The Self-Denial of Abbot Apollos

But so that you can fairly measure your strength by a sure test of strictness, I will tell you what a certain old man did, namely, Abbot Apollos. If the secret search of your hearts finds that you are not behind this man in purpose and goodness, you may venture to stay in your own country and live near your families without harm to your purpose or damage to your way of life. You may be sure that neither the feeling of their nearness nor your love for the place can interfere with the strictness of this lowly life, which not only your own will but also the needs of your exile force on you in this country. [a]

This old man’s own brother came to him in the dead of night, begging him to come out of his monastery for a little while to help him rescue an ox. The ox, he sadly complained, had got stuck in the mud of a swamp a little way off, and he could not possibly get it out alone. Abbot Apollos answered his pleas unmoved: “Why didn’t you ask our younger brother, who was nearer to you than I am as you passed by?” The other thought he had forgotten the death of their brother, who had been buried long ago, and that he had grown almost feeble-minded from too much fasting and constant solitude. He replied: “How could I call a man who died fifteen years ago?” Abbot Apollos said: “Don’t you know that I too have been dead to this world for twenty years, and that from my tomb in this cell I can give you no help in what belongs to the affairs of this present life? Christ is so far from letting me relax even a little the purpose of dying to the world on which I have entered, in order to pull out your ox, that he did not allow even the briefest break in it for my father’s funeral, which would have been undertaken far more readily, fittingly and piously.”

So now search out the secrets of your hearts, and consider carefully whether you too can keep up such strictness of mind toward your families without a break. When you find that you are like him in this dying of the soul to the world, then at last you may know that, in the same way, living near your families and brothers will not hurt you. I mean, when you hold that, though they are very close to you, you are dead to them, in such a way that you neither let them be helped by your assistance nor let yourselves be slackened by duties toward them.