The Counsellor of Monks

St. Poemen the Great is remembered in the Apophthegmata Patrum less as a teacher who taught than as an elder who was asked — the spiritual father to whom monks, and even other abbas, came saying “give me a word, father.” This file examines the desert institution of the “word” (rhēma / logos) that the Poemen dossier embodies: its character as brief, occasional, and addressed to the particular questioner rather than offered as systematic theology; the elder-disciple bond it served; the famous cases of Abba Isaac and the brother who could not stay in his cell; and Poemen’s deliberate reluctance to speak of “heavenly things,” his preference for the passions and the practical. It connects the figure of Poemen to the Orthodox tradition of spiritual direction.

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

“Give Me a Word, Father”

The most characteristic sentence in all the Sayings of the Desert Fathers is a request: eipe moi rhēma — “speak to me a word,” “give me a word.” It is the form in which the desert’s wisdom was sought and given, and no figure in the Apophthegmata is the object of that request more often than Abba Poemen. The alphabetical collection assigns to him by far its largest single dossier — on the order of 180 numbered sayings — and a great proportion of them open with a brother, or a named abba, coming to him to ask (Ward 1984, “Poemen,” 165–193; Harmless 2004, 248–250). The dossier is, in its dominant grammatical shape, a record of Poemen being questioned, and that shape is itself the historical testimony: whatever else is uncertain about him, the tradition is unanimous that Poemen was a spiritual father, a counsellor of monks (Gould 1993, 26–30; Harmless 2004, 174–175).

The “word” asked for was not information. The desert father was not consulted as an expert who possessed a body of doctrine to be transmitted, but approached as a charismatic to whom God might give, in the moment, exactly the saying the questioner needed (Ward 1984, xviii–xxv; Burton-Christie 1993, 76–103). The classic account of the institution is given not under Poemen but in a saying that the whole tradition treats as programmatic: a brother comes, receives a word, and goes away to do it — the word is given to be enacted, not discussed (cf. Ward 1984, “Antony” 19; “Poemen” passim). To “keep the word” meant to live it; to ask for a fresh word before one had done the last was itself reproved (Burton-Christie 1993, 76–129). The desert “word,” in short, was performative and pastoral before it was theological.

The Character of the Desert “Word”

Several features of the rhēma as the Poemen dossier preserves it deserve to be named, because they distinguish the desert’s spiritual direction sharply from later systematic ascetical theology.

It is brief. The apophthegm is by definition a short saying — often a single sentence, rarely more than a short exchange. Poemen’s words are compressed to the point of opacity: “Vigilance, self-knowledge, and discernment; these are the guides of the soul” (cf. Ward 1984, “Poemen” 35); “Teach your mouth to say what is in your heart” (Ward 1984, “Poemen” 63). The brevity is not a literary accident of compilation but belongs to the genre’s purpose: a word short enough to be carried back to the cell and held in the memory and the heart (Burton-Christie 1993, 107–129; Rubenson 1995, 145–152).

It is occasional and particular. The word is given to this brother, on this occasion, for this need. The same elder could give apparently opposite counsel to two different visitors without contradiction, because each word was a medicine measured to a particular sickness (Gould 1993, 26–58; Regnault 1999, 115–124). This is why the Apophthegmata resist being read as a treatise: they are a casebook, not a system. Poemen himself is reported to have resisted generalization. He preferred to answer the question actually asked rather than to expound (Ward 1984, “Poemen” 8; Harmless 2004, 248–253).

It is addressed, not published. The word presupposes a relationship. It is spoken by an elder who knows — or is willing to come to know — the one who asks, and it is received within the obedience and trust of the disciple toward the father. Detached from that relationship, the saying loses its force; the desert was wary of monks who collected sayings without submitting to an elder (Gould 1993, 26–88; Ward 1984, xxii–xxv).

The Elder and the Disciple

Graham Gould’s study of the Apophthegmata as evidence for desert community life makes the relationship of elder and disciple the central institution of the literature, and Poemen its richest single witness (Gould 1993, esp. chs. 1–2). The bond was personal and voluntary: a younger monk attached himself to an elder, opened his thoughts (logismoi) to him, and lived in obedience to his word. The opening of the thoughts — the disclosure of every movement of the heart to the father — is the disciplinary heart of the relationship, and it is the seed of what would become the Orthodox practice of the manifestation of thoughts and, eventually, of confession to a spiritual father (Gould 1993, 26–58; Hausherr 1990, 1–18).

