The Courtier Becomes a Monk

When Arsenius came to Scetis from the imperial court he had to be unmade and remade: the man who had taught emperors submitted himself to unlettered desert elders, and the Apophthegmata preserve the deliberate testing by which the fastidious aristocrat was humbled into a monk. This file gathers the sayings of his reception under John the Colobos and the fathers of Scetis, the famous scenes of his testing, and the obedience by which the courtier became a desert disciple.

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

Arrival in Scetis

Arsenius came to Scetis as a postulant, not a master. Whatever his rank in the world, in the desert he was a beginner who had to be received, instructed, and proved by men who knew nothing of the court and cared less. The desert of Scetis in the 390s was the most celebrated of the Egyptian anchoritic settlements, a loose colony of cells gathered around a few churches, where solitaries lived apart through the week and met for the synaxis, and where the formation of a new brother was entrusted to a senior who became his abba, his spiritual father (on this relationship, see Spiritual Direction; on the settlement, St. Macarius the Great). The whole machinery of the desert’s spiritual formation rested on obedience to such an elder, and it was to this that Arsenius now submitted.

The tradition associates his reception and early formation with John the Colobos (“John the Dwarf”/“John the Short”), one of the great fathers of Scetis, to whom several of the testing-anecdotes are attached (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 5; John the Dwarf collection; Chitty 1966, 67–68; Ward 1984). [Disputed: the *Apophthegmata* and the later tradition variously associate Arsenius' reception with John the Colobos and with other elders of Scetis; the sources do not give a single, consistent account of who his first *abba* was, and some of the testing-anecdotes circulate without a named elder (Ward, *Sayings*, 1984; Harmless, *Desert Christians*, 2004, 421–423). The point common to all the versions is the fact of his humbling submission, not the identity of the elder.]

The Testing of the Aristocrat

The most memorable scenes of Arsenius’ early desert life are the deliberate humiliations by which the fathers tested whether the great Roman could bear to be treated as nothing. The desert distrusted unproven virtue, and it had a settled instinct that the proud and the refined must be broken before they could be built. Arsenius, the courtier accustomed to deference, was a natural subject for such testing, and the Apophthegmata record it without embarrassment.

In one celebrated saying, when Arsenius came asking to live with the brethren, an elder arranged a meal at which a loaf of bread was thrown on the ground before him, to see whether the great man would stoop to eat it like a dog rather than be served at table. Arsenius understood the test, crept to the bread on his hands and knees, took it, and ate it where it lay — and the elder, seeing that he had no pride, said, “He will be a monk” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 5–6, in the various recensions; Ward 1984; Chitty 1966, 67–68). The anecdote is a topos of the desert literature — the testing of the postulant’s humility — but it is told of Arsenius with particular point, because of all the postulants of the desert he had the most worldly dignity to surrender.

The lesson the desert drew from such scenes was not cruelty but discernment. The point of throwing down the bread was not to degrade Arsenius but to discover whether the renunciation he claimed was real — whether the man who had left the court had also left the pride of the court. His willingness to eat from the ground was the sign that he had; and the Apophthegmata preserve the test precisely because it answered the question the desert always asked of the well-born: can he be humble? (Burton-Christie 1993, on the desert testing of humility; Harmless 2004, 421–423).

“I Have Not Yet Become a Monk”

The obedience by which the courtier became a monk did not end with his reception; it remained the texture of his whole life, and the Apophthegmata are at pains to show that Arsenius never regarded his renunciation as finished. One of the most quoted of his sayings turns on exactly this. Asked, or reflecting on his own state, he is reported to have said that the monk who is a stranger in a strange land should “meddle with nothing, and thus he will have peace” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 13; Ward 1984) — the discipline of a man who had renounced not only the world’s goods but the world’s opinions.

The tradition also preserves the striking note that even at the threshold of death Arsenius wept and was afraid, and that when his disciples marveled, he answered that he had been afraid since the day he became a monk and was afraid still (see The Death at Troe; Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 40; Ward 1984). The man who had been tested at his reception never ceased, in his own estimation, to be on probation. This is the inner meaning of “the courtier becomes a monk”: not a single moment of conversion but a lifelong refusal to presume on what he had attained, the same humility that had let him eat bread from the ground carried through to the hour of his death.

Learning from the Unlettered

The most pointed of all the reversals in Arsenius’ formation is the one that addresses his learning directly. He was, the tradition insists, among the most cultivated men of his age, “instructed in Greek and Latin” and in the secular wisdom of the schools; yet in the desert he sought instruction from peasants who could barely read. When someone expressed surprise that “a man so well educated in Greek and Latin” should ask an unlettered Egyptian about his thoughts, Arsenius answered, “I have indeed been taught Latin and Greek, but I do not know even the alphabet of this peasant” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 6; trans. Ward 1984).

This saying is the precise inversion of the court career. At the palace Arsenius had been the teacher of the masters of the world; in the desert he made himself the pupil of its least men, because he judged that the “alphabet” they knew — the science of repentance, humility, and the warfare of the heart — was a wisdom his Greek and Latin had never reached. The desert’s whole pedagogy is compressed in the exchange: that the learning that matters is not the learning of the schools, and that the proud intellect must become a beginner again to acquire it. In Arsenius the lesson has its sharpest illustration, because no one in the desert had further to descend (Ward 1984, 9–10; Harmless 2004, 423–425).

The Meaning of the Desert’s Pedagogy

The testing of Arsenius is sometimes read, by modern eyes, as harsh or even cruel — the deliberate humiliation of a great man for the satisfaction of his inferiors. The desert understood it otherwise, and its understanding is worth recovering. The fathers held that pride is the root passion, the first and deadliest of the soul’s diseases, and that humility is the foundation of every virtue; a postulant who came still clothed in the pride of his former rank could build nothing on it, because the building would rest on sand. The testing was therefore not malice but medicine: it aimed to discover and to dislodge the pride that would otherwise have poisoned everything, and to lay the foundation of humility on which a real monastic life could be raised (Ward 1984, on the desert teaching of humility; Burton-Christie 1993).

This is why the tradition tells the testing-anecdotes with approval rather than embarrassment. The elder who threw the bread on the ground was not degrading Arsenius but serving him, by giving him the occasion to prove and to deepen his humility; and Arsenius, in eating from the ground, was not humiliated but exalted, because he showed that the pride of the court had no hold on him. The desert’s whole pedagogy rests on this paradox — that the way up is down, that the soul rises by descending, that the great become great in the kingdom by making themselves least. Arsenius, who had the furthest to descend, is its supreme illustration; and the willingness with which he descended is the measure of the reality of his conversion (Ward 1984, 9–10; Harmless 2004, 423–425).

The fastidiousness and the refinement that survived this descent, and the friction they caused, are the subject of a later file (see The Aristocrat in the Desert); the silence into which his formation finally flowered is the subject of the next (see Silence and Stillness).

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Arsenius 5–6, the testing and the “alphabet of this peasant”; Arsenius 13, “meddle with nothing”; Arsenius 40, the fear at death; introduction, 9–10.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (67–68, on Arsenius’ reception and formation in Scetis.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (421–425, on Arsenius among the fathers of Scetis.)
Burton-Christie, Douglas. The Word in the Desert. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (On the desert’s testing of humility and its pedagogy of obedience.)