Veneration

Arsenius is venerated across the traditions of the undivided Church as a great father of the desert — in the Orthodox East, where he stands among the chief masters of stillness, and in the Catholic West, which received his sayings and keeps his memory. This file sets out the forms of his veneration across these traditions: his standing in the monastic and devotional memory, the iconography by which he is shown, and the unanimity with which the divided Churches still honor a father they hold in common.

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

A Father Honored Across the Traditions

Arsenius’ veneration, like his memory, is shared across the branches of the early Christian tradition. He is honored as a saint in the Orthodox Church (Greek, Russian, and the other Orthodox Churches), in the Coptic and other Oriental Orthodox Churches that preserve the Egyptian desert as their own heritage, and in the Roman Catholic Church, which received the desert fathers through Cassian and the Verba Seniorum and keeps their memory in its martyrologies and monastic tradition (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). He is, in the proper sense, a saint of the undivided Church — venerated before the divisions that came later, and still honored across them (see The Pre-Schism Church).

This breadth of veneration is grounded in the breadth of his transmission (see Arsenius in the Monastic Memory): because his sayings were read everywhere, his sanctity was acknowledged everywhere. The desert fathers as a class enjoy this near-universal honor, and Arsenius, as one of the greatest of them, enjoys it in full measure. His specific liturgical commemoration — the feast on 8 May — is treated in the final section (see Feast and Cult); here the concern is the wider shape of his cult.

Veneration in the Orthodox East

In the Orthodox East, Arsenius is venerated above all as a master of hesychia and a model of the eremitical and contemplative life. He is commemorated in the synaxaria, named in the spiritual literature, and held up in the monastic tradition — especially on the Holy Mountain of Athos and in the other centers of Orthodox monasticism — as one of the supreme exemplars of stillness, silence, and the gift of tears (Ware 2000; Chitty 1966; see The Root of Stillness). His sayings are read in the monastic refectories and cells, and his example is invoked in the teaching of the contemplative life.

In the iconographic tradition Arsenius is depicted as an aged monk in the desert habit, often shown as an old man with a long beard, sometimes with the scroll bearing one of his sayings — the threefold word or the epigram on silence — and sometimes shown weeping, in token of the gift of tears for which he is famous (the iconographic tradition of the desert fathers; standard hagiographic representation). His distinctive attributes in the tradition — where they are specified — are precisely those of his sayings: the great age, the channelled tears, the scroll of his words on silence, marking him as the father of stillness even in the silent medium of the icon.

The veneration in the East is, above all, a veneration of imitation. The Orthodox monastic tradition does not honor the desert fathers as distant exemplars to be admired but as masters to be followed, and Arsenius is held up in the monastic instruction as a pattern for the contemplative to imitate: in his flight from distraction, his guarding of the tongue, his weeping, his vigils, his single-minded attention to God. To venerate him, in this tradition, is to be set before his example and called to the same stillness. This is why his cult is concentrated in the monasteries and especially in the centers of the contemplative life, where his way is not only honored but lived (Ware 2000; the Athonite and wider Orthodox monastic tradition; see The Root of Stillness). [Disputed: detailed and consistent iconographic programs for Arsenius specifically are less fixed than for the most prominent desert fathers such as Antony; he is most often shown in the general manner of an aged desert ascetic, and the particular attributes (the scroll, the tears) follow the conventions for the fathers of stillness rather than a distinctive established type (the hagiographic and iconographic tradition; cf. the general representation of the desert fathers).]

Veneration in the West

In the Latin West, Arsenius was received as one of the venerable fathers of the desert whose sayings, transmitted through Cassian and the Verba Seniorum, formed the contemplative tradition (see Arsenius in the Monastic Memory). He is named in the Roman Martyrology and remembered in the monastic calendars, and his threefold word fuge, tace, quiesce and his epigram on silence were quoted through the centuries as maxims of the religious life (the Roman Martyrology; the Latin monastic tradition; Harmless 2004). His cult in the West is the cult of the desert fathers generally — honored as the founders of the contemplative life that Western monasticism inherited and developed.

The Western veneration, like the Eastern, is grounded in the sayings rather than in relics or shrines: Arsenius is honored for what he taught and was, and his “presence” in the West is the presence of his words in the spiritual literature. This is characteristic of the desert fathers, whose cult is bound less to a place or a body than to a body of teaching carried in the Apophthegmata.

The Coptic Inheritance

A special word belongs to the Coptic Orthodox Church, for whom Arsenius is not a foreign import but a father of the home country. Scetis — known to the Copts as Shiheet, the desert of the Wadi al-Natrun — remains to this day a living center of Coptic monasticism, with ancient monasteries still inhabited in the very region where Arsenius wept and kept silence (Chitty 1966; the continuing Coptic monastic tradition of the Wadi al-Natrun). The Copts have preserved the memory of the great fathers of Scetis as their own heritage, in their own language and liturgy, in an unbroken line from the fourth century. For them Arsenius is one of the desert fathers who sanctified the very ground their monks still tread, and his veneration is bound up with the continuity of the place itself.

This gives the Coptic veneration of Arsenius a concreteness that the cult elsewhere lacks. Where the Greek and Latin traditions honor him chiefly through his sayings, the Coptic tradition honors him also through the land — the surviving desert, the ancient monasteries, the continuity of a monastic life that has never wholly ceased in Scetis since his day. The father of stillness is, for the Copts, a father of their own desert, and his memory is kept in the place of his labors.

A Witness Held in Common

The veneration of Arsenius across the divided traditions is, finally, a small but real witness to the unity that underlies the divisions. The Orthodox who honor him as a father of hesychasm, the Copts who keep the Egyptian desert as their own, and the Catholics who received his sayings through Cassian all venerate the same courtier-hermit of Scetis, and all draw on the same sayings. He is a saint whom the separated Churches have never had cause to dispute, because he belongs to the age before their separation and to the common stock of the desert tradition (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004; Ware 2000).

That such a man should be honored in common is fitting. Arsenius sought no party and founded no faction; he fled even the great men of his own Church to be alone with God. The father of stillness is a point of quiet on which the divided Churches still agree. The form of that honor in the calendar, and the final assessment of his place, are the subjects of the closing section (see Feast and Cult; Legacy and Assessment).

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Arsenius collection, the ground of his veneration.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (On the veneration of the desert fathers East and West.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (On the reception and honor of the desert fathers across the traditions.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Inner Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (On Arsenius in the Orthodox contemplative tradition.)