07 — Moses and the Question of Race
Moses the Black is one of the few black African saints whose memory the whole Christian world has kept, and the Sayings preserve episodes in which his color is the matter of contempt and of his own self-accusation. This section handles that dimension soberly and even-handedly — reporting what the sources say, neither minimizing the prejudice they record nor anachronistically reframing it — and then turns to the deeper truth the desert read in his life: that the desert is the place where the brigand becomes the saint and every worldly distinction falls away.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)
The racial dimension of Moses’s story is real and cannot be passed over, but it is easily mishandled in either direction — by minimizing the prejudice the sources record, or by recasting a fourth-century desert father as a modern figure. This section takes the middle, source-faithful course required by the methodology: it reports the racial episodes as the Sayings give them, sets them in the desert’s own theology of humility, and then draws out the universal gospel of transformation that makes Moses beloved far beyond any question of race — the desert as the place where the robber becomes the saint.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Black Desert Father | Moses as a figure beloved across the whole Christian world; the racial episodes in the Sayings reported soberly — neither minimized nor anachronistically reframed — and read within the desert’s theology of humility; the modern reception and the question of anachronism. |
| The Universality of the Desert | The desert as the place where the brigand becomes the saint and every worldly distinction falls away; the gospel of transformation that makes Moses a witness for all. |
See Also
- Ordination and the Test — the racial episodes at his ordination
- Humility and Self-Knowledge — the theology into which they are read
- The Conversion to the Desert — the transformation the desert worked
- Monasticism — the desert as the place of remaking
References
- Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Abba Moses 3, 4.)
- Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.