Letter 387
To Victor the Archimandrite.
Just as in the gymnastic contests [athletic games] the man who has been anointed [with oil] easily undoes what are called the holds, but if he should take on dust he escapes the hand of his adversary only with difficulty, so here the man who is free from anxious care is hard for the devil to seize; whereas the man who is full of cares, and who by his anxieties roughens, as it were with dust, the smoothness of the mind's freedom from care, is extricated from the hand of Satan only with difficulty. For understand the oil here to mean freedom from care, and the dust to mean the manifold anxieties of the present age.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.
Latin / Greek Original
Ὥσπερ ἐπὶ τῶν γυμνικῶν ἀγώνων ὁ ἠλειμμένος εὐχερῶς διαλύει, τὰ λεγόμενα παρ’ αὐτῆς ἄμματα, εἰ δὲ δέξοιτο κόνιν, δυσκόλως ἐκφεύγει τὴν χεῖρα τοῦ ἀντιπάλου· οὕτως ἐνταῦθα ὁ μὴ μεριμνῶν δυσλήπτος ἐστὶ τῷ διαβόλῳ, φροντίζων δὲ, καὶ ταῖς μερίμναις καθάπερ κόνι τραχύνων τὸ λεῖον τῆς ἀμεριμνίας τοῦ νοῦ, δυσχερῶς ἐξελεῖ τῆς τοῦ Σατανᾶ χειρός. Ἔλαιον γάρ μοι νῦν τὴν ἀμεριμνίαν νόει, κόνιν δὲ τὰς πολυτρόπους φροντίδας τοῦ παρόντος αἰῶνος.
Revision history
- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from modern nilus ancyra workflow v1.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: project source import
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