Cassian Asks How to Forget the Poets

At this I was at first moved by a hidden emotion, and then I groaned deeply and said: All these things you have set out so fully have filled me with even greater despair than I felt before. Besides those general captivities of the soul by which, I do not doubt, weak people are struck from outside, a special hindrance to salvation is added in my case by the knowledge of literature which I seem already to have gained in some slight measure. In it the efforts of my tutor, or my attention to constant reading, have so weakened me that my mind is now filled with those songs of the poets. Even at the hour of prayer it is thinking about those trifling fables and the stories of battles with which it was stocked from earliest childhood by its boyhood lessons. When I am singing psalms or asking forgiveness of sins, either some wanton memory of the poems pushes its way in, or the images of heroes fighting appear before my eyes. Some picture of such phantoms is always deceiving me, and it does not let my soul aspire to insight into things above, so that it cannot be got rid of by my daily weeping. [a]