Flee, Be Silent, Be Still

The single most influential saying attached to Arsenius is the threefold word given him in prayer — flee, be silent, be still — known in the Latin tradition as fuge, tace, quiesce. This file examines that word: its form in the Apophthegmata, the meaning of each of its three commands, and its career as a foundation-stone of the eremitical and hesychast tradition, the compact charter of the life of stillness that the later Church read back into the desert.

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

The Word and Its Form

When Arsenius had already left the world and was living in the desert, the Apophthegmata report, he prayed again as he had prayed in the palace — “Lord, lead me in the way of salvation” — and a voice answered him: “Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always, for these are the sources of sinlessness” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 2; trans. Ward 1984). The Greek triad is pheuge, siōpa, hēsychaze — flee, keep silence, be still — and it is this third verb, hēsychaze, “be still,” that ties the saying to hesychia, the stillness that became the name of a whole tradition (Ward 1984; Hausherr 1966).

In the Latin West the triad was rendered with a lapidary economy that fixed it as a maxim: fuge, tace, quiesce — “flee, be silent, be still.” [Disputed: the Greek of Arsenius 2 reads *pheuge, siōpa, hēsychaze* ("flee, be silent, be still") and pairs it with "pray always" (*adialeiptōs proseuchou*), while the proverbial Latin form *fuge, tace, quiesce* compresses the saying into three words; the exact wording therefore varies between the Greek alphabetical collection, the systematic recensions, and the Latin *Verba Seniorum*, and the famous three-word Latin tag is a distillation of the fuller Greek oracle rather than a literal translation of a single source (Ward, *Sayings*, 1984; the Latin systematic collection, *Verba Seniorum*, in PL 73).] The variation is itself instructive: the saying lived as a portable formula, reshaped in transmission into the most memorable possible form, which is exactly how the apophthegmata worked as a genre (see The Apophthegmata of Arsenius).

Flee

The first command, flee (pheuge), repeats and deepens the word of the first oracle, “flee from men” (see Flee from Men). In the second oracle it is no longer only the flight from the world — that had already been accomplished — but the continuing discipline of withdrawal even within the monastic life: the flight from distraction, from unnecessary company, from the occasions of speech and trouble. Arsenius enacted it by living far out, refusing visitors, and guarding his solitude even against the archbishop of Alexandria (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 7–8; Ward 1984). To flee, in this sense, is the perpetual movement of the soul away from everything that scatters it and toward the one thing necessary (Ward 1984, 9–10; Chitty 1966).

The desert understood this flight not as an end in itself but as the precondition of the other two commands. Only the one who has fled can fall silent; only the one who is silent can be still. The three are a sequence as well as a triad, a ladder of increasing interiority: the body withdraws, the tongue falls quiet, and at last the heart itself comes to rest in God (Hausherr 1966; Harmless 2004, 227–228).

Be Silent

The second command, be silent (siōpa), governs the tongue. It is the discipline most associated with Arsenius, who carried it to the point of refusing speech even to the great and of weeping rather than talking (see Silence and Stillness). The desert prized silence not as mere reticence but as the guard of the heart: the tongue is the readiest instrument of the passions — of anger, vanity, judgment, idle talk — and to still it is to deny the passions their easiest expression (Ward 1984; on the guarded tongue, the On stillness material in the systematic collection).

Arsenius’ own epigram supplies the rationale: “I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having kept silent” (see Silence and Stillness). Silence is the safer side of the ledger; speech is a perpetual risk, and the monk who would be sinless does better to say nothing than to weigh, in every word, whether it is worth the danger. The command be silent makes this the second pillar of the way of stillness.

Be Still

The third command, be still (hēsychaze), is the deepest and the one that names the tradition. Hesychia is not merely outward quiet but the gathered stillness of the whole person — body, tongue, mind, and heart — at rest in attentive prayer before God. It is the inner correlate of the outward flight and silence: the point of withdrawing from men and stilling the tongue is to come to this inner quiet, in which the monk can “pray always” and attend to God without distraction (Hausherr 1966; Ware, The Inner Kingdom, 2000, on hesychia).

