In the first year of his child’s life, Aesop developed an unquenchable love of gambling. As the sun peaked each day, he would take pause from his diligent craft of calligraphy to frequent the local theatre in his hometown of Karanis, situated south of Egypt’s Nile Delta. The sight of brawny gladiators mustering every drop of their beastly power to tear asunder their opponents intoxicated him. Aesop allied himself to certain of these men by soliciting their success through silver coins. Tragically and one by one, the men he had admired from afar fell to the sword, taking with them to the grave all of his wealth. When a money collector barged into Aesop’s home and beat him and his wife with a cudgel, he was forced to pay for his sin. With an overflowing of tears, he sold their first and only born child into slavery. At the demand of his wife, he consented to divorce and left Karanis.
“I am going off to be a monk,” he had told his wife, convinced that only Christianity and the virtues it embraced could mend his life. His wife laughed and bade him never to return.
Each footstep out of town felt insurmountable as the weight of Aesop’s heartache bore down hard upon him. He passed through Karanis’ stone city gates and, to his good fortune, happened upon a caravan traveling south along the Nile River. For nine days, he traveled by camel train into the depths of Egypt until, reaching the great city of Thebes, the caravan disbanded.
Without delay, Aesop trekked east toward the famed monastery of Tabennisi until he was stopped by a colossal mud-brick wall that climbed up and out from the earth. The wall was five times his height and stretched five hundred paces to his left and five hundred paces to his right before bending back in on itself to ultimately form a circle. Inside the enclosure, the desert bloomed with hundreds of monks.
As Aesop approached the monastery door, the gravity of his circumstance became overwhelming and his stomach was sent tumbling. The door was slightly taller than he and made of rotting wood. With a deep sigh, Aesop gave it two firm knocks. It immediately cracked open, revealing a somber face with parched skin and eyes sunk deep beneath the brow.
“I wish to renounce the world,” Aesop said. “I beg you, receive me into your hermitage, that I may become a monk.”
Without a word spoken, the doorkeeper escorted him to the guest chamber situated just inside the monastery wall. It was a small and simple room containing a bare mattress, an oil lamp, and a small window no bigger than Aesop’s head over which a red cross was painted. The window looked out onto an olive tree.
For seven days, Aesop was forbidden to leave his chamber. The doorkeeper would visit three times daily—in the morning, afternoon, and at sunset—entering the guestroom carrying a tray of unsalted bread, cooked vegetables, and figs. The two would break bread together in absolute quietude—the doorkeeper explained silence of mouth and stillness of heart allowed the faithful to commune with the Lord and appreciate his fruits. After they put down every last morsel, the doorkeeper offered Aesop instruction in the language of the monks—Coptic—which he fittingly described as Egyptian vernacular expressed in Greek letters, and taught him the Lord’s Prayer and many other psalms for memorization. On the seventh day, the doorkeeper prepared Aesop for what was to come.
“You must think of the monastery as a spiritual battlefield on which the most veracious of demons, bent on the destruction of pious souls, bring all their weapons to bear. A fellow monk, Evagrius of Pontus, who has been buffeted by these demons for many years, pinpointed the eight most harmful that cause man to falter. They are the demons of gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, vainglory, pride, and acedia—these are the eight deadly sins,” he said.
Aesop listened in earnest.
“The demon of gluttony forces us to overindulge; lust creates a desire for inappropriate sexual intimacy; avarice spawns a desire for worldly goods for their own sake; sadness comes from the desire of not having what one wants, and the frustration that comes with it; anger involves the improper use of our motivations, which should always be used to thwart demonic assaults; with vainglory we seek the admiration of others to puff up the self; with pride we attribute all success or virtue only to ourselves, to the point where we reject God as the source of good things, wrongly finding the source to be within ourselves instead; and last, acedia, which we also call the noonday demon, strikes with a sense of boredom, making the monk feel like the day is dragging on or is too difficult, spawning a case of spiritual sloth. Do you understand these?” the gatekeeper asked.
“Some of them I understand all to well,” Aesop said.
“In this monastery, we train to quell these passions, to reject the wicked advances of demons that bind our souls in chains of sin. Those who can stand steadfast in virtue with unfettered souls can partake in divine and spiritual things, transforming themselves evermore in the image and likeness of God. It is that for which we toil,” he said.
“And it is that which I seek,” Aesop replied.
The gatekeeper then stripped Aesop of his secular clothes and dressed him in the monastic habit. Aesop would live out his life in the monastery, fighting against the eight deadly sins until his body became dead to demonic advances, and his soul ascended to God.
By the sixth century, the spiritual battlefield on which Aesop fought looked slightly different—Pope Gregory the Great reduced the list from eight to seven deadly sins, folding vainglory into pride, acedia into sadness, and adding envy—but the battle remains the same.
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