What Abbot Joseph First Asked Us

The blessed Joseph, whose instructions and precepts are now to be set out, was one of the three we mentioned in the first conference. He came from a very distinguished family and was the leading man of his city in Egypt, which was called Thmuis. So he had been carefully trained in the eloquence of Greece as well as of Egypt, and he could talk admirably with us, or with those who knew no Egyptian at all, not through an interpreter as the others did, but in his own person. When he found that we were eager for instruction from him, he first asked whether we were brothers by birth. He heard that we were united by a tie of spiritual, not fleshly, brotherhood, and that from the very beginning of our renunciation of the world we had always been joined together in an unbroken bond, both in our travels, which we had both undertaken for the sake of spiritual service, and in the pursuits of the monastery. Then he began his discourse as follows. [a]