The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: An Honest Review of the Alphabetical Collection

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What This Book Is

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection is Benedicta Ward's translation, first published by Mowbray and Cistercian Publications in 1975 and revised in 1984, of the Greek alphabetical series of the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Fathers.

The collection contains around a thousand sayings and anecdotes attributed to some hundred and thirty named monks of the Egyptian desert, arranged alphabetically by the monk's name from Antony to Zeno, with a short foreword by Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh and Ward's own introduction, notes and glossary. It is around 270 pages.

The sayings were gathered from oral tradition in the late fourth and fifth centuries, written down in Greek from Coptic originals, and became one of the most copied books of the Christian Middle Ages in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and every other language of the churches.

The Desert and Who Went There

From the middle of the third century, and in numbers from the early fourth, Christians began leaving the towns and villages of Egypt for the desert: for Nitria, a day's walk from Alexandria; for Kellia, the Cells, further in; and for Scetis, deep in the Wadi Natrun, where the hardest of them settled. Some lived alone; most lived in loose colonies of scattered cells around a church and an elder, coming together only for the weekly liturgy.

They were not, mostly, learned men. Many were Coptic peasants who could not read Greek. What they had was a decision to leave everything, and a practice: prayer, psalmody, fasting, weaving baskets or ropes to sell for bread, and the guarding of the heart against the thoughts that arose in solitude.

Visitors came, from Alexandria, from Palestine, from Rome, to see them and to ask for a word. The sayings are what the visitors and the disciples brought back.

Antony

The first name in the collection and the founder of the tradition.

Antony was born around 251 to Coptic Christian farmers, heard the Gospel passage on selling all one has read in church at about twenty, did so, and went into the desert, first on the edge of his village, then in a tomb, then in an abandoned fort, then to an inner mountain by the Red Sea, where he lived until his death at around a hundred and five in 356. Athanasius wrote his life within a year, and the book made him the model of the monk across the Christian world.

His thirty-eight sayings open the collection, and they set its tone: on the necessity of expecting temptation until the last breath, on the danger of judging, on the fool who thinks the whole world mad, and the saying that the tradition took as its charter: whoever sits in solitude and is quiet has escaped from three wars, hearing, speaking and seeing, and has only one to fight, the war of the heart.

How the Sayings Were Collected

The sayings were spoken in Coptic, remembered, repeated among the disciples, and written down in Greek by monks who had left Egypt for Palestine after the devastation of Scetis by raiders in 407 and 434. They were sorted, first by speaker and then by subject, and the two arrangements circulated together.

The process means that the sayings are not verbatim and that a few are attributed to more than one father or to none. It also means they were selected by people who used them: what survived is what disciples found worth remembering, which is a different principle of selection from any editor's, and part of why the collection has the shape it has.

Give Me a Word

The form, and the practice it records.

A brother comes to an old man and says: Abba, give me a word. The old man answers. The answer is short, specific to the questioner, and meant to be practised. It is not a teaching in the sense of an explanation; it is a prescription, and the disciple's part is to go away and do it.

Sometimes the old man refuses, or says nothing, or does something instead: Abba Moses, asked to judge a brother, walks to the meeting with a leaking basket of sand on his back and says his sins run out behind him and he has come to judge another. Sometimes the disciple asks the same question for years and gets the same answer. The form is a whole pedagogy: one person, one instruction, no discussion, and the truth of the word tested in the living of it.

The Cell

The place, and the saying that defines the book.

A brother came to Scetis to see Abba Moses and asked him for a word. The old man said: Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.

The cell is a mud-brick hut or a cave. In it the monk prays, works, eats, sleeps and confronts himself, and the desert's insistence is that he stay there. The sayings return to it constantly: the monk who leaves his cell is like a fish out of water; the cell is the furnace of Babylon in which the three children found God; a monk should sit in his cell as a hen sits on her eggs. What the cell teaches is what the monk is, without the cover that company and movement provide, and the tradition held that nothing could be learned until that had been faced.

