An Introduction to the Desert Fathers. Jason Byassee

Robert C. Gregg, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 1980).

2. As Harmless points out in great detail in his Desert Christians: A particular “word of salvation’ was not meant, in the first instance, for everyone. It was a ‘word’ for this monk on this occasion, a key specially fitted to unlock a particular heart” (172).

3. Sarah Coakley comments on our culture’s extraordinary irreligious asceticism: “In the late twentieth-century affluent West, the ‘body,’ to be sure, is sexually affirmed, but also puritanically punished in matters of diet or exercise; continuously stuffed with consumerist goods, but guiltily denied particular foods in aid of the ‘salvation’ of a longer life; taught that there is nothing but it (the ‘body’), and yet asked to discipline it with an ‘I’ that still refuses complete materialistic reduction” (62). Coakley’s complete article is titled “The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation, and God,” Modern Theology 16 (2000) 61–73.

4. See Williams’s extraordinary treatment of the desert fathers in Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another (Boston: New Seeds, 2005).

      5. For a scholarly account of the shifts of meaning for the word religion in modernity, see Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Or attend to this vignette that Stanley Hauerwas likes to tell about what a Jewish colleague from his days at Notre Dame used to say: any religion that doesn’t tell you what to do with your pots and pans and genitals simply cannot be interesting!

6. The Desert Fathers, 3–4. We shall use parenthetical citations from here on.

7. Williams, Where God Happens, 24, describes the goal of desert asceticism this way: “Insofar as you open such doors for another, you gain God, in the sense that you become a place where God happens for somebody else.”

      II. Quiet

      o It is hard to find quiet in our world. Cell phones ring and people talk loudly in places they never used to. We fret if we haven’t received an e-mail in the last few minutes, as though worried we shall cease to exist. Blackberry, appropriately nicknamed “crackberry,” keeps us linked to the Internet like sick people to an IV. David Brooks describes the moment when the airline asks passengers to turn off their cell phones as no more welcome than a request to rip out their tracheas would be.1

      Even when we try for quiet, when we act on our vague sense that it would be a good thing, we are not innately good at it. In my time at the monastery, I find I enjoy the startling quiet for a few minutes, and quickly become antsy and bored. Or else I fall asleep (having been up since 3 a.m. for morning vigils, after all)! So I venture off in pursuit of some task: something to read from the monastic library, a monk to talk to, studying that I have brought with me. This initial objection to quiet must be overcome and the quiet restored. That process of resistance and overcoming must be repeated until the quiet is, once again, “natural.” Only then can we begin to listen for God.

      Or so spiritual writers from the Christian tradition throughout time have held. This section contains sayings that show us why. Although we have more material here to which to object—such as disparagement of women at II.7 and II.13—we also have lovely, if puzzling, appeals to the importance of quiet for the spiritual life. Antony2, the patron saint of the desert, insists that as “Fish die if they stay on dry land,” so the monk cannot survive outside his cell (II.1). Abba Moses says, in his typically cryptic and wise way, “Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything” (II.9). Clearly the goal is not to pay attention to the inside of the cell, as we often do when bored—counting ceiling tiles or attending to the rustic surroundings. Abba Arsenius criticizes brothers who tell him that the rustling noise is the shaking of the reeds. For “If a man sits in silence and hears the voice of a bird, he does not have quiet in his heart; how much more difficult is it for you, who hear the sound of these reeds?” (II.5). In contemporary spirituality, we are often encouraged to notice the handiwork of God in creation; here, precisely the opposite advice is given. A lovely sound is a distraction that the good monk will not even notice.

      Stories with archbishops in the Sayings normally turn out in similar ways to the two here: with the monk in question fleeing, and the archbishop rejected. This is more startling in an ancient context, in which the bishop must be treated with the same respect due to Christ himself. (In our day, disrespecting an ecclesial figure is more to be expected than not!) The wariness about ecclesial dignitaries suggests the monks’ discomfort with the ruling version of Christianity in their day, with its penchant for gaudy displays of wealth and quick obedience to imperial power. Nevertheless, even an archbishop in Alexandria—one of the five holiest sees in ancient Christianity since legend held the apostle Mark had evangelized the place personally—is interested in the monks and eager for their support. This is partly for political reasons. Monks in ancient Christianity occasionally acted rather more like mafia figures than the monks at Mepkin Abbey—beating up opponents, breaking up rival meetings, furthering or hindering the political agendas of the bishops they supported or opposed. The memory of Sts. Athanasius and Cyril, both of Alexandria, is somewhat tainted by the enlisting of such monastic muscle.

      Yet in the Sayings the monks see bishops as threats for a different reason and are eager to distance themselves from them and all they represent. Here Abba Arsenius cleverly elicits a promise from the archbishop to do whatever he, the wise guide, asks. In appropriate fashion for a spiritual seeker or novice, the archbishop agrees. “Wherever you hear Arsenius is, do not go there,” he insists (II.4). Later, in the same saying, we get an explanation: “If I have opened the door to you, I must open it to all, and then I shall no longer be able to live here.” Later, a wealthy woman from Rome is sent by Archbishop Theophilus to Arsenius. He rejects her, rather harshly. He fears that her gossip about him upon her return from her pious tour will “turn the sea into a highway with women coming to see me.” This is worrisome not only for its destruction of his quiet, but because “the enemy uses women to attack holy men,” as Theophilus explains to a distraught and stricken pilgrim (II.7). This description betrays the ancient prejudice, contrary to our own, that women were somehow innately more sexually inclined than men, and so impossible to resist if inclined to make sexual advance, which they undoubtedly would. It also suggests that monks wanted to be left in peace, to have no visitors at all, especially not bishops or women. Why?

      We see a hint in the final saying in this section: “There were three friends, serious men, who became monks.” Two do praiseworthy things commended by Christ himself in Scripture: one becomes a peacemaker, another a visitor of the sick. The third chooses the quiet of solitude. When they meet to consider their lives, the first two are weary and troubled. The third has a parable. He pours water, which only after a moment is still, allowing them to see their faces in its surface. “So it is with anyone who lives in a crowd; because of the turbulence, he does not see his sins: but when he has been quiet, above all in solitude, then he recognizes his own faults.” Quiet is a kind of laboratory of the spirit, in which all other variables have to be controlled—friendship, visits by strangers, even the hint of sexual attraction, desire for fame, sheer busyness. Only when the painstaking work of achieving quiet is accomplished—once the surface of our spirit is calm—can we begin to see our sins, root them from our spirits, and leave space for holiness to bloom.

      Questions

      I. Have you ever sought, or perhaps even achieved, the sort of quiet about which the Sayings speak here?

      2. Does the misogyny of these texts make them totally unreadable, or can we filter that out and still profit from reading?

      3. How do you “talk” about quiet? How does the portrait of Arsenius and others shunning fame square with the writing and widespread distribution of stories such as these?