Arsenius in the Monastic Memory

Arsenius belongs to the undivided Church, and his sayings were carried into both halves of it. This file traces the transmission of his memory through the Greek collections to the Byzantine East and through the Latin Verba Seniorum and John Cassian to the monasticism of the West, where his threefold word fuge, tace, quiesce and his epigram on silence became commonplaces of the religious life — a desert father of the fourth century who became a common possession of the whole Christian tradition.

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

The Diffusion of the Desert Sayings

The Apophthegmata Patrum were among the most widely diffused texts of early Christianity. Born in the Greek and Coptic of Egypt, they were gathered, translated, and carried across the whole Christian world — into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Old Church Slavonic — and read in monasteries from Ireland to Mesopotamia (Harmless 2004, 167–200; Chitty 1966). They were, in effect, the common spiritual literature of early monasticism, a portable desert that any monk anywhere could enter through the page. And within this diffusion Arsenius traveled especially well: his dramatic story (the courtier who fled the court), his pungent sayings (the epigram on silence, the threefold word), and his vivid asceticism (the channelled tears, the night-long vigils) made him memorable and quotable in any language.

The result is that Arsenius became a common possession of the whole undivided Church (on which see The Pre-Schism Church). He is not the property of the Greek East alone, though it was there that his sayings were first gathered and there that the hesychast tradition would claim him most fully (see The Root of Stillness). He belongs equally to the Latin West, which received his sayings early and treasured them, and to the wider Oriental Christian world that preserved the desert tradition in its own tongues.

The Greek and Byzantine Transmission

In the Greek East, Arsenius’ sayings were carried in the alphabetical and systematic collections of the Apophthegmata, copied and recopied through the Byzantine centuries, and woven into the broader literature of monastic instruction (Ward 1984; Guy, SC 387). He appears in the great Byzantine spiritual anthologies and florilegia, in the synaxaria that supplied his commemoration (see Feast and Cult), and in the continuous living tradition of Eastern monasticism, where the desert fathers were never antiquarian figures but present teachers. When the Philokalia and the hesychast revival gathered the tradition of stillness in later centuries, Arsenius stood among its acknowledged fathers (Ware 2000; see The Root of Stillness).

His sayings entered the Slavonic world through the translation of the desert collections — the Paterik literature — that accompanied the Christianization of the Slavs and the founding of Russian monasticism, so that Arsenius was known and venerated in the Russian and other Slavic Churches as he was in the Greek (Chitty 1966; on the broader Slavic reception of the desert tradition). The Byzantine and Slavic transmission kept his memory continuously alive in the Orthodox East from his own day to the present.

The Latin West: Cassian and the Verba Seniorum

The transmission of Arsenius to the Latin West ran through two great channels. The first was John Cassian (c. 360 – c. 435), who had lived among the monks of Egypt, including in the region of Scetis, and who carried the desert tradition to the West in his Institutes and Conferences, the works that shaped Western monasticism and were prescribed by St. Benedict for his monks. Cassian transmitted the teaching of the Scetiote fathers on stillness, compunction, and unceasing prayer — the very themes of which Arsenius was the supreme exemplar — and so brought the substance of the Arsenian ideal into the Latin tradition (Cassian, Conferences and Institutes; Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004, 373–417).

The second channel was the Latin Verba Seniorum — the Latin translations of the desert sayings, made in the fifth and sixth centuries (associated with Pelagius and John the Deacon and others), which rendered the Apophthegmata into Latin and gave the West direct access to the words of the fathers, Arsenius among them (the Verba Seniorum, in PL 73; Harmless 2004, 254–267). It was through this Latin transmission that Arsenius’ threefold word took its famous Latin form, fuge, tace, quiesce — “flee, be silent, be still” — which became a commonplace of Western monastic instruction, quoted for centuries as a summary of the contemplative ideal (see Flee, Be Silent, Be Still). His epigram on silence likewise passed into the Latin tradition and was repeated in the monastic literature of the West as a maxim of religious prudence.

