True and Complete Perfection

But this is a partial perfection, not a thorough and altogether complete one. Perfection, then, is very rare, and is granted by God’s gift to only a very few. For he is truly perfect, and not partially, who with equal calm can bear the squalor of the wilderness in the desert and the weaknesses of the brothers in the coenobium. That is why it is hard to find someone perfect in both lives: the anchorite cannot fully acquire freedom from possessions, that is, a disregard for material things and a stripping of oneself of them, nor the coenobite purity in contemplation. Yet we know that Abbot Moses and Paphnutius and the two Macarii were masters of both, in perfection. [a]

And so they were perfect in either life. They withdrew further than all who lived in the desert, delighted without ceasing in the seclusion of the wilderness, and, as far as it lay with them, never sought the company of other men. Yet they bore with the presence and the weaknesses of those who came to them. When a great number of brothers came to them to see them and to profit by it, they endured this almost unbroken burden of receiving them with unshakable patience, so that people imagined they had learned and practiced nothing all the days of their lives but how to show courtesy to those who came. So it was a puzzle to everyone to say in which life their zeal chiefly showed itself: that is, whether their greatness fitted itself more remarkably to the purity of the hermitage or to the common life.