Discretion, the Queen of Virtues

The desert tradition held that diakrisis — discernment, discretion — is the mother and queen of the virtues, the faculty that measures every other ascetic labour and keeps it from running into excess. This file sets out that teaching in its classic sources (the saying of Abba Antony, and John Cassian’s Conference 2 “On Discretion”), and shows how St. Poemen the Great embodies it: in his counsel against extremes, against measuring oneself by spectacular feats, against self-will; in his preference for a humane, gradual asceticism over rigorism; and in his insistence on “measure in all things.” It connects this teaching forward to John Climacus’s Ladder. Where the attribution of a specific saying is uncertain, this is said.

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

Diakrisis: The Faculty That Measures

The Greek word diakrisis (Latin discretio) covers a range the English “discernment” and “discretion” only partly capture: the act of distinguishing — between thoughts that come from God, from the self, and from the demons; between true virtue and its counterfeit; between a labour proportioned to a soul and one that will break it. In the desert it was held to be the indispensable faculty without which every other virtue could be turned to ruin, because zeal, fasting, vigil, and even prayer can each be driven to excess or pride if they are not measured (Cassian, Conferences 2.4 [SC 42]; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57; Ware 2000, 99–104; Harmless 2004, 232–236). Discretion is therefore not one virtue beside the others but the virtue that governs the others — and the desert gave it the highest titles: the mother of the virtues, their guide, their queen (Cassian, Conferences 2.4; cf. Ward 1984, “Antony” 8).

The classic desert statement is placed at the head of the Apophthegmata, under Antony. The fathers, discussing which virtue is greatest, conclude that discretion is the chief, because it is discretion that preserves all the rest: “Some said fasting, others vigils… but Abba Antony said: I think discretion (diakrisis) is the virtue that surpasses them all” — for without it the most strenuous asceticism comes to nothing (Ward 1984, “Antony” 8; cf. the parallel discussion in Cassian, Conferences 2.2). This saying is the charter of the whole tradition that Poemen carries forward.

Cassian’s Conference 2, “On Discretion”

The fullest desert theology of discernment is John Cassian’s second Conference, set in the mouth of Abba Moses and devoted entirely to discretio. Cassian, who had himself lived among the Egyptian monks before transmitting their teaching to the West, makes discretion the hinge of the ascetic life (Cassian, Conferences 2; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57; Stewart 1998, 41–47; see St. John Cassian). Three of his points frame Poemen’s sayings exactly.

First, discretion is the eye and lamp of the soul, the faculty by which a monk judges his own thoughts and distinguishes their origin (Cassian, Conferences 2.2). Second — and this is Cassian’s great theme — the gravest dangers of the desert come not from sloth but from indiscreet zeal: he assembles cases of monks destroyed precisely by excessive fasting, excessive vigil, excessive austerity undertaken without measure, and concludes that the devil deceives the fervent through their own virtues (Cassian, Conferences 2.2–6, esp. the account of Heron, who through indiscreet rigour fell into delusion and ruin, 2.5; Stewart 1998, 45–47; Harmless 2004, 388–390). Third, discretion is learned, not innate: it is born of humility, and humility is born of opening one’s thoughts to an elder rather than trusting one’s own judgment (Cassian, Conferences 2.10–11; Stewart 1998, 46–47). The young monk’s safeguard against ruinous excess is therefore the spiritual father — the same elder-disciple bond examined in The Counsellor of Monks.

Cassian’s Conference 2 is the theological frame within which Poemen’s sayings on moderation should be read: they are not the prudence of a lax man but the diakrisis that the whole desert recognized as the highest and most dangerous-to-lack of the virtues.

Poemen Against the Extreme

What distinguishes Poemen within the Apophthegmata — what saves his memory from the rigorism that the desert literature elsewhere sometimes glorifies — is the consistency with which his sayings counsel measure. He is the desert father who, again and again, pulls the zealous back from the extreme.

