The person who, totally forsaking the world, retires to the mountains as though in pursuit of stillness and who then showily writes to those in the world, blessing some and praising and flattering others, is like someone who, after divorcing a foul and slatternly whore of a wife and going off to a distant land to expunge even his memory of her, then forgets why he came there and longs to write to those living with that whore, and sullied by her, even deeming them happy.
If not bodily, at least in heart and in intellect he shares their passions, inasmuch as he deliberately condones their commerce with that woman.
St Symeon the New Theologian
