Description
The Vitae Patrum (literally Lives of the Fathers, also called Lives of the Desert Fathers) is an encyclopedia of hagiographical writings on the Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers of early Christianity. The bulk of the original texts date from the third and fourth centuries. The Lives that were originally written in Greek were translated into Latin between the fourth and the seventh century. An Italian vernacular translation was made by Dominican friar Domenico Cavalca from Pisa at the beginning of the fourteenth century.
A printed edition, edited by the Jesuit Heribert Rosweyde, was printed by Balthazar Moret in 1615. The book is a significant part of the much broader work, Acta Sanctorum.
The Vitae Patrum is based on extensive research by Rosweyde into all the available literature he could find on the early desert monastics. Hippolyte Delehaye described the work as “the epic of the origins of monasticism in Egypt and Syria, an epic unsurpassed in interest and grandeur.” In the thirteenth century, a version of Vitae Patrum had been translated into Latin. It was such a popular book that numerous versions and editions were published, with extensive changes and variations in the stories. Rosweyde based his book on twenty-three different versions of those earlier books, studying, dating, and classifying all the different versions and changes.
Rosweyde’s Vitae Patrum consists of ten books. Book I has the lives of sixteen saints under the title Vitae virorum and eleven saints under the title Vitae mulierum, beginning with St. Paul the Hermit and St. Anthony of the Desert, and including women saints such as Saint Mary the Harlot. Books II, Historia monachorum, and III, Verba seniorum (Sayings of the Elders), are attributed to Rufinus, who was later found to be only their translator. Book IV is a compilation of writings by Sulpicius Severus and John Cassian. Book V is another collection of Verba seniorum from Latin and Greek by Pelagius.
Book VI and Book VII are further collections of Verba seniorum (Sayings of the Elders) by unknown Greek authors translated by John the subdeacon, possibly Pope John III, and by Paschasius. Book VIII is a text that was previously known as The Paradise of Heraclides, but which Rosweyde attributed to its real author, Palladius, and titled the Lausiac History. Book IX is De Vitis Patrum by Theodoret. Book X is The Spiritual Meadow of Moschus. Rosweyde wrote an introduction to each book.
Relevant quotes
Introduction
Pag. 7
1 – The present booklet contains the words of those monks who, in the vast hermitic movement that began in the fourth century A.D. and flourished throughout the following century, had, by virtue of attained spiritual enlightenment, fundamental importance. Before briefly touching on the historical-philological news directly concerning the collection of words, allowing some historical-interpretive hints on monasticism which is the precious pearl of the Western and Eastern Church.
2 – The Christian vocation has presented itself to human consciousness as the imposition of an unrevocable choice between the world and the spirit. “No one succeeds in serving two masters together; either he will hate the one by loving the other, or he will love the first by hating the second. You cannot serve GOD and Mammon” (Mt. 6:24).
And the Evangelist St. John reports these words of the Lord Jesus in the Upper Room: “It is for them that I pray to You, not for the world…I entrusted Your Word to them, and the world has taken them in hatred because they do not belong to the world (they are like me) : I too am not of the world. I do not ask You to get out of the way of the world, but to defend them from evil” (Jn. 17, passim). No other word more than this from the New Testament indicates, with greater brevity and clarity, the Christian walk in history.
Pg. 7
Christians are not distinguished from other men either by the territory they inhabit, or by the language they speak, or by the customs they follow. They have no cities as their own, they do not use a particular language, they do not lead a kind of life that distinguishes them from others…. Disseminated through Hellenic and barbaric cities, according as each is touched by lot, and conforming without difficulty to the environmental customs in dress, in food, in all the outward expressions of existence, they therefore reveal, to the confession of all, the marvelous and paradoxical fashion from their associated life. They dwell, it is true, in their respective nations, but they are there solely as pilgrims. They participate in the duties and burdens of all; but all regard and suffer as foreigners. Any foreign land is a homeland to them; any homeland is a foreign land. They go to weddings like everyone else and beget children, but do not expose them as soon as they are born; they share the table but not the thalamus; they proceed in the flesh, but do not live according to its instincts; they seem to idugize on Earth, but in reality they are citizens of Heaven; they conform to the constituted laws, but by their way of life they transcend the laws. They bring love to all and by all they are persecuted, disowned and mistreated; they are condemned to death and in this condemnation they find nourishment of life. They are poor and spread riches over many; of everything they seem to have scarcity and of everything instead they overflow. Struck down, they rejoice as if filled with life; those who hate them would hardly find justification for their hostility and resentment. Christians pass wayfarers among perishing realities, stretching toward the incorruptibility of heaven. Mortified in food and drink, the soul uninterruptedly refines itself. Every day persecuted, Christians multiply: it is GOD who has called them and destined them to such arduous delivery, and they are no longer permitted to hesitate and shirk the Divine call.
