Once, after a man had confessed to murder and adultery, Dion said to his assistant: “Murder and adultery — it sounds atrocious and grandiose, and certainly it is bad enough, I grant you. But I tell you, Joseph, in reality these people in the world are not real sinners at all. Whenever I attempt to put myself entirely into the minds of any of them, they strike me as absolutely like children. They are not decent, good, and noble; they are selfish, lustful, overbearing, and wrathful, but in reality and at bottom they are innocent, innocent in the same way as children.”
“And yet,” Joseph said, “you often belabor them mightily and paint them a vivid picture of hell.”
“Exactly. They are children, and when they have pangs of conscience and come to confess, they want to be taken seriously and reprimanded seriously. At least that is my view. You went about it differently; you didn’t scold and punish and deal out penances, but were friendly and sent the penitents off with a brotherly kiss. I don’t mean to criticize you, but that wouldn’t be my way.”
“No doubt,” Joseph said hesitantly. “But then tell me why, after I made my confession, you did not treat me as you would your other penitents, but silently kissed me and said not a word about penances?”
Dion Pugil fixed his piercing eyes upon him. “Was what I did not right?” he asked.
“I am not saying it was not right. It was surely right, for otherwise that confession would not have done me so much good.”
“Well then, let it be. In any case, I did impose a long and stern penance on you, without calling it such. I took you with me and treated you as my servant, and led you back to your duty, forcing you to hear confessions when you had tried to escape from that.”
He turned away; the conversation had already been too long for his liking. But this time Joseph was pressing.
“You knew in advance that I would follow your orders; I’d pledged that before the confession and even before I knew who you were. No, tell me, was it really for this reason that you treated me so?”
Dion Pugil took a few steps back and forth. Then he stopped in front of Joseph and laid his hand on his shoulder. “Worldly people are children, my son. And saints — well, they do not come to confess to us. But you and I and our kind, we ascetics and seekers and eremites — we are not children and are not innocent and cannot be set straight by moralizing sermons. We are the real sinners, we who know and think, who have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, and we should not treat one another like children who are given a few blows of the rod and left to go their way again. After a confession and penance we do not run away back to the world where children celebrate feasts and do business and now and then kill one another. We do not experience sin like a brief bad dream which can be thrown off by confession and sacrifice; we dwell in it. We are never innocent; we are always sinners; we dwell in sin and in the fire of conscience, and we know that we can never pay our great debt unless after our departure God looks mercifully upon us and receives us into His grace. That, Joseph, is the reason I cannot deliver sermons and dictate penances to you and me. We are not involved in one or another misstep or crime, but always and forever in original sin itself. This is why each of us can only assure the other that he shares his knowledge and feels brotherly love; neither of us can cure the other by penances. Surely you must have known this?”
Softly, Joseph replied: “It is so. I knew it.”
“Then let us not waste our time in talk,” the old man said curtly. He turned to the stone in front of his hut, on which he was accustomed to pray.
Several years passed. Every so often Father Dion was subject to spells of weakness, so that Joseph had to help him in the mornings, for otherwise he could not stand up by himself. Then he would go to pray, and after prayer he was again unable to rise without aid. Joseph would help him, and then Father Dion would sit all day long staring into space. This happened on some days; on others the old man would manage to stand up by himself. He also could not hear confessions every day; and sometimes, after Joseph had acted as his substitute, Dion would want a few words with the visitor and would tell him: “My end is nearing, my child, my end is nearing. Tell the people that Joseph here is my successor.” And when Joseph demurred at such talk, the old man would fix him with that terrible look of his that penetrated like an icy ray.
One day, when he had been able to stand without help, and seemed stronger, he called Joseph and led him to a spot at the edge of their small garden.
“Here is where you will bury me,” he said. “We will dig the grave together; we have a little time, I think. Bring me the spade.”
Thereafter he had Joseph dig a little early in the morning every day. If Dion was feeling stronger, he would himself scoop out a few spadefuls of earth with great difficulty, but also with an air of gaiety, as though he enjoyed the work. All through the day this gaiety would persist. From the time he started the project, he remained in continual good humor.
“You will plant a palm on my grave,” he said one day while they were working. “Perhaps you will even live to eat its fruit. If not, another will. Every so often I have planted a tree, but too few, far too few. Some say a man should not die without having planted a tree and left a son behind. Well, I am leaving behind a tree and leaving you also. You are my son.”
He was calm and more cheerful than Joseph had ever known him, and he grew more and more so. One evening as it was growing dark — they had already eaten and prayed — he called out to Joseph and asked him to sit beside his pallet for a while.
“I want to tell you something,” he said cheerfully. He seemed wakeful and not at all tired. “Do you remember, Joseph, the time you were so miserable in your cell near Gaza and tired of your life? And then you fled, and decided to find old Dion and tell him your story? And in the cenobite settlement you met the old man whom you asked to direct you to Dion Pugil? You remember. And was it not like a miracle that the old man turned out to be Dion himself? I want to tell you now how that happened. Because you see, it was strange and like a miracle for me too.
“You know what it is like when an ascetic and father confessor grows old and has listened to so many confessions from sinners who think him sinless and a saint, and don’t know that he is a greater sinner than they are. At such times all his work seems useless and vain to him, and everything that once seemed important and sacred — the fact that God had assigned him to this particular place and honored him with the task of cleansing human souls of their filth — all that seems to him too much of an imposition. He actually feels it as a curse, and by and by he shudders at every poor soul who comes to him with his childish sins. He wants to get rid of the sinner and wants to get rid of himself, even if he has to do it by tying a rope to the branch of a tree. That is how you felt at the time. And now the hour of confession has come for me too, and I am confessing: it happened that way to me also. I too thought I was useless and spiritually dead. I thought I could no longer bear to have people flocking to me so trustfully, bringing me all the filth and stench of human life that they could not cope with, and that I too could no longer cope with.