The Shepherd Name

“Poemen” is the Greek word poimēn, “shepherd” — a by-name, in this case fittingly borne, for the desert father who became the shepherd-of-souls par excellence of the Egyptian wilderness. This file unfolds the name and its resonance with the Good Shepherd of the Gospel, sketches who Poemen was — the great elder of discernment and mercy whose dossier is the largest in the Sayings — and locates him in the second or third generation of the desert fathers after Antony and Macarius. It also gives the source-critical caution that the very portrait drawn here is a literary as much as a historical construct.

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

The Name: Poimēn, “Shepherd”

The name by which this father is universally known, Poemen, is simply the Greek noun poimēn (ποιμήν), “shepherd” — the ordinary word for a herdsman of sheep, and the word the Greek Bible uses for the shepherds of Bethlehem, for the shepherd-kings of Israel, and, supremely, for Christ Himself (Ward 1984, 165; Harmless 2004, 244). Whether it was the name given him at birth or a monastic by-name acquired in the desert cannot now be determined from the Sayings, which do not say; but the tradition has always heard in it more than a coincidence, because the man it names became, in the memory of the desert, precisely a shepherd of souls. It is one of the small ironies of the dossier that a father who taught nothing so insistently as self-effacement and the refusal to set oneself above others should bear, as his very name, the title of the one who leads the flock.

The Greek character of the name is itself worth a word. Many of the fathers of the lower Egyptian desert were Copts who bear Coptic or Egyptian names — Anoub, Pambo, Pshoi, Sisoes, Or — while others carry Greek or Latin names from the wider Greco-Roman world (Regnault 1999, 36–55). “Poemen” is a Greek name in a Coptic milieu, and the Sayings that bear it were transmitted and edited above all in Greek, in the alphabetical and systematic collections that are the foundation of the whole tradition (Guy 1962/1984; Harmless 2004, 167–273). The name we use is thus already the name as the Greek tradition received and fixed it.

The Good Shepherd Resonance

For the Christian ear the word poimēn cannot be heard without its scriptural overtone. It is the word the Lord takes to Himself in the tenth chapter of John: “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” (John 10:11), repeated at John 10:14, “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.” It is the word of the most beloved of the psalms — “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1; in the Septuagint numbering Psalm 22:1, Kyrios poimainei me) — and of the prophets’ indictment of the false shepherds and promise of the true (Ezekiel 34; Jeremiah 23:1–4). It is the word the Lord uses of Himself again as the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one that is lost (Luke 15:4–7; Matthew 18:12–14), and the word the risen Lord lays on Peter — “Feed [poimaine] my sheep” (John 21:16) — as the charge of pastoral care handed to the Church.

A desert father named “Shepherd,” then, carries in his very name the whole biblical theology of pastoral care: the shepherd who knows each sheep by name, who goes after the one that strays, who lays down his life for the flock, and who is answerable for the sheep entrusted to him. The fittingness is not pressed by the Sayings into an explicit etymological sermon — the desert was sparing of such conceits — but the Orthodox tradition has long delighted in it, for the Poemen of the dossier is exactly a shepherd of this kind: one who refuses to drive the straying sheep away, who covers rather than exposes the fallen, and who streams of monks sought out precisely because he would not break the bruised reed (Ward 1984, Poemen series; Gould 1993, 107–166; on his mercy, The Counsellor of Monks).

Who Poemen Was: A Portrait From the Sayings

Strip away what cannot be known, and the Sayings still yield a remarkably coherent portrait of the man — coherent enough, indeed, that its very coherence has become a scholarly problem (see below; and The Poemen Collection Problem). The Poemen of the Apophthegmata is the great elder of the desert as a teacher: the monk whose name heads by far the largest single block of sayings in the alphabetical collection, some 180-odd numbered apophthegms, more than for any other father, including Antony and Macarius (Ward 1984, 165–193; Harmless 2004, 244–250). He is remembered above all as a master of discernment (diakrisis) — the capacity to weigh thoughts, persons, and situations and to find the measured, life-giving path between extremes — which the tradition came to call the queen of the virtues, and which Poemen embodies as no other (Ward 1984, Poemen 35, 60, and passim; Gould 1993, 26–87; see Discretion the Queen of Virtues).

Three notes sound through the dossier with particular clarity. The first is mercy toward the fallen. Time and again the sayings show Poemen refusing to condemn, covering a brother’s sin, weeping for the sinner rather than exposing him: “we have not come here to judge our brother” runs the burden of his teaching (Ward 1984, Poemen series; Gould 1993, 107–166; see The Teacher of Mercy). The second is compunction and tears — the conviction that the monk’s first work is to weep for his own sins: “weeping is the way the Scriptures and our Fathers give us, when they say, Weep! Truly, there is no other way than this” (Ward 1984, Poemen 119, p. 184). The third is a deep, deliberate humility and reticence: Poemen will not be photographed, as it were, into a teacher of doctrine; his sayings are practical, sober, often a single sentence, and he repeatedly turns questions back upon the questioner and refuses to measure himself against the great (Ward 1984, Poemen 5, 27, and passim; Gould 1993, 26–87).

