01 — Foundations
The ground from which the witness of St. Moses the Black rises: his origins as an Ethiopian household slave dismissed for theft and violence, his career as the chief of a band of brigands in the Nile delta, and the flight that brought him to the monks of Scetis. Almost all of this survives only as the opening notes of the Apophthegmata tradition and the brief narrative of Palladius; these files establish what the sources claim and how securely.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)
The figure of Moses begins not in a monastery but on the wrong side of the law. The sources are agreed that before his conversion he was a slave, a robber, and a man of violence — the very opposite of the meek elder he became — and the whole force of his later witness depends on that contrast being real. This section sets out what the tradition reports of his pre-monastic life and of the conversion that brought him to the desert, distinguishing throughout between the thin, early notices and the fuller, more dramatic embellishment that the sayings-tradition and later hagiography supplied.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Robber and the Slave | Moses’s origins as an Ethiopian household slave dismissed by his master for theft and (in the tradition) murder; his leadership of a band of brigands terrorizing the Nile delta; the lurid feats the sources attribute to him; and the source-critical status of these details. |
| The Conversion to the Desert | His flight to the monks of Scetis — by one tradition hiding from the authorities — and the radical conversion that turned the brigand-chief into a postulant; the patterns of repentance in the desert literature into which his story is set. |
See Also
- The Struggle with the Passions — the ascetic warfare that followed his conversion
- The Apophthegmata and the Lausiac History — the sources for everything in this section
- The Historical Moses — what can be known behind the layered tradition
- Monasticism — the desert world Moses entered
References
- Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Abba Moses 1–18.)
- Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. ACW 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964.
- Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
- Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.