Nilus of Ancyra→Paul|c. 415 AD|nilus ancyra|From Ancyra|AI-assisted
To Paul the Monk.
Being a sluggish sort, and a prisoner of idleness, embracing your book alone, you remain (so I hear) from the first hour until sunset without stirring, as though fastened to your chair with some weight of lead, and this especially since you have been allotted a robust body. But Antony [Antony the Great, the founder of Egyptian monasticism], our chief, does not act in this way; rather, following the pattern of the angel, now he would sit down to the work of his hands, and now again he would rouse himself up to prayer. And he enjoyed so great an illumination that on one of those days he said to a certain philosopher that he read the words of the Lord in created things as in a contest of nature [in the original, an image drawn from boxing]; and so much the more in the night, when the darkness was deeper, did he commune with God, that when the day began to shine through he was greatly vexed, and rejected it thus: "What have I to do with you, light of the senses?" If, therefore, you understand exactly that a house will in no way be built out of a single stone, do not suppose that you must hold fast to one virtue alone, that is, to reading, but lay hold also henceforth of prayer, and of sober psalms, and of intense vigil, and of the rest; through which you will be able, in due order, to build yourself up, and to please God in the very manner he wills, leaping toward every virtue, and ridding yourself of the mud and the rottenness of sloth.
Being a sluggish sort, and a prisoner of idleness, embracing your book alone, you remain (so I hear) from the first hour until sunset without stirring, as though fastened to your chair with some weight of lead, and this especially since you have been allotted a robust body. But Antony [Antony the Great, the founder of Egyptian monasticism], our chief, does not act in this way; rather, following the pattern of the angel, now he would sit down to the work of his hands, and now again he would rouse himself up to prayer. And he enjoyed so great an illumination that on one of those days he said to a certain philosopher that he read the words of the Lord in created things as in a contest of nature [in the original, an image drawn from boxing]; and so much the more in the night, when the darkness was deeper, did he commune with God, that when the day began to shine through he was greatly vexed, and rejected it thus: "What have I to do with you, light of the senses?" If, therefore, you understand exactly that a house will in no way be built out of a single stone, do not suppose that you must hold fast to one virtue alone, that is, to reading, but lay hold also henceforth of prayer, and of sober psalms, and of intense vigil, and of the rest; through which you will be able, in due order, to build yourself up, and to please God in the very manner he wills, leaping toward every virtue, and ridding yourself of the mud and the rottenness of sloth.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.