Humility and Self-Knowledge

Beneath every saying and episode of Moses lies one theology: that humility — the unceasing knowledge of oneself as a sinner — is the root of all the virtues and the condition of grace. This file sets out the desert doctrine of self-accusation that Moses embodied more completely than almost any other father: the refusal to judge, the bearing of contempt as deserved, the remembrance of one’s own sins, and the conviction that the way up to God runs down into the truth about oneself.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

Humility as the Ground of All

The desert fathers were unanimous that humility is the foundation of the whole spiritual life — the soil in which every other virtue grows and without which every other virtue rots into pride. The Apophthegmata return to it endlessly: it is humility that disarms the demons, humility that draws down grace, humility that the proud ascetic lacks and the humble penitent has (Ward 1984; Harmless 2004). Moses is one of the supreme exemplars of this teaching, not because he theorized about humility but because his whole life was its enactment. A former slave and robber, an Ethiopian insulted for his color, he had no dignity to defend and every reason to know himself a sinner — and he made that knowledge the permanent foundation of his soul.

The desert’s humility is not a feeling but a knowledge: the accurate perception of oneself as a sinner before God. It is the opposite of self-deception, the cure for the great illusion of the proud that they are better than they are and better than others. Moses’s leaking vessel of sand — his sins running out behind him where he cannot see them — is a figure of exactly this self-knowledge: the awareness that one’s own sins are vast, constant, and largely hidden from oneself, and that this awareness is the only safe ground on which to stand (see The Teacher of Non-Judgment).

Self-Accusation

The characteristic discipline of this humility, in the desert, is self-accusation — the habit of blaming oneself rather than others, of taking responsibility for one’s own state, and of receiving even unjust reproach as deserved. The Apophthegmata hold self-accusation to be one of the highest attainments, and they show Moses practicing it in its extreme form: when driven from the sanctuary with the insult “Ethiopian,” he agrees with his abusers and abases himself further than they had (Ward 1984, Moses 3; see Ordination and the Test). The desert saw in this not masochism but freedom — the man who accuses himself has nothing left for others to accuse, no dignity that can be wounded, no reputation that can be lost, and is therefore beyond the reach of the passions that injury feeds.

This discipline is rooted in the gospel. The publican who would not lift his eyes but beat his breast saying “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” goes down to his house justified, while the Pharisee who recited his virtues does not (Luke 18:9–14). The desert read its whole ascetic program out of this parable: the only prayer that is heard is the prayer of the self-accusing sinner, and the only safe self-understanding is the publican’s. Moses, the chief of penitents, stood permanently in the publican’s place, and his sayings are the publican’s prayer turned into a way of life.

The Remembrance of One’s Own Sin

Bound up with self-accusation is the unceasing remembrance of one’s own sins — the refusal to let the consciousness of what one has been fade with the years. The desert held that the monk who forgets his sins grows proud, and that the safest armor against pride is the constant memory of one’s own fall. For Moses this was no abstraction: he had been a robber and a murderer by the tradition’s account, and he never let himself forget it. His non-judgment, his meekness under insult, his weeping — all flow from a memory he refused to release (Ward 1984, Moses; Chitty 1966). The desert prized this in him: he was the living proof that the remembrance of sin, far from crushing a man, can make him gentle, for the one who knows his own depths cannot despise another’s.

This is why the desert never treated Moses’s past as something to be hidden or apologized for. The robber-past was not an embarrassment to be lived down but the permanent ground of his humility — the dark soil out of which his sanctity grew. A man who had been forgiven so much could love much (cf. Luke 7:47), and could judge no one; the greatness of his sin became, in the economy of grace, the measure of his mercy.

Humility and the Coming of Grace

The desert held, finally, that humility is the precondition of grace — that God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble (cf. James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5), and that the whole ascetic labor exists to bring a man to the humility in which grace can act. The spectacular austerities of Moses’s early years were not, in the end, what made him a saint; what made him a saint was the humility those austerities, rightly directed, finally produced. The desert was wary of asceticism that bred pride and prized the humility that asceticism was meant to serve (Harmless 2004; Ward 1984). Moses’s trajectory — from the violent feats of his early warfare to the quiet self-accusation of his maturity — traces exactly this movement: from the labor to its fruit, from the effort to the humility, from the man fighting his passions by force to the father who had nothing left to defend.

This theology is not Moses’s alone; it is the common possession of the desert, articulated by Antony, Macarius, Poemen, Sisoes, and the rest, and gathered into the Apophthegmata as the shared wisdom of the fathers (Ward 1984; Chitty 1966). But Moses embodies it with a particular completeness, because his life supplied the contrast that makes humility legible: only a man who had been so low could show so clearly that the way up is the way down. The humility he embodied would have its final test in the manner of his death, where the man who would not defend his own dignity would also not defend his own life (see Non-Resistance and the Sword).

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 desert sayings on humility, self-accusation, and the remembrance of sin; Moses 3 on receiving insult as deserved.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The desert doctrine of humility; the shared wisdom of the fathers.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Humility and self-accusation in the Apophthegmata; the desert’s wariness of proud asceticism.)
The Holy Bible (Luke 18:9–14, the publican and the Pharisee; Luke 7:47; James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5). (The scriptural ground of the desert’s theology of humility.)