The cumulative impression is of a man of measure — neither the towering wonderworker of the Antony tradition nor the silent recluse of the Arsenius tradition, but the accessible, merciful elder to whom one could bring a real fault and receive a real, gentle, exacting word. It is this quality that made the Poemen material the practical heart of the Apophthegmata and, through it, of the whole later Orthodox literature of the spiritual father (Harmless 2004, 244–273; Ward 1984, intro.; on the elder–disciple relation, Spiritual Direction).

His Place Among the Generations

The desert fathers are conventionally reckoned in generations, and Poemen belongs to the second or third. The first generation is that of Antony the Great (c. 251 – 356), the father of Christian monasticism, whose name stands first in the alphabetical Sayings, and of the founders of the great settlements — Macarius the Egyptian at Scetis, Amoun at Nitria, and Pachomius, the founder of the cenobitic life, in the Thebaid (Ward 1984, intro.; Regnault 1999, 1–15; Harmless 2004, ch. 3–6; see St. Antony the Great, St. Macarius the Great, St. Pachomius the Great). Poemen comes after these. The Sayings show him living in the desert that Macarius founded, fleeing the barbarian raids that broke Scetis in the early fifth century, and conversing with or remembering fathers of the intervening generations (Ward 1984, Poemen series, Anoub 1; Regnault 1999, 6–10; see The Brothers of Scetis). His conventional dates, c. 340 – c. 450, place him roughly a generation or two below Antony and Macarius and make him a near-contemporary of the silent Arsenius (c. 354 – c. 450), whom the Sayings set in the same desert and the same decades (Ward 1984, Arsenius series; see St. Arsenius the Great), and an elder among the figures of Scetis such as Sisoes, Moses the Black, and others of the late fourth and fifth centuries (on Moses, see St. Moses the Black; Sisoes is known only from his own dossier in the Sayings and has no collection here). Those dates, it must be stressed once more, are inferred from the sayings, not recorded (Harmless 2004, 167–172; Regnault 1999, 6–7; see The Brothers of Scetis).

If Antony’s was the heroic generation that opened the desert and Macarius’s the founding generation that settled it, Poemen’s was the generation that distilled the desert’s wisdom into transmissible form — the generation in whose teaching, gathered into the Apophthegmata, the desert handed on what it had learned. That is why the later tradition, East and West, drew so deeply on Poemen, and why his sayings stand near the center of the Philokalic inheritance of watchfulness and the discernment of thoughts (Harmless 2004, 244–273; see Jesus Prayer).

The Portrait Is Also a Construct

A final caution belongs here, lest the coherence of the portrait be mistaken for the security of a biography. The very features that make Poemen so vivid — the size and internal consistency of his dossier, the recurrence of his characteristic themes, the sense of a single recognizable voice — are also what raise the central source-critical question of this guide. The largest, most coherent dossier in the Apophthegmata may be the deposit of a single great elder; it may equally be a focal point around which much fourth- and fifth-century ascetic teaching crystallized in the editing of the Sayings, anonymous or composite material gathering to a famous name (Guy 1962/1984; Harmless 2004, 244–273; Gould 1993, 1–25). The “one Poemen or many?” question is treated in full, with named scholars on both sides, in Section 05 (see The Poemen Collection Problem). For the present file the point is only this: the portrait drawn above is the portrait the Sayings give, and the Sayings are a compiled, edited, late tradition. The figure of the Shepherd is at once a historical memory and a literary achievement of the desert’s own remembering — and the Orthodox reader honors it best by receiving it as both, and by going to the sayings themselves rather than resting in any summary of them (Harmless 2004, 167–172; per METHODOLOGY §2.4, §3.5).

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Poemen dossier, pp. 165–193, the largest in the collection; Poemen 119 on weeping, p. 184; the Antony, Macarius the Great, Arsenius, and Anoub series; introduction on the generations of the desert.)
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 Coptic and Greek milieu of the desert; the geography and generations of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis; the chronology inferred for Poemen.)
Harmless, William, S.J. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Poemen as the largest dossier in the Apophthegmata; the portrait of discernment and mercy; the generations of the desert; the source-criticism of the Poemen corpus.)
Gould, Graham. The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (Poemen as teacher of discernment and mercy; the coherence of the dossier and its bearing on the question of the historical Poemen.)
Guy, Jean-Claude, S.J. Recherches sur la tradition grecque des Apophthegmata Patrum. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1962; 2nd ed. 1984. (The Greek transmission and editing of the Sayings; the formation of the alphabetical collection in which the name “Poemen” was fixed.)
The Holy Bible. Cited: John 10:11, 10:14, 21:16; Psalm 23:1 (LXX 22:1); Ezekiel 34; Jeremiah 23:1–4; Luke 15:4–7; Matthew 18:12–14.