The Universality of the Desert

Beneath the question of race lies the deeper truth the desert read in Moses’s life: that the desert is the place where the brigand becomes the saint and every worldly distinction — of origin, of race, of class, of past — falls away before the one thing that matters, the soul’s turning to God. This file draws out that gospel of transformation: the desert as the great leveler and the great remaker, in which the chief of robbers, the runaway slave, the black African outsider is raised to be a father of the Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

The Desert as the Great Leveler

The desert of fourth-century Egypt drew men and women from every quarter of the late-antique world — Copts and Greeks and Latins, the learned and the illiterate, the wellborn and the slave, the devout and the criminal — and it subjected them all to the same discipline and measured them by the same standard (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). In the cell, the distinctions of the world counted for nothing. The Apophthegmata preserve fathers who had been senators and fathers who had been peasants, and they treat them alike; what mattered was not where a man came from but what he became. The desert was, in this sense, the great leveler — a place where the hierarchies of the empire were suspended and a new measure applied, the measure of humility and the love of God.

Moses is the supreme illustration of this. By every worldly reckoning he stood at the bottom: a slave, a criminal, a foreigner, a black African in a society that ranked such things against him. The desert took this man and made him a father, a priest, and a martyr, sought out by monks of every background for a word, his sayings gathered with those of Antony and Macarius as the common treasure of the Church (Ward 1984, Moses; see The Making of a Father). The desert did not merely tolerate Moses despite his origins; it raised him above men of every advantage, because in its economy his depth of repentance outweighed every disadvantage of birth.

The Brigand Becomes the Saint

The heart of the desert’s gospel, and the heart of Moses’s witness, is transformation. The desert held — and Moses proved — that no past disqualifies a soul from sanctity, that the worst of men may become the best, and that grace works most visibly where it has the most to overcome (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). The chief of brigands became the teacher of non-judgment; the man of violence became the martyr of non-resistance; the runaway slave became a free father of the Church. This is the pattern the desert loved above all others, and it is why it kept the memory of penitents whose former lives were scandalous — robbers, harlots, murderers — and made them luminous: they were the proof of the gospel’s central promise, that what a man has been does not bind what he may become.

The nearest parallel in the Egyptian tradition is St. Mary of Egypt, the harlot of Alexandria raised to be the great penitent of the Jordan desert, as Moses is the robber raised to be the great father of Scetis (see St. Mary of Egypt). The two stand together as the desert’s twin witnesses to the power of repentance — the woman from the depths of the flesh, the man from the depths of violence — and both teach the same lesson: that the way to God is open from the lowest place, and that the depth of the fall can become the depth of the sanctity. The desert’s gospel is a gospel of reversal, and Moses and Mary are its emblems.

Every Distinction Falls Away

Set against the racial episodes of the Sayings, this universality is the deeper and truer word. The prejudice that the Sayings record — the contempt that drove Moses from the sanctuary with the insult “Ethiopian” — belongs to the fallen social world the monks brought with them into the desert (see The Black Desert Father). But the verdict the desert finally rendered — “this one alone is worthy” — belongs to the gospel, and it overrules the prejudice. The Church’s lasting judgment on Moses is not the insult but the sanctity; not “get out, Ethiopian,” but a black African father and martyr venerated across the whole Christian world. The distinction of race, like every other worldly distinction, falls away before the soul’s turning to God, and the saint stands forth measured only by what grace has made of him.

This is the truth the gospel itself proclaims: that in Christ “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all” (Colossians 3:11; cf. Galatians 3:28). The desert did not always live up to this — the Sayings record its failures — but it knew it, and in Moses it enacted it. A community that could raise a black former slave and robber to be one of its greatest fathers was a community that had glimpsed, however imperfectly, the leveling and remaking power of the gospel; and the Church that has kept his memory has kept that glimpse.

A Witness for All

Because his witness is finally about transformation rather than race, Moses belongs to everyone. He is a saint for the penitent of every kind — for all who fear their past disqualifies them, for all who have been violent or low or despised — because he is the standing proof that grace reaches to the bottom and raises up. He is a saint for the black Christian, who finds in him a father of the Church of his own people and a witness against the contempt of color; and he is a saint for every Christian, who finds in him the gospel’s promise that what we have been does not bind what we may become. The universality of the desert is the universality of Moses: the brigand who became the saint is a witness for all who would be remade (on his enduring veneration, see Feast and Cult and Legacy and Assessment).

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; the desert’s economy of repentance and the gathering of his sayings with the great fathers.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The social diversity of the desert; the leveling discipline of the cell.)
  • Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Transformation as the desert’s gospel; the penitent saints.)
  • The Holy Bible (Colossians 3:11; Galatians 3:28). (The gospel of the abolition of worldly distinctions in Christ.)