The Conversion to the Desert

The hinge of Moses’s life is the turn from the brigand-band to the monks of Scetis. This file gathers what the sources report of that conversion — the flight to the desert (by one tradition, hiding from the authorities), the arrival among the monks, and the radical change that made the robber-chief a postulant — and sets it within the patterns of repentance that the desert literature everywhere assumes: that no sin is too great for the mercy of God and that the desert is precisely the place where such a turn is made.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

The Flight to Scetis

The sources are thinner on the moment of conversion than the later imagination would wish, and they do not all tell the same story. The constant element is the destination: Moses came to Scetis (Scete, the Wadi al-Natrun), the great monastic settlement in the desert west of the Nile delta founded by Macarius the Great, and there he was received among the monks and became one of them (Palladius, Lausiac History 19.3; Ward 1984, Moses, introduction; on Scetis, see St. Macarius the Great). Palladius, having narrated the robberies, says simply that Moses afterward “was converted because of some misfortune and gave himself up to monastic life with such fervour” that he became a model of ascetic struggle (Lausiac History 19.3; Meyer 1964) — compressing the whole turn into a phrase and leaving its occasion vague.

One strand of the tradition supplies what Palladius leaves blank: that Moses fled to the desert not at first out of penitence but out of necessity, hiding among the monks to escape the authorities who were hunting him for his crimes — and that the life he found there worked on him until flight became conversion. This is the pattern the desert literature found most eloquent: a man comes to the desert for the wrong reason and is caught by grace. [Disputed: the motive and occasion of Moses's conversion are reported variously and thinly — Palladius (*Lausiac History* 19.3) attributes it vaguely to "some misfortune" and gives no detail; the tradition that he was hiding from the law, and the more elaborate later accounts of his repentance, are expansions of the bare notice and cannot be pinned to a single early source. What is common to the witnesses is only that he came to Scetis, was received, and became a monk of extraordinary fervor.]

The Robber Among the Monks

Whatever brought him, the sources agree on the result: the change was total and the fervor extreme. Palladius reports that Moses gave himself to the monastic life so wholeheartedly that he surpassed many in austerity, and the Apophthegmata preserve sayings in which the violence of his former discipline is turned, without remainder, against himself — the strength that had served robbery now bent to repentance (Palladius, Lausiac History 19.3–5; Ward 1984, Moses). The same energy ran in both directions; conversion did not make him a mild man but redirected a ferocious one. This is one reason the desert valued him: he was living proof that the passions are not destroyed by grace but converted — that the very intensity that had made him a terrible robber could make him a great monk.

The reception of so notorious a man was not, on the tradition’s account, without friction. The brothers knew who he was, and a current of suspicion and contempt — sharpened, in some episodes, by his being a black African and a former slave — would follow him into the monastery and be made the matter of his testing (see Ordination and the Test and The Black Desert Father). The desert did not pretend to a community without sin; it was a place where men of every background, the brigand among them, came to be remade, and the remaking was hard.

Repentance and the Desert

Moses’s conversion belongs to a pattern the desert literature returns to again and again: the great sinner who becomes the great saint, and whose past is not erased but transfigured into the ground of his humility. The desert was understood precisely as the place of metanoia — of repentance as a turning of the whole life — and its literature is full of penitents whose former lives were scandalous: robbers, harlots, murderers, who are received without reproach and become luminous (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). The nearest parallel in the Egyptian tradition is St. Mary of Egypt, the harlot of Alexandria who became the great penitent of the Jordan desert, as Moses is the robber who became the great penitent of Scetis (see St. Mary of Egypt).

This pattern is not sentimental. The desert fathers held that the consciousness of one’s own sin, far from being left behind at conversion, is the permanent foundation of the spiritual life — that the monk who remembers what he was is armored against pride, and that the deepest humility is found in the deepest penitents. Moses became the supreme teacher of exactly this: his refusal to judge a fallen brother, his “my sins run out behind me and I do not see them,” his weeping over himself, all grow directly from the robber-past he never forgot (see The Teacher of Non-Judgment and Humility and Self-Knowledge). The conversion, in the tradition’s understanding, did not delete his history; it converted it into wisdom.

The Place of the Conversion in His Story

The flight to the desert is the structural center of Moses’s life, the point on which everything turns. Before it stands the robber and the slave; after it, the monk, the father, the priest, and the martyr. The sources’ very reticence about its occasion is instructive: the desert tradition cared less about the psychology of the moment than about its fruit, and measured the reality of the conversion not by an account of feelings but by the life that followed — the austerities, the sayings, the meekness, the death. The chapters that follow take up that life in order, beginning with the ascetic warfare by which the habits of the brigand were unmade (see The Struggle with the Passions).

References

Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (Chapter 19.3–5: the conversion “because of some misfortune,” the entry into monastic life, the extraordinary fervor.)
Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Abba Moses, introduction and sayings; the redirection of his ferocity into repentance.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Scetis and the founding of the desert settlements; repentance in the desert.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The conversion-narratives of the desert literature; the great-sinner-to-great-saint pattern.)