The Two Brothers Who Took No Food

What shall I say of those two brothers who lived beyond that desert of the Thebaid where the blessed Antony once lived? Not guided enough by careful discernment, as they were going through the vast, wide wilderness, they decided to take no food with them except what the Lord himself might provide for them. As they wandered through the deserts and were already fainting with hunger, they were seen from far off by the Mazices. This is a race even more savage and ferocious than almost all wild tribes, for they are not driven to shed blood, as other tribes are, by desire for plunder, but by sheer ferocity of mind. Yet these men, acting against their natural ferocity, met them with bread. One of the two, as discernment came to his aid, received it with delight and thanks, as though the Lord were offering it to him. He thought the food had been provided for him by God, and that it was God’s doing that men who always delighted in bloodshed had offered the staff of life to men already fainting and dying. But the other refused the food because it was offered to him by men, and died of starvation. Though this sprang in the first place from a mistaken notion that deserved blame, one of them, with the help of discernment, overcame the idea he had rashly and carelessly formed. But the other, persisting in his stubborn folly and utterly lacking discernment, brought on himself the death that the Lord would have turned away, because he would not believe that it was by a divine impulse that the fierce barbarians forgot their natural ferocity and offered them bread instead of a sword. [a]