(Letter to Diognetus, 5-6)
Pag. 9
The hermit’s flight knew no compromise: he abandoned cities for solitude, cultural digressions for fixity in contemplative silence, the vain pursuits of the human mind on what is pertinent to the world of the spirit for the conquest of uninterrupted prayer, the easy existence of Christendom for the most complete stripping away. His flight, considered on the plane of verticality, is ascent, a step forward in the story of man’s deepening of Christian values, an essentially positive flight which, when it was accomplished, poured forth as unfailing nourishment for all Christian generations. For in the inaccessible solitudes inhabited by these athletes of the spirit, a fact of extreme importance for the Church of all times was accomplished in the fourth century; these men, continuing the episode of the temptation of Christ defeated Satan in the desert, and pointed out to their contemporary Christians and to the Christians of every generation that the follower of the Gospel is called to wage an unrelenting struggle against all manifestations of evil. And in the wilderness those temptations to which most Christians of that period succumbed were overcome: the love of riches, the enchantment of senzi, the thirst for earthly power, the attachment to pure earthly values…
Pg. 10
The life of the solitary, of the monk, is neither clamorous nor tempting nor easy, but it is the only one that allows the reality of redemption to be translated into a concrete fact in man’s spirit. Not that the terms of asceticism, contemplation, silence, separation of worldly values, are identifiable with those of a redeemed man and redemption; but through the passage of renunciation, solitude, non-possession, silence, etc., the man achieves purification. Man achieves purification, the stature of the new man, and with the eye of one born of the other, with a pure and participating heart he returns to life as a host of peace. St. Anthony Abbot, after years of maceration in prayer and full solitude, of hard strivings, becomes “the childless Father of an innumerable generation” (K.Hase), and when, purified, he breaks the cloister to meet men again, they find in him “the merciful physician” (Vita Antonii, 13, 25).
St. Benedict from the silence of a harsh and diuturnal solitude, becomes a guide toward peace to countless numbers of men. Even the gaudy and overwhelming call of pious respect for the mystery enclosed in every creature, by the Poverello, matured in love to Our Lady Poverty and silent contemplation…
Pg. 11
The sensual will find in the senses the limit to his love, the violent in his eagerness to overpower, the miser in the goods to which he remains bound, the ambitious in the desires of the first places… Love is synonymous with liberation; liberation with pacification of one’s being; pacification, with redemption in the blood of Christ; redemption, with enlightenment: “He is the light that enlightens every man who comes to the World.”
Page 12
5 (a) – The collection of the Words of the Fathers is the core of the whole tradition concerning the desert hermits; it is drawn on by writers who, like Jerome, Ruffinus, Palladius, Cassian, wrote about the Desert Fathers.
It seems that the hermitic center where the words of the Fathers were collected and fixed first orally then in writing, is Scete, one of the most celebrated localities of Christian monasticism, in lower Egypt there first settled St. Macarius the Egyptian in the first half of the fourth century, who chose this place for its rugged solitude (cf. Ch. 20, no. 15 ) perhaps the gradual fixation of the oral tradition into the written one is recalled in the word of the ancient friar reported in Ch. 10, n.114: “the Prophets wrote books, the Fathers … accomplished many things by drawing inspiration from them, their successors learned them by heart, our generation has recopied them on papyri and parchment and idled them on the shelves.”
Pg. 13
5 (b) – In the desert the solitaries found the ideal conditions for implementing the effective and total detachment from the heaviness of earthly realities, which is the indispensable condition of Christian liberation. The desert, in addition to guarding their isolation from the noise of contemporary culture, allowed for an essential kind of life in which only the indispensable was allowed.