The Apophthegmata are insistent, however, that the elder’s authority is not power. Poemen is repeatedly shown refusing to give orders, declining to bind the conscience of the questioner, throwing the brother back on his own discernment and on God (Gould 1993, 39–58). When a brother asked how he should live, Poemen often answered with a counsel of self-knowledge and watchfulness rather than a command (Ward 1984, “Poemen” 27, 35, 67). The desert father’s word frees rather than enslaves; the relationship is therapeutic, not juridical (Hausherr 1990, 19–62; Harmless 2004, 174–179). This is why the tradition could call such a father a physician of souls.

That brothers came to Poemen in great numbers is the consistent picture of his dossier. Abba Anoub and Poemen are remembered as brothers who, with others, formed a community that moved together when the barbarian raids drove them from Scetis (Ward 1984, “Poemen” 1; Regnault 1999, 14–22) — and around Poemen a circle of younger monks gathered, so that the dossier preserves not only his sayings but the memory of his disciples preserving them (Gould 1993, 19–25; Harmless 2004, 245–253). The very existence of so large and coherent a Poemen corpus is evidence of a school of disciples around him — a point that becomes the source-critical crux of this collection (see The Poemen Collection Problem).

Abbas Come to Poemen

It is a striking feature of the dossier that the questioners are not only young or weak monks but, repeatedly, other abbas — established elders who themselves received disciples. The Apophthegmata show Abba Joseph, Abba Anoub, Abba Isaac, and others coming to Poemen with their questions (Ward 1984, “Poemen” passim; Gould 1993, 26–35). Abba Isaac in particular is remembered as a disciple and intimate of Poemen: several sayings open “Abba Isaac said: I was sitting with Abba Poemen,” or report Isaac asking him a question and treasuring the answer (cf. Ward 1984, “Isaac of the Cells”/“Poemen” cross-references; Regnault 1999, 115–124). That elders sought out Poemen marks him, within the literary world of the Sayings, as an elder’s elder — a father of fathers, a master of discernment whose judgment other masters trusted (Harmless 2004, 248–253).

The motif should be read with the source-critical caution this collection’s master README sets out: the convergence of so many famous names on Poemen is partly a literary phenomenon of the compilation, by which Poemen became a focal point around which sayings clustered (Guy 1962/1984; Harmless 2004, 250–253; see The Poemen Collection Problem). But the convergence is also itself the tradition’s verdict: the desert remembered Poemen as the one to whom even the great came for a word.

The Brother Who Could Not Stay in His Cell

Among the most humane of the Poemen sayings is the counsel given to a brother troubled by acedia — the listlessness that made the cell unbearable. The desert’s standing counsel was “sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything” (Ward 1984, “Moses” 6; cf. “Antony” 10), and Poemen stands within that tradition; but his way of applying it is gentle. To a brother whose thoughts so troubled him that he could not remain, Poemen does not thunder but counsels patience, the refusal of despair, and a return to the small, concrete labour of the present moment (cf. Ward 1984, “Poemen” 20, 28; Regnault 1999, 53–66). The pastoral instinct — to meet the discouraged brother with mercy rather than with a heavier yoke — is the same instinct that governs Poemen’s whole teaching on mercy and mourning (see Weeping and Self-Accusation). The precise wording and attribution of individual acedia sayings vary across the collections, and the systematic collection groups such counsel thematically rather than by author; [Disputed: several sayings on the troubled brother and the cell circulate under more than one name and are placed differently in the alphabetical (Ward 1984) and Greek systematic (Guy, SC 387/474/498) collections, so attribution of a specific wording to Poemen is not always secure].

“Do Not Give Your Heart to What Does Not Satisfy”

One saying expresses Poemen’s pastoral realism with unusual force. Asked, or counselling, about the restless pursuit of what cannot fill the soul, Poemen is remembered for the counsel rendered by Ward as the warning not to fix the heart upon what cannot finally satisfy it — the redirection of desire away from the passions and toward God (cf. Ward 1984, “Poemen” 8; Harmless 2004, 248–250). The exact phrasing differs among translations and the saying is grouped near Poemen’s refusal to discourse on lofty matters, which is why it is best cited by the cluster (Poemen 8 and its neighbours) rather than pressed for a single quotable line; [Disputed: the wording "do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart" is a paraphrase that gathers the sense of Poemen 8 and adjacent sayings as translated by Ward (1984); the Greek text and the systematic collection distribute the thought across more than one saying, so the single-sentence form should be treated as a faithful summary rather than a verbatim quotation].

