The Making of a Father

The penitent under direction became, in time, a director of others. This file traces how the brigand seasoned by the ascetic warfare of Scetis grew into a father of the desert — a man to whom younger monks came for a word, whose counsels were gathered into the Apophthegmata, and whose authority rested not on learning or office but on the depth of his repentance and the meekness it had won. It examines what “being a father” meant in the desert and how Moses came to embody it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

What a Desert Father Was

The title abba — “father” — in the Apophthegmata Patrum is not an office but a recognition. A desert father was a monk whom others sought out for a “word,” a saying or counsel that bore the weight of lived experience and could be carried away and pondered (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). The authority of such a man was personal and spiritual: it came from the visible fruit of his life — his discernment, his humility, his peace — and not from ordination, age, or letters. The whole Apophthegmata is built on this relationship: a brother comes, says “Abba, give me a word,” and the father answers; the answer is remembered because the life behind it gives it force (on this relationship, see Spiritual Direction).

For Moses to become a father in this sense was a remarkable thing, and the tradition knows it. He had no education to speak of; he was a former slave and a former criminal; he was a black African in a world not free of prejudice (see The Black Desert Father). That such a man should become one of the most sought-after elders of Scetis — that brothers should come to him precisely for a word — is the measure of how completely the desert’s economy of value differed from the world’s. In the desert, the depth of a man’s repentance was his credential, and Moses’s repentance was very deep.

Seasoning Into Wisdom

The making of a father was a matter of time. The Apophthegmata assume that wisdom is the fruit of a long, hidden seasoning — years in the cell, years of the same struggle, years of obedience — and that a monk who has not been so seasoned has nothing to give (Ward 1984; Chitty 1966). Moses’s most famous counsel, “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Moses 6; trans. Ward 1984), is itself a statement of this principle: the cell is the school, and only the one who has stayed in it has learned anything worth passing on. The man who gave that counsel had earned the right to give it by his own long sitting.

The Sayings show Moses dispensing exactly the wisdom his own warfare had taught him. He counsels silence, stability, the keeping of one’s own cell, the refusal to judge others, and the constant remembrance of one’s own sins — the whole moderate, humble, hidden ethic of the seasoned desert father (Ward 1984, Moses 1–18). There is nothing spectacular in it; the extremities of his early asceticism are behind him, and what remains is the distilled counsel of a man who has fought his battles and come through. The desert tradition prized exactly this: not the heroics of the beginner but the quiet, tested wisdom of the father.

The Authority of the Penitent

What gave Moses his particular authority was that his fatherhood was visibly continuous with his penitence. He did not teach humility from above, as one who had never sinned, but from below, as the chief of penitents — and this is precisely why his word carried. When he refused to go to a council to judge a brother, or carried a leaking basket of sand to say “my sins run out behind me and I do not see them” (see The Teacher of Non-Judgment), he was not performing humility but enacting the only self-understanding a former robber could honestly have. The brothers received it because it was true; the father’s authority was the authority of a man who knew exactly what he was.

This is the deep meaning of the desert’s love for Moses. He was the proof of its central claim — that the gospel can reach the worst of men and make them the best, that no past disqualifies, that the way up is the way down into one’s own sin and the mercy that meets it there. A community of penitents could have no better father than the greatest penitent among them, and the Apophthegmata enshrined him as exactly that.

The Gathering of Disciples and Sayings

By the end of his life Moses was a father with disciples of his own. The tradition reports that he came to preside over a body of brothers — the seven companions who, by the martyrdom-tradition, died with him in the barbarian raid on Scetis are remembered as his disciples (see The Barbarian Raid on Scetis). His sayings were gathered, with those of Antony, Macarius, Poemen, Arsenius, Sisoes, and the rest, into the great alphabetical collection of the Apophthegmata, where the chapter on Abba Moses preserves eighteen sayings — among them some of the most quoted in the entire monastic tradition (Ward 1984, Moses 1–18). That his words were thought worth gathering and keeping is the surest sign of his standing: the desert remembered the fathers it counted greatest, and Moses was one of them.

[Disputed: the number of Moses's disciples and the precise shape of any community under him are not given securely by the early sources; the seven companions of the martyrdom-tradition (attested in the *Apophthegmata*, Moses 10, and the later synaxaria) are the firmest indication that he presided over a body of brothers, but the details of his eldership beyond the *Sayings* are not independently documented.]

The father Moses had become is the subject of the central section of this guide — the Apophthegmata Patrum and the counsels that made him a teacher for the whole Church (see The Sayings of Abba Moses).

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Abba Moses 1–18; the introduction on the figure of the abba and the “word”; Moses 6, “sit in your cell”; Moses 10, the companions.)
Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (Chapter 19: Moses’s standing among the fathers of Scetis.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The seasoning of the desert father; the community of Scetis.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The abba and the “word”; the structure of desert authority.)