The principle is given directly in a saying on the danger of excess in mortification. Poemen is remembered as teaching that the monk should not undertake what is beyond his strength, and that violence done to the body without discernment is not virtue. In one of the most quoted of his sayings, asked about severe bodily austerities, he answers that “we were taught to kill not the body but the passions” (cf. Ward 1984, “Poemen” 184; Harmless 2004, 248–253). The body is not the enemy; the passions are. To wage war on the body itself, as the rigorists did, is to mistake the target — and the mistake is a failure of discernment. [Disputed: the saying "we were taught not to kill the body but to kill the passions" (or "we are not body-slayers but passion-slayers") is given under Poemen in Ward 1984 but circulates in the tradition under more than one name and is grouped thematically in the systematic collection (Guy, SC 387/474/498); its sense is securely Poemenic even where the precise attribution of the wording is debated].

A second cluster counsels against self-will — the insistence on one’s own judgment and one’s own way, which discretion exists to break. Poemen is remembered for the saying that self-will (to thelēma, the private will) is a “brazen wall” between the soul and God, and that the monk’s whole labour is to cut off his own will (cf. Ward 1984, “Poemen” passim; “Poemen” on cutting off the will; Regnault 1999, 115–124). Self-will and indiscreet zeal are, for Poemen, the same disease: both are the soul preferring its own measure to the measure discernment would impose.

“Do Not Measure Yourself by Spectacular Feats”

The desert preserved memories of astonishing austerities, and a constant temptation of the literature — and of the monks who read it — was to measure holiness by the visible feat: the longest fast, the least sleep, the harshest standing. Poemen’s counsel cuts directly against this. He warns the monk not to compare himself with the great feats of others, and not to take the spectacular as the measure of the spiritual life. The standard is not the feat but the state of the heart — humility, mercy, watchfulness — and a small labour done in humility outweighs a great one done in pride or self-display (cf. Ward 1984, “Poemen” 19, 28, 67; Harmless 2004, 248–253; Regnault 1999, 115–124).

This is of a piece with his refusal, treated in the companion file, to speak of “heavenly things” to monks still bound by the passions: in both cases Poemen redirects attention from the lofty and the spectacular to the present, ordinary, attainable work of the soul (see The Counsellor of Monks). The desert called the moderate path the basilikē hodos, the “royal road” — the highway that runs between the ditches of excess and laxity, neither to the right hand nor to the left (cf. Num. 20:17; Deut. 5:32; the image is developed in Cassian, Conferences 2.16, and is taken up under Poemen’s name in the tradition; Stewart 1998, 47). Poemen is, in the memory of the Apophthegmata, the great teacher of that road.

“The Instruments of the Soul,” Measured by Discretion

Poemen names the ascetic disciplines plainly enough — vigil, meditation on the Scriptures, prayer, self-control — but he characteristically presents them as instruments, tools given to the soul for its healing, not as ends in themselves or as measures of attainment. The instruments must be wielded with discernment, in proportion to the soul that wields them, or they injure rather than heal (cf. Ward 1984, “Poemen” 35, on watchfulness, self-knowledge, and discretion as the guides of the soul; Harmless 2004, 248–253). The formulation that lists “vigil, meditation, and prayer, with self-control” as the soul’s instruments, all governed by discretion, gathers the sense of several Poemen sayings; [Disputed: the exact catalogue of "instruments of the soul" and its precise wording vary across translations and collections, and the grouping under Poemen is partly the work of the compilers; the substance — that the disciplines are means measured by discernment, not ends — is consistently Poemenic, but no single verbatim "instruments of the soul" saying should be over-pressed]. The point is the priority of discretion: the disciplines are real and necessary, but it is diakrisis that tells the monk how much, when, and to what end — exactly Cassian’s teaching in Conference 2.

