The Brothers of Scetis

Poemen the Great is remembered in the Apophthegmata Patrum not as a solitary but as one of a band of brothers — natural brothers as well as monastic ones — who lived together at Scetis in the lower Egyptian desert, the great ascetic settlement founded by Macarius the Great. When barbarian raiders devastated Scetis, the Sayings show Poemen and his brothers among the monks who fled, sheltering for a time in a ruined pagan temple at Terenuthis. This file assembles what the sayings allow us to reconstruct of that brotherhood and that flight, and is honest that almost everything here is inferred from the Sayings and not from any vita.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; master of discernment)

A Life Reconstructed Only From Sayings

Before anything is said about Poemen’s life it must be said how little ground there is to stand on. Poemen wrote nothing, and no contemporary vita of him survives; he is known almost entirely through the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, in which his name heads by far the largest dossier of the alphabetical collection (Ward 1984, 165–193; Harmless 2004, 244–250). Every date conventionally attached to him — the floruit “c. 340 – c. 450” — is an inference, not a record: it is reconstructed backward from the events the sayings mention (chiefly the barbarian raids on Scetis) and from the elders the sayings show him meeting (Regnault 1999, 6–7; Harmless 2004, 167–172). The dossier is a compilation, edited late and assembled from oral tradition, and its own date, growth, and arrangement are debated (Guy 1962/1984; Harmless 2004, 167–172, 244–273). What follows, therefore, is offered as the picture the Sayings give, pinned to the sayings that give it, and not as a documented biography. The deeper source-critical problem — whether “Abba Poemen” even names a single historical elder — is reserved for its own section (see The Poemen Collection Problem).

The Desert of Scetis

The world in which the Sayings place Poemen is Scetis, the southernmost and most austere of the three great monastic settlements of the lower Egyptian desert. The three are usually named together: Nitria, nearest the cultivated Delta; Kellia (“the Cells”), a little deeper into the desert, founded as an overflow of Nitria so that monks seeking greater solitude could withdraw from it; and Scetis (Coptic Shiet; the modern Wadi al-Natrun), the remotest of the three, reached only by a long march across waterless desert (Regnault 1999, 1–15; Harmless 2004, 273–276; Ward 1984, intro.). Each had its own character — Nitria more populous and accessible, Kellia a settlement of dispersed cells gathered for the Saturday and Sunday synaxis, Scetis the hardest and most isolated — but together they formed the heartland of the semi-anchoritic life, in which a monk lived alone or with one or two disciples in his cell through the week and came together with the others only for the weekly liturgy.

Scetis was founded, the tradition holds, by Macarius the Egyptian (“the Great”), who is remembered as withdrawing into that desert around the middle of the fourth century and gathering the first monks there (Ward 1984, 124–138, Macarius the Great; Regnault 1999, 5–10; see St. Macarius the Great). The settlement’s life was austere even by desert standards: it lay a full day’s journey or more from the nearest village, its water was brackish, and its monks supported themselves by plaiting rope and weaving baskets from the marsh reeds (Regnault 1999, 16–35, 76–98). It is in this desert, in the generation after Macarius, that the Sayings set Poemen and his brothers — which is one reason the conventional chronology makes Poemen a man of the second or third desert generation, born around the time Macarius was establishing the place and living on into the next century (Harmless 2004, 167–172; Regnault 1999, 6–7).

Poemen and His Brothers

The Apophthegmata present Poemen not as a hermit who came alone to the desert but as one of a group of brothers who were monks together. The sayings name several of them and repeatedly show them as a household. Chief among those named is Abba Anoub, who in the Sayings is presented as Poemen’s brother (the elder of the group), and the sayings of Anoub and of Poemen cross-reference one another (Ward 1984, Anoub 1, p. 33; Poemen 1–2, pp. 165–166; Gould 1993, 89–106). Other brothers — including a younger brother named Paesius and others left unnamed — appear in the Poemen dossier, and several sayings turn precisely on the relations among them: how the elder brother is to be honored, how the younger are to be borne with, how a brother’s failing is to be covered (Ward 1984, Poemen 1–2; Gould 1993, 89–123). The very first saying of the Poemen series concerns his brothers: it tells how Poemen and his brothers wished to leave their country and how their mother followed them, weeping, to see them once more, and how Poemen would not open the door to her but answered through it, persuading her that she would see them more truly in the age to come than in this life — and she went away comforted (Ward 1984, Poemen 2, pp. 165–166). Whatever its historical value, the saying fixes the brothers at the center of the tradition’s memory of Poemen from its very first word.

Graham Gould has shown how much of the Poemen material presupposes exactly this small-community setting — a cluster of brothers under an elder, learning the life from one another and from their abba — and has used the dossier as the richest single body of evidence for what desert “community” actually meant in practice: not the regimented common life of the cenobium, but a flexible household of solitaries bound by obedience, mutual forbearance, and the giving and receiving of “a word” (Gould 1993, 1–25, 89–166). The brotherhood of Poemen is, on this reading, a small image of the whole semi-anchoritic ideal of Scetis.

