The Apophthegmata of Poemen

Abba Poemen is the most heavily attested of all the desert fathers: his name heads by far the largest single block of sayings in the alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum, on the order of 180-odd numbered apophthegms — more than for Antony, Macarius, or Arsenius, and so large that the Poemen series functions as a kind of backbone of the whole alphabetical collection. This file describes the literary genre of the apophthegm — the desert chreia, the “give me a word” exchange, the laconic “an old man said” — surveys the size and shape of the Poemen dossier, gives a few of its most famous sayings with careful citation, and explains why the sheer quantity of material under one name is itself the central scholarly question, treated in full in Section 05.

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

A Father Made of Sayings

Poemen left no writing of his own, and no contemporary Life was composed for him as one was for Antony or Pachomius. He survives entirely as speech — as the Apophthegmata Patrum, the “sayings of the fathers,” remembered him (Harmless 2004, 167–273; Ward 1984, introduction). This is not a gap to be apologized for but the very nature of the evidence: the desert tradition preserved its elders not in biography but in the compact memorable word, and Poemen is the supreme case of a father who is known only in that form. Everything that can responsibly be said of him must be drawn from the sayings, and the sayings are a compilation, not a memoir — a point the present guide treats as a topic rather than an embarrassment, in keeping with the repository methodology on compiled and oral tradition (METHODOLOGY §2.4).

What makes Poemen exceptional within this body of material is its quantity. In Benedicta Ward’s standard English translation of the Greek alphabetical collection, the Poemen series runs to roughly 187 numbered sayings — by a wide margin the largest dossier attached to any single father, far exceeding the series for Antony (38), Macarius the Egyptian (41), or Arsenius (44) (Ward 1984; the counts are Ward’s numbering of the alphabetical series). The exact figure should be given with care: saying-counts vary slightly by recension and edition, because the Greek alphabetical-anonymous collection survives in more than one form and editors divide and number the apophthegms differently, so “about 180” or “some 185–190” is the honest range, and “~187” reflects Ward’s translation of the standard Greek alphabetical text (Ward 1984; Guy 1962, on the recensions). What is not in dispute is the relative weight: no other name in the collection carries anything approaching this volume of material.

The Genre of the Apophthegm

An apophthegm (Greek apophthegma, a “pointed saying”; plural apophthegmata) is a short, self-contained unit of remembered speech or action. The form belongs to a wider ancient genre, the chreia — the brief anecdote attaching a memorable pronouncement to a named figure, used in the Greco-Roman schools and adapted by the desert to its own ends (Harmless 2004, 244–248). A desert apophthegm is typically one of a few recurring shapes. Most common is the “give me a word” exchange: a younger monk comes to an elder and says, “Abba, give me a word,” or asks a specific question, and the old man answers in a sentence or two (Ward 1984, introduction; Gould 1993, 26–33). A second shape is the bare report — “An old man said …” or “Abba Poemen said” — a saying preserved without narrative setting. A third is the brief scene, an action remembered for the word it crystallizes.

Three features define the genre and govern how it must be read. First, brevity: the apophthegm resists elaboration; its force is in its compression, and to expand it into a treatise is to lose it. Second, the question-and-answer structure of much of the material, which preserves not abstract doctrine but a word given to a particular person in a particular need — desert teaching is occasional and personal before it is systematic (Gould 1993, 26–33). Third, orality and accretion: the sayings were transmitted by memory and repetition before they were written and collected, probably from the later fourth century through the fifth and into the sixth, and the same saying can appear under different names, in different forms, in different collections (Guy 1962; Harmless 2004, 167–180). The apophthegm is therefore a reliable witness to a kind of teaching and to the spiritual culture of Scetis far more securely than it is a transcript of any one elder’s exact words on a datable day.

The Shape of the Poemen Series

The Poemen dossier is not random. Read as a whole it has discernible centers of gravity: discernment (diakrisis) and the measured path; mercy toward the fallen and the refusal to judge; mourning and self-accusation; humility, the cell, and not measuring oneself against others; and, very prominently, the thoughts (logismoi) and the guarding of the heart (Ward 1984; Regnault 1999, on the Poemen material; Gould 1993). These themes recur with such consistency that the series reads less like the scattered remarks of one man and more like the curriculum of a school — which is precisely what raises the source-critical question pursued in Section 05 (see The Poemen Collection Problem).

A number of the sayings are framed as exchanges with other named fathers — Anoub, Paesius, Joseph, Isaac, Sisoes, and others appear in the Poemen series — and several have Poemen quoting or commenting on the words of still earlier elders, so that his dossier also functions as a repository of the tradition he received (Ward 1984; Gould 1993, 28–32). This embeddedness is part of what makes the corpus so large: Poemen is remembered not only for his own words but as a relay and interpreter of the desert’s accumulated wisdom.

Representative Sayings

A handful of the most famous apophthegms shows the texture of the dossier.

The first saying of the series is also one of the few with biographical content. It tells how the mother of Poemen and his brothers came to see them and they would not receive her, and how, on another occasion, a magistrate (archon) had detained the son of Poemen’s sister and the mother begged Poemen to go and secure the boy’s release. Poemen sent word to the official that if his nephew was guilty he should suffer the penalty of justice, but if not, the official should act as he saw fit — declining to use influence to subvert judgment; the magistrate, struck by the answer, released the young man (Poemen 1; trans. Ward 1984). The episode is told as the sayings tell it; it is reported here as the apophthegm’s own testimony and is not certified as datable biography (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Its placement at the head of the series is itself revealing: the collection opens not with a teaching on prayer but with a scene of diakrisis and restraint.

