The Humility of Abbot Pinufius and His Hiding Place

I am now going to set out the teaching of that excellent and remarkable man, Abbot Pinufius, on the end of penitence. I think I would be throwing away a very large part of my material if, out of consideration for my reader and so as not to weary him, I passed over in silence here the praise of his humility, which I touched on in a brief account in the fourth book of the Institutes, the book entitled “Of the rules to be observed by those who renounce the world.” This is all the more so because many who know nothing of that work may happen to read this one, and then all the authority of his words would be weakened if no account were given of the virtues of the speaker. [a]

This man was presiding as abbot and presbyter over a large coenobium not far from Panephysis, a city of Egypt, as we were told there. The whole province praised him to the skies for his virtues and his miracles, so that it already seemed to him that he had received the reward of his labors in the payment of human praise. He was afraid that the emptiness of popular favor, which he particularly disliked, might interfere with the fruits of an eternal reward. So he secretly fled from his monastery and made his way to the farthest retreats of the monks of Tabenna. There he did not choose the solitude of the desert, or the freedom from care that the life of one living alone allows, a life that even the imperfect, who cannot bear the effort that obedience demands in a coenobium, sometimes seek out of proud presumption. He chose instead to submit himself to a very famous monastery.

There, so that no sign of his dress might give him away, he put on the clothes of a man living in the world. As is the custom there, he lay before the doors in tears for many days, clinging to the knees of everyone. Day after day he was turned away by those who, to test his purpose, said that he was now seeking this holy life in extreme old age not sincerely but because he was driven by lack of food. At last he was admitted. He was assigned to help a young brother who had been put in charge of a garden. He did with marvelous and holy humility everything that his superior ordered him, or that the care of the work entrusted to him required. But beyond this he also worked secretly by night at certain necessary tasks which the rest avoided out of disgust. So when morning came, the whole community was delighted at such useful work but did not know who had done it.

He had spent nearly three years there, rejoicing in the labors he had longed for but to which he was so unfairly subjected, when a certain brother who knew him came there from the same part of Egypt that he himself had come from. For a time this man hesitated, because the poorness of his clothes and of his work kept him from recognizing him readily at once. But after looking at him very closely, he fell at his feet. First he astonished all the brothers. Then he gave away his name, which the fame of his exceptional holiness had made known to them too, and he struck them to the heart with sorrow because they had assigned a man of such virtue, and a priest, to such lowly tasks. But he, weeping freely and blaming the accident of his discovery on the bitter envy of the devil, was brought to the monastery in honorable custody, with the brothers surrounding him. After he had stayed there a short time, he was once more troubled by the respect shown to his dignity and rank. So he secretly boarded a ship and sailed to Palestine, a province of Syria. There he was received as a beginner and a novice in the house of the monastery in which we were living, and the abbot told him to stay in our cell. But not even there could his virtues and merits stay hidden for long. For he was discovered and given away in the same manner, and brought back to his own monastery with the greatest honor and respect.