Ordination and the Test

The tradition reports that Moses, the former slave and robber, was at length ordained to the priesthood, and it surrounds the ordination with episodes that test his humility — including incidents in which his being a black African is made the matter of contempt, and one in which his color becomes the figure of his own self-accusation. This file sets out the ordination and its testing, reporting the racial dimension soberly and as the Sayings give it, neither minimized nor anachronistically reframed, and reading it within the desert theology of humility that the episodes themselves supply.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

The Ordination of a Former Robber

That Moses was ordained to the priesthood is reported by the tradition as the crown of his standing among the fathers of Scetis — and as a thing remarkable in itself. A former slave, a former criminal, an Ethiopian: by every measure of the surrounding society, an unlikely candidate for the altar. That he was nonetheless ordained is a statement of the desert’s whole scale of values, in which the depth of a man’s repentance counted for everything and his origins for nothing (Ward 1984, Moses; Harmless 2004). The Apophthegmata take the ordination as an occasion not for the display of honor but for the testing and proving of Moses’s humility, which is how the desert measured fitness for the priesthood.

[Disputed: the historical fact and circumstances of Moses's ordination rest on the *Apophthegmata* and the hagiographical tradition rather than on documentary record; the sources agree that he became a priest and a presiding father at Scetis, but the date and details of his ordination are not independently attested. The episodes surrounding it are preserved as sayings (notably Moses 3 and 4 in Ward's alphabetical collection) and are reported here as what those sayings claim.]

The Test of Contempt

The Apophthegmata preserve an episode that the tradition attaches to Moses’s ordination or to his standing as a clergyman, in which his Ethiopian identity is made the deliberate matter of a test. As the alphabetical collection records it, the archbishop — wishing to test Moses — instructed the clergy to drive him from the sanctuary with insults and to follow him to hear what he would say. So they drove him out, reviling him: “Get out, Ethiopian!” — and as he went he said to himself, “They have treated you correctly, for your skin is as black as ashes. You are not a man, so why should you be allowed to meet men?” When the clergy reported this, the archbishop said that Moses alone was worthy of the order (Apophthegmata Patrum, Moses 3; trans. Ward 1984, paraphrased). [Disputed: the *Sayings* preserve this testing-episode in close connection with Moses's ordination or clerical standing (Moses 3 in Ward's alphabetical collection); the precise framing — whether a formal test ordered by the archbishop or an incident of contempt turned to humility — varies in the telling, but the core, that Moses met racial insult with self-abasement and was thereby judged worthy, is constant.]

The episode must be reported for exactly what it is. It records, without disguise, that Moses was insulted because he was black — that “Ethiopian” was flung at him as an insult, and that his color was treated as a mark of inferiority by some around him. The Sayings do not pretend this did not happen, and neither does this guide: the prejudice is part of the record, and to minimize it would be to falsify the source (METHODOLOGY §4). The episode is preserved, however, not to certify the prejudice but to display Moses’s response to it — and that response is the point the desert wished to teach.

The Insult Turned to Humility

What Moses does with the insult is the heart of the episode. He does not protest, retaliate, or resent; he takes the contempt directed at his color and turns it into a fresh occasion of self-accusation, agreeing with his accusers and abasing himself further than they had abased him. In the desert’s theology this is the supreme act: the monk who can receive insult as deserved, who can say of even an unjust contempt “they have treated me correctly,” has reached the humility that is the goal of the whole ascetic life (Ward 1984, Moses 3; Harmless 2004; on the theology, see Humility and Self-Knowledge).

This is delicate ground, and it must be handled with care. The episode shows Moses internalizing the language of his abusers and applying it to himself — taking “your skin is as black as ashes” onto his own lips as a term of self-reproach. To the desert that recorded it, this was the height of humility: the saint so dead to self-regard that he would not even defend his own dignity, but joined his accusers against himself. A modern reader rightly notices, too, that the episode preserves a wounding prejudice and a hierarchy of color that the gospel itself overturns. Both things are true at once, and the sober course is to hold them together: to honor the humility the desert praised without endorsing the prejudice it took for granted, and to report the source rather than to rewrite it (the fuller handling of the racial dimension is reserved for The Black Desert Father, where the modern scholarship and the question of anachronism are treated directly).

Meekness and the Priesthood

The desert’s logic in attaching such tests to the priesthood is consistent. It held that the priesthood is dangerous to the soul precisely because it brings honor, and that only a man proof against honor — a man who could be driven from the sanctuary with insults and bless his abusers — was safe to receive it. Moses passed the test not by demonstrating dignity but by demonstrating that he had none to defend; and the archbishop’s verdict, “this one alone is worthy,” turns the world’s measure of worth on its head. The man at the bottom of every social scale — slave, criminal, foreigner, black — is declared the one fit for the altar, because he alone has the humility the altar requires (Ward 1984, Moses 3–4; Chitty 1966).

The other ordination-saying preserved in the collection completes the picture: when Moses was made a clergyman and clothed in the vestment, the archbishop said to him, “Behold, Abba Moses has become entirely white” — and Moses answered, “Outwardly, lord and father; would that I were so within!” — turning even the language of color, once more, into a confession of his own unworthiness (Ward 1984, Moses 4, paraphrased). [Disputed: this saying (Moses 4 in Ward's alphabetical collection) again turns the contemporary association of "white" with purity and "black" with sin — an association of the period's imagery, not a doctrine — into Moses's self-accusation; the wording varies among the collections, but the self-abasement is constant.] The theology that all these episodes serve — humility and self-knowledge as the root of the spiritual life — is the subject of the companion file (see Humility and Self-Knowledge).

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Abba Moses 3, the testing by the clergy and “get out, Ethiopian”; Moses 4, “Abba Moses has become white” and his reply; the ordination tradition.)
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.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The desert’s testing of candidates; the priesthood at Scetis.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The episodes of Moses’s humility; the theology of testing.)