“Of the Passions, Not of Heavenly Things”

The saying that most sharply defines Poemen as a spiritual director is his refusal to discourse on the sublime. The Apophthegmata report that when someone wished to draw him into talk of high theological or “heavenly” matters — the nature of God, the Godhead, lofty contemplation — Poemen fell silent; but when the conversation turned to the passions and the struggle of the soul, he spoke readily and at length. The point, as the tradition draws it, is that Poemen would speak about the soul and its warfare, not about the Godhead and the things above (cf. Ward 1984, “Poemen” 8; Harmless 2004, 248–253; Regnault 1999, 115–124).

This is not anti-intellectualism but a theology of order. The desert held that the knowledge of God is given to the purified, and that a monk still bound by the passions has no business speculating on heavenly things he is not yet able to bear or to live (Burton-Christie 1993, 134–149; Harmless 2004, 248–253). Poemen’s reticence is therefore a pastoral judgment about where the questioner actually is: the word a man needs is the word for his present condition, and for almost every monk that word concerns the passions, not the Trinity. The reticence is itself an act of discernment — and so it bridges directly to the second half of Poemen’s portrait as the master of diakrisis (see Discretion, the Queen of Virtues). As with the previous saying, the anecdote is preserved with some variation, and the contrast “passions / heavenly things” is the tradition’s compression of a cluster of sayings rather than a single fixed text (Harmless 2004, 248–253).

The “Word” and Orthodox Spiritual Direction

The institution embodied in the Poemen dossier did not stay in the desert. The opening of the thoughts to a trusted elder, the personal and non-juridical bond of father and disciple, the brief living “word” given for the present need — these became foundational structures of Orthodox spiritual life. Through John Cassian, who carried the desert teaching West, and through the Sinaite synthesis of John Climacus, who made obedience to a spiritual father and the disclosure of the thoughts central to the Ladder, the desert “word” became the trunk of the later tradition of the geron / starets (Hausherr 1990, 19–95; Ware 2000, 127–151; see St. John Cassian, St. John Climacus). The Orthodox practice of spiritual direction — the relationship to a pneumatikos pater, the manifestation of thoughts, the priority of the living word over the abstract rule — descends in a recognizable line from the cell of Poemen (see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction; on the desert as the source, Orthodoxy: Monasticism).

What the tradition took from Poemen, above all, was a style of fatherhood: merciful, concrete, reluctant to bind, attentive to the particular soul, distrustful of the abstract and the extreme. That style is the substance of his sanctity, and it is examined further as discernment in the companion file.

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The “Poemen” series, sayings cited by number; the “give me a word” form throughout; Poemen 8 on the passions and on what does not satisfy the heart; Poemen 35, 63, 67 on watchfulness and self-knowledge; the cross-references to Isaac, Joseph, and Anoub.)
Gould, Graham. The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (The elder-disciple relationship as the central institution of the Apophthegmata; the non-juridical character of the elder’s authority; Poemen’s circle of disciples, chs. 1–2.)
Burton-Christie, Douglas. The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (The desert “word” as performative and Scriptural; the practice of “keeping the word”; the brevity and particularity of the apophthegm.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The Poemen dossier as the largest in the alphabetical collection; Poemen’s preference for the passions over heavenly things; the literary convergence of names on Poemen, 245–253.)
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. (The brotherhood of Scetis and the flight from the raids; the texture of the elder-disciple life; Isaac and Poemen.)
Hausherr, Irénée. Spiritual Direction in the Early Christian East. Trans. Anthony P. Gythiel. Cistercian Studies 116. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1990. (The manifestation of thoughts and the genealogy of Orthodox spiritual direction from the desert.)
Rubenson, Samuel. The Letters of St. Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. (The transmission and oral character of the desert sayings.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Inner Kingdom (Collected Works, vol. 1). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The geron / starets and the continuity of spiritual fatherhood from the desert.)
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 of the Sayings and the thematic redistribution of sayings in the systematic collection.)