Some time in the 520s, the great old man Barsanuphius, an Egyptian recluse, wrote from his cell in the vicinity of Gaza, in order to comfort a sick and dispirited monk:

Throughout the Christian world of the fifth and sixth centuries, average Christian believers (like the sick monk, Andrew) were encouraged to draw comfort from the expectation that, somewhere, in their own times, even maybe in their own region, and so directly accessible to their own distress, a chosen few of their fellows (who might be women quite as much as men) had achieved, usually through prolonged ascetic labour, an exceptional degree of closeness to God. God loved them as His favoured children. He would answer their prayers on behalf of the majority of believers, whose own sins kept them at a distance from Him.