So Tichon remained in the desert with the two old men.
Father Hilarion fasted very strictly. Sometimes for weeks he would not taste bread. He kept himself alive with pine bark, which he dried, crushed in a mortar and baked with a little flour. He drank from land-locked pools water which was tepid and tasted of rust. In the winter he prayed standing up to his knees in snow. In the summer he would remain naked in the marshes offering his body for food to the midges. He never washed, following the precept of the Holy Isaac Sirine: “On no account uncover your members. If you feel a desire to scratch cover your hand with your shirt or trousers, and then only scratch. Never touch your bare body or privy members with your hand. If your body suffers, let it do so.”
Father Hilarion sometimes spoke to Tichon about his teacher Trifon, a monk at the Kirilo Beloserski Monastery. This Trifon had been surnamed the Sordid, because of his saintly sordidness, through which, it was said, he had the special gift of prophecy. Water had never wetted his feet nor his head; and yet he had no vermin on him, which caused him distress, “For,” said he, “in the future life I shall be overrun by fleas big as mice.” He repeated day and night the Lord’s prayer; his lips were so used to saying it that they moved now perpetually, by instinct. On his forehead, by dint of resting his fingers thereon in endlessly making signs of the cross, there was a sore. When officiating he often wept so abundantly that he used to swoon. During the eight days which preceded his death he suffered a great deal, but never complained, never moaned nor begged for a drink. When he was asked, “Father, have you much pain?” he answered, “All is well!” One day Father Hilarion had gently crept up to him and heard him murmur: “Oh for a good mouthful of water!” “Are you thirsty?” asked Hilarion. But Trifon answered aloud “No. I do not want to drink.” And by this Hilarion understood that Father Trifon was tormented by a great thirst, but that he had imposed this upon himself as a supreme privation.
“Notwithstanding all these fasts and works and prayers,” said Father Hilarion, “it is almost impossible for a man to be saved. According to a certain saint, out of thirty thousand souls which left the body only two got into Heaven; the rest went to Hell. The devil is very powerful,” Father Hilarion would sometimes sigh in great affliction: he seemed doubtful as to which was the stronger, which would conquer, God or the Devil.
At times it seemed to Tichon that should Father Hilarion press his thought he would arrive at the same conclusion as the teachers of the Red Death.
Father Sergius differed exceedingly from Father Hilarion. “An extravagant and unreasonable abstinence,” said he, “does more harm than eating sufficient food. Every one ought to decide for himself the amount of food he should eat. It is right to taste all foods, even those which are pleasant, for to the pure all things are pure. Every creature and gift of God is good and none should be despised.”
Salvation, he said, depended not on the accomplishment of extraordinary actions, but on the inward life. Every night he prayed, standing motionless on the rock, and Tichon felt that in that motionlessness there was yet a more powerful impulse than in all the furious dance of the “Khlisti.”
“How should one pray?” Tichon one day asked Father Sergius.
“In thought,” the latter answered, “descend into your own heart and say ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me!’ You can pray while standing, sitting or lying down. Confine your reason in your own heart; and keep back, as much as possible, your breathing. At first you will discover within yourself deep darkness and great hardness; you will feel an obstacle, a kind of triple rampart of brass between God and yourself; but do not get discouraged. Pray all the more perseveringly. At last the brazen barrier will fall, and an ineffable light will fall, too, upon your heart. Words will cease, and your prayer will change into sighs, genuflections, yearnings of the heart and gentle sorrowings. This is the perfect peace. This is the great ecstasy. Man no longer knows whether he is within his body or without it. This is the awe and the vision of God. Therein Man and God are fused, and become one; and the prophet’s words, ‘God unites himself to a god, and will be known by a god,’ is accomplished. That is what mental prayer is, my child.”
Tichon noticed that in speaking to him Father Sergius had the same exalted, almost intoxicated, look the Khlisti had, only their drunkenness was momentary and frantic; his, lasting and peaceable.