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AND to support this judgment delivered of old by the blessed Antony and
the other fathers by a modern instance, as we promised to do, remember what
you lately saw happen before your very eyes, I mean, how the old man
Heron, only a very few days ago was cast down by an illusion of the
devil from the heights to the depths, a man whom we remember to have lived
for fifty years in this desert and to have preserved a strict continence
with especial severity, and who aimed at the secrecy of solitude with
marvellous fervour beyond all those who dwell here. By what device then or
by what method was he deluded by the deceiver after so many labours, and
falling by a most grievous downfall struck with profound grief all those
who live in this desert? Was it not because, having too little of the
virtue of discretion he preferred to be guided by his own judgment rather
than to obey the counsels and conference of the brethren and the
regulations of the elders? Since he ever practised incessant abstinence and
fasting with such severity, and persisted in the secrecy of solitude and a
monastic cell so constantly that not even the observance of the Easter
festival could ever persuade him to join in the feast with the brethren:
when in accordance with the annual observance, all the brethren remained in
the church and he alone would not join them for fear lest he might seem to
relax in some degree from his purpose by taking only a little pulse. And
deceived by this presumption he received with the utmost reverence an angel
of Satan as an angel of light and with blind slavishness obeyed his
commands and cast himself down a well, so deep that the eye could not
pierce its depths, nothing doubting of the promise of the angel who had
assured him that the merits of his virtues and labours were such that he
could not possibly run any risk. And that he might prove the truth of this
most certainly by experimenting on his own safety, in the dead of night he
was deluded enough to cast himself into the above mentioned well, to prove
indeed the great merit of his virtue if he should come out thence unhurt.
And when by great efforts on the part of the brethren he had been got out
already almost dead, on the third day afterward he expired, and what was
still worse, persisted in his obstinate delusion so that not even the
experience of his death could persuade him that he had been deceived by the
craft of devils. Wherefore in spite of the merits of his great labours and
the number of years which he had spent in the desert those who with
compassion and the greatest kindness pitied his end, could hardly obtain
from Abbot Paphnutius that he should not be reckoned among suicides, and
be deemed unworthy of the memorial and oblation for those at rest.
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