The dwelling: a natural cave, a burial ground, or a hut of stones covered with straw provided by the vegetation of the swamps, the entrance was preotect by a door at which the visitor knocked. The interior of the cell: a reed mat for bedding, a goatskin for a blanket, a stool, lamp, a few vessels for water, oil, food, a basin for steeping the palm leaves with which they wove sporte.
In the desert the solitaries sought through isolation silence, deprivation of all comfort, peace, purification, redemption from evil; the fruits of which are the perfect harmony of all components, physical and spiritual, of man and boundless love for every creature. Their familiarity with beasts the inability to pronounce condemnation on anyone, the serene countenance with which they welcome the guest, the benevolence toward all, are the signs of the reconciliation between heaven and earth accomplished in these great spirits.
Pg. 14
And perseverance in fasting and kindness of mind will lead the loner to invulnerability (1, 3); the dominion of the decomposed maybes that are in the human individual is guiding him to rest in ultimate unity (11, 1); solitude makes him fruitful as ripe grapes (2, 10); and it will grant him perfect control over his thoughts (7, 27); it will free him from all fear by giving him the ability to love: “Anthony Abbot said, ‘Now I no longer time GOD, I love'” (17:1). “A friar asked an elder this question: ‘There are two friars; one of them sits in his cell, prolonging his fast up to six days…. The other, on the other hand, lends his work to the sick. Which work is more pleasing to GOD.” And the elder: “If that fasting friar … hung by his nostrils from the ceiling of his cell, he would not equal the work of the other who serves the sick'” (17, 18). But the love that is expressed in the service of the sick must be the fruit of an inner appeasement, otherwise this service is disturbing and dissipating:
A fellow reported this story: there were three fervent men who loved one another and became monks. And one, wanting to fulfill the beatitude “blessed are those who bring peace,” chose the mission of working to restore concord among those who were in dispute. The second, on the other hand, devoted himself to caring for the sick; the third, finally, secluded himself in a hermitage to become a quiet and receptive mirror to the pacifying Divine Light. The first labored to recompose quarrelsome hearts in peace, but his workfrequently failed; invaded by sadness he went to the one who devoted himself to the sick and found him afflicted and discouraged at having failed to fulfill his purpose. In agreement they decided to go to the other one who had chosen solitude, and they reported to him their tribulations. And they begged him that he would tell them all the path he had taken to perfection. And he kept silent for a long space of time, then he put his hand in a basin full of water and shook it, saying, “See what happens.” And they saw the water moving. Stopping his hand again he said. “See instead now how still the water is.” The two bowed their heads to the rim of the basin, and saw their faces reflected in the still mirror of the water. And then he uttered these words, “Similarly it happens to those who dwell in the din of human agitation, because of restlessness they do not have the opportunity to see their sins; if, on the other hand, they manage to settle down in silence, or better yet to retire to the hermitage, they attain the gift of considering their sins.”
“Work first and then speak.”
Other 10 relevant quotes:
- “Do not let the sun go down on your anger, but rather make peace with your brother.” – St. Anthony the Great
- “A man may seem to be silent, but if his heart is condemning others, he is babbling ceaselessly. But there may be another who talks from morning till night and yet he is truly silent, that is, he says nothing that is not profitable.” – Abba Poemen
- “Go, and have pity on all, for through pity, one finds freedom of speech before God.” – Abba Pambo
- “The cell of a monk is the furnace of Babylon, where the three young men found the Son of God, and it is the pillar of cloud out of which God spoke to Moses.” – Abba John the Dwarf
- “Be like a king in your heart, seated high in humility, and commanding laughter: Go, and it goes; and sweet weeping: Come, and it comes.” – St. John Climacus
- “A monk’s clothing and his humility should be of the same quality.” – Abba Bessarion
- “The nearer a man approaches to God, the greater he appears to himself to be a sinner.” – Abba Sisoes
- “The measure of a man’s true progress is the love of God which he has in his heart.” – St. Isaac the Syrian
- “It is better to eat meat and drink wine and not to eat the flesh of one’s brethren through slander.” – St. John Cassian
- “He who wishes to see the living God face to face should not seek him in the empty firmament of his mind, but in human love.” – St. Silouan the Athonite
