As we’ve seen, the Desert Fathers were mostly concerned with very practical matters. The Sayings recorded and passed on to posterity are not about doctrine — in fact, many of them would find themselves on opposite sides of the ancient schisms that divided the Eastern Churches, yet we see no indication of that from these texts — but about practical, day-to-day questions of how to live. While it might be surprising for us today, in the ancient world, what they were doing would have been considered philosophy. Again, for us that word conjures images of Plato or Aristotle in white robes talking under shady colonnades or nineteenth-century men looking down from their ivory towers, for the most part philosophy was a practical discipline in the ancient Mediterranean, focused on questions that would be very familiar to most of us today: what it means to live a good life and how to be happy.
These are the kinds of questions that come up in the Saying we’ll be be looking at today:
[Abbe Isidore] also said, ‘Badness takes men away from God and separates them from one another. So we must turn from it quickly and pursue virtue, which leads to God and unites us with one another. Now the definition of virtue and of philosophy is: simplicity with understanding.’ (Abba Isidore of Pelusia 4)
Men and women came to the Desert for many reasons; where some were on the run from the law, Abba Isidore was on the run from people who wanted him to be their bishop (which seems like a very wise decision on his part, if you ask me!). Because he had come from a well-educated background and leadership position, it’s no surprise he continued more than most of the Desert Fathers to think in terms of the kind of general philosophical advice one might hear in a public lecture or sermon than in the cells of the Desert. While only a handful of his sayings were included in the collection known as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, hundreds of his personal letters are also extant, including some urging the major players in what became the Nestorian controversy (and eventual schism) to cut out their speculative argumentation. In other words, he sounds like the kind of guy I’m interested in listening to!
When approaching any ancient discussion on virtue, including those in the New Testament, we need to take some care to define the terms used. The major contrast here, as usual, is between kakia, ‘badness, wickedness, ill-repute’ and arete, ‘excellence, virtue, goodness.’ While these words were commonly used throughout the history of Greek thought, what things were considered to be bad or good changed. It was really up to every philosopher to define them for himself. And this is what we have here — Abba Isidore’s definition of what it means to live a good or bad life.
Kakia, he says, separates us from God and each other. So he defines badness, what we might call ‘sin’, as that which divides us, breaks relationships, and isolates. Arete by contrast ‘leads us to God and unites us with one another’. So, it would seem Abba Isidore shares the understanding we’ve been working with here over the past few years of faith as showing up and living into our relationships with God and each other. (It’s always nice to see these things corroborated in ancient sources!) But he further hones this down by saying that the best way to achieve this is to lead a simple life (haplastos, ‘simple, undisguised, true, natural’) with understanding (synesis, ‘faculty of understanding, ‘ability to synthesize information’, ‘bringing together’). In other words, the good life for Abba Isidore, and the path to good relationships with God and others, is simply to be ourselves, without pretending to be anything else, while exercising good discernment about the world and a perspective that seeks to bring disparate things together rather than seeing things in isolation.
I think this is great and holy advice. But it’s also a life’s work. In a world where there is so much pressure to be other than who we are, it’s not easy to step into our genuine self; and in a world that does its best to divide and isolate, it takes a lot of wisdom to see things as a whole. But, I think it’s also worth it, and Abba Isidore would agree.
Matthew Root 