The Aristocrat in the Desert

Arsenius brought into the desert the formation of a Roman aristocrat, and the Apophthegmata preserve, with rare candor, the friction between that formation and the desert’s poverty — the fastidiousness he was reproached for and defended, the contrast of Rome and Egypt by which his thoughts were humbled, and the deliberate humility with which he held his own greatness in contempt. This file gathers the anecdotes of the great man in the desert and the lesson the tradition drew from them.

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

The desert did not erase Arsenius’ past; it carried it. The man who had lived in the palace of Theodosius did not become a peasant when he became a monk, and the Apophthegmata are unusually frank about the habits of refinement that survived his conversion. They report that he kept some delicacies the rougher fathers did without — that he was particular in small things, that traces of his former cultivation clung to him — and that this drew comment from the brethren (Ward 1984; Chitty 1966, 67–68).

The most discussed of these anecdotes concerns his manner of living. The tradition tells that when a magistrate brought Arsenius the will of a senator, a kinsman, who had left him a large inheritance, Arsenius took the document and was about to tear it up, saying, “I died before he did; how can he make me his heir?” — and sent it back, refusing the fortune (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 29; trans. Ward 1984). The renunciation of the inheritance is the perfect emblem of the aristocrat in the desert: the man who could have been rich again with a word, who held the wealth of his class so cheaply that he reckoned himself already dead to it.

Reproached for Comfort

Yet the same sources do not pretend that Arsenius lived as harshly as some of his neighbors, and they preserve the tension. A famous exchange records that the fathers noticed Arsenius did not mortify his body in certain outward ways as the Egyptian peasant-monks did — that he allowed himself some small ease in his cell — and a brother, perhaps scandalized, raised it. The tradition’s answer is given through the abba Daniel, Arsenius’ disciple, and through a vision granting that both the severe Egyptian way and Arsenius’ own way were acceptable to God, each suited to the man (cf. Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 36; Ward 1984; Chitty 1966).

The fullest form of the lesson is the saying in which Arsenius’ very fastidiousness is turned into an occasion of humility. When his thoughts troubled him with the memory of his greatness — when the aristocrat’s pride stirred — he is reported to have said to himself, or been reminded: “Arsenius, remember why you came here”; and the contrast of his two lives was set before him in the words, “Rome and the whole world knew thy father, but no one in Egypt knows thee” (paraphrasing the substance of Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 36; Ward 1984). The greatness of his origin became the measure of his self-abasement: the higher the world he had left, the lower he had now to count himself.

[Disputed: the various anecdotes about Arsenius' surviving refinement and comparative bodily ease (that he kept some comforts, that the Egyptians out-fasted him, that his way was nonetheless approved in a vision) are preserved in the *Apophthegmata* and elaborated in the later *Life*, but they function in the tradition as a deliberate teaching device — the contrast between the severe Egyptian asceticism and the refined Roman's own measured path, both shown to be pleasing to God — rather than as a neutral record of his diet and habits; the historical detail of his daily regimen cannot be recovered behind the didactic shaping (Ward, *Sayings*, 1984; Chitty, *The Desert a City*, 1966, 67–68; Harmless, *Desert Christians*, 2004, 425–427).]

The Humbling of the Great Man

What the tradition makes of all this is consistent: the aristocrat’s greatness exists in the sayings to be humbled. Arsenius is never allowed to rest on his rank; every reminder of his former eminence is turned, in the desert’s hands, into an instrument of self-abasement. He sought the instruction of unlettered peasants because he judged his Greek and Latin worthless beside their knowledge of repentance (see The Courtier Becomes a Monk); he refused the inheritance because he counted himself dead to the world; he set the world’s knowledge of his father against the desert’s ignorance of him to crush the stirrings of pride. The refinement is real, and the sayings do not deny it; but it is everywhere subordinated to the labor of humility.

This is what makes the portrait of the aristocrat in the desert spiritually serious rather than merely picturesque. The desert tradition was not interested in Arsenius as a curiosity — the courtier among the peasants — but as a demonstration that the highest worldly formation can be brought under the discipline of humility, that the great can become least, and that the very memory of greatness can be made to serve repentance. The fastidiousness that survived was not the point; the humility that mastered it was (Ward 1984, 9–10; Harmless 2004, 425–427).

A Both-Sided Witness

The tradition’s handling of Arsenius’ comparative ease is also a model of its own discernment, and worth noting for what it refuses to do. It does not present the severe Egyptian asceticism as the only valid path and condemn Arsenius for falling short of it; nor does it use Arsenius’ refinement to relativize the desert’s austerity. Instead it holds both together — the peasant’s harsh fasting and the aristocrat’s measured way — and declares both acceptable to God, each fitted to the man who follows it (cf. the vision in Arsenius 36, and the paired vision of Arsenius and Moses in Silence and Stillness; see also St. Moses the Black). This is the desert’s characteristic refusal of a single rule for all souls, and Arsenius — the great man whose path differed from his neighbors’ and was yet approved — is one of its clearest illustrations.

The Candor of the Sources

One feature of the Arsenius tradition deserves particular notice: its candor. The sayings do not present an idealized, frictionless saint. They show a man with surviving habits of refinement, a man whose asceticism differed from his neighbors’, a man who had to be reminded of his own greatness lest pride return — and they show all this without embarrassment, as part of the truthful portrait of a real ascetic. This candor is itself a mark of the desert literature’s seriousness: it was interested in real spiritual struggle, not in hagiographical perfection, and it preserved the friction because the friction was where the spiritual work was done (Ward 1984; Harmless 2004, 425–427; Burton-Christie 1993).

For the modern reader this candor is a gift, because it makes Arsenius humanly intelligible. He is not a plaster saint but a recognizable man: cultivated, fastidious, proud by temperament and station, who fought those very qualities and brought them under the discipline of humility without ever wholly losing them. The tradition does not pretend that his conversion erased his nature; it shows him converting his nature — turning even his refinement and his greatness into occasions of self-abasement. This is a more credible and a more useful holiness than any seamless perfection would be, and the sayings preserve it deliberately.

A Figure of Reconciliation

The aristocrat in the desert is thus, finally, a figure of reconciliation: the proof that the world’s greatness need not bar a man from the kingdom if he will bring it low, and that the desert had room for the refined as well as the rough, provided both were humble. The same Arsenius who wept through the night and fled even the saints (see Tears and Vigil; Silence and Stillness) was the senator’s kinsman who tore up a fortune and the emperor’s tutor who learned the alphabet of a peasant. The tradition kept all of it, and made all of it serve the one end of humility before God.

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Arsenius 29, the torn-up will and the refused inheritance; Arsenius 36, the contrast of Rome and Egypt and the approval of his way; introduction, 9–10, on his rank and humility.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (67–68, on Arsenius’ background and his life in Scetis.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (425–427, on the anecdotes of Arsenius’ refinement and humility.)