For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falls; for he has not another to help him up.
All Commentaries on Ecclesiastes 4:10 Go To Ecclesiastes 4
Gregory of Nyssa
AD 394
Since the majority of persons who intend to lead a life of virginity are still young and immature, they must concern themselves with this before all: the finding of a good guide and teacher on this path, lest, on account of their ignorance, they enter upon trackless places and wander away from the straight road. For, as Ecclesiastes says, “Two are better than one.” The one is easily overcome by the enemy lying in ambush on the divine road, and truly, “woe to the solitary man, for if he should fall he has no one to lift him up.” In the past, certain people have made an auspicious beginning in their desire for this life, but, although they have attained perfection in their intention, they have been tripped up because of their vanity. They deceived themselves, through some craziness, into thinking that that was fair toward which their own thought inclined. Among these, there are those called “the slothful” in the Book of Wisdom, who strew their path with thorns, who consider harmful to the soul a zeal for deeds in keeping with the commandments of God, the demurrers against the apostolic injunctions, who do not eat their own bread with dignity but, fawning on others, make idleness the art of life. Then there are the dreamers who consider the deceits of dreams more trustworthy than the teachings of the Gospels, calling fantasies revelations. Apart from these, there are those who stay in their own houses, and still others who consider being unsociable and brutish a virtue without recognizing the command to love and without knowing the fruit of longsufferinility.
