Reading the Sayings

How an apophthegm actually works, and how it was meant to be used. This file treats the characteristic desert transaction — the disciple’s request “Abba, give me a word” and the elder’s answer — and the several genres the Apophthegmata contains: the terse saying, the illustrative story, the question-and-answer. The Sayings are a practical literature, made to be carried away and lived, not merely read.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Egyptian desert monasticism)

“Give Me a Word, Father”

The central act of desert pedagogy, and the setting that generated most of the Apophthegmata, is a simple one: a younger monk walks to the cell of an old man and says, “Abba, give me a word” (Greek eipe moi rhēma, or “speak to me a word”) — or, more fully, “Speak a word to me, how I may be saved.” The elder replies, often in a single sentence; the disciple takes the “word” (logos or rhēma) away to his own cell to ponder, to “keep,” and to put into practice (Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, Oxford, 1993, ch. 3, “A Word for This Generation,” the classic study of the request and the “word”; Ward, introduction to The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, Cistercian, 1984).

The “word” is not information and not, in the first place, doctrine. It is a saving utterance addressed to this disciple in his condition — a diagnosis and a prescription at once — and it carries authority because it comes from a father who has himself lived what he says. “The old men used to say” is the recurring formula; and the disciple’s task is not to debate the word but to receive it, guard it, and do it (Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 1993, ch. 3–4, on obedience to the “word” and the reticence of the elders to speak without being asked). Hence the desert’s insistence that a word be sought, not volunteered: the elders are wary of teaching the unready or the unwilling, and some, like Agathon or Pambo, are remembered for their long silences before they would answer (e.g., Pambo 2, in the Alphabetical Collection, trans. Ward, 1984, where Pambo takes months to answer a single verse of a psalm).

This setting explains the shape of the literature. The sayings are terse because they were meant to be memorable and portable — carried in the mind across the sand from the elder’s cell to one’s own. They are concrete because they answer real cases, not abstract questions. And they are addressed to persons, so that the “same” question receives different answers from different fathers, or from the same father to different brothers, according to what each needs (Ward, introduction, 1984, on the personal and situational character of the sayings).

The Genres of the Sayings

Within this common setting the Apophthegmata contains several distinguishable kinds of unit (Harmless, Desert Christians, Oxford, 2004, ch. 6, on the forms of the apophthegm; Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 1993, ch. 3):

The saying proper. A pointed maxim, sometimes proverbial in form, standing on its own: “Abba Poemen said, ‘Do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart’” (cf. Poemen sayings, Alphabetical Collection, trans. Ward, 1984); or Antony’s “The time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us’” (Antony 25, trans. Ward, 1984). These are the sayings most easily excerpted and most often quoted — and, precisely because they detach so easily, the ones whose attribution is least secure (see The Sayings and Their Collections).

The narrative or story (diēgēsis). A brief account of something an abba did, which teaches by example rather than maxim. The most famous is the story of the brother who had sinned at Scetis: the elders assembled to judge him and sent for Abba Moses, who came carrying a leaking basket of sand on his back; asked what it meant, he said, “My sins run out behind me and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another” — and the assembly forgave the brother (Moses 2, Alphabetical Collection, trans. Ward, 1984). The story-form carries the desert’s teaching on not-judging more powerfully than any maxim could.

The question-and-answer (erōtapokrisis). The explicit dialogue form: “A brother questioned Abba Poemen, saying, ‘…’; the old man said to him, ‘…’.” Much of the Poemen material is of this kind, and it shades into the developed spiritual correspondence of later masters such as Barsanuphius and John of Gaza (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 6 and 12). The question-form preserves the situation as well as the answer, and so tells us most about the actual practice of spiritual direction in the desert (see Penthos, Discernment, and Humility).

To these may be added the small number of longer edifying tales and visions that the collections carry — stories of angels, of the death of an old man, of a monk shown the state of a soul — which stand closer to hagiography than to the terse “word” and which the reader weighs accordingly.

How the Sayings Ask to Be Read

The Apophthegmata is a practical literature, and it resists two opposite misreadings. It is not a systematic theology to be mined for propositions — its wisdom is occasional, personal, and sometimes deliberately paradoxical, and to extract a doctrine from a single saying is to mistake its genre. But neither is it a mere anthology of pious anecdotes: it embodies a coherent and demanding spiritual teaching — on stillness, compunction, humility, discernment, and unceasing prayer — which emerges only from the whole and from long acquaintance (Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 1993, on the Apophthegmata as a scriptural and formative literature; Ward, introduction, 1984).

Above all, the desert understood its own sayings as words to be done. The recurring test of a monk is not whether he can explain a word but whether he keeps it: “A brother asked an old man, ‘Why is it that when I hear a word, I am not moved to compunction?’ The old man said, ‘Because you do not do the word’” (a common motif of the collections; cf. the anonymous series, trans. Ward, The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, SLG Press, 1975). Scripture itself is read this way in the desert — as a word to be enacted, not analyzed — and the Apophthegmata is in large part a record of the desert’s practical exegesis, its living-out of the Gospel in the details of the cell (Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 1993, the central thesis of the book: that the desert’s spirituality is fundamentally a hearing and doing of Scripture).

This is why the tradition warns against reading the Sayings for curiosity or for judgment. The right disposition is the disciple’s: to read as one who asks “give me a word,” expecting to be addressed and changed, and to receive even a hard saying — on silence, on weeping, on refusing to judge a brother — as a prescription for one’s own healing rather than a standard by which to measure others. Read so, the Apophthegmata is less a book about the desert fathers than a means by which they still give a word to whoever asks (Ward, introduction, 1984; see The Desert in the Modern World).

See Also

References

  • The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo / London: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Antony 25; Moses 2, the leaking basket; Pambo 2; the Poemen material; introduction on how the sayings work.)
  • The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers: The Apophthegmata Patrum, the Anonymous Series. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Oxford: SLG Press, 1975. (“Because you do not do the word.”)
  • 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 request “give me a word”; the “word” as saving utterance; the desert’s practical exegesis of Scripture.)
  • Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The genres of the apophthegm; the question-and-answer form and its afterlife.)