Setting Shame Aside, and the Danger of One Without Contrition

Not all young men are alike in fervor of spirit, nor equally instructed in learning and good conduct. In the same way, we cannot find that all old men are equally perfect and excellent. For the true riches of old men are not to be measured by gray hairs but by the diligence of their youth and the rewards of their past labors. As one writer says, “The things you have not gathered in your youth, how will you find them in your old age?” And, “Venerable old age is not that of long time, nor is it counted by the number of years; but a man’s understanding is gray hair, and a spotless life is old age.” So we are not to follow in the steps, or embrace the traditions and advice, of every old man whose head is covered with gray hair and whose age is his only claim to respect. We should follow only those whom we find to have distinguished themselves in youth in an approved and praiseworthy way, and to have been trained up not in self-assurance but in the traditions of the elders. For there are some, and sadly they are the majority, who pass their old age in the lukewarmness and sloth they took on in their youth, and so gain authority not from the ripeness of their character but simply from the number of their years. The Lord’s rebuke through the prophet is aimed especially at them: “Strangers have devoured his strength, and he did not know it; yes, gray hairs also are spread over him, and he is not aware of it.” These men, I say, are held up as examples to the young not because of the uprightness of their lives, nor the strictness of their profession, which would be worthy of praise and imitation, but simply because of the number of their years. And so the subtle enemy uses their gray hairs to deceive the younger men by a wrongful appeal to their authority. In his cunning he tries, by their example, to upset and deceive those who might have been urged into the way of perfection by their advice or by that of others. Through their teaching and practice he drags them down, either into a harmful indifference or into deadly despair. [a]

I want to give you an example of this, so I will tell you something that happened, which may give us some wholesome teaching. I will not give the name of the man who did it, so that we may not be guilty of something like what he did when he made public the sins of a brother that had been disclosed to him. A young man, and not the laziest of them, had gone to an old man whom we know very well, for the profit and health of his soul. He candidly confessed that he was troubled by fleshly appetites and the spirit of sexual immorality, imagining that the old man’s words would give him comfort in his struggles and a cure for the wounds inflicted on him. But the old man attacked him with the bitterest reproaches. He called him a miserable and disgraceful creature, unworthy of the name of monk, since he could be affected by a sin and a lust of this kind. Instead of helping him, he so injured him with his reproaches that he sent him away from his cell in hopeless despair and deadly dejection. Weighed down with such sorrow, the young man was sunk in deep thought, no longer about how to cure his passion, but about how to satisfy his lust. Then Abbot Apollos, the most skillful of the elders, met him. From his looks and his gloom Apollos saw his trouble and the violence of the attack he was secretly turning over in his heart, and he asked him the reason for this distress. The young man could not possibly answer the old man’s gentle question. Apollos saw more and more clearly that it was not without reason that he wanted to hide in silence the cause of a gloom so deep that his face could not conceal it, and so he began to ask him still more earnestly the reasons for his hidden grief. By this the young man was forced to confess that he was on his way to a village to take a wife, to leave the monastery and return to the world. For, as the old man had told him, he could not be a monk if he was unable to control the desires of the flesh and to cure his passion. Then Apollos soothed him with kind comfort. He told him that he himself was tried every day by the same goads of desire and lust, and that therefore he ought not to give way to despair, nor be surprised at the violence of the attack. He would get the better of it not so much by his own zealous efforts as by the mercy and grace of the Lord. He begged him to put off his intention for just one day, and pleaded with him to go back to his cell.

Then Apollos went as fast as he could to the monastery of the old man we spoke of. When he had come near him, he stretched out his hands and prayed with tears, saying: “O Lord, who alone are the righteous Judge and the unseen Physician of secret strength and human weakness, turn this assault from the young man onto the old one, so that he may learn to stoop to the weakness of those who suffer, and to sympathize, even in old age, with the frailties of youth.” When he had finished his prayer with tears, he saw a filthy Ethiopian standing opposite the old man’s cell and shooting fiery darts at him. The old man was wounded by them at once. He came out of his cell and ran here and there like a lunatic or a drunk. Going in and out, he could no longer keep himself in his cell, and he began to hurry off in the same direction the young man had gone. When Abbot Apollos saw him like a madman driven wild by the Furies, he knew that the fiery dart of the devil he had seen had been fixed in his heart, and by its unbearable heat had produced this derangement of mind and confusion of understanding. So he went up to him and asked: “Where are you hurrying to? What has made you forget the dignity of your years, and thrown you into this childish agitation, so that you rush about so fast?”

Because of his guilty conscience, and confused by this disgraceful excitement, the old man imagined that the lust of his heart had been discovered. Since the secrets of his heart were known to Apollos, he did not dare give any answer to his questions. Then Apollos said: “Go back to your cell, and recognize at last that until now the devil has either overlooked or despised you. He has not counted you among those against whose efforts and earnestness he is stirred up every day to fight and struggle. For after so many years spent in this profession of yours, you could not, I will not say ward off, but even put off for one day a single dart he aimed at you. The Lord has allowed you to be wounded by it so that, at least in your old age, you may learn to sympathize with weaknesses that are strange to you, and may know from your own case and experience how to stoop to the frailties of the young. For when you received a young man troubled by an attack of the devil, you did not encourage him with any comfort. You handed him over, dejected and in destructive despair, into the hands of the enemy, to be miserably destroyed by him as far as it depended on you. But the enemy would certainly never have attacked him so fiercely, when until now he has scorned to attack you, unless, jealous of the progress the young man was going to make, he had tried to get the better of the virtue he saw in his character and to destroy it with his fiery darts. For he knew without a shadow of doubt that the young man was the stronger, since he thought it worth his while to attack him so violently. So learn from your own experience to sympathize with those in trouble. Never terrify those in danger with destructive despair, nor harden them with severe words, but restore them with gentle and kindly comfort. As the wise Solomon says, ‘Do not hold back from delivering those who are led away to death, and from redeeming those who are about to be slain.’ Following the example of our Savior, do not break the bruised reed or quench the smoking flax. And ask the Lord for that grace by which you yourself may faithfully learn, both in deed and in power, to sing: ‘The Lord has given me a learned tongue, so that I may know how to uphold by a word the one who is weary.’ For no one could bear the schemes of the enemy, or put out or hold down those fleshly fires that burn with a kind of natural flame, unless God’s grace helped our weakness, or protected and supported it. And so, since the purpose of this helpful incident is now fulfilled, by which the Lord meant to set that young man free from dangerous desires and to teach you something of how violent their attack is, and something of compassion, let us together beg him in prayer to be pleased to remove the scourge the Lord saw fit to lay on you for your good. For ‘he makes sorrowful and he cures; he strikes, and his hands heal. He humbles and exalts; he kills and makes alive; he brings down to the grave and brings up.’ And let us ask him to put out, with the abundant dew of his Spirit, the fiery darts of the devil that he allowed to wound you at my request.” [e]

The Lord removed this temptation at a single prayer of the old man, as quickly as he had allowed it to come upon him. Yet he showed by a clear proof that a man’s faults, when laid bare, are not merely not to be scolded, but that the grief of one in trouble must not be lightly despised. So never let the clumsiness or shallowness of one old man, or of a few, deter you and keep you back from that life-giving way we spoke of earlier, or from the tradition of the elders, even if our crafty enemy makes wrongful use of their gray hairs to deceive younger men. Without any cloak of shame, everything should be disclosed to the elders, and remedies for our wounds faithfully received from them, together with examples of life and conduct. From them we will find the same help and the same kind of result, if we try to do nothing at all on our own responsibility and judgment.