The Flight from the Barbarians

Arsenius outlived the desert of his prime. The Scetis that had received the courtier was repeatedly devastated by barbarian raids in the early fifth century, and the surviving fathers were scattered; Arsenius, by then very old, was driven into a wandering exile — to Troe near Memphis and to the island of Canopus near Alexandria — to keep his stillness amid the ruin. This file traces those forced moves and sets them within the documented history of the sacking of Scetis.

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

The Devastation of Scetis

The desert of Scetis, where Arsenius had spent the long central decades of his monastic life, did not endure undisturbed. In the first decades of the fifth century it was struck by a series of barbarian raids — incursions of nomadic peoples (the sources speak of “Mazices” or Berber raiders from the western desert) who fell upon the isolated and undefended cells, killed monks, and burned the settlement. The history of Egyptian monasticism records several such sackings of Scetis, conventionally placed around 407–408, again in the 430s, and later still, after which the great colony of the fourth century never fully recovered (Chitty 1966, 66, 144–146; Harmless 2004, 173, 437–438). The desert that had been “a city” of monks was repeatedly laid waste.

These raids are among the better-documented events of the period, attested in the monastic sources and the ecclesiastical histories, and they form the historical frame for the last chapter of Arsenius’ life. The man who had fled the imperial court for the peace of the desert lived to see that peace shattered by violence, and to be driven from the cell he had kept for decades. The Apophthegmata preserve his grief at the destruction in a saying of stark resignation: when the brethren fled the devastation of Scetis, Arsenius is reported to have said, “The world has lost Rome and the monks have lost Scetis” (paraphrasing the sense of the tradition; cf. Chitty 1966, 145; Ward 1984). The fall of the desert was, for him, an event of the same order as the fall of an empire.

The Move to Troe

Forced from Scetis, Arsenius did not abandon the monastic life but sought a new place of stillness. The tradition records that he moved north and east, to a place called Troe (also given as Tura or Petra) near Memphis, on the edge of the cultivated land south of the apex of the Delta — a rocky district that offered refuge to monks displaced from the deep desert (Chitty 1966, 145; Ward 1984; the Life tradition). There, the sources hold, he settled for a period of his old age, keeping as far as he could the silence and the vigils of his Scetiote years.

The move to Troe is significant as more than geography. It marks the adaptation of the eremitical ideal to the catastrophe that had overtaken the desert: the deep solitude of Scetis was no longer possible, and the surviving fathers had to find stillness in less remote and more exposed places, nearer the inhabited land. Arsenius carried his hesychia with him into this diminished circumstance, and the tradition presents his fidelity to silence amid the ruin as itself a witness — the stillness was in the man, not merely in the place (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004).

The Sojourn at Canopus

The tradition records a further move, to Canopus, near Alexandria, at the western mouth of the Nile — a place associated in the monastic geography with the suburban monasteries of the Alexandrian region (Chitty 1966, 145; the Life and synaxarion tradition). The reasons given vary in the sources, but the move fits the pattern of an old monk seeking, amid continuing insecurity, a place where the solitary life could still be kept. The tradition holds that he remained at Canopus for a period before returning at last to Troe, where he died (see The Death at Troe).

[Disputed: the sequence and the exact locations of Arsenius' wanderings after the destruction of Scetis — Troe near Memphis, Canopus near Alexandria, and a final return to Troe — are given chiefly by the later *Life* and the synaxaria, and the sources vary in the order and the duration they assign; the *Apophthegmata* attest his departure from Scetis and his old age elsewhere but do not supply a precise itinerary (Chitty, *The Desert a City*, 1966, 145; Ward, *Sayings*, 1984; the later *vita* tradition). The reality of the displacement is secure; the detailed itinerary is the developed form of the tradition.]

The tradition also reads the wandering against the longer history of the desert. Scetis fell, and the monks were scattered, but the tradition of stillness they carried did not perish; it was borne by men like Arsenius into new places, and through the sayings into the whole later life of the Church (see Arsenius in the Monastic Memory; The Root of Stillness). The displaced hermit of Troe is thus a figure of the survival of the desert’s deepest gift through the ruin of its outward home.

The “Three Departures” of His Life

The desert tradition itself drew a pattern out of Arsenius’ flights, and it is worth setting down because it shows how the sayings interpret his life. He was understood to have “departed” three times, and a saying preserved in the tradition gives the sequence in his own reported voice. In the form Chitty reports, Arsenius, grieving as he left Scetis, said: “The world has lost Rome, and the monks have lost Scetis” — joining the two great losses of his life, the fall of the imperial order he had served and the ruin of the desert he had chosen (Chitty 1966, 145; Ward 1984). The pairing is deliberate and characteristic: the man who had fled Rome for Scetis now had to flee Scetis too, and he measured the second loss against the first.

The desert read this not as mere misfortune but as a deepening of the lesson of his life. Arsenius had been taught from the first to flee — “flee from men and you will be saved” (see Flee from Men) — and the barbarian raids forced upon him a flight he had not chosen, a stripping away even of the place of his stillness. The man who had renounced everything was made to renounce even his renunciation’s outward home, and to learn that the stillness he sought was finally not in any place but in God alone. The wandering thus completed the work the first oracle had begun: it taught Arsenius to carry his desert within him.

The Stillness Carried into Exile

What the wandering reveals about Arsenius is the portability of his vocation. The flight from the barbarians was the second great flight of his life — the first from the court, this one from the ruined desert — and in both he was governed by the same command: to keep the stillness in which he attended to God. The Apophthegmata preserve no complaint against God for the loss of Scetis, only the bleak acknowledgment that the desert, like Rome, had fallen. The old hermit accepted the wandering as he had accepted the testing of his youth, and carried his weeping and his silence into each new refuge.

This is the figure the tradition leaves us at the end of the wandering: a very old man, his great desert in ruins, his cell abandoned, moving from refuge to refuge near the inhabited land, and keeping in each the same silence and the same tears he had kept in the depths of Scetis. The outward circumstances of his stillness were destroyed; the stillness itself was not. His death, the close of the wandering and of the life, is the subject of the companion file (see The Death at Troe).

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Arsenius’ departure from Scetis and his old age; the grief at the desert’s fall.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (66, 144–146, on the sacking of Scetis; 145, on Arsenius at Troe and Canopus.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (173, 437–438, on the destruction of Scetis and the dispersal of its monks.)
Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. ACW 34. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1965. (Context for the monastic geography of Lower Egypt.)