06 — The Spiritual Teaching
The systematic gathering of what the Apophthegmata preserve as St. Poemen the Great’s spiritual teaching: nepsis (watchfulness, sobriety) and the warfare of the thoughts; the priority of the active life (praktikē) over speculation and “heavenly things”; humility as the foundation of the whole edifice of the virtues; and the desert doctrine of “the cell,” stability, and self-knowledge. Where Section 03 sets out Poemen’s sayings on the logismoi as sayings, this section reads them as a coherent ascetic teaching and locates it in the broader desert nepsis tradition that runs forward to the hesychasts and the Philokalia.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; master of discernment)
Poemen wrote nothing and built no system; what the desert remembered as his teaching survives only as occasional sayings, addressed to particular monks in particular need (see The Apophthegmata of Poemen). Yet read together those sayings have a recognizable shape — a spirituality of watchful, humble, practical labor over the heart, suspicious of lofty talk and of all measuring of oneself against others. This section draws that shape out under two heads. The first file treats nepsis, the thoughts, and the relation of the active to the contemplative life: Poemen’s insistence that the monk attend to the passions and the practical struggle rather than to “heavenly things,” and how this plain desert discipline of watchfulness stands at the head of the long tradition that issues in the Jesus Prayer and the Philokalia. The second treats humility and “the cell”: the desert maxim of stability (“stay in your cell and it will teach you everything”), self-accusation and self-knowledge, the refusal to compare one’s progress with another’s, and humility as the air the soul must breathe — the foundation on which, in Poemen’s teaching, every other virtue stands or falls.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Thoughts and Watchfulness | Nepsis (watchfulness/sobriety) and the warfare of the logismoi; the active life (praktikē) and contemplation (theōria) in Poemen’s teaching; his priority of the “doing” over speculation and his refusal to speak of “heavenly things”; continuous watchfulness over the heart, its relation to unceasing prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and the forward link to the hesychast and Philokalic nepsis of the Jesus Prayer (which Poemen predates as a formula). |
| Humility and the Cell | The desert maxim of the cell and of stability (“stay in your cell and it will teach you everything,” attributed across the fathers, most famously to Abba Moses); self-knowledge and self-accusation; the refusal to measure oneself against others; humility “as the breath of the nostrils” (Poemen 49) as the foundation of the whole edifice of the virtues; the desert teaching against wandering. |
See Also
- The Teaching on the Thoughts — the sayings on the logismoi themselves, of which this section is the systematic reading
- Discretion, the Queen of Virtues — diakrisis, the faculty that measures the watchful struggle treated here
- The Enduring Influence — Poemen’s place in the Philokalic inheritance to which this teaching leads
- The Jesus Prayer — the prayer of the heart and watchfulness that the desert nepsis tradition anticipates
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 on watchfulness, the thoughts, humility, and the cell; Poemen 49 on humility “as the breath of the nostrils.”)
- Harmless, William, S.J. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The desert psychology of the thoughts; praktikē and theōria; the Poemen dossier.)
- 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. (The texture of cell-life, stability, and the practical asceticism of the Poemen material.)
- Gould, Graham. The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (Self-knowledge, the cell, and the refusal to judge others in the Apophthegmata.)
- Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995. (Watchfulness, the prayer of the heart, and the Philokalic inheritance of the desert.)