The Struggle with the Passions

Conversion did not end Moses’s warfare; it began a harder one. This file gathers what the Apophthegmata Patrum and Palladius report of his fierce ascetic struggle against the lust and violence of his former life — the extremity of his early discipline, the assaults he endured, and the wise restraint of his elders, the priest Isidore and Macarius the Great, who tempered his zeal and taught him that the passions are not defeated by violence but by patience, humility, and the long obedience of the cell.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

The Ferocity Turned Inward

The first thing the sources say of Moses the monk is that he fought as hard as he had once robbed. Palladius reports that, having given himself to the monastic life, he subjected his body to such labors — fasting, vigils, and the wearing-down of the flesh — that he became a wonder to the others (Palladius, Lausiac History 19.3–6; Meyer 1964). The same energy that had made him a terror to the countryside now made him a terror to his own passions; the desert tradition saw in this not the abolition of his nature but its conversion. The robber’s strength, his fearlessness, his refusal to be turned aside, were not destroyed at his baptism into the monastic life but reforged into instruments of repentance.

That warfare was directed first against the sins of the body. The tradition is candid that Moses was tormented for years by the lusts of his former life — that the habits of a man who had lived without restraint did not loose their hold at once, and that he was assaulted by fantasies and desires he could not simply will away (Palladius, Lausiac History 19.5–9; Ward 1984, Moses). Palladius preserves the tradition of extreme remedies: that Moses, beset by temptation, went to extraordinary lengths of austerity — long fasts, sleeplessness, fetching water by night for the cells of the older monks across great distances — fighting the body with the body until the assaults at last subsided (Palladius, Lausiac History 19.5–10; Meyer 1964). The point the sources press is that the victory was neither quick nor cheap: even a man of Moses’s strength had to wear the passions down by years of patient violence against himself.

The Counsel of Isidore the Priest

The decisive correction came not from austerity but from a word of wisdom. The Apophthegmata preserve an episode that the tradition treats as the turning-point of Moses’s inner warfare. Troubled past endurance by the war of lust, he went to Abba Isidore the Priest and told him he could bear it no longer. Isidore took him up to the roof before dawn and said, “Look toward the west” — and Moses saw a multitude of demons in tumult, ready for battle; then “look toward the east,” and he saw a yet greater multitude of holy angels in glory. Isidore told him that these were the host sent by the Lord to the aid of the saints, and that the saints’ enemies, however many, are fewer than the powers on their side — and that Moses should not be cast down, for the help of God outnumbers the assault (Apophthegmata Patrum, Moses 1; trans. Ward 1984). [Disputed: the *Sayings* preserve this episode under the name of Abba Isidore the Priest (Moses 1 in Ward's alphabetical collection); the lesson it teaches — that the powers aiding the tempted outnumber those assailing them — is the consistent point across the witnesses, though the precise occasion and wording vary among the collections.]

The same Isidore is credited in the Sayings with a complementary counsel directed at the impatience of Moses’s zeal: the lesson that the spiritual life is not won by a single heroic effort but by perseverance, and that the demons are most defeated not by spectacular feats but by the steady refusal to give up (Ward 1984, Moses and Isidore). The thrust of the eldership Moses received was therefore corrective: it took a man inclined to fight every battle by main force and taught him patience — that humility and endurance, not violence, are the desert’s weapons.

Macarius the Great and the Tempering of Zeal

Standing over the whole formation of Moses is Macarius the Great, the founder of Scetis and its presiding father, under whose authority the settlement lived (Chitty 1966; on Macarius, see St. Macarius the Great). The tradition associates Moses’s seasoning with Macarius’s wisdom, and the Apophthegmata repeatedly show the elders of Scetis tempering the excesses of the young and zealous — for the desert had learned that immoderate asceticism is itself a temptation, a subtle form of pride, and that the surer road is the moderate, hidden, persevering life (Ward 1984; Harmless 2004). Moses, whose nature ran to extremes, had to learn this lesson particularly, and the Sayings show him learning it: his most famous counsels are all on the side of moderation, humility, and the refusal to do anything conspicuous.

This is the deep logic of Moses’s whole development. The brigand had lived by force; the young monk fought his passions by force; the seasoned elder learned that the kingdom is not taken by force of that kind at all, but by the patient sitting in the cell, the refusal to judge, the weeping over one’s own sins. The counsel he received from Isidore and the example of Macarius bent the violent man toward the meekness for which he became famous — so that the same Moses who had once swum a flooded Nile with a sword in his teeth became the father who carried a basket of leaking sand and said, “My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them” (see The Teacher of Non-Judgment).

“Sit in Your Cell”

The fruit of this struggle is condensed in the single most quoted of all Moses’s sayings, which is also a saying about how the passions are finally overcome. A brother came to Scetis asking Abba Moses for a word, and the old man said to him: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Moses 6; trans. Ward 1984). The counsel is the distillation of his own warfare: the passions are not conquered by restless effort or by fleeing from place to place, but by stability — by staying in one place, enduring oneself, and letting the silence and the struggle of the cell do their slow work. The man who had learned this the hard way, over years of assault, gave it to the next generation as the heart of the ascetic life (on this saying and its place in the tradition, see The Sayings of Abba Moses).

The struggle with the passions, then, is not a preliminary to Moses’s wisdom but its source. Everything the desert remembered him for — the humility, the non-judgment, the moderation, the patience — was forged in the long warfare against the lust and violence he had brought with him from the world. The next file follows the seasoning of that warfare into the eldership by which he became a father to others (see The Making of a Father).

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, the vision of the angelic and demonic hosts shown by Isidore; Moses 6, “sit in your cell”; the counsels on patience and moderation; Abba Isidore.)
Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (Chapter 19.3–10: the extreme austerities, the war of lust, the night labors, and the subsiding of the assaults.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Scetis under Macarius; the discipline of the settlement.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The desert’s suspicion of immoderate asceticism; the theology of the passions.)