Abbot Serenus’s Hospitality

When we had finished the duties of the day, and the congregation had been dismissed from church, we went back to the old man’s cell and enjoyed a most lavish meal. In place of the sauce, with a few drops of oil spread over it, that was usually set on his table for his daily meal, he mixed in a little broth and poured over it a somewhat more generous helping of oil than usual. For each of them, when he is about to take his daily meal, pours on those drops of oil, not to get any enjoyment from the taste of it, for the amount is so small that it is hardly enough, I will not say to coat the passage of his throat and jaws, but even to get down it. He uses it to keep down the pride of his heart, which is sure to creep in quietly and surely if his abstinence is any stricter, and the urges to empty glory. For the more secretly his abstinence is practiced, with no one to see it, the more subtly it never stops tempting the man who hides it. [a]

Then he set before us table salt and three olives each. After that he brought out a basket of roasted vetches, which they call trogalia, and from it we each took five, along with two prunes and a fig apiece. For it is considered wrong for anyone in that desert to go beyond that amount. When we had finished this meal, and had begun to ask him again for the answer he had promised to our question, the old man said: Let us hear your question, the one we put off until now.