"Who can number adequately all the benefits of the desert and the advantages for virtue enjoyed by those who live there? Finding themselves placed in this world, they in a way go beyond this world. As the Apostle says, ‘They wander through desert places, in mountains and caves and in holes of the earth’. Quite correctly the Apostle says that the world is not worthy of such people, for they are alien to the confusion of human society; they are distant, quiet, silent, and free now both from sin and from inclination to sin."