The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers

The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers

2010 First Printing

Copyright © 2010 by Paraclete Press, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-55725-780-2

Unless otherwise designated, Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations designated (KJV) are taken from the King James Version.

         Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data

The wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers : contemporary English version / [translated] by Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. : foreword by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.

     p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-55725-780-2

1. Spiritual life–Christianity. 2. Anthony, of Egypt, Saint, ca. 250-355 or 6. 3. Paul, the Hermit, Saint, d. ca. 341. 4. Desert Fathers–Biography. I. Carrigan, Henry L., 1954- II. Athanasius, Saint, Patriarch of Alexandria, d. 373. Life of St. Antony. English. III. Jerome, Saint, d. 419 or 20. Vita Pauli. English.

  BR63.W57 2010

  248.4’70922394–dc22

                                                                                                          2010022514

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press

Brewster, Massachusetts

www.paracletepress.com

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

FOREWORD by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

INTRODUCTION

THE LIFE OF ANTONY OF EGYPT

THE LIFE OF PAUL OF THEBES

SAYINGS OF THE FATHERS AND MOTHERS

Antony the Great

Basil the Great

Gregory the Theologian

Gerontius

Ephrem

Amoun of Nitria

Anoub

Abraham

Apollo

Andrew

Dioscorus

Doulas

Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus

Evagrius

Theodora

John the Dwarf

Isidore the Priest

Isidore of Pelusia

Cassian

Macarius the Great

Arsenius

Agathon

Moses

Poemen

FOREWORD

If books could be weighted according to the power of their words, you wouldn’t be able to hold the volume that is now in your hands. Given the cost of printing books, we can all be grateful that it’s available in paperback. But the wisdom printed on these pages is the kind of thing humans have historically written on stone. This is a heavy book.

I say this because I didn’t know what I was getting into the first time I encountered Antony of the desert. When his biography was assigned to me in an undergraduate class on Christian classics, I remember feeling relief that it was so much shorter than Augustine’s Confessions. I was looking forward to a light evening of reading. But I did not get very far into this story about a man who heard Jesus’ words to the rich young ruler and decided to obey them himself before I forgot what time it was. I remember leaning expectantly over the pages as I tried to make sense of wrestling matches with demons and the rigors of ascetic practice for the sake of drawing near to God. When Antony’s friends dragged him from his cell after twenty years, I sat in wonder that he was a picture of health with power to heal and raise the dead. Here was a human being transformed. I sat up half the night, reading that description over and again.

A son of Southern Baptists, I grew up going to revival meetings where some of the best storytellers in the world told me the story of Jesus. By the time I was seven, I was so captivated by the power of Jesus that I promised him my whole life. My pastor told me it was the most important decision I would ever make—that this one choice changed everything. But a decade later, when I was a student on a Christian college campus, I was disappointed by how little had changed. Could Jesus really make me into a whole new person?

Antony gave me hope that a new life in Christ was possible. But he also showed me, in no uncertain terms, what new life would cost—nothing less than everything. I was scared to death, but I was also unexplainably attracted to this person. Like Nicodemus who came to Jesus in the night, I wanted to slip away and listen to this man.

In time I learned that I was not the first to have this feeling. When word got out about Antony’s transformation, the desert became a city. Those who came proved that Antony was not an exception. Devoting themselves to a life of prayer and the hard work of stability, a whole host of men and women grew in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, Syria and Turkey to become wise mothers and fathers in the faith. They gathered themselves in communities called lauras and sketes. When hungry souls came looking for a word, they listened prayerfully and spoke succinctly. The sayings collected here under the names of those who said them are the sound advice that folks took home with them. I doubt they wrote them down immediately. These are the sort of words that, if you really hear them, you don’t have to write them down. They stay with you forever.

The heart of desert wisdom, just like the heart of Jesus’ gospel, is in the memorable images and words of instruction that came in short sayings from the ammas and abbas. But just as Peter, Paul, and John wrote reflections to help us make sense of the sayings of Jesus, more systematic thinkers came along to make sense of the desert wisdom also. Evagrius and John Cassian are the best known of these scholars. Their reflections help us put the pieces together into a whole—the desert wisdom as a vision for what life with God and other people can be. They are secondary, of course. Without the radical commitment and total abandon of someone like Antony, their work would have never been possible. And yet, without their careful thought, we may well misunderstand the gift of the mothers and fathers. Part of the wisdom of the tradition, I suppose, is that we need experience and reflection, theology and practice.