The Western reception of the desert sayings was not antiquarian but formative. Cassian’s Conferences, which transmitted the Scetiote teaching, were prescribed by St. Benedict in his Rule for reading in the monasteries, so that the wisdom of the Egyptian fathers — and with it the substance of the Arsenian ideal of stillness and unceasing prayer — became part of the daily formation of Western monks for centuries (Benedict, Rule, ch. 73, commending Cassian and the Lives of the Fathers; Harmless 2004, 373–417). The Verba Seniorum were among the most copied books of the Western Middle Ages, read in the cloister and excerpted in the spiritual florilegia, so that Arsenius’ sayings reached an audience far wider than the desert that produced them. The courtier of Theodosius who had fled to Scetis thus became, through the Latin tradition, a teacher of monks who never knew Egypt and spoke no Greek — a measure of how completely the desert tradition was naturalized in the West.

The Oriental and Slavic Transmission

Beyond the Greek and Latin, Arsenius’ sayings traveled in the other tongues of Eastern Christianity. The desert collections were translated early into Coptic — the language of Egypt itself, where the Apophthegmata were partly born — and into Syriac, the literary language of a vast monastic world stretching across Mesopotamia and beyond, where the sayings of the Egyptian fathers were treasured and copied (Harmless 2004, 167–200; Chitty 1966). The Syriac and Coptic versions preserve the Arsenius material with their own variations and are part of the textual witness to his sayings (see The Apophthegmata and the Tradition). Through these channels Arsenius became known across the whole Christian East, not only the Greek-speaking part of it.

The transmission to the Slavic world followed the Christianization of the Slavs and the founding of their monasticism. The desert collections were rendered into Old Church Slavonic in the Paterik literature — the “books of the fathers” that carried the sayings of the desert into the monasteries of Bulgaria, Serbia, and the Rus’ — and through them Arsenius entered the spiritual heritage of Russian and the other Slavic Orthodox Churches (Chitty 1966; the Slavonic Paterik tradition). When Russian monasticism flowered, and again when the hesychast revival of later centuries gathered the tradition of stillness, Arsenius stood among the fathers the Slavic Church had long known and venerated. His memory in the Slavic East is thus not borrowed at second hand but received directly through the same desert literature that carried him everywhere else.

A Common Father

This common possession is itself a kind of testimony. Arsenius belongs to no party and no later jurisdiction; he is a father of the undivided Church, received and honored across all its branches, and his sayings are among the texts that the divided traditions still hold in common. The same courtier-hermit who wept and kept silence in Scetis is read in Greek and Latin, in Coptic and Syriac, in Slavonic and the rest, and venerated wherever the desert tradition is kept. His veneration across those traditions — the forms his cult has taken in East and West — is the subject of the companion file (see Veneration), and his feast and assessment the subject of the final section (see Feast and Cult; Legacy and Assessment).

See Also

• Flee, Be Silent, Be Still — the saying that traveled farthest, in its Latin form
• Veneration — his cult across the traditions
• The Apophthegmata and the Tradition — the recensions and translations that carried him
• The Root of Stillness — his reception in the Greek hesychast tradition
• The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church that holds him in common

References

• Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Arsenius collection and its transmission.)
• Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (167–200, on the diffusion of the Apophthegmata; 254–267, on the Latin Verba Seniorum; 373–417, on Cassian.)
• Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (On the transmission of the desert tradition East and West.)
• John Cassian. The Conferences and The Institutes. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57, 58. New York: Newman Press, 1997, 2000. (The transmission of the Scetiote tradition to the West.)
• Verba Seniorum (Latin systematic collection of the desert sayings), in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 73. (The Latin transmission, fuge, tace, quiesce.)
• Ware, Kallistos. The Inner Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (On the Philokalia and the hesychast reception.)