03 — The Sayings
The documentary heart of the collection: Arsenius’ prominent place in the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, where his is one of the largest of the alphabetical collections — the weeping, the night vigils, the guarded tongue — and the threefold word given him in prayer, flee, be silent, be still (fuge, tace, quiesce), which became a foundation-stone of the hesychast tradition. These files read the sayings as both the chief evidence for the man and a body of teaching in their own right.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of stillness)
Arsenius left no writings; he survives in sayings. The Apophthegmata Patrum — the compiled anecdotes and oracles of the Egyptian fathers, gathered in the fifth and sixth centuries and arranged both alphabetically by father and systematically by theme — preserve under his name a collection of some forty-four sayings, one of the fullest in the corpus and the foundation of everything later said about him. This section reads that collection: first as a whole, with its recurring themes of tears, vigil, silence, and the renounced court; then in its most influential single utterance, the threefold command that the later tradition of stillness took as a charter.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Apophthegmata of Arsenius | Arsenius’ place in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers; the size and shape of his collection; the recurring themes — the weeping, the night vigils, the guarded tongue, the renounced court — and how the sayings work as a genre. |
| Flee, Be Silent, Be Still | The threefold word fuge, tace, quiesce — flee, be silent, be still — given him in prayer; its place as a foundation-stone of the hesychast and eremitical tradition; its later transmission and use. |
See Also
- Silence and Stillness — the stillness the sayings record
- The Apophthegmata and the Tradition — how the sayings were collected and transmitted
- The Root of Stillness — the hesychast reception of the threefold word
- The Jesus Prayer — the prayer of stillness the sayings anticipate
References
- Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984.
- Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Regnault, Lucien. Les sentences des Pères du désert. Solesmes, 1966–1985 (multi-volume).