The Apophthegmata of Arsenius

Arsenius left no writings; he survives almost entirely in the Apophthegmata Patrum, where his collection of some forty-four sayings is one of the largest and most influential in the corpus. This file describes his place in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers — the size and shape of his collection, the recurring themes of weeping, vigil, silence, and the renounced court — and how the apophthegmata function as a genre that is at once the chief evidence for the man and a body of spiritual teaching.

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

A Saint Known Through Sayings

Arsenius is, more completely than almost any other desert father, a figure of the Apophthegmata Patrum. He wrote nothing that survives; there is no treatise, no letter, no rule from his hand. What the Church has of him is a body of sayings — short anecdotes and pointed oracles preserved in the great fifth- and sixth-century collections of the desert fathers’ words — and from this body everything else is reconstructed. To study Arsenius is therefore to study the apophthegmata, and to accept that the man is known to us only as the tradition chose to remember him in its sayings (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004, 167–273, on the genre; on the collections themselves, see The Apophthegmata and the Tradition).

The Apophthegmata Patrum survive in two main arrangements. The alphabetical collection orders the sayings by the name of the father to whom they are attributed, beginning with Antony and Arsenius; the systematic collection rearranges much of the same material by theme — on stillness, on compunction, on humility, and so on. Arsenius appears prominently in both. In the alphabetical Greek collection his is the second name, after Antony, and his collection runs to some forty-four sayings — one of the largest assigned to any single father, a measure of the esteem in which the tradition held him (Ward 1984; Guy, Les Apophtegmes des Pères, SC 387, on the structure of the collections).

The Shape of the Collection

The Arsenius collection has a recognizable shape, organized loosely around the great themes of his life. It opens with the two foundational oracles — “flee from men” and “flee, be silent, be still” (Arsenius 1–2) — which set the program of the whole (see Flee from Men). It moves through the scenes of his testing and formation as a monk (the bread on the ground, the “alphabet of this peasant”; Arsenius 5–6), his sayings and practices of silence (his withdrawal from company, his turning away of Theophilus, his hiding at the synaxis; Arsenius 7–8, 13, 30), his asceticism of tears and vigil (the weeping that furrowed his face, the night-long prayer with hands raised; Arsenius 27, 30, and the death-bed material), and the anecdotes of his refined background and deliberate humility (the contrast of Rome and Egypt; Arsenius 36). It closes with the scenes of his old age, his wanderings, and his death (Arsenius 40–42; see The Death at Troe). The collection thus reads almost as a compressed vita, a life told in oracles.

[Disputed: the exact count of sayings under Arsenius' name varies slightly between editions and recensions of the *Apophthegmata*; the standard Greek alphabetical collection edited in Migne (PG 65) and translated by Ward contains forty-four, but the systematic collections and the Latin and Coptic recensions distribute the material somewhat differently, and a few sayings attached to Arsenius in one recension appear anonymously or under another father elsewhere (Ward, *Sayings*, 1984; Regnault, *Les sentences des Pères du désert*; Guy, SC 387). The number forty-four is a feature of one particular collection, not a fixed total.]

The Recurring Themes

Four themes recur through the Arsenius collection and together compose his portrait.

Silence. The largest and most characteristic group of his sayings concerns the guarded tongue and the stillness of the heart: “flee, be silent, be still”; “I cannot be with God and with men”; the famous “I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having kept silent”; the hiding at the synaxis. Silence is the master-theme, and it is treated in its own file (see Silence and Stillness).

Tears. Arsenius is the desert’s great weeper. The sayings report that he wept so constantly that the tears had worn furrows in his cheeks, that he kept a cloth in his bosom to catch them, and that he sat through the night in silent weeping over his sins (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 27, 41; Ward 1984). The gift of tears — penthos, compunction — is a central desert virtue, and Arsenius is its supreme exemplar (see Tears and Vigil).

Vigil. Bound up with the tears is the night vigil: the sayings show Arsenius standing all night in prayer with his hands stretched out to heaven, so that “his face was as the rising sun” when the brethren saw him, and giving himself only the briefest sleep before rising again (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 30; Ward 1984). The ceaseless prayer commanded in the second oracle is enacted in these vigils.

The renounced court. The fourth theme is the memory of the world he left. The sayings keep returning to his Roman past — his learning, his rank, his former delicacy — and use the contrast to point his humility, as in the saying where, troubled by a thought, he is reminded that “Rome and the whole world knew thy father, but no one in Egypt knows thee” (cf. Arsenius 36; see The Aristocrat in the Desert). The court is never simply biography in the sayings; it is always a foil for the desert’s reversal of values.

How the Sayings Work

To read the Arsenius collection rightly is to understand what kind of text it is. The apophthegmata are not biography in the modern sense, nor are they transcripts. They are remembered words and deeds, shaped by oral transmission and by the purposes of the desert’s spiritual instruction, written down a century or more after the events. A saying preserves not a verbatim record but a distilled lesson — the gist of an encounter, polished by repetition into a memorable form (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004, 244–267; Burton-Christie 1993, on the sayings as instruments of formation).

This has two consequences for the study of Arsenius. The first is humility about the historical detail: the sayings tell us what the desert believed about Arsenius and how it used his memory, more reliably than they tell us the exact facts of his life (see The Historical Arsenius). The second is that the sayings are themselves the teaching — they were collected not to satisfy curiosity about a great man but to form monks, and Arsenius’ sayings on silence and tears were preserved because the desert found them spiritually useful, not merely biographically interesting. The genre is a means of formation, and Arsenius’ prominence in it is a measure of how useful the tradition found his example.

Why Arsenius Looms So Large

It is worth asking why Arsenius, of all the desert fathers, should have so large a collection and so high a place — second only to Antony in the alphabetical arrangement. Part of the answer is the drama of his story: the courtier who fled the court was a figure the tradition could not forget, and his renunciation, measured against the height of the station he left, made him a natural exemplar of the desert’s whole reversal of values (see The Roman Tutor). Part is the pungency of his sayings: the threefold word, the epigram on silence, the contrast of his Greek and Latin with the peasant’s alphabet, the channelled tears, the fear at death — these are among the most memorable utterances in the whole corpus, and memorable sayings survive and multiply (Ward 1984; Harmless 2004, 421–427).

But the deepest reason is that Arsenius embodied, more purely than any other father, the particular ideal the Apophthegmata most prized: hesychia, the stillness that is the goal of the eremitical life. The collections were gathered by monks who sought that stillness, and they treasured above all the fathers who had attained it; Arsenius, the supreme master of silence, was therefore a father they could not honor enough. His large collection is thus a kind of monument — the desert’s tribute to the man who had carried its central ideal to its uttermost — and his prominence in the Apophthegmata is itself evidence of the esteem in which the tradition held the way of stillness (Ward 1984, 9–10; Hausherr 1966).

The most influential single saying in his collection — the threefold word that the later hesychast tradition took as a charter — is treated in the companion file (see Flee, Be Silent, Be Still).

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Arsenius collection, sayings 1–44; introduction on the genre and the size of the collection.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (167–273, on the Apophthegmata as literature; 421–427, on Arsenius.)
Guy, Jean-Claude, ed. Les Apophtegmes des Pères: Collection systématique. Sources Chrétiennes 387, 474, 498. Paris: Cerf, 1993–2005. (Critical edition of the systematic collection.)
Regnault, Lucien. Les sentences des Pères du désert. Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1966–1985. (Multi-volume gathering of the sayings across recensions.)
Burton-Christie, Douglas. The Word in the Desert. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (On the apophthegmata as instruments of spiritual formation.)