The Black Desert Father

Moses the Ethiopian 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 made the matter of contempt and of his own self-accusation. This file handles that dimension as the methodology requires — reporting what the sources actually say, neither minimizing the prejudice they record nor recasting a fourth-century desert father as a modern figure — and reads the racial episodes within the desert’s own theology of humility, while noting honestly how they are received today.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

“Ethiopian” in the Sources

The sources call Moses Aithiops — “Ethiopian” — a term that in the Greek of the period denoted a black African from the lands south of Egypt, and that the whole tradition keeps as part of his name: Moses the Ethiopian, Moses the Black (Palladius, Lausiac History 19.1; Ward 1984, Moses). His color is not incidental to his memory; it is fixed in the way the Church has always named him. He is, with very few others, a black African among the canonized fathers of the early Church whose sayings and life were preserved and venerated across the Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, and later traditions — a figure beloved, quoted, and depicted throughout the Christian world (Harmless 2004). That the desert produced and the whole Church kept the memory of a black saint of the first rank is a fact worth stating plainly.

The Episodes of Contempt

The Apophthegmata do not present a world free of prejudice, and honesty requires reporting what they record. Several episodes turn on Moses’s color being made the matter of insult or test. In the testing at his ordination, the clergy drive him from the sanctuary with the cry “Get out, Ethiopian!” — and Moses, instead of protesting, takes the contempt onto himself, saying that they have treated him correctly because his skin is “as black as ashes” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Moses 3; trans. Ward 1984; see Ordination and the Test). In another saying, when he is vested as a clergyman and the archbishop says “Abba Moses has become white,” he answers that he is white only outwardly and wishes he were so within (Ward 1984, Moses 4). These episodes record, without disguise, that Moses was insulted because he was black, that “Ethiopian” was used against him as a term of contempt, and that the period’s imagery associated blackness with sin and whiteness with purity.

The methodology requires that this be neither minimized nor anachronistically reframed (METHODOLOGY §4). To minimize it — to pretend the Sayings contain no prejudice, or that “Ethiopian” carried no sting — would be to falsify the source. To reframe it anachronistically — to read into the fourth-century desert the categories of modern racial politics, or to make Moses a spokesman for a cause he never knew — would be equally false to the source. The sober course is to report exactly what the Sayings say: that prejudice against Moses’s color existed and is recorded, and that the Sayings preserve these episodes not to endorse the prejudice but to display Moses’s humility under it.

The Episodes Read Within the Desert’s Theology

The Apophthegmata themselves supply the frame in which they set these episodes, and it is the theology of humility (see Humility and Self-Knowledge). In the desert’s understanding, the point of the “Ethiopian” episodes is not Moses’s color but his response to contempt: that he received insult without retaliation, agreed with his accusers, and turned even an unjust reproach into a fresh occasion of self-abasement. The archbishop’s verdict — “this one alone is worthy” — turns the contempt on its head: the man insulted as least is declared most fit for the altar, precisely because he has the humility the world’s hierarchy lacks (Ward 1984, Moses 3). In the desert’s economy, the episode is a triumph: the saint so dead to self-regard that he will not even defend his own dignity.

Two things must be held together here, and the sober reader holds them. First, the desert genuinely prized Moses’s humility, and the episodes are preserved to teach it. Second, the episodes also preserve a wounding prejudice and an imagery of color — black as sin, white as purity — that does not belong to the gospel and that the gospel itself overturns. Both are true. The right response is neither to celebrate the prejudice as if it were edifying, nor to condemn the Sayings as if their whole point were racial contempt, but to see clearly what each episode does: it records a prejudice and it records a saint transcending it, and the saint, not the prejudice, is what the desert wished to commemorate.

The Modern Reception and the Question of Anachronism

In the modern period, and especially in the English-speaking world, Moses has become a figure of particular devotion — honored as a black saint, invoked in the cause of reconciliation, depicted in icons that foreground his African features, and held up as evidence that the Church’s communion of saints has from the beginning crossed every line of race and origin (Harmless 2004). This devotion is genuine and well-founded: Moses was a black African saint of the first rank, and the Church has always venerated him. The methodology’s caution applies only to the manner of reception, not to its substance: it is right to honor Moses as a black saint and to find in him a witness against racial contempt; it is anachronistic to make him a modern political figure or to read the fourth-century desert through twenty-first-century categories.

[Disputed: the modern reception of Moses — especially his prominence in twentieth- and twenty-first-century devotion as a black saint and a patron of racial reconciliation — is a development of the later tradition, well-grounded in the secure fact of his African identity and his veneration but distinct from what the early sources themselves emphasize. The early *Sayings* foreground his humility, not his race as such; the modern emphasis on his race is a legitimate retrieval but should be recognized as a retrieval, not read back into the fourth-century texts as their own primary concern.]

The honest and the devout course converge: to honor Moses as the Church has always honored him — a black African former robber raised by grace to be one of the great fathers and martyrs of the desert — while reporting the racial episodes of the Sayings as exactly what they are, prejudice recorded and prejudice transcended. The deeper truth his life teaches, beneath the question of race, is the universality of the desert’s grace, the theme of the companion file (see The Universality of the Desert).

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 3, “get out, Ethiopian” and Moses’s self-abasement; Moses 4, “Abba Moses has become white.”)
  • Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (Chapter 19.1, Moses “an Ethiopian by race.”)
  • Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Moses among the fathers; the reception of the Apophthegmata.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The desert’s social world and its diversity.)