Moses in the Monastic Tradition

Moses’s counsels traveled with the Apophthegmata Patrum into every language and monastic culture of East and West, and his memory has endured wherever the desert fathers are read. This file traces that diffusion: his place among the fellow fathers of Scetis in the Greek and Coptic collections, his passage into the Latin Verba Seniorum that fed Western monasticism, and the way his great sayings — “sit in your cell,” the leaking vessel of non-judgment — became common property of the whole Christian ascetic tradition.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

Among the Fathers of Scetis

Moses belongs to a particular company — the fathers of Scetis whose sayings fill the Apophthegmata Patrum and define the classic image of the desert. He stands among Macarius the Great, the founder of Scetis and its presiding father; Poemen the Great, the most quoted of all the fathers, whose chapter is the longest in the alphabetical collection; Arsenius the Great, the courtier turned hesychast; Sisoes the Great, the elder of profound humility; and the rest of the great names of the settlement (Ward 1984; Chitty 1966). In the alphabetical collection his sayings are gathered with theirs, and the cross-references among the fathers — the visits, the questions, the shared counsels — locate him firmly within this community of elders. Among Orthodox readers of the Apophthegmata, Moses stands beside Poemen, Arsenius, and Sisoes as one of the recognized great fathers of Scetis, his sayings quoted in the same breath as theirs.

His place among them is distinctive precisely because of his origins. The other great fathers came mostly from settled or respectable life; Moses came from slavery and crime, and his presence in their company is itself a statement — the desert’s witness that the brigand belongs beside the courtier and the sage when both have been remade by grace (see The Universality of the Desert). The Apophthegmata set him there without apology, and the tradition has kept him there ever since.

The Greek and Coptic Transmission

In the Christian East, Moses’s memory was carried first in the Greek Apophthegmata, the collections in which his sayings were gathered and arranged in the fifth and sixth centuries, and which became the foundational ascetic reading of Byzantine monasticism (Ward 1984; Harmless 2004). Through the Greek collections his counsels passed into the whole Byzantine tradition and, in time, into the Slavic monastic world that received the Greek fathers. In Egypt itself, the Coptic Church kept his memory with particular devotion as one of its own — a father of the Egyptian desert and a saint of the Coptic calendar, commemorated and honored in the land where he had lived and died (Chitty 1966; on the Egyptian Church, see The Church of Alexandria). The Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, and other Eastern Christian traditions, which translated the Apophthegmata early and widely, carried Moses with them, so that his sayings became known across the whole Christian East.

The Latin West and the Verba Seniorum

In the Christian West, the desert fathers reached the Latin world through translations of the Apophthegmata — the Verba Seniorum, the “Sayings of the Elders,” gathered and rendered into Latin in late antiquity and read throughout Western monasticism — and through the writings of John Cassian, who had lived among the monks of Scetis and brought their wisdom to the Latin-speaking world in his Institutes and Conferences (Harmless 2004; Chitty 1966; see St. John Cassian). Cassian’s Conferences open with an “Abba Moses” of Scetis as the interlocutor of the first two conferences, on the goal of the monastic life and on discernment — a figure the Latin tradition long associated with the desert’s wisdom, though the relation of Cassian’s literary Moses to the Moses of the Apophthegmata is a question for the scholars. [Disputed: the "Abba Moses" who serves as the speaker of Cassian's first two *Conferences* is a father of Scetis, but whether he is to be identified with Moses the Ethiopian of the *Apophthegmata* is uncertain; Cassian does not specify, and scholars differ on whether the two are the same man or distinct Scetiote elders bearing a common name. The identification is traditional in some Western reception but not secured by the sources.]

Through the Verba Seniorum and Cassian, Moses’s counsels entered the bloodstream of Western monasticism — the Benedictine tradition that drew on Cassian, the medieval monastic readers of the desert fathers, and on down to the modern editions and translations (Harmless 2004). His great sayings became common property: “sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything” and the parable of the leaking vessel of non-judgment are quoted across the whole Christian ascetic tradition, East and West, Orthodox and Catholic and beyond, often without their hearers knowing the name of the black former robber who first spoke them (Ward 1984, Moses 2, 6; see The Sayings of Abba Moses).

A Father for the Whole Church

The breadth of this transmission means that Moses is, in the fullest sense, a father of the whole Church and not of any one tradition. His sayings are read in Orthodox monasteries and Catholic ones, in the Coptic Church that claims him as its own and in the Western churches that received him through Cassian and the Verba Seniorum, in scholarly editions and in popular devotion. The Apophthegmata were one of the great unifying texts of Christian spirituality, read in common across the divisions of the Church, and Moses traveled with them everywhere. That a black former slave and robber of fourth-century Egypt should have become a teacher quoted in every monastic culture of East and West is among the more remarkable facts of Christian history, and it is the measure of how completely the desert’s gospel of transformation took hold of his memory (see The Universality of the Desert).

The shape of the veneration that grew up around him — the commemorations, the calendars, the icons — is the subject of the companion file (see Veneration).

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 among the fathers of Scetis; Moses 2 and 6, the sayings of widest reception; the transmission of the alphabetical collection.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The fathers of Scetis; the Greek and Coptic tradition; Cassian and the West.)
  • Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The transmission of the Apophthegmata into Greek, Coptic, Latin, and Syriac; the Verba Seniorum; Cassian’s Conferences and the “Abba Moses.”)