Covering the Brother’s Sin

The sayings for which Poemen is most loved are his sayings of mercy toward the fallen: “we have not come here to judge our brother”; the covering of a brother’s fault with one’s own cloak; and the refusal to condemn a sinner that runs through his whole dossier. This file sets out those sayings, the desert theology of mercy and non-judgment they teach — bearing the brother’s burden (Galatians 6:2), the command not to judge (Matthew 7:1–5) — and the genuine attribution-crux between Poemen and Moses the Black over the desert’s single most famous parable of mercy, the leaking vessel of sand carried to a council called to condemn a fallen brother.

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

“We Have Not Come Here to Judge”

The mercy of Poemen is not a soft spot in an otherwise severe asceticism; it is the centre and crown of his teaching, the outward face of the self-accusation and mourning treated in the companion file (see Weeping and Self-Accusation). The Apophthegmata Patrum return again and again to Poemen’s refusal to condemn, and they preserve the principle in a saying that has become one of the desert’s mottoes: when monks were inclined to judge a brother who had fallen, the old man’s answer was that “we have not come here to judge our brother” — judgment of persons is not the monk’s office (Ward 1984; Gould 1993; Harmless 2004). The desert held this with a seriousness that can surprise the modern reader, for whom “judging” is a small fault: for the fathers, to sit in judgment on another’s soul was to usurp the seat of God, and to forfeit one’s own claim on His mercy. “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1) was not a counsel of tolerance but a law of the spiritual life with teeth in it: the measure one gives is the measure one receives (Matthew 7:2).

Poemen’s whole bearing toward sinners is governed by this. The dossier shows him deflecting the impulse to condemn, declining to investigate a brother’s faults, and turning the questioner back upon himself. The point, in the desert as in the gospel, was never that sin does not matter — the fathers took sin with deadly seriousness, and Poemen above all — but that the judgment of persons belongs to God alone, while the monk’s business is his own repentance and his brother’s restoration. To refuse to judge was not to be indifferent to the brother’s sin; it was to care for the brother more than for the verdict (Gould 1993; Harmless 2004).

The Cloak: Covering the Brother’s Fault

The most concrete form Poemen’s mercy takes in the Apophthegmata is the covering of a brother’s fault. The image the desert reached for was the cloak: the elder who finds a brother in sin throws his own garment over him, hiding the fault from sight rather than exposing it. The gesture is enacted mercy — a refusal not only to judge inwardly but to publish the sin outwardly, to make the brother’s shame a spectacle. The Sayings attach this disposition firmly to Poemen, whose counsel was that the faults of a brother should be covered, borne, and not exposed (Ward 1984; Gould 1993). Graham Gould, in his study of the Apophthegmata as evidence for desert community life, shows that this forbearance toward the failings of others was not sentimentality but a structural principle of how the desert fathers held a community together: a brotherhood of sinners can survive only if its members cover and bear one another’s faults rather than prosecuting them, and the Sayings present this mutual forbearance as the very fabric of charity in the desert (Gould 1993).

The cloak that covers the brother is, at bottom, an image of love itself, which “covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8; cf. Proverbs 10:12). To cover a fault is not to deny it or to pretend it did not happen; it is to refuse to let it define the brother, to keep his sin between him and God rather than spreading it abroad, and so to give him room to repent without the added weight of public shame. The desert reckoned the exposure of a brother’s sin among the cruelties: the monk who broadcasts another’s fall, even truthfully, does the work of the accuser, while the monk who covers it does the work of God, who “does not desire the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn from his way and live” (cf. Ezekiel 33:11). Poemen’s cloak is the gospel’s mercy made visible (Gould 1993; Harmless 2004).

Bearing the Brother’s Burden

The theology beneath these sayings is the apostolic command, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). The desert read the brother’s sin as a burden to be carried — not a charge to be prosecuted, not a stain to be denounced, but a weight to be shouldered alongside him until he can stand. The whole logic of the cloak, of covering, and of “we have not come to judge” follows from this. The monk who has learned to accuse himself and to weep over his own sins knows the brother’s fall from the inside, as something he shares and not something he stands above; and the one who knows himself a fellow-sinner does not condemn but helps to bear (Gould 1993; Hausherr 1982).

This is why, in the desert, mercy and humility are inseparable. The refusal to judge is not a generous opinion the monk holds about his neighbour; it is the necessary consequence of a true opinion he holds about himself. Galatians 6 makes the connection explicit, for the same passage that commands the bearing of burdens warns: “if a man thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself” (Galatians 6:3). The desert fathers tied the two verses together: only the man who knows that he is “nothing” — that his own sins run out endlessly behind him — is fitted to bear his brother’s burden rather than to add to it (Gould 1993; Harmless 2004; see Weeping and Self-Accusation). The command not to judge (Matthew 7:1–5) is grounded in the same self-knowledge: the Lord does not forbid judging because faults do not matter, but because the man with the log in his own eye cannot see clearly to remove the speck from his brother’s (Matthew 7:3–5). First the log, then the speck — and the desert father, occupied his whole life with the log, never reaches the speck at all.

