02 — The Desert Father
St. Poemen the Great as the Egyptian desert remembered him: not a writer or a founder of institutions but a spiritual father, the elder to whom monks — and even other abbas — “streamed for a word.” This section examines the two things for which the Apophthegmata most consistently honours him: the elder-disciple bond built on the desert “word” (rhēma), and his characteristic teaching of diakrisis — discernment, discretion, the measured and merciful path the tradition called the queen of the virtues.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; master of discernment)
Poemen wrote nothing and ruled nothing; what the Sayings of the Desert Fathers preserve of him is overwhelmingly the record of a man being asked — by brothers who could not stay in their cells, by abbas who came a long way to question him, by the young and the fallen and the perplexed. The largest single dossier in the alphabetical collection is, in its dominant form, a dossier of questions and answers, and that form is itself the testimony: Poemen is remembered as the counsellor of monks (Ward 1984; Gould 1993). Two files draw out what that counsel was. The first treats the institution of the desert “word” and the elder-disciple relationship it served; the second treats the substance of Poemen’s counsel — his insistence on discretion, moderation, and mercy against the rigorism that always tempted the desert. Together they portray the spiritual father whom Orthodox tradition has read ever since as the pattern of pneumatikē patrotēs, spiritual fatherhood.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Counsellor of Monks | The “give me a word, father” relationship: the desert institution of the rhēma / logos — brief, occasional, addressed to the particular questioner, not systematic theology; the elder-disciple bond; famous cases (Abba Isaac, the brother who could not stay in his cell); Poemen’s reluctance to speak of “heavenly things” and his preference for “the passions” and the practical (Poemen 8); and the connection to Orthodox spiritual direction. |
| Discretion, the Queen of Virtues | Poemen’s diakrisis (discernment / discretion): the desert teaching that discretion is the mother of the virtues (Antony 8; Cassian, Conferences 2); Poemen’s moderation, his counsel against extremes and self-will, the “measure in all things,” and his humane, gradual asceticism; the theological frame in Cassian and its later treatment in John Climacus. |
See Also
- The Apophthegmata of Poemen — the dossier itself, the only ground on which everything in this section stands
- Weeping and Self-Accusation — the mercy and mourning that are the affective core of Poemen’s counsel
- Humility and the Cell — “sit in your cell,” the discipline that frames the elder’s word
- Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction — the elder-disciple bond Poemen embodies, carried into later Orthodox practice
- St. Antony the Great — the first father of the Sayings, whose word on discretion frames Poemen’s
- St. John Cassian — who carried the desert teaching on discretion West in Conferences 2
- St. John Climacus — who systematized discernment and the elder-disciple bond in the Ladder
References
- Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984.
- Gould, Graham. The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
- Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Regnault, Lucien. The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers in Fourth-Century Egypt. Trans. Étienne Poirier Jr. Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1999.
- John Cassian. The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997.