A Humane and Gradual Asceticism

The cumulative effect of these sayings is a portrait of an asceticism that is humane and gradual rather than heroic and sudden. Poemen counsels patience with oneself and with others, the cutting off of one small passion at a time, the refusal of despair when one fails, and mercy toward the fallen — including mercy toward one’s own weakness (Ward 1984, “Poemen” 19, 20, 28, and the mercy sayings; Regnault 1999, 115–124; see Weeping and Self-Accusation). Where some strands of desert memory glorify the prodigy, Poemen’s strand glorifies the steady, discerning, merciful labourer who does not break himself or others. This is why later Orthodox tradition reads him not as a softening of the desert ideal but as its most balanced and trustworthy voice — the father in whom askēsis and discretion are held together (Ware 2000, 99–104; Harmless 2004, 248–253).

It is worth saying plainly, with the methodology of this collection, that the smoothness of this portrait is partly a function of the source. Poemen survives only as compiled sayings, and the compilers had their own pastoral interests in foregrounding moderation and mercy; the coherence of the “moderate Poemen” is therefore in some degree a coherence of the tradition’s making as well as the man’s (Guy 1962/1984; Harmless 2004, 250–253; see The Poemen Collection Problem). What is not in doubt is that the desert chose to remember discernment and measure as Poemen’s signature — a verdict of the tradition that is itself a historical fact about how the Apophthegmata understood the spiritual life.

From the Desert to the Ladder

The desert teaching on discretion did not end in Egypt. John Cassian carried it West and made it the substance of Conference 2; in the East it was gathered, two centuries after Poemen, into the great Sinaite synthesis of John Climacus, whose Ladder of Divine Ascent makes discernment a high rung of the spiritual ascent and devotes sustained attention to the distinguishing of thoughts and the dangers of indiscreet zeal (John Climacus, Ladder, Step 26 “On Discernment”; trans. Luibheid and Russell, CWS; Ware 2000, 99–104; see St. John Climacus). Climacus stands in an unbroken line from Antony’s saying and Poemen’s counsel: discernment is the queen of the virtues because it alone keeps the others from destroying the monk who practises them. Through the Ladder and through Cassian, Poemen’s discretion entered the bloodstream of Orthodox ascetical theology and of the Philokalic tradition that gathered it (Ware 2000, 99–104; see Orthodoxy: Monasticism, Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction).

The man who would not speak of the Godhead to the unpurified, and who told the zealous to kill the passions and spare the body, is for that very reason the desert’s master of discernment — and discernment, the fathers agreed, is the queen of the virtues.

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (“Antony” 8 on discretion as the greatest virtue; the “Poemen” series on killing the passions not the body, on self-will, on not measuring by spectacular feats, and on watchfulness, self-knowledge, and discretion as the guides of the soul.)
John Cassian. The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (Conference 2, “On Discretion”: discretion as the eye and lamp of the soul, 2.2; the ruin of monks through indiscreet zeal, including Heron, 2.5; the royal road, 2.16; discretion born of humility and the opening of thoughts to an elder, 2.10–11. Latin text: SC 42, ed. E. Pichery.)
Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (Analysis of Conference 2 and the centrality of discretio in Cassian’s transmission of the Egyptian teaching, 41–47.)
John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Step 26, “On Discernment,” the later Sinaite systematization.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Discretion in the desert literature, 232–236; Poemen’s sayings on the passions and moderation, 248–253; the literary shaping of the Poemen dossier, 250–253.)
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. (Poemen’s teaching in the texture of desert life; moderation and self-will, 115–124.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Inner Kingdom (Collected Works, vol. 1). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (Discernment as the queen of the virtues and its continuity from Antony and Cassian to Climacus and the Philokalia, 99–104.)
Guy, Jean-Claude. Recherches sur la tradition grecque des Apophthegmata Patrum. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1962; 2nd ed. 1984; and Les Apophtegmes des Pères: Collection systématique, SC 387, 474, 498. Paris: Cerf, 1993–2005. (The recensions and the thematic redistribution of sayings that bears on attribution.)