Legacy and Assessment

Arsenius the Great left no monastery, no rule, and no writings — only sayings and an example — and yet his legacy is among the most enduring of the desert. This closing file offers a sober assessment of his place: the courtier who became the supreme father of stillness, the source of some of the most quoted sayings in Christian literature, a root of the hesychast tradition, and a saint honored across the whole Church. It weighs what is securely his against what the tradition added, and considers how the historical man and the venerated saint are rightly held together.

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

What Arsenius Left

Arsenius founded nothing. He established no monastery as Pachomius did (see St. Pachomius the Great), wrote no rule, left no treatise or letter, gathered no school of disciples into an institution. His whole legacy is carried in his sayings and his example — a body of apophthegmata and the memory of a life — and yet this slender bequest has proved among the most durable in the history of Christian spirituality (Ward 1984; Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). The reason is that what Arsenius bequeathed was not an institution but an ideal, perfectly embodied: the ideal of stillness, silence, and ceaseless prayer, shown not in argument but in a life.

Three things in particular constitute his legacy. The first is the sayings themselves — above all the threefold word flee, be silent, be still and the epigram “I have often repented of having spoken, but never of having kept silent,” which became commonplaces of Christian wisdom quoted for fifteen centuries in East and West (see Flee, Be Silent, Be Still; Silence and Stillness). The second is his place as a root of the hesychast tradition — the desert’s supreme witness to hesychia, claimed by the later tradition of stillness as one of its own fathers (see The Root of Stillness). The third is his enduring image — the courtier who fled the court, the great man humbled, the weeper whose tears channelled his chest — which has fixed itself in the Christian imagination as one of the most vivid of all the desert portraits.

The Master of Stillness

Arsenius’ central and securest claim is to be the desert’s master of stillness. Across all the recensions and the whole tradition, this is the constant: he is the father who loved silence above all, who fled even the saints, who wept in silence and watched through the night, who could not be with God and with men at once. The theme is too consistent, too distinctive, and too deeply attested to be doubted; whatever uncertainty surrounds his court career or his chronology, the kind of monk he was is secure (see The Historical Arsenius). He is the great hermit of hesychia, and the Church has rightly remembered him as such.

This is the heart of his significance, and it does not depend on the disputed elements of his story. Whether or not he was personally tutor to Arcadius and Honorius, whether or not the chronology of his wanderings is exact, the Arsenius who matters to the tradition is the one the sayings show: the man who, having tasted everything the world could give, judged it all as nothing beside the silence in which God is found, and gave his whole life to that silence. The later tradition’s vast esteem for him rests on this, and it is well founded (Ward 1984; Ware 2000; Harmless 2004, 425–427).

Holding the Man and the Saint Together

The honest assessment must hold two things together, as this guide has tried to do throughout. There is the historical man, of whom relatively little can be securely known: a Roman of high station who renounced it for Scetis around the end of the fourth century, lived a very long life of extreme asceticism and silence, was driven from the desert by the barbarian raids, and died very old near Memphis around the middle of the fifth (see The Historical Arsenius). And there is the venerated saint, on whom the tradition has lavished its honors: the named tutor of emperors, the dramatic secret fugitive, the worker of wonders, the father of hesychasm, the saint of 8 May (see Feast and Cult).

These are not two different people but one person seen at two distances — the man and the Church’s memory of him. The discipline this guide has followed, per METHODOLOGY §§3.5, 4, is to keep them distinct without setting them against each other: to report the secure kernel as secure, to mark the later elaborations as elaborations, to pin the wonders to their attestation, and to flag with [Disputed: ...] notes the points where the sources genuinely divide (the court tutorship, the chronology, the wonders, the recensional variants). This is not skepticism but honesty, and it is the kind of truthfulness Arsenius himself would have prized — the man who fled honor and refused even to be venerated in the body.

The Enduring Significance

What, in the end, is Arsenius’ significance? He is, first, a witness to the cost and the worth of stillness — the proof that the highest worldly station can be renounced for the silence in which God is found, and that such renunciation is not loss but gain. He is, second, a father of the contemplative tradition — a root of hesychasm, a source of its sayings, a model of its practice, claimed by the whole later tradition of the prayer of the heart (see The Root of Stillness; on the prayer, The Jesus Prayer). He is, third, a common father of the undivided Church, honored across all its branches, a point of quiet on which the divided traditions still agree (see Arsenius in the Monastic Memory; Veneration).

Arsenius and the Other Desert Fathers

Arsenius’ particular place is clarified by setting him beside the other great fathers of the desert. Antony is the founder and the archetype, the first to go out into the deep desert and the pattern of the anchoritic life (see St. Antony the Great); Macarius is the father of Scetis itself, the settlement Arsenius entered (see St. Macarius the Great); Pachomius is the founder of the cenobitic life, the communal counterpart to the solitary way (see St. Pachomius the Great). Among these Arsenius is not a founder or an organizer but a perfecter — the one who carried the eremitical ideal of stillness to its uttermost, and so became its supreme exemplar (Chitty 1966; Ward 1984; Harmless 2004).

The desert itself marked his distinctiveness in the vision that set him beside Moses the Black: Arsenius with the Spirit of God resting on him in stillness, Moses fed by angels for his hospitality, both pleasing to God (see Silence and Stillness; St. Moses the Black). The vision is the tradition’s own assessment of Arsenius’ place: he is the master of one of the desert’s great ways — the way of stillness — not the only way, but that way carried to its height. To honor him rightly is to honor that particular gift, neither absolutizing it against the way of love and hospitality, nor diminishing it, but receiving it as the desert received it: as one of the supreme forms of the love of God.

A Perpetual Question to the Noise of the World

And he is, finally, a perpetual question to the noise of every age. The man who fled the court of the masters of the world to weep in silence in the desert stands as a permanent reminder that the deepest knowledge of God is found not in speech but in stillness — that there is a wisdom the schools cannot teach, learned only by those who fall silent and listen. “I have often repented of having spoken,” he said, “but never of having kept silent.” Fifteen centuries later the saying still indicts the clamor of the world and still points to the silence in which God is heard. That is Arsenius’ legacy, and it has not grown old (Ward 1984; Ware 2000; Harmless 2004).

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Arsenius collection; the sayings that constitute his legacy.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (On Arsenius’ life and his place in the desert tradition.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (421–427, on Arsenius and his significance.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Inner Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (On Arsenius in the contemplative and hesychast tradition.)