Silence and Stillness

Of all the desert fathers Arsenius is the supreme witness to hesychia — silence and stillness — and the Apophthegmata gather under his name the most concentrated body of teaching on the guarded tongue and the quiet heart. This file sets out his love of stillness as the sources record it: the saying “I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having kept silent,” his silence even in holy company, and the withdrawal from the brethren that made his name a synonym for the eremitical ideal.

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

The Love of Hesychia

If the desert had a patron of silence, it was Arsenius. The second of the oracles given him — “flee, be silent, be still” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 2; Ward 1984; see Flee from Men) — became the governing principle of his whole life, and the Apophthegmata preserve under his name a cluster of sayings on hesychia, the stillness of body, tongue, and heart, denser and more pointed than for any other father. Hesychia in the desert vocabulary is more than the absence of noise; it is the cultivated quiet in which the monk withdraws from distraction, stills the passions, and attends to God alone (Ward 1984, introduction; Hausherr, Hésychasme et prière, 1966). Arsenius is its great exemplar, the man in whom the ideal is concentrated to the point of severity.

The fathers themselves recognized this concentration and traced his attainment to it. “Abba Mark said to Abba Arsenius, ‘Why do you avoid us?’ The old man said to him, ‘God knows that I love you, but I cannot be with God and with men. The thousands and ten thousands of the heavenly powers have but one will, while men have many wills. So I cannot leave God to be with men’” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 13; trans. Ward 1984). The silence was not coldness but the cost of an undivided attention; to be with the many wills of men was, for Arsenius, to be drawn away from the one will of God.

“I Have Often Repented of Speaking”

The single saying most firmly attached to Arsenius’ name, and one of the most quoted in the whole desert corpus, is his word on the danger of speech. In the form the tradition preserves it: “I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having kept silent” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius; cf. the systematic collection under On stillness; Ward 1984). The saying is sometimes given in a fuller frame in which Arsenius, or the tradition reflecting on him, observes that speech is the readiest occasion of sin and silence the surest guard against it.

The aphorism became proverbial far beyond the desert, carried into the Latin tradition and quoted for centuries as a maxim of monastic prudence. [Disputed: the epigram "I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having kept silent" is firmly attached to Arsenius in the desert tradition and the systematic collections, but the same sentiment is attributed in classical sources to others (a comparable saying is credited to Simonides and to the sage Xenocrates in Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius), so the desert form is best understood as the Christian appropriation of a widely circulating maxim rather than a verbatim record of Arsenius' own words (cf. Ward, *Sayings*, 1984; standard discussions of the *apophthegmata* as a genre that reshapes received wisdom).] What matters for the tradition is not the originality of the phrase but its perfect fit with the man: Arsenius is remembered as the father who spoke least and weighed his words most, and the saying crystallizes that memory.

Silence Even in Holy Company

The severity of Arsenius’ silence is measured by the company he kept silent in. The Apophthegmata record that the fathers themselves, far from being offended, learned from his quiet. When the brethren came to him he would often say nothing, or send them away with the briefest of words, and they took even his silence as instruction. The tradition tells that the archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria once came with magistrates to see the great hermit, wishing to hear a word from him; Arsenius asked, “If I tell you something, will you keep it?” and when they promised, he said, “If you hear that Arsenius is anywhere, do not go there” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 7; trans. Ward 1984). On another occasion, when Theophilus and his party came uninvited, Arsenius asked whether they would do what he said, and when they agreed, told them to depart and not return; so they went away (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 8; Ward 1984). Even the archbishop of Alexandria could not draw him out of his stillness.

The most telling scene is the one in which his silence is contrasted with the talk of others at the very table of the church. When the brethren gathered at the synaxis, the tradition reports, Arsenius would place himself out of sight, behind a pillar or in some corner, so that no one might see his face or he be drawn into conversation, “in order that he might not see others and that others might not see him” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 30; Ward 1984). His stillness was guarded even in the assembly of the saints; he came to the common worship but kept the wall of his silence about him.

The Withdrawal from the Brethren

The same love of stillness led Arsenius to the most extreme withdrawal in the desert. He lived far out, kept his cell, and resisted every occasion of company that was not strictly necessary. The Apophthegmata preserve his reasoning in the saying already quoted — “I cannot be with God and with men” — and in his counsel to others to “flee, be silent, be still.” His withdrawal was so complete that it became a measure against which the desert judged the degrees of solitude: Arsenius was the one who fled even the fathers, who would not see even the archbishop, who guarded silence even at the holy table.

This severity drew comment, and the Apophthegmata do not conceal that it was a subject of discussion in the desert. A revelation was said to have been given about Arsenius and another father, Moses, who received the brethren with great love and hospitality: a voice showed the two of them in vision, Arsenius with the Spirit of God resting on him in stillness and Moses with the angels of God feeding him honey-cakes for his hospitality — and the desert took the vision to mean that both ways, the way of stillness and the way of love, were pleasing to God (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 38, the vision of the two ships/the two paths; Ward 1984; cf. St. Moses the Black). The tradition, that is, did not absolutize Arsenius’ severity; it set his stillness beside the hospitality of others as one valid path among the gifts of the Spirit, while still holding him up as the unsurpassed master of the one path that was his (Ward 1984, 9–10; Harmless 2004, 425–427).

The Discipline of the Tongue

Arsenius’ silence was, at the practical level, a discipline of the tongue, and the desert had a developed teaching about why this discipline mattered so much. The fathers held that the tongue is the readiest instrument of the passions: anger, vanity, judgment of others, idle curiosity, and self-display all find their easiest expression in speech, and the monk who would master the passions must begin by mastering the tongue (Ward 1984, on the desert teaching of guarded speech; the On stillness and On nothing done for show material in the systematic collection). To keep silence is to deny the passions their readiest outlet, and to give the heart the quiet in which it can attend to God rather than to the endless commerce of words.

This is why Arsenius’ silence is presented not as a peculiarity of temperament but as a spiritual achievement and a model. The desert did not value silence for its own sake — it was no admirer of mere taciturnity — but for what it guarded and what it made possible: the guarding of the heart from the passions, and the clearing of the soul for prayer. Arsenius carried the discipline further than any other father, and the tradition held him up not as an oddity but as the one who showed most fully what the guarded tongue can win. His epigram — “I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having kept silent” — is the rationale in a sentence: speech is a perpetual risk, silence a perpetual safety, and the monk who would be sinless does better to keep still (Ward 1984; Harmless 2004, 425–427).

Stillness as Vocation

For Arsenius, then, silence and stillness were not a temperament but a vocation — the thing he had been sent into the desert to learn, and the thing he guarded above company, reputation, and even the hospitality the desert prized. The Apophthegmata make him the embodiment of hesychia precisely because in him it is carried to its uttermost: the man who spoke least, who fled even the saints, who wept in silence through the night (see Tears and Vigil). It is this concentration that made his name the watchword of the later tradition of stillness, the hesychasm that would look back to him as one of its desert roots (see The Root of Stillness; Silence as Theology). The sayings that record this silence are themselves the subject of the next section (see The Apophthegmata of Arsenius).

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Arsenius 2, “flee, be silent”; Arsenius 7–8, Theophilus turned away; Arsenius 13, “I cannot be with God and with men”; Arsenius 30, hidden at the synaxis; Arsenius 38, the vision of Arsenius and Moses; the silence epigram in the On stillness material; introduction, 9–10.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (425–427, on Arsenius and hesychia.)
Hausherr, Irénée. Hésychasme et prière. Orientalia Christiana Analecta 176. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1966. (On hesychia in the desert and later tradition.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (On Scetis and the eremitical ideal.)