The second saying sets the keynote of Poemen’s reputation as the teacher of mourning. Asked what a man should do about the failings of others, or in another telling about his own thoughts, Poemen answers in the spirit of penthos — the gift of tears — that runs through his whole dossier (Poemen 2; trans. Ward 1984). The famous word that a monk ought “to weep” and that “there is no other way” than this stands at the center of the Poemen material and is treated in its own place (see Section 04; on the theme of mourning, Regnault 1999; Ward 1984).

Among the most quoted of all is the saying that “a man who teaches without doing what he teaches is like a spring which gives drink and refreshes everyone and is not able to purify itself” (Poemen 25; trans. Ward 1984) — a word on the gap between speech and life that the desert returns to repeatedly. Equally famous is Poemen’s counsel on the thoughts, including the saying that one must deal with the logismoi as with a snake or scorpion shut in a jar, and that humility is needed “as the breath which comes out of his nostrils” — sayings examined in detail in the companion file (see The Teaching on the Thoughts; Poemen 21 and related; Ward 1984). Other well-known apophthegms include his word that “vigilance, self-knowledge and discernment are the guides of the soul” (Poemen 35; Ward 1984), and the repeated insistence that a monk should not give his heart to “what does not satisfy the heart” but should guard it (Ward 1984; Gould 1993).

A further well-known apophthegm shows the gentleness for which Poemen is loved. When a brother asked him what to do because he fell often into sin, the old man told him to come back; the brother, ashamed, asked how long he might keep returning, and Poemen answered that a man should rise as often as he falls, “until that in which he is overtaken finds him in the way of good,” — a word against despair that runs through the whole dossier and anticipates his teaching of mercy (Ward 1984; on this theme, Regnault 1999). The same register appears in the saying that one ought to keep “death daily before one’s eyes” yet without crushing the soul — discernment, not severity, is Poemen’s measure (Ward 1984; Gould 1993). The series is thus not only large but tonally consistent: severe with self, merciful with others, suspicious of extremes, and everywhere governed by diakrisis.

These are a small sample. The point of citing them is not completeness but calibration: the reader should see that the Poemen series is dense, practical, occasional, and remarkably consistent in its concerns — and should weigh that consistency when coming to the question of the dossier’s formation. That consistency cuts two ways in the scholarship. To Regnault it is the natural signature of a single great teacher and his disciples; to Guy it is precisely what one would expect if a body of like-minded material had been gathered and organized under one revered name. The same datum — the coherence of the dossier — serves both arguments, which is why the question cannot be settled from the sayings alone and must be argued on the ground of the manuscript tradition and the history of the collections (Guy 1962; Regnault 1999; Harmless 2004).

Why So Much Under One Name

The size of the Poemen dossier is the single most striking fact about it, and it is also the chief scholarly problem. Why should one elder of Scetis carry four or five times the material of Antony, the father of monasticism himself?

Several explanations have been offered, and they are not mutually exclusive. One is simply that Poemen and his circle were close to the milieu in which the Apophthegmata were first gathered: if the collection took shape among monks who had fled Scetis after the barbarian raids of the early fifth century and settled in lower Egypt and Palestine, and if Poemen’s brotherhood was central to that displaced community, then his sayings and those of his associates would naturally predominate in the resulting compilation (Guy 1962; Regnault 1999; Harmless 2004, 173–180). On this reading the Poemen series is large because his circle did the remembering.

A second, more radical explanation treats “Abba Poemen” in part as a literary focus — a name to which anonymous, composite, or floating ascetic material accreted in the editing of the Sayings, so that the dossier represents less one man’s teaching than the deposit of a whole school crystallized around his memory (Guy 1962; discussed in Harmless 2004). Against this, others (with Lucien Regnault) defend a substantial historical core and argue that the coherence of the dossier is evidence of a real teacher rather than of redactional accretion (Regnault 1999; Gould 1993). The repository does not resolve this here. The dispute, with its named positions, is the centerpiece of Section 05:

[Disputed: the size and coherence of the Poemen dossier — Guy (*Recherches*, 1962) treats "Poemen" in part as a redactional focus around which much desert material gathered; Regnault (1999) and Gould (1993) defend a substantial historical core and read the coherence as the mark of a real teacher and his circle] (see The Poemen Collection Problem).

What can be said without controversy is that, whatever its precise relation to a single historical man, the Poemen series is the densest and most central deposit of desert teaching in the alphabetical collection, and that to read it is to read the spiritual core of the Apophthegmata Patrum themselves.

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Poemen series, ~187 numbered sayings; Poemen 1, the mother and the magistrate; Poemen 2, on mourning; Poemen 25, the spring that cannot purify itself; Poemen 35, on vigilance, self-knowledge, and discernment; the series-counts for Antony, Macarius, and Arsenius.)
Guy, Jean-Claude, S.J. Recherches sur la tradition grecque des Apophthegmata Patrum. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1962; 2nd ed. 1984. (The manuscript tradition and recensions; the variation of saying-counts; the redactional question of the Poemen focus.)
Harmless, William, S.J. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The genre of the apophthegm and the chreia, pp. 244–248; the formation of the collections, pp. 167–180; the Poemen material.)
Regnault, Lucien, O.S.B. The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers in Fourth-Century Egypt. Trans. Étienne Poirier, Jr. Petersham: St. Bede’s Publications, 1999. (Synthesis of the Poemen and apophthegmatic material; the displaced Scetis community.)
Gould, Graham. The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (The “give me a word” relationship and the apophthegm as evidence, pp. 26–33; Poemen in his circle.)