The Apophthegmata and the Lausiac History

The whole portrait of Moses is drawn from a small dossier: the Apophthegmata Patrum — the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, and especially the chapter on Abba Moses — together with the chapter Palladius devotes to him in the Lausiac History and a brief notice in Sozomen. This file describes those sources: what the Apophthegmata are and how they came to be, how the Lausiac History and Sozomen stand to them, and the named scholarship — Benedicta Ward, Derwas Chitty, William Harmless — through which they are read.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

The Apophthegmata Patrum

The principal source for Moses, as for the desert fathers generally, is the Apophthegmata Patrum — the Sayings of the Desert Fathers — a vast and complex body of remembered sayings and short anecdotes of the monks of fourth- and early-fifth-century Egypt (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). The sayings began as oral tradition, the “words” given by the fathers to those who sought them, treasured and repeated in the cells of Scetis, Nitria, and Kellia. Over the later fifth and the sixth centuries they were gathered into written collections, of which two great types survive: the alphabetical collection, arranged by the names of the fathers (from Antony at alpha to the end of the Greek alphabet), and the systematic collection, arranged by theme (on humility, on non-judgment, on stillness, and so on); to these is added a large body of anonymous sayings (Ward 1984; Harmless 2004). The same saying often appears, in varying forms, across more than one collection and in more than one language — Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and others — for the Apophthegmata were among the most translated and most copied texts of early Christianity.

Moses’s place in this corpus is secure and prominent. In the alphabetical collection he has a chapter of eighteen sayings under the letter mu (Abba Moses 1–18; trans. Ward 1984), and further material attributed to him or about him appears in the systematic and anonymous collections and in the Latin Verba Seniorum. The chapter contains several of the most famous sayings in the entire literature — “sit in your cell,” the leaking vessel at the council, the testing at the ordination — which is itself evidence of the standing he held among the fathers (see The Sayings of Abba Moses).

The source-critical character of the Apophthegmata must be kept in view. They are not a contemporary biography but a tradition: sayings remembered, repeated, gathered, translated, and arranged across more than a century after the fathers spoke them (Ward 1984; Harmless 2004). This does not make them worthless as history — the desert had a strong oral culture and a real concern to preserve the fathers’ words faithfully — but it means that the sayings give us the remembered Moses, the figure the tradition held him to be, with the embellishment and the variation that any such tradition carries (per METHODOLOGY §2.4, sayings are cited by collection and number, and the late and oral character of the witness is stated rather than concealed).

Palladius’s Lausiac History

The earliest connected narrative of Moses’s life is the chapter Palladius of Helenopolis gives him in the Lausiac History, written about 419/420 for the imperial chamberlain Lausus (Palladius, Lausiac History 19; trans. Meyer 1964). Palladius had himself lived among the monks of Egypt in the 390s and claims informants who had known the fathers, which gives his account a near-contemporary value; he is, with the Apophthegmata, the closest the dossier comes to a witness who could have known men who knew Moses (Meyer 1964, introduction; Harmless 2004). The Lausiac History supplies what the sayings do not: the connected story of the slave dismissed for robbery, the band of brigands, the conversion, and the extreme early austerities (see The Robber and the Slave and The Struggle with the Passions).

Palladius is nonetheless a shaped source. He writes to edify, selects and heightens his material, and his narrative of Moses already bears the marks of the hagiographical amplification by which the desert dramatized the contrast between the robber and the saint (Harmless 2004; Ward 1984). The lurid detail of the brigand-career — the precise exploits, the murders — is at its most vivid in Palladius and thinnest elsewhere, and is weighed accordingly in this guide (see The Historical Moses).

Sozomen and the Wider Witness

The fifth-century church historian Sozomen, writing his Ecclesiastical History in the 440s, includes Moses in his survey of the great monks of Egypt, noting him among the celebrated ascetics of the desert (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History VI.29; trans. Hartranft, NPNF II/2). Sozomen’s notice is brief and dependent on the same broad tradition; it is valuable chiefly as evidence that Moses’s fame was established and general by the mid-fifth century, set among the recognized fathers of the desert. The later synaxaria and menologia — the liturgical calendars and collections of saints’ lives of the Byzantine and Coptic Churches — carry the tradition forward, including the martyrdom, but they are later still and dependent on the earlier dossier (see Feast and Cult).

The Named Scholarship

The modern study of this dossier is the work of a recognizable body of scholars. Benedicta Ward, whose translation of the alphabetical Sayings (1975; rev. 1984) is the standard English text, supplies in her introduction and notes the principal guide to the collection’s formation and to Moses’s place in it. Derwas Chitty, in The Desert a City (1966), gave the classic narrative history of Egyptian and Palestinian monasticism within which Moses and Scetis are set. William Harmless, in Desert Christians (2004), provides the fullest recent introduction to the whole literature of early monasticism — the Apophthegmata, the Lausiac History, and their source-critical problems — and is the standard guide to how these texts are read today. These three, with the editors of the Greek and Latin collections behind them, are the scholarship on which this guide rests (Ward 1984; Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004).

The dossier they have edited and studied is, in the end, small and layered: a chapter of sayings, a chapter of Palladius, a notice of Sozomen, and the later liturgical tradition. What can be securely known from it, and what must be held more loosely, is the subject of the companion file (see The Historical Moses).

See Also

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 introduction on the formation, types, and transmission of the Apophthegmata.)
  • Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (Chapter 19, on Moses the Ethiopian; Meyer’s introduction on Palladius’s date, informants, and method.)
  • Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History. Trans. Chester D. Hartranft. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 2. 1890. (VI.29, Moses among the monks of Egypt.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
  • Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The Apophthegmata and the Lausiac History as sources; their formation, transmission, and source-criticism.)