Chapter XL.
Of the boys who when bringing to a sick man some figs, died in the desert from hunger, without having tasted them.
But since in the section in which we proposed to say something about the strictness of fasting and abstinence, kindly acts and deeds of charity seem to have been intermingled, again returning to our design we will insert in this little book a noteworthy deed of some who were boys in years though not in their feelings. For when, to their great surprise, some one had brought to Abbot John, the steward in the desert of Scete, some figs from Libya Mareotis, [874] as being a thing never before seen in those districts,--(John) who had the management of the church in the days of the blessed Presbyter Paphnutius, [875] by whom it had been intrusted to him, at once sent them by the hands of two lads to an old man who was laid up in ill health in the further parts of the desert, and who lived about eighteen miles from the church. And when they had received the fruit, and set off for the cell of the above-mentioned old man, they lost the right path altogether--a thing which there easily happens even to elders--as a thick fog suddenly came on. And when all day and night they had wandered about the trackless waste of the desert, and could not possibly find the sick man's cell, worn out at last both by weariness from their journey, and from hunger and thirst, they bent their knees and gave up their souls to God in the very act of prayer. And afterwards, when they had been for a long while sought for by the marks of their footsteps which in those sandy regions are impressed as if on snow, until a thin coating of sand blown about even by a slight breeze covers them up again, it was found that they had preserved the figs untouched, just as they had received them; choosing rather to give up their lives, than their fidelity to their charge, and to lose their life on earth than to violate the commands of their senior.
[874] The Mareotic nome is the district round Lake Mareotis, a lake in the north of the delta bordering upon the Libyan desert (the modern Birket el Mariout), and running parallel to the Mediterranean, from which it is separated by a long and narrow ridge of sand.
[875] On Paphnutius see the note on the Conference III. i.
Chapter XLI.
The saying of Abbot Macarius of the behaviour of a monk as one who was to live for a long while, and as one who was daily at the point of death.
There is still one valuable charge of the blessed Macarius to be brought forward by us, so that a saying of so great a man may close this book of fasts and abstinence. He said then that a monk ought to bestow attention on his fasts, just as if he were going to remain in the flesh for a hundred years; and to curb the motions of the soul, and to forget injuries, and to loathe sadness, and despise sorrows and losses, as if he were daily at the point of death. For in the former case discretion is useful and proper as it causes a monk always to walk with well-balanced care, and does not suffer him by reason of a weakened body to fall from the heights over most dangerous precipices: in the other high-mindedness is most valuable as it will enable him not only to despise the seeming prosperity of this present world, but also not to be crushed by adversity and sorrow, and to despise them as small and paltry matters, since he has the gaze of his mind continually fixed there, whither daily at each moment he believes that he is soon to be summoned. [876]
[876] Socrates (H.E. Book IV. c. xxiii.) gives an account of two monks of the name of Macarius, one of whom was from Upper Egypt, and the other from Alexandria. Compare also Rufinus History of the Monks, cc. xxviii., xxix. It is not certain to which of them Cassian's stories refer, here and in the Conferences V. xii. VII. xxvii., XXIV. xiii. The story told in Conference XV. iii, refers to the "Egyptian" Macarius (cf. Sozomen H. E. III. xiv., where the miracle is expressly assigned to him): that in XIV. iv. evidently belongs to the "Alexandrian" Macarius. The two are mentioned together in Conference XIX. ix., and by various other writers.