03 — The Desert Father
The heart of the collection: Moses in the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Here are the counsels on which his fame rests — “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything”; the leaking jug of sand; and the great parable of non-judgment, the basket of sand carried to a brothers’ council with the words “my sins run out behind me and I do not see them.” This section sets out the sayings and the theology of humility and non-judgment they teach.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)
If Moses is remembered at all by most who know his name, it is for a handful of sayings preserved in the Apophthegmata Patrum — sayings so concentrated and so widely quoted that they have passed into the common stock of Christian spiritual wisdom. This section is built around them. The first file surveys the chapter on Abba Moses and its most famous counsels; the second isolates the single episode that made him the desert’s supreme teacher of non-judgment, the basket of leaking sand carried to a council called to condemn a fallen brother.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Sayings of Abba Moses | Moses’s place in the Apophthegmata Patrum; the chapter of eighteen sayings; “sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything”; the leaking-jug-of-sand episode and the other great counsels of his eldership. |
| The Teacher of Non-Judgment | The episode of the basket of sand carried to a brothers’ council — “my sins run out behind me and I do not see them” — and the refusal to judge a fallen brother; the desert theology of not-judging. |
See Also
- The Making of a Father — how Moses became the elder whose sayings these are
- Humility and Self-Knowledge — the theology beneath the sayings
- The Apophthegmata and the Lausiac History — the source of the sayings
- Spiritual Direction — the “word” of the desert father
References
- Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Abba Moses 1–18.)
- Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
- Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.