I live my life with Jesus and other friends in a Christian community that has been described as part of a new monasticism. I never cease to be amazed by how many people in our hypermodern culture of virtual reality show up at our door and dinner table, eager to talk about one thing: how to live the way of life that Jesus taught and practiced. As I pass the potatoes or sit across a cup of tea from these souls, I see a glimmer of hope in their eyes. I suspect it’s something like the hope I felt that first night I sat up reading about Antony of Egypt. Maybe, I kept thinking, a whole new life is possible. Maybe it’s already here. Maybe we really can become the church we dream of. Coming back to the words in this book helps me keep hope alive. The church doesn’t just believe another world is possible—we’ve seen it. If it could happen in the fourth and fifth centuries, it can happen where we are today. May we, by the power of the Holy Spirit, become the new creation we long for.

—Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

INTRODUCTION

Two of the most enduring images used to describe the Christian spiritual life are the wilderness and the desert. On one level, Christians have used these images to describe spiritual experiences involving feelings of God’s absence or abandonment. Christians often describe their feelings of spiritual loneliness and times of separation from God as periods of wandering in the wilderness. Often these same Christians, feeling that God is somehow testing them as they experience devastating losses, physical pain, or spiritual forlornness, compare their time of suffering to Jesus’ experience of being tested in the desert.

While these images often suggest an aridity of spirit, however, they also evoke powerful visions of renewal and redemption. In Exodus 16, as the Israelites murmur their threats at Moses for leading them into such a situation, God provides food and water for them and guides them into a new land of promise. In Matthew 4:1–11 (Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13), Jesus finds himself alone in the wilderness with the great tempter, Satan. After forty days and forty nights of what appear to be exhausting struggles, Jesus emerges from his desert period prepared to face the challenges of his forthcoming ministry. The wilderness stories of the Israelites and of Jesus provide the foundational narratives of desert spirituality in the Christian traditions.

The history of the earliest Christian communities after Jesus’ life and ministry is indeed the story of a wilderness experience. Very soon after Jesus’ death, according to the account in Acts, several of his followers were killed for preaching his message of a coming new kingdom of God. One of the persecutors, Saul of Tarsus, suddenly experienced conversion to the nascent Christian tradition (while in the desert), changed his name to Paul, and soon became one of the tradition’s most ardent supporters. During a period of roughly twenty years or less, Paul and his followers established numerous churches throughout the Mediterranean region. In his letters, Paul offered his advice to several churches about internal doctrinal matters—what does it mean to be ekklesia, or church?—as well as about external matters—how should the church or Christians deal with the Roman government?

During the first four centuries of the Common Era, Christianity experienced tremendous persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire. Paul and the writers of the Gospels had already warned their communities that the coming of the new kingdom would be fraught with perils for the faithful (1 Thessalonians 3:1–5, 5:1–11; Mark 13). But as the early Jesus movement migrated into urban areas and established churches, it came increasingly into conflict with the Roman Empire, which required total obedience to its laws of emperor worship. With their belief in the coming new kingdom in which their own God would reign supreme, many Christians refused to submit to the Empire’s insistence that the true God was the Roman emperor. With such refusals began a series of persecutions of Christians under a string of emperors from Nero to Diocletian.

When the persecution was at its height in the first two centuries of the Common Era, church theologians such as Justin, Irenaeus, and Origen encouraged faithfulness to the developing doctrine of the church as well as to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. For Justin, persecution provided the opportunity to show true faithfulness to Christ by dying for him in the manner in which he had died for his followers. Thus, during these centuries of the developing Christian community, martyrdom became its central expression of faith. Early Christian martyrs enacted their own desires to be united with God through their passionate defenses of their faith and through their deaths. The passion of the martyrs for their faith attracted many new converts to Christianity, and suddenly the community found itself engaged in internal arguments about baptism and the nature of a true Christian.

Yet, these internal arguments did not halt the growth of Christianity. In fact, some have claimed recently that Christianity continued to grow in spite of martyrdom because of the frequent tendency of Christians to intermarry with non-Christians in the Empire. Whatever the reasons, Christian communities experienced slow but steady growth between the second and fourth centuries. By the time of Constantine, who issued an edict of toleration that ended the persecution of Christians, the Christian church had grown so large that it confronted new problems. Suddenly, the church found itself not having to engage in a process of self-definition.

When the emperor Constantine came to power in the early part of the fourth century, he ushered in a new attitude toward the Christian religion. Constantine himself probably experienced some kind of conversion to Christianity in 312, when he attributed his victory over his rival to the deity he referred to as the Unconquered Sun. While many Christians believed that their God had given Constantine the victory, he did not differentiate between his monotheism and that of the Christians. Thus, he adopted the Christian cross as his battle symbol, and he placed the Chi-Rho symbol of Christ on his coins beginning in 315. Moreover, the emperor thought of himself as a ruler whose duty was to establish and promote a united church. As the first Christian Roman ruler, Constantine supported the growth of the church. In order to repay Christians for the years of persecutions by the Empire, he built new churches and had new copies of the Bible made. For the first time