The Married Farmer Who Put a Demon to Flight

For besides the loss we have said a monk suffers who in his fickleness wants to pass from one pursuit to another, there is also a risk of death that comes from it. At times things that some do rightly are wrongly taken by others as an example, and things that turned out well for some are found to be harmful to others. To give an instance, it would be as if someone wished to imitate the good deed of the man whom Abbot John is accustomed to bring forward, not so that anyone will imitate him, but simply out of admiration for him. A man came to the old man we have mentioned, dressed as a layman, and brought him some of the first fruits of his crops. There he found someone possessed by a most savage demon. This demon had scorned the solemn commands and orders of Abbot John, and had sworn that he would never leave, at John’s bidding, the body he had taken over. Yet he was terrified at the coming of this other man, and left, speaking his name with the greatest humility. The old man marveled greatly at grace so evident, and was all the more amazed because he saw that the man was dressed as a layman. So he began to ask him carefully about his manner of life and his pursuits. When the man said that he lived in the world and was bound by the ties of marriage, the blessed John, weighing in his mind the greatness of his virtue and grace, looked still more carefully into what his way of life might be. He said that he was a countryman who earned his food by the daily work of his hands, and that he knew of nothing good in himself except this. He never went out to his work in the fields in the morning, nor came home in the evening, without first giving thanks in church to God, who gave it, for the food of his daily life. He had never used any of his crops without first offering their first fruits and tithes to God. And he had never driven his oxen past the edge of another man’s harvest without first muzzling them, so that his neighbor might not suffer the slightest loss through his carelessness. These things did not seem to Abbot John enough to win such grace as he saw the man had been given, and he questioned him and searched out what could account for the merit of such grace. Then, moved by respect for such earnest questioning, the man confessed this. When he had wanted to become a monk, he had been forced twelve years before, by compulsion and by his parents’ command, to take a wife. And without anyone knowing it to that day, he had kept her as a virgin, as though she were his sister. When the old man heard this, he was so overcome with admiration that he declared openly in the man’s presence that it was not without good reason that the demon who had scorned John himself could not endure the presence of this man. For he himself, he said, would not dare to aim at such virtue without risk to his chastity, not only in the heat of youth, but even now. And though Abbot John would tell this story with the greatest admiration, he never advised any monk to try this plan. He knew that many things rightly done by some bring great danger to others who imitate them, and that what the Lord granted to a few by a special gift cannot be attempted by all. [a]