Silence

The practice the old men prized above all others, and spoke about sparingly.

Abba Arsenius, a Roman courtier who had tutored the emperor's sons before fleeing to Scetis, prayed for guidance and heard: Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always. He is recorded as saying that he had often repented of speaking and never of keeping silent. Abba Poemen said that a man may seem silent and yet his heart condemns others, and that another may talk from morning to night and keep silence, because he says nothing that is not useful.

The silence of the desert is not the absence of sound. It is the refusal to let the tongue run ahead of the heart, and the sayings distinguish carefully between the silence that hides pride and the silence that guards attention.

The Struggle with Thoughts

The desert's psychology, which is its most original contribution.

The monks discovered that solitude does not bring peace but the opposite: that in the cell, the mind fills with thoughts, logismoi, of food, of sex, of the past, of leaving, of one's own holiness, and that the real work of the desert is the work with these. They catalogued them, Evagrius later reduced them to eight, and they developed a practice: to watch the thought arise, to refuse it entry, to reveal it to an elder, and to answer it with a word of scripture.

The sayings on thoughts are the earliest systematic observation of the mind in the Christian tradition, and readers from other traditions of meditation recognise them at once. The old men knew that the thought is not the sin, that suppression fails, and that exposure to another person breaks the thought's hold. That knowledge was learned in the cell and passed on in a sentence at a time.

Do Not Judge

The theme that recurs more than any other, and the collection's moral centre.

A brother sinned, and the priest ordered him out of the church. Abba Bessarion got up and went out with him, saying: I too am a sinner. Abba Moses, when a council was called to judge a brother, refused to come, and when made to, brought the leaking basket. A brother asked Abba Poemen what to do about a brother who was sinning and was told: whenever we cover our brother's fault, God covers ours; whenever we expose it, God exposes ours.

The severity the monks turned on themselves they refused to turn on anyone else, and the sayings are full of old men who would not condemn, who took the blame for others' faults, who received thieves and prostitutes with the same courtesy as bishops. The refusal to judge is presented not as tolerance but as the only sane response to knowing one's own heart, and it is the desert's most consistent teaching.

Humility

The virtue the sayings place above all others, including prayer.

Abba Antony saw all the snares of the enemy spread out over the earth, and asked what could get through them, and heard: humility. Abba John the Dwarf said that humility and the fear of God are above all virtues. The sayings describe it in acts rather than definitions: the old man who took the blame for a theft he did not commit; the one who, praised, said that if he were what people said he would not be sitting there; the one who was asked how he had reached peace and said that he had never in his life gone to sleep with a grievance against anyone.

The desert's humility is not self-abasement. It is the accurate assessment of oneself as a person capable of every sin one sees in others, and the sayings treat it as the ground on which everything else can stand.

Work and the Body

The practical life, which the sayings treat as inseparable from the spiritual one.

The monks worked: plaiting rope and weaving baskets from palm leaves, which they sold for bread and gave the surplus to the poor. The sayings insist on it. A brother who wanted to pray without working was reminded that the angels do not eat. Antony, troubled by thoughts, saw an angel alternately plaiting rope and standing to pray, and heard: do this and you will be saved.

The body is treated with a severity that modern readers find difficult, in the fasting, the vigils, the reduction of sleep and food to the minimum. It is also treated with a realism that surprises: old men who fed their visitors when they themselves were fasting, who broke a fast rather than shame a guest, and who warned the young against destroying the body that had to carry the practice.

Discernment and Moderation

The counterweight to the severity, and the desert's most mature teaching.

Abba Antony was asked which virtue was greatest and said discernment, since without it every other virtue can be ruined by excess. The sayings tell of monks who fasted themselves into madness, who prayed themselves into pride, who took on disciplines beyond their strength and fell, and of old men who told them to eat, sleep and go easy. A hunter saw Antony relaxing with the brothers and was scandalised, and Antony told him to bend his bow, and again, and again, until the hunter said it would break, and Antony said: so it is with the work of God.

