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What did he require of his disciples?
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” ([Luke xiv, 26]).
It is scarcely possible in this age of enlightenment and unbelief to realize what sorrows and miseries these accursed teachings of Christ once caused. The eminent historian Lecky, in his “History of European Morals,” has attempted to describe some of their awful consequences. From his pages I quote the following:
“To break by his ingratitude the heart of the mother who had borne him, to persuade the wife who adored him that it was her duty to separate from him forever, to abandon his children, uncared for and beggars, to the mercies of the world, was regarded by the true hermit as the most acceptable offering he could make to his God. His business was to save his own soul. The serenity of his devotion would be impaired by the discharge of the simplest duties to his family. Evagrius, when a hermit in the desert, received, after a long interval, letters from his father and mother. He could not bear that the equable tenor of his thought should be disturbed by the recollection of those who loved him, so he cast the letters unread into the fire. A man named Mutius, accompanied by his only child, a little boy of eight years old, abandoned his possessions and demanded admission into a monastery. The monks received him, but they proceeded to discipline his heart. ‘He had already forgotten that he was rich; he must next be taught to forget that he was a father.’ His little child was separated from him, clothed in rags, subjected to every form of gross and wanton hardship, beaten, spurned and ill-treated. Day after day the father was compelled to look upon his boy wasting away with sorrow, his once happy countenance forever stained with tears, distorted by sobs of anguish. But yet, says the admiring biographer, ‘though he saw this day by day, such was his love for Christ, and for the virtue of obedience, that the father’s heart was rigid and unmoved’ (Vol. ii, 125, 126).
“He [St. Simeon Stylites] had been passionately loved by his parents, and, if we may believe his eulogist and biographer, he began his saintly career by breaking the heart of his father, who died of grief at his flight. His mother, however, lingered on. Twenty-seven years after his disappearance, at a period when his austerities had made him famous, she heard for the first time where he was and hastened to visit him. But all her labor was in vain. No woman was admitted within the precincts of his dwelling, and he refused to permit her even to look upon his face. Her entreaties and tears were mingled with words of bitter and eloquent reproach. ‘My son,’ she is represented as having said, ‘why have you done this? I bore you in my womb, and you have wrung my soul with grief. I gave you milk from my breast, you have filled my eyes with tears. For the kisses I gave you, you have given me the anguish of a broken heart; for all that I have done and suffered for you, you have repaid me by the most cruel wrongs.’ At last the saint sent a message to her to tell her that she would soon see him. Three days and three nights she had wept and entreated in vain, and now, exhausted with grief and age and privation, she sank feebly to the ground and breathed her last sigh before that inhospitable door. Then for the first time the saint, accompanied by his followers, came out. He shed some pious tears over the corpse of his murdered mother, and offered up a prayer consigning her soul to heaven” (Ibid, 130).