Flee from Men

At the height of his court career Arsenius prayed to be shown the way of salvation and heard a voice say, “Arsenius, flee from men and you will be saved.” This file recounts the call as the Apophthegmata preserve it — the prayer in the palace, the first word that sent him from the court to the Egyptian desert around the year 394, and the second word, “flee, be silent, be still,” given him once he had come to the solitary life — and shows how this double oracle became the seed of his whole vocation and a watchword of the later tradition of stillness.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of stillness)

The Prayer in the Palace

The decisive moment of Arsenius’ life, as the Apophthegmata Patrum tell it, came not in the desert but in the palace, and it came as an answer to prayer. “While still living in the palace,” the opening saying of his collection reports, “Abba Arsenius prayed to God in these words, ‘Lord, lead me in the way of salvation.’ And a voice came saying to him, ‘Arsenius, flee from men and you will be saved’” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 1; trans. Ward 1984). The Greek is terse and lapidary: Arseni, pheuge tous anthrōpous kai sōthēsē — “Arsenius, flee men and you will be saved.” It is the founding oracle of his life, and the tradition treats it as a direct divine commission, not a private impulse.

The saying is theologically careful in a way easily overlooked. Arsenius does not ask for a sign, a vision, or a great work; he asks, simply, to be led “in the way of salvation.” The answer is not a doctrine but a command, and a command of separation: flee from men. For a man whose whole station consisted in proximity to the greatest men of the age — the emperor, the princes, the court — this was a word that struck at the root of his life. To flee men was to flee everything that had defined him. The Apophthegmata present the rest of his story as the working-out of this single command in the most literal and uncompromising way (Chitty 1966, 67; Ward 1984, 9).

The Flight to Scetis

Arsenius obeyed. The tradition holds that he left the court — secretly, according to the later Life, lest he be detained — and made his way to Egypt, to the desert of Scetis, the great anchoritic settlement in the Nitrian wilderness south-west of the Nile Delta founded a generation earlier by Macarius the Great (on Scetis and its founder, see St. Macarius the Great; on the desert tradition, Monasticism). There he sought out the elders and asked to be received among them, exchanging the purple of the court for the sheepskin of the monk.

The date of the flight is conventionally placed around 394, in the last year or two of the reign of Theodosius (who died in January 395), when Arsenius was about forty years old (Chitty 1966, 67). [Disputed: the year of Arsenius' flight is not fixed by any contemporary document; the conventional date of c. 394 is an inference from his presumed presence at court during the rearing of the princes and from his reported age of about forty at his renunciation (Chitty, *The Desert a City*, 1966, 67), and some accounts place the departure slightly earlier; the *Apophthegmata* themselves give no date, and the chronology depends on the later *Life*.] What the sources agree on is the shape of the act: a man at the summit of the Christian Empire abandoned it, in middle life, for the most austere form of the monastic vocation then known.

The Second Word: Flee, Be Silent, Be Still

The oracle came in two stages, and the second is as famous as the first. Having obeyed the command to flee men and come to the solitary life, Arsenius prayed again in the same words — “Lord, lead me in the way of salvation” — and again a voice answered him: “Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always, for these are the source of sinlessness” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 2; trans. Ward 1984). In the form that became proverbial in the Latin West, the three commands were rendered fuge, tace, quiesce — “flee, be silent, be still” — and they were taken as the summary of the whole eremitical and hesychast ideal (see Flee, Be Silent, Be Still).

The two oracles together trace a deepening. The first word, flee from men, governed his renunciation of the world: it took him from the court to the desert. The second word, flee, be silent, be still, governed his life within the desert: it took him from the common life of the brethren into the deepest solitude and silence, the hesychia that became the signature of his asceticism (see Silence and Stillness). To flee was not enough; the monk must also still the tongue and the heart. The desert tradition read the sequence as a map of the spiritual life: separation from the world, then separation from the noise of one’s own soul, until nothing remained between the monk and God but ceaseless prayer (Ward 1984, 9; Harmless 2004, 227–228).

The Logic of Flight

The command “flee from men” has often been misread as misanthropy, and the Apophthegmata anticipate the misreading. When a brother once asked why Arsenius, who had so much learning, would not speak the word of God with the brethren but withdrew from them, the answer the tradition supplies is that Arsenius fled not out of contempt for men but because he could not be with God and with men at the same time in the measure his vocation required. The most pointed form is his own reported word: “I cannot live with God and with men; the thousands and ten thousands of the heavenly hosts have but one will, while men have many. So I cannot leave God to be with men” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 13; trans. Ward 1984).

This is the theological heart of the “flight.” It is not a denial that men can be saved in the world or in community — the cenobitic tradition of Pachomius stood as a living witness that they could (see St. Pachomius the Great) — but a recognition of a particular calling to the undistracted love of God, a calling whose price is the renunciation even of legitimate human society. Arsenius is the desert’s most uncompromising witness to that particular vocation, and the Apophthegmata present his flight not as a rejection of others but as a single-minded answer to a personal command of God (Ward 1984, 9–10; Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 1993, on the obedience to the heard word).

The Heard Word and the Desert

The form of Arsenius’ call is itself characteristic of the desert and worth dwelling on. He was not converted by a sermon, a book, or the persuasion of a friend, but by a voice heard in prayer — a direct, unmediated word that he obeyed without argument. The desert literature is full of such heard words: the fathers ask God for guidance and receive it, sometimes in a voice, sometimes through the chance reading of a Scripture, sometimes through a word spoken by an elder; and the proper response is immediate obedience (Burton-Christie 1993, on the desert obedience to the divine word; Ward 1984). Antony himself was called by a word of the Gospel heard in church (see St. Antony the Great), and Arsenius’ call by the voice in the palace stands in the same tradition.

What distinguishes Arsenius’ call is its sheer literalism. “Flee from men” is not a metaphor he softened or interpreted; he took it at its word and fled men in the most exact sense, to the point of refusing even the company of the saints (see Silence and Stillness). The desert admired this literal obedience as the mark of a true monk: the word of God is to be done, not discussed, and Arsenius did it. His whole subsequent life is the working-out of two short commands taken with absolute seriousness, and the tradition holds this up as a model of how the heard word is to be obeyed (Ward 1984, 9–10; Burton-Christie 1993).

The Seed of a Tradition

From this double oracle the whole of Arsenius’ desert life unfolds, and so does a long line of later reflection. The threefold word flee, be silent, be still was taken up by the systematic collections, carried into the Latin Verba Seniorum, and made a commonplace of monastic instruction East and West (see Arsenius in the Monastic Memory). For the later hesychast tradition it was read as an early charter of the prayer of stillness, the hesychia that the fourteenth-century theologians of the Holy Mountain would defend and systematize (see The Root of Stillness; on the prayer itself, The Jesus Prayer). The voice that came to a courtier at prayer in the palace of Theodosius thus became one of the founding words of the Christian tradition of silence — the subject to which the rest of this guide is devoted.

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Arsenius 1, “flee from men and you will be saved”; Arsenius 2, “flee, be silent, pray always”; Arsenius 13, “I cannot live with God and with men”; introduction, 9–10.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (67, on the flight to Scetis and its dating.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (227–228, 421–423, on Arsenius and the ideal of stillness.)
Burton-Christie, Douglas. The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (On the desert obedience to the divine word.)