The teaching on discernment is why the desert tradition survived its own extremes. The wisest of the old men were the ones who knew when to stop.

The Mothers

Three women are named in the collection: Theodora, Sarah and Syncletica, the desert mothers, and their sayings are among the sharpest.

Amma Sarah is recorded as saying to monks who came to test her: it is I who am a man, and you who are women, and that she had prayed for thirteen years against the demon of fornication and never asked for the battle to stop, only for strength. Amma Syncletica compared the beginning of the spiritual life to lighting a fire, all smoke and tears, until the flame catches, and warned that a monk who is praised should think of the judgment. Amma Theodora spoke on the passions and on teaching.

The women were fewer in the record and not, the sayings suggest, in the desert, and Ward's introduction is careful to note what was lost.

The Humour of the Desert

A quality readers do not expect and find on every page.

The old men were funny, in a dry and deflating way. Abba Macarius, meeting the devil carrying flasks of temptation to the brothers, asked how business was and was told that only one brother remained loyal to him, and went to find that brother. Abba Moses, praised for his gentleness, arranged for his disciples to insult him and then thanked them. A brother asked an old man whether he should tell his sins to someone, and was told: yes, to someone who can bear them. The humour is never at the expense of others and often at the expense of the speaker, and it is one of the things that make the collection readable where more solemn spiritual books are not.

Ward's Translation

Benedicta Ward, born 1933, was a member of the Sisters of the Love of God, an Anglican contemplative community in Oxford, and taught church history at the university for decades. She translated the alphabetical collection, the systematic collection, the Lives of the Desert Fathers, the Sayings of the later Latin tradition, and wrote extensively on the desert and on medieval spirituality. She died in 2022.

Her English is plain, exact and unadorned, which is the right register for material of this kind, and she resisted every temptation to make the sayings more elegant or more explained than they are. The notes identify persons and places and the glossary covers the technical terms. Her introduction, with Metropolitan Anthony's foreword, is a short and complete account of who the fathers were and how to read them. There is no better English edition.

What Grew from It

The collection's influence, which is the influence of monasticism itself.

Evagrius of Pontus, who lived in Kellia in the 380s, systematised the desert's psychology into the eight thoughts and the stages of prayer. John Cassian carried the teaching to Gaul, where it shaped Benedict's Rule and so the whole of Western monasticism. The Greek tradition carried it through the Ladder of John Climacus into the hesychast practice of Athos and the Philokalia. Every contemplative order in Christianity, every monastery, every tradition of spiritual direction, descends from the men in this book.

In the twentieth century Thomas Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert, a short selection, took the sayings to readers outside the churches, and Ward's translations made the full collection available. The desert is now read by Buddhists, by secular contemplatives, and by anyone interested in what silence does.

How to Read It

Not straight through. The collection is a thousand short entries in alphabetical order, and read continuously it blurs. The tradition read it as it read scripture, a little at a time, and returned to the same sayings for years.

Begin with Antony, Arsenius, Moses, Poemen and Macarius, who have the most sayings and the most range. Read the anonymous sayings, gathered at the end, for the tradition's collective voice. Keep the book somewhere it can be opened at random. A saying that means nothing today may be the word needed next year, and the desert's own teaching is that the word arrives when the disciple is ready and not before.

The Difficulties

Three.

The asceticism. The fasting, the vigils and the contempt for the body are extreme by any standard, and a reader must decide how much of the practice to take with the wisdom.

The form. A thousand disconnected entries with no argument and no development. The collection assumes a reader who will do the connecting.

The world it left. The desert was a flight from society, and the sayings have almost nothing to say about how to live among people who have not fled. Later traditions supplied that; this book does not.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you want the root of Christian contemplative practice, before it was systematised, in the words of the people who invented it.

Read it if you practise any form of silence or meditation and want to see what the earliest Christian practitioners discovered in it, which is most of what everyone since has discovered.

Read it if you are tired of spiritual books that explain. This one does not, and the not-explaining is the method.

Read it slowly, and keep it.

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