But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes. Such was the case with the peace Josephus Famulus enjoyed. It was unstable, visible one moment, gone the next, sometimes near as a candle carried in the hand, sometimes as remote as a star in the wintry sky. And in time a new and special kind of sin and temptation more and more often made life difficult for him. It was not a strong, passionate emotion such as indignation or a sudden rush of instinctual urges. Rather, it seemed to be the opposite. It was a feeling very easy to bear in its initial stages, for it was scarcely perceptible; a condition without any real pain or deprivation, a slack, lukewarm, tedious state of the soul which could only be described in negative terms as a vanishing, a waning, and finally a complete absence of joy. There are days when the sun does not shine and the rain does not pour, but the sky sinks quietly into itself, wraps itself up, is gray but not black, sultry, but not with the tension of an imminent thunderstorm. Gradually, Joseph’s days became like this as he approached old age. Less and less could he distinguish the mornings from the evenings, feast days from ordinary days, hours of rapture from hours of dejection. Everything ran sluggishly along in limp tedium and joylessness. This is old age, he thought sadly. He was sad because he had expected aging and the gradual extinction of his passions to bring a brightening and easing of his life, to take him a step nearer to harmony and mature peace of soul, and now age seemed to be disappointing and cheating him by offering nothing but this weary, gray, joyless emptiness, this feeling of chronic satiation. Above all he felt sated: by sheer existence, by breathing, by sleep at night, by life in his cave on the edge of the little oasis, by the eternal round of evenings and mornings, by the passing of travelers and pilgrims, camel riders and donkey riders, and most of all by the people who came to visit him, by those foolish, anxious, and childishly credulous people who had this craving to tell him about their lives, their sins and their fears, their temptations and self-accusations. Sometimes it all seemed to him like the small spring of water that collected in its stone basin in the oasis, flowed through grass for a while, forming a small brook, and then flowed on out into the desert sands, where after a brief course it dried up and vanished. Similarly, all these confessions, these inventories of sins, these lives, these torments of conscience, big and small, serious and vain, all of them came pouring into his ear, by the dozens, by the hundreds, more and more of them. But his ear was not dead like the desert sands. His ear was alive and could not drink, swallow, and absorb forever. It felt fatigued, abused, glutted. It longed for the flow and splashing of words, confessions, anxieties, charges, self-condemnations to cease; it longed for peace, death, and stillness to take the place of this endless flow.
That was it, he wished for the end. He was tired, had had enough and more than enough. His life had become stale and worthless. Things went so far with him that at times he felt tempted to put an end to it, to punish and extinguish himself, as the traitor Judas had done when he hanged himself. Just as the devil had plagued him in the earlier stages of his ascetic’s life by smuggling into his soul the desires, notions, and dreams of sensual and worldly pleasures, so the evil one now assailed him with ideas of self-destruction, so that he found himself considering every tree with the view to its holding a noose, every cliff in the vicinity with a view to casting himself from its top. He resisted the temptation. He fought. He did not yield. But day and night he lived in a fire of self-hatred and craving for death. Life had become unbearable and hateful.
To such a pass had Joseph come. One day, when he was again standing on one of the cliffs, he saw in the distance between earth and sky two or three tiny figures. Obviously they were travelers, perhaps pilgrims, perhaps visitors who intended to call on him for the usual reason. And suddenly he was seized by an irresistible craving to leave as fast as possible, to get away from this place at once, to escape from this life. The craving that seized him was so overpowering, so instinctive, that it swept away all the thoughts, objections, and scruples that naturally came to him — for how could a pious penitent have obeyed an impulse without twinges of conscience? But he was already running. He sped back to the cave where he had dwelt through so many years of struggle, where he had experienced so many exaltations and defeats. In reckless haste he gathered up a few handfuls of dates and a gourd of water, stuffed them into his old traveling pouch, slung it over his shoulder, took up his staff, and left the green peace of his little home, a fugitive and restless roamer, fleeing away from God and man, and most of all fleeing from what he had formerly thought the best he had to offer, his function and his mission.
At first he tore on frantically, as if those figures in the distance whom he had seen from the cliff were enemies who would pursue him. But after an hour of tramping, his anxious haste ebbed away. Movement tired him pleasantly, and he stopped to rest, although he did not allow himself to eat — it had become a sacred habit for him to take no food before sunset. While he rested, his reason, skilled in self-examination, once more asserted itself. It looked into his instinctive action, seeking to form a judgment. And it did not disapprove, wild though the action might seem, but rather viewed it with benevolence. His reason decided that for the first time in a long while he was doing something harmless and innocent. This was flight, a sudden and rash flight, granted, but not a shameful one. He had abandoned a post which he was no longer fit for. By running away he had admitted his failure to himself and to Him who might be observing him. He had given up a daily repeated, useless struggle and confessed himself beaten. There was nothing grand, heroic, and saintly about that, his reason decided, but it was sincere and seemed to have been inescapable. Now he found himself wondering that he had attempted this flight so late, that he had held on for so long. It now seemed to him that the doggedness with which he had for so long defended a lost position had been a mistake. Or rather that it had been prompted by his egotism, his old Adam. Now he thought he understood why this obstinacy had led to such evil, to such diabolic consequences; to such division and lethargy in his soul, and even to demonic possession, for what else could he call his urge toward death and self-destruction? Certainly a Christian ought to be no enemy of death; certainly a penitent and saint ought to regard his life as an offering; but the thought of suicide was utterly diabolic and could arise only in a soul no longer ruled and guarded by God’s angels, but by evil demons.