled as far as my feeble ability allowed. I would certainly like to know what opinion was fairly reached about this work, both by his judgment and by yours: whether, on a subject so deep and so lofty, and one never before made the subject of a treatise, we have produced anything worthy of your notice and of the eager desire of all the holy brothers. But now the bishop I mentioned has left us and departed to Christ. Meanwhile, there are these ten Conferences of the greatest of the fathers, the anchorites who lived in the desert of Scete. He, fired with an incomparable desire for holiness, had told me to write them for him in the same style, not considering, in the greatness of his affection, what a burden he was laying on shoulders too weak to bear it. These Conferences I have thought it right to dedicate to you in particular, blessed Pope Leontius, and holy brother Helladius. [a]

For one of you was joined to the man I have mentioned by the ties of brotherhood and the rank of the priesthood, and, what matters more, by fervor in sacred study, and so has a hereditary right to claim the debt owed to his brother. The other has ventured to follow the sublime customs of the anchorites, not presumptuously on his own account, as some others have, but seizing at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit on the right path of teaching almost before he had been taught, and choosing to learn not so much from his own ideas as from their traditions. And so, just when I had anchored in the harbor of silence, a wide sea opens out before me, so that I must venture to hand down to later generations some of the rules and teaching of these great men. For the boat of my slender abilities will be exposed to the dangers of a longer voyage on the deep, in proportion as the anchorite’s life is grander than that of the coenobium, and the contemplation of God, to which those priceless men always devoted themselves, is more sublime than ordinary practical life. It is yours, therefore, to help our efforts with your devout prayers, so that so sacred a subject, to be treated in a way untried but faithful, may not be endangered by us, and our simplicity may not lose itself in the depths of the subject matter.

Let us therefore pass from what is visible to the eye, the outward way of life of the monks, which we treated in the earlier books, to the life of the inner man, which is hidden from view. From the system of the canonical prayers, let our discussion rise to that continuance in unceasing prayer which the apostle commands. In this way, whoever has already, through reading our former work, spiritually earned the name of Jacob by ousting his fleshly faults may now, by receiving the instructions which are not mine but the fathers’, rise by a pure insight to the merits and, so to speak, the dignity of Israel, and in the same way be taught what he should observe on these lofty heights of perfection. And so may your prayers win this from him who has thought us worthy to see these men, to learn from them and to live with them: that he will grant us a perfect memory of their teaching and a ready tongue to tell it, so that we may explain it as beautifully and as exactly as we received it from them, and may succeed in setting before you the men themselves, embodied, as it were, in their own instructions, and, what matters more, speaking in the Latin tongue.

Above all, however, we want to let the reader of these Conferences, as well as of our earlier works, know this. If anything here happens to seem to him either impossible or very difficult, because of his own condition and the character of his profession, or because of custom and the common way of life, he should measure it not by the limits of his own powers but by the worth and perfection of the speakers. He should first consider their zeal and purpose, for they were truly dead to this worldly life, and so were hampered by no feelings for their relatives according to the flesh and by no ties of worldly business. Next, let him bear in mind the character of the country in which they lived: how they dwelt in a vast desert, cut off from contact with all their fellow men, and so were able to have their minds enlightened, and to contemplate and speak of things which will perhaps seem impossible to the uninitiated and uninstructed, because of their way of life and the commonplace character of their habits. But if anyone wants to give a true opinion on this matter and is eager to test whether such perfection can be reached, let him first try to make their purpose his own, with the same zeal and the same way of life. Then in the end he will find that the things that used to seem beyond human power are not only possible but truly delightful. But now let us go on at once to their Conferences and instructions.