From: THE STRUGGLE WITH GOD by Paul Evdokimov

Man’s transgression confines him to a situation that is closed to all that is not of this earth. The more material this is and the more it is made a thing, the more it appears deprived of reality and of any substance. This is the world of finance, with its temple, the Stock Exchange, and its votaries of luxury; it is the political world of ambition and covetousness, of collective neurosis of mad passions and unfaithful sensual love. It is a world vacillating above an abyss, without any consistency, being made of vapors and peopled with phantoms, and which at any moment risks disappearing “as smoke in the air and as wax melted by fire”. On the other hand, Origen compares the efforts of the hermits of the desert, in their march toward perfection, to the slow departure of the inhabitants of Plato’s cave. Leaving the silhouetted shadows for a vision of reality, where nothing is interposed between man and the truths of the divine life, the monk of the desert kept firmly to the way of return toward the kingdom. [page 68]