OS (Text) -- 11

48 Let a model of stillness (hesychia) of the heart be for you he who holds a mirror and gazes towards it, and at that time you will see in your heart those things which intelligibly are written in it, both wicked and good.

49 Keep watch ever to have in your heart no thought (logismos) at all, either irrational or reasonable, so that thus you recognize easily the foreigners, that is to say, the first-born sons of the Egyptians.

50 As a good and delightful, bright and most sweet and all-beautiful and brightly-shining and comely virtue, sobriety, prospered by you, Christ God, and travelled in much humility by the human mind (nous) which has kept awake. For it extends its vine-branches unto the sea and abyss of contemplations and its offshoots unto the rivers of delightful and divine mysteries [cf. Ps. 79, 12]; and it waters the mind (nous) parched for much time in impiety by the brine of the thoughts (logismoi) of wicked spirits and the hostile-mindedness of the flesh, which is death [cf. Rom. 8, 6].

51 Sobriety is similar to Jacob’s Ladder upon which God abides and the angels ascend [cf. Gen. 28, 12]. For it takes out of us every evil. For it cuts off loquacity, revilement, slander and the catalogue of all the sensible evils, not enduring even for a little time to be deprived for the sake of these things of its own sweetness.

52 Let us pursue this thing willingly, my brothers. And flying in its views with a pure intellect (dianoia) in Christ Jesus, let us set in motion the contemplation of our sins and of our former life, so that being crushed and humbled by the remembrance of our sins we will have unseparated the help of Jesus Christ our God in the invisible war. For having been deprived of the help of Jesus through pride or vainglory or self-love, we have fallen short of purity of heart, through which God is known by man. For the cause, as is the promise [cf. Matt. 5, 8], of the second is the first.

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