CHAPTER XLIV

INNOCENT

[1] YOU have heard from many the story of the blessed Innocent, the priest of the Mount of Olives, but none the less you will hear it also from us who lived with him for three years. He was simple to an excess. Having been one of the dignitaries of the palace in the early days of the Emperor Constantius, he renounced the world, leaving his marriage, by which he had also a son, Paul by name, of the imperial bodyguard. [2] When the latter had sinned with the daughter of a priest, Innocent cursed his own son, beseeching God and saying: “Lord, give him such a spirit that his flesh may no longer find opportunity to sin”—thinking it better that he should struggle with a demon than with incontinence, which actually happened. At this present moment he is still on the Mount of Olives, wearing irons and chastised by the spirit. [3] How compassionate indeed this Innocent was, so that often he himself stole from the brethren and gave to the needy—I shall seem to be talking nonsense if I tell the truth. And he was exceedingly innocent and simple, and was counted worthy of the gift (of power) over demons. As an example of this: Once a young man was brought to him before our eyes taken by a spirit and by paralysis, so that I, having seen him, wished publicly to repel the mother of the man who had been brought, since I despaired of his cure. [4] Well, it happened in the meantime that the old man having come up saw her standing and weeping and lamenting over the unspeakable misfortune of her son. So the good old man wept and, moved with compassion, took the young man and entered into his oratory, which he had built with his own hands, and in which relics of John the Baptist were laid. And having prayed over him from the third hour to the ninth, he restored the young man to his mother cured that same day, having driven out both his paralysis and the demon. His paralysis was such that the boy, when he spat, spat on his own back, so twisted was he.

[5] An old woman having lost a sheep came to him in tears. And having followed her he said: “Show me the place where you lost it.” She led him to the neighbourhood of the tomb of Lazarus. He stood and prayed. But the young men who had stolen it anticipated him by killing it. So while he prayed, no one confessing and the meat lying hidden in the vineyard, a crow came from somewhere and hovered over the place, took a morsel and flew off again. And the blessed one having marked the place found the slain animal, and so the young men who had killed it fell at his feet and confessed and paid, when asked, the proper price of the sheep.