The Council and the Leaking Vessel of Sand

The desert’s single most famous enactment of this whole teaching is the episode of the council. A brother had committed a fault; a council of the fathers was convened to judge him; and the great elder, summoned to it, came carrying a leaking vessel — a basket or a jug — of sand (or water) on his back, the contents trailing out unseen behind him, and when asked the meaning answered: “My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.” Confronted with their own situation in the elder’s enacted parable, the council said no more, but forgave the brother (Ward 1984). It is the desert’s perfect image of mercy: the man who would not judge because his own sins, running out behind him where he cannot see them, disqualify him from turning to face his brother’s. The episode has long since broken out of the monastery and become one of Christianity’s permanent parables of non-judgment.

The episode bears directly on Poemen, whose whole teaching it crystallizes — and it raises a genuine question of attribution, which the honesty of this guide requires be stated plainly rather than smoothed over.

[Disputed: the council-and-leaking-vessel episode — the elder who carries a leaking basket or jug to a council called to judge a fallen brother and says "my sins run out behind me and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another" — is attached in the alphabetical collection of the *Apophthegmata Patrum* to **Abba Moses** (Moses 2 in Ward's alphabetical collection; trans. Ward 1984), where it is among the best-attested and most famous of all the desert sayings. It is also widely retold and, in some popular recensions, sermons, and translations, attributed to **Abba Poemen** or to other desert elders; the *Apophthegmata* are a fluid, multiply-recensed corpus in which a striking type-scene can migrate between fathers across the alphabetical, systematic, anonymous, and Latin (*Verba Seniorum*) collections. The firmest attestation places the council-episode with Moses 2; the attribution to Poemen, where it occurs, is a feature of the later and looser transmission rather than of the controlling alphabetical text. Additionally, the contents of the leaking vessel vary between the witnesses — water in Ward's alphabetical text, sand in many retellings — a separate variant within the same episode (cf. Ward 1984, Moses 2). The lesson, "my sins run out behind me and I do not see them," is constant across all the witnesses and across both names.]

What can be said with confidence is this. The council-episode, as a fixed text, belongs in the alphabetical collection to Moses the Black, whose past as the chief of brigands made him the desert’s supreme and most credible teacher of non-judgment — a man who could have no illusions about his own sinfulness, so that the leaking vessel was for him not a humble pose but an exact self-description (Ward 1984, Moses 2; and see St. Moses the Black, where the episode is treated in full). The theology of the episode, however — the refusal to judge, the self-accusation, the covering of the fallen brother, the conviction that one’s own sins disqualify one from condemning another’s — is precisely Poemen’s, stated by him in his own sayings of mercy and grounded in his teaching on weeping and self-accusation (see Weeping and Self-Accusation). The two figures are contemporaries of the same desert of Scetis, and the desert tradition remembered them together as its twin emblems of mercy; that the most famous parable of non-judgment should drift between their names in the later retellings is not a scandal but a sign of how completely the two shared one teaching. This guide assigns the episode to Moses, with whom the controlling text places it, and treats Poemen as the great voice of the same mercy in his own distinct sayings — the cloak, the covering, “we have not come to judge.”

Mercy as the Heart of the Desert

It would be a mistake to read these sayings as a relaxation of desert rigor — as if the fathers, having demanded everything of themselves in fasting and vigil, went soft on the sins of others out of mere fatigue. The opposite is the truth. Mercy toward the fallen was, for the desert, the fruit of the severest asceticism, not a holiday from it. Only the man who has fought his own passions to exhaustion knows how hard the fight is and how often it is lost; only the man who weeps over his own sins each day knows that he stands by mercy and not by merit; and such a man cannot condemn another without condemning himself. The desert’s mercy is the mercy of veterans of the same war, who do not despise the wounded because they have been wounded themselves (Gould 1993; Harmless 2004). This is why the desert ranked the refusal to judge among the highest of the virtues and the surest signs of spiritual maturity: it was the visible proof that a monk had truly come to know himself.

For Poemen specifically, mercy is the place where his three great themes converge — discernment, mourning, and humility (see Discretion, the Queen of Virtues; Humility and the Cell). His discernment taught him the measure of human weakness and the danger of rigorism; his mourning kept his eyes fixed on his own sins; his humility forbade him the seat of judgment. The result is a spiritual father of extraordinary gentleness toward the fallen — not because he thought sin small, but because he thought God’s mercy large and his own righteousness nothing. This is the Poemen whom Orthodox tradition has loved best: the teacher who covered the brother with his cloak, who would not come to judge, and who left the verdict to the only One who can pronounce it. In an age and a desert that could tempt even saints toward harshness, his voice is the gospel’s own — “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36).

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Abba Poemen series: the sayings on mercy, covering a brother’s fault, and “we have not come to judge”; Abba Moses 2: the council, the leaking vessel, “my sins run out behind me,” and the forgiving of the fallen brother.)
Gould, Graham. The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (Forbearance toward the faults of others as a structural principle of desert community; covering and bearing the brother’s fault; non-judgment in the Apophthegmata, with sustained attention to Poemen.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The theology of non-judgment in the Apophthegmata; the council-episode as a type-scene; the fluidity of attribution across the recensions.)
Hausherr, Irénée. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Trans. Anselm Hufstader. Cistercian Studies 53. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1982. (Self-accusation and the bond between compunction and mercy toward the neighbour.)
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. (Mercy, forbearance, and the handling of a brother’s fall in the daily life of the Egyptian monks.)