The Sayings of Abba Moses

Moses’s enduring fame rests on the chapter the Apophthegmata Patrum devotes to him — eighteen sayings in the alphabetical collection that contain some of the most quoted counsels in the whole monastic tradition. This file surveys that chapter: the great word “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything”; the seven “headings” he gave a brother; the episode of the leaking jug of sand by which he taught humility about his own unworthiness; and the place these sayings hold in the desert literature.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

The Chapter on Abba Moses

In the alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum — the Sayings of the Desert Fathers arranged by the names of the fathers, from Antony to the end of the Greek alphabet — the fathers are listed in alphabetical order, and under the letter mu stands the chapter of Abba Moses, comprising eighteen sayings (Moses 1–18; trans. Ward 1984). The chapter is the principal source for his teaching, and several of its sayings are among the best-known in the entire collection. The Apophthegmata are not a treatise; they are gathered fragments — counsels given to particular brothers in particular moments, remembered and passed on because they carried weight (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). Reading the chapter on Moses is therefore reading the distilled wisdom of a tested elder, not a system.

The sayings share a marked character. They are overwhelmingly concerned with humility, the refusal to judge, the keeping of one’s own cell, silence, and the unceasing remembrance of one’s own sins — the moderate, hidden, self-accusing ethic of a man whose whole authority rested on the depth of his penitence (Ward 1984, Moses 1–18; on the formation behind them, see The Making of a Father). There is in them almost nothing of the spectacular; their power is in their concentration.

“Sit in Your Cell”

The single most famous of Moses’s sayings is also the shortest. “A brother came to Scetis to visit Abba Moses and asked him for a word. 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 saying has become one of the touchstones of monastic spirituality and is quoted far beyond it. Its meaning is the whole desert doctrine of stability: that the spiritual life is not advanced by restless movement, by seeking new teachers or new places, but by staying — by remaining in one place, enduring oneself and one’s thoughts, and letting the silence and struggle of the cell do their slow, indispensable work. The cell is the school; the one who flees it learns nothing (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). Coming from Moses, who had himself been wandering and violent before the desert held him still, the counsel carries the authority of hard experience.

The Seven Headings

The Apophthegmata also preserve a fuller set of counsels — the tradition that Moses gave a brother seven “headings” or rules for the spiritual life, a kind of summary of the desert way. These include the keeping of manual labor and silence in the cell, the weeping and mourning for one’s sins, the keeping of death before one’s eyes, the guarding against evil thoughts and harmful speech, the bearing of injury without retaliation, and the subjection of oneself in humility — the constant themes of his teaching gathered into a rule of life (Ward 1984, Moses; cf. the systematic collections). [Disputed: the exact number, order, and wording of these "headings" or sayings vary among the collections of the *Apophthegmata* (alphabetical, anonymous, and systematic) and their translations; Ward (1984) presents the alphabetical chapter, while fuller or differently arranged versions of Moses's counsels appear in the systematic collection and the Latin *Verba Seniorum*. The substance — labor and silence in the cell, mourning for sin, the remembrance of death, the refusal to judge or retaliate — is consistent across the witnesses.]

The Leaking Jug of Sand

Among the most loved of the episodes attached to Moses is the parable of the leaking vessel of sand, by which he taught humility about his own unworthiness even as he was praised. The tradition tells that Moses, being honored by the brothers and even by the clergy for his holiness, took a basket — or, in the common form, a jug — full of sand, set it on his shoulders so that the sand poured out behind him as he walked, and when asked what he was doing answered that the sand running out and unseen behind him was his own sins, which he did not see, while he was going to judge another’s. In the form most often told, the leaking vessel of sand is his answer to honor: as the sand runs out and is lost behind him, so his own good works (or his own sins) escape his notice, and he has no ground to think well of himself or ill of his brother (Ward 1984, Moses; on the council-episode that this same image serves, see The Teacher of Non-Judgment).

[Disputed: the *Apophthegmata* preserve the image of the leaking vessel of sand in close connection with the episode of the council called to judge a fallen brother (Moses 2 in Ward's alphabetical collection, where Moses carries a leaking basket of sand and says, "My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another"). Whether the leaking-vessel image was also told as a separate parable about humility under praise, or only as part of the council-episode, is a matter of how the collections arrange the material; the image and its lesson — that one's own sins run out unseen behind oneself — are the same in either telling.]

The Character of the Sayings

What unites the chapter is the consistent refusal of all self-exaltation. Whether counseling stability (“sit in your cell”), self-accusation (the sand running out behind), silence, or the bearing of injury, Moses teaches one thing under many figures: that the monk’s whole work is to know himself a sinner and to leave the judgment of others to God. The sayings are remembered because they say this so memorably — in images a brother could carry away and a later compiler could not improve. They are the reason Moses is not merely a dramatic biography but a teacher whose counsel is still read and quoted across the Christian world (see Moses in the Monastic Tradition).

The most consequential of these sayings — the one that made Moses the desert’s emblem of non-judgment — deserves treatment on its own, and the next file takes it up: the basket of sand carried to the council, and the theology of not-judging it teaches (see The Teacher of Non-Judgment).

See Also

• The Teacher of Non-Judgment — the council-episode and the refusal to judge
• The Making of a Father — how Moses became the elder of these sayings
• Humility and Self-Knowledge — the theology beneath the sayings
• The Apophthegmata and the Lausiac History — the collection and its transmission
• Moses in the Monastic Tradition — the reception of the sayings East and West
• Spiritual Direction — the desert “word”

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; Moses 6, “sit in your cell”; Moses 2, the basket of sand and “my sins run out behind me”; the counsels on silence, labor, mourning, and the remembrance of death.)
• Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Stability and the cell; the Apophthegmata as a record of the fathers.)
• Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The form and transmission of the Apophthegmata; the “word” and the chapter on Moses.)