04 — The Teacher of Mercy
The affective and pastoral heart of the Poemen dossier: the desert’s teaching that the monk’s first labour is to weep over his own sins, and its corollary, that he must therefore refuse to weigh the sins of his brother. This section treats penthos (the gift of mourning and compunction) and self-accusation on the one hand, and on the other the great sayings of mercy toward the fallen — “we have not come to judge,” the covering of a brother’s fault, and the council called to condemn a sinner — for which Poemen, with Moses the Black, is the desert’s enduring emblem.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; master of discernment)
If Section 02 shows Poemen as the counsellor of monks and Section 03 gathers the sayings themselves, this section isolates what is most distinctive — and most loved — in the whole Poemen corpus: a spirituality whose two poles are tears for oneself and mercy for one’s neighbour, held together as a single movement of the heart. The desert father weeps over his own sin until he has no eyes left to spy out his brother’s; the man who knows the weight of his own faults cannot pick up a stone. Poemen states both halves with a directness that has fixed them in the Christian memory. On the first: “Weeping is the way the Scriptures and our Fathers give us, when they say, ‘Weep!’ Truly, there is no other way than this” (Poemen 119; Ward 1984). On the second: “We have not come here to judge our brother” — and the saying that a man must “throw himself” before God and “accuse himself,” not his neighbour (Poemen; Ward 1984). The two files below take these in turn, and together they describe the teacher of mercy whom Orthodox tradition has read ever since as the desert’s gentlest and most exacting voice. The same teaching, in the same generation of Scetis, is attached most famously to Moses the Black, whose leaking vessel at the council is the desert’s single most quoted parable of non-judgment; the relation between the two figures, and the genuine attribution-crux it raises, is treated in the second file.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Weeping and Self-Accusation | Penthos, the gift of mourning: “we have need to weep”; “there is no other way than weeping” (Poemen 119); compunction, the gift of tears, and self-accusation — “a man should accuse himself” — over against judging the neighbour; “Do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart”; godly sorrow (2 Corinthians 7:10) distinguished from despair; the line from the desert to John Climacus, Ladder Step 7 (“On Mourning”), and the later Orthodox tradition of the gift of tears. |
| Covering the Brother’s Sin | The great sayings of mercy toward the fallen: “we have not come to judge”; the covering of a brother’s fault with one’s cloak; the council called to condemn a sinner and the elder who carried a leaking vessel of sand, saying “my sins run out behind me and I do not see them” — the genuine attribution-crux between Poemen and Moses the Black; the theology of bearing the brother’s burden (Galatians 6:2) and the refusal to judge (Matthew 7:1–5). |
See Also
- Discretion, the Queen of Virtues — the diakrisis of which mercy and the measured path are the practical fruit
- The Apophthegmata of Poemen — the dossier from which every saying in this section is drawn
- Humility and the Cell — the self-knowledge in which both mourning and non-judgment are grounded
- Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction — the elder-disciple relationship in which Poemen’s mercy was exercised
- St. Moses the Black — the converted brigand of Scetis whose leaking vessel at the council stands beside Poemen’s mercy
- St. John Climacus — who gathered the desert teaching on mourning into Ladder Step 7, “On Mourning”
References
- Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984.
- 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.
- 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.
- Hausherr, Irénée. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Trans. Anselm Hufstader. Cistercian Studies 53. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1982.
- John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibhéid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.