The life of St Pitirim of Egypt
He made his home at Mount Porphyry in the Thebaid, given over there to a discipline of fasting that went beyond what most ascetics attempted, at times eating only water mixed with a little flour twice in a week, at other times taking no food at all.
He is remembered among the desert fathers for teaching that a particular temptation and its accompanying spirit attend each of the passions, working to stir that passion by whatever means will serve, and that watchfulness had to be fitted to the temptation actually at hand rather than practiced in a general way. Palladius, writing of the Egyptian monks in his Lausiac History early in the fifth century, recorded that Pitirim received a vision from an angel while at prayer in the mountains, a detail belonging to the Church's memory of him rather than to any independently verifiable event. Little more of his life has survived beyond this reputation for extreme asceticism and for the sayings gathered under his name.
