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The Unknown Pilgrims
solely to the true God, never becoming prey to suggestions of evil, but always maintaining its needful purity and transparency as it stretches out towards God.15
The monk is one who is separated from all and united to all.16
.. he (the monk) seeks the best means to disengage himself from all forms of matter, in order to proceed in an immaterial state to the Immaterial.17
It is not possible to succeed in living as a monk and simultaneously to visit towns where the soul is glutted with many and varied sights received from outside. 18
The most difficult and also the most honourable of all ascetic endeavours is, according to St Nilus, the practice of xeniteia i.e. a stranger's life, to which is condemned or to which condemns himself the individual who goes off alone of his sort, his race, his language, to live in a country which is not his.own, even if it were in the midst of fellow-ascetics who have contemplation as their supreme goal. . . the first and foremost of these combats is xeniteia which consists in setting forth alone, stripping oneself, like an athlete, of one's country, one's race and one's goods.19
15 Macaire, Homélie 56, ibid., p.17.
16 Evagre, De Oratione 124, ibid.,
p.
17 Evagre, De Oratione 113, ibid., p.31.
18 Evagre, Lettre 41, ibid., p.37.
19 Hausherr, ibid., p.49.
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