The Barbarian Raids and the Devastation of Scetis

The settled life of Scetis was broken, more than once, by raids from the desert nomads the Greek sources call the Mazices (Mazici) — Libyan Berber tribesmen who fell upon the undefended monastic settlements, killed monks, and plundered and burned the cells. The Apophthegmata and the other desert sources remember a series of such devastations, and they were severe enough to scatter the monks of Scetis repeatedly over the late fourth and the fifth centuries (Regnault 1999, 6–10, 219–225; Harmless 2004, 174, 273–276; Ward 1984, intro.). The historical tradition speaks of several distinct “sacks” or devastations of Scetis: a major one is conventionally dated to the first decade of the fifth century, around 407–408, with further and even more destructive raids later in the century (Regnault 1999, 6–10; Harmless 2004, 273–276). [Disputed: the number, sequence, and dates of the devastations of Scetis are not fixed; the great early raid is commonly placed c. 407–408 (Regnault, *Day-to-Day Life*, 6–10), but the sources distinguish more than one destruction across the fifth century and the precise chronology is reconstructed and debated (Harmless, *Desert Christians*, 273–276; Regnault, *Day-to-Day Life*, 219–225)].

These raids matter for Poemen’s story because they are among the few datable external events the Sayings attach to him, and so they are the main hinge on which his conventional chronology turns. If the sayings that show Poemen fleeing a raid refer to the devastation of c. 407–408, then he was an established elder by the opening of the fifth century, which (working backward from a long life) yields the traditional birth around 340 and a death well into the fifth century (Harmless 2004, 167–172; Regnault 1999, 6–7). The inference is reasonable but it is an inference: the sayings are not dated, and the identification of which raid a given saying remembers is itself a reconstruction.

The Flight to Terenuthis

The clearest narrative the Sayings give of the brotherhood in flight is set at Terenuthis, a place on the edge of the cultivated Delta to which monks driven from Scetis withdrew. The relevant saying belongs to Abba Anoub. It tells how, when Scetis was devastated, Anoub and Poemen and their brothers departed together and came to Terenuthis, where they sheltered in a ruined pagan temple (a naos) while they decided where to go, agreeing to remain together there for a time before separating (Ward 1984, Anoub 1, p. 33; Regnault 1999, 6–10).

What the saying is remembered for is the lesson Anoub drew there. Each morning, the sayings report, Anoub rose and threw stones at the face of a stone statue (a pagan idol) that stood in the ruined temple, and each evening he said to it, “Forgive me.” He did this for the whole of their stay. At the end of it Poemen asked him what he meant by it, and Anoub explained: he had been pelting the statue with stones, yet it had neither spoken nor grown angry, and he had begged its pardon, yet it had neither been disturbed nor moved — and so, he said, if the brothers wished to live together, they must become like this statue, unmoved alike by injury and by honor; and whoever could not do this should depart, each to his own way (Ward 1984, Anoub 1, p. 33; Gould 1993, 107–123). The vignette is at once a piece of the brotherhood’s history and a parable of the impassibility (apatheia) that the common life of solitaries demands — borne, characteristically, not by Poemen but by his elder brother Anoub, with Poemen as the one who asks and receives the teaching.

The image of the brothers camped in a derelict temple of the old gods, learning Christian apatheia from the indifference of a broken idol, is one of the most vivid in the whole desert literature, and it is the Sayings’ own account of how the brotherhood of Poemen survived the breaking of Scetis. After Terenuthis the brothers are remembered as scattering, and Poemen reappears in the dossier as an elder in his own right, to whom monks came for a word (Ward 1984, Poemen series; Gould 1993, 89–166; see The Counsellor of Monks).

What May and May Not Be Said

The result of assembling all this is a picture, not a chronicle. The Sayings let us say, with reasonable confidence, that the tradition remembered Poemen as a monk of Scetis in the line of Macarius; as one of a brotherhood that included his brother Anoub; and as one who, when barbarian raids scattered Scetis, fled with his brothers and sheltered at Terenuthis. They do not let us fix his birth, his death, the year of his flight, or the order of the raids except by inference, and they are a late compilation whose relation to the events it remembers is itself a scholarly question (Guy 1962/1984; Harmless 2004, 167–172, 244–273; Regnault 1999, 6–7). The honest state of the evidence is that almost the whole of Poemen’s “life” is a reconstruction from the sayings — and that the reconstruction is worth making only so long as its provisional character is kept in view (see The Poemen Collection Problem; on the wider monastic setting, Monasticism).

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Cited by abba and saying-number: Anoub 1 [the flight to Terenuthis and the statue], p. 33; Poemen 1–2 [the brothers and the mother at the door], pp. 165–166; and the Poemen and Macarius the Great series.)
Regnault, Lucien, O.S.B. The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers in Fourth-Century Egypt. Trans. Étienne Poirier, Jr. Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1999. (The geography of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis; the foundation of Scetis by Macarius; the barbarian raids and the chronology of the devastations; the flight to Terenuthis.)
Harmless, William, S.J. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Scetis and the lower-Egyptian settlements; the Mazices and the destructions of Scetis; the reconstruction of Poemen’s chronology from the Sayings; the source-criticism of the Apophthegmata.)
Gould, Graham. The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (The Poemen dossier as evidence for desert community; the brotherhood of Poemen and Anoub; the Terenuthis saying and the teaching on bearing injury.)
Guy, Jean-Claude, S.J. Recherches sur la tradition grecque des Apophthegmata Patrum. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1962; 2nd ed. 1984. (The manuscript tradition, recensions, and late compilation of the Sayings.)