The pairing of “be still” with “pray always” in the Greek oracle is the key to its later importance. Stillness and ceaseless prayer are presented not as two practices but as one: the still heart is the praying heart, and unceasing prayer is the content of hesychia, not an addition to it. This is precisely the nexus that the later hesychast tradition would develop — the union of inner stillness with the unceasing invocation of the name of Jesus — and it is why that tradition could read Arsenius 2 as one of its founding texts (see The Root of Stillness; on the prayer itself, The Jesus Prayer).

The Triad as a Ladder

The three commands were read by the tradition not only as a list but as a sequence — a ladder of ascent in which each step rests on the one below. The reading is implicit in the desert’s own understanding and was drawn out by the later interpreters of stillness. To flee is the first and most outward act: the withdrawal of the body from the world and its distractions, the establishment of the conditions in which the inner work can begin. To be silent is the second and more inward: the stilling of the tongue, which depends on the flight (one cannot easily keep silence in the midst of the world) and which guards the heart from the passions that speech expresses. To be still is the third and deepest: the inner hesychia of the gathered soul, which depends on the silence (the noisy tongue keeps the heart in turmoil) and which opens at last into ceaseless prayer (Hausherr 1966; Ware 2000).

So read, the triad describes a movement from the outer to the inner, from the body to the heart, from withdrawal to prayer. It is not enough to flee the world if the tongue still runs; not enough to silence the tongue if the heart is still in tumult; the work is complete only when the whole person — body, tongue, mind, and heart — has come to rest in attentive prayer before God. Arsenius enacted the whole sequence: he fled the court and then the brethren, he kept the most rigorous silence, and he came to the stillness of ceaseless prayer and tears (see Silence and Stillness; Tears and Vigil). The threefold word is thus a map of his own ascent, and the tradition read it as a map for every soul that would seek God in stillness.

A Foundation-Stone of the Tradition

The threefold word became one of the most widely transmitted utterances of the desert. It passed into the systematic collections under the heading of stillness, into the Latin Verba Seniorum as fuge, tace, quiesce, and through these into the monastic instruction of both East and West (see Arsenius in the Monastic Memory). It was quoted as a summary of the eremitical ideal, set at the head of treatments of stillness, and remembered as the divine commission that made Arsenius the desert’s master of hesychia.

For the hesychast tradition in particular the saying functioned as a charter. When John Climacus, in the seventh century, treated of stillness in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, he drew on the desert masters of hesychia, of whom Arsenius was foremost (see St. John Climacus); and when the fourteenth-century theologians of the Holy Mountain defended the practice of stillness and the prayer of the heart, they appealed to the unbroken desert tradition of which Arsenius 2 was a primary witness (see The Root of Stillness; St. Gregory Palamas). The careful historian will distinguish the fourth-century oracle from the developed fourteenth-century theology — the one is a desert command, the other a articulated doctrine of stillness and uncreated light — but the line of descent is real, and the later tradition was right to see in flee, be silent, be still one of its own deepest roots (Ware 2000; Harmless 2004, 227–228). The fuller reception is the subject of Section 07.

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Arsenius 2, “flee, be silent, pray always”; Arsenius 7–8, the flight from company; introduction, 9–10.)
Hausherr, Irénée. Hésychasme et prière. Orientalia Christiana Analecta 176. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1966. (On hesychia and its desert roots.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Inner Kingdom (Collected Works, vol. 1). Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (On stillness and the prayer of the heart.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (227–228, on the ideal of stillness.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (On the eremitical ideal of Scetis.)
Verba Seniorum (Latin systematic collection of the desert sayings), in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 73. (The Latin transmission, fuge, tace, quiesce.)