The Death of the Elder Heron

To support with a modern example this judgment, given long ago by the blessed Antony and the other fathers, as we promised to do, remember what you saw happen lately before your very eyes. I mean how the elder Heron, only a very few days ago, was cast down from the heights to the depths by an illusion of the devil. We remember that he lived fifty years in this desert, kept a strict self-control with special severity, and sought the seclusion of solitude with wonderful fervor, beyond all who live here. By what trick, then, or by what means was he deluded by the deceiver after so many labors, so that by a most grievous fall he struck all who live in this desert with deep grief? Was it not because he had too little of the virtue of discernment, and chose to be guided by his own judgment rather than to obey the counsels and conference of the brothers and the rules of the elders? [a]

For he always practiced unbroken abstinence and fasting with such severity, and kept to the seclusion of solitude and of his monastic cell so constantly, that not even the keeping of the Easter festival could ever persuade him to join the brothers in the feast. When, by the yearly custom, all the brothers stayed in the church, he alone would not join them, for fear he might seem to relax his purpose in some degree by eating even a few beans or lentils. Deceived by this presumption, he received an angel of Satan with the deepest reverence as an angel of light, obeyed his commands with blind slavishness, and threw himself down a well so deep that the eye could not see to the bottom. He had no doubt of the promise of the angel, who had assured him that the merits of his virtues and labors were such that he could not possibly come to any harm. To prove this beyond all doubt by testing it on his own safety, in the dead of night he was deluded enough to throw himself into the well we have spoken of, to prove, indeed, the great merit of his virtue if he came out of it unhurt.

With great effort the brothers got him out, already almost dead, and on the third day after he died. What was still worse, he held on to his stubborn delusion, so that not even the experience of dying could persuade him that he had been deceived by the craft of demons. So, in spite of the merits of his great labors and the number of years he had spent in the desert, those who pitied his end with compassion and the greatest kindness could hardly obtain from Abbot Paphnutius that he should not be counted among the suicides and judged unworthy of the remembrance and offering made for those at rest.