Arkiv, Høytlesning
Desert Fathers 16
Below is the text of the sixteenth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
The blessed Athanasius entreated Abba Pambo to come down from the desert to Alexandria. Coming down, he saw an actress there, and began to weep. When those who were with him asked why he was weeping, he said: ‘Two things moved me. First, the loss of this woman. Secondly, the fact that I do not have such zeal to please God as she has to please shameless men’.
We have noted that compunction has a corporate aspect. The true Christian, putting on the mind of Christ, will adopt as his or her own the firm intention of God, ‘who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’. To see a human being turn away from grace, or opt for untruth, will be for them a personal cause for grief. Think of St Paul’s words: ‘If one member [of the Church, Christ’s mystical Body] suffers, ’all suffer together’. The suffering set to result from saying No to God may not be felt straight away by the rebellious subject, caught up in passionate distraction; all the keener will the Church’s pain be, and her prayer. The Desert Fathers show us what such existential intercession looks like.
There are several things to note about this vignette from the life of Pambo. The first is his relationship with Athanasius, the patriarch of Alexandria. Pambo was a disciple of Antony, whom Athanasius revered. Antony on his part bequeathed to Athanasius his cloak, one of his rare possessions, rather the way Elijah, on departing this world in a chariot of fire, left Elisha his mantle, designating him as successor in prophecy. Athanasius is known to have called on Pambo to witness on his behalf in the courts, caught up as he was in endless trouble both with civil authorities and heretical sects. We are reminded of the close bond that existed between the Church’s hierarchical establishment and her charismatic wild cards in the wilderness, a useful fact to recall, given how easily people assume that charismatic and institutional authorities are bound to be in conflict. The Fathers, though committed to solitude, did not refuse to emerge from it now and again when the Church had need of them.
Actresses in Antiquity were regarded as women of easy virtue, or even none at all. Described to us here is the encounter in a town square of a monk and a prostitute, opposite human types in a series of intersecting spectrums. One might expect the austere ascetic to spit at a public sinner, or at any rate to turn away his gaze in disgust. Pambo does neither. Instead he begins to cry, his heart of hearts pierced.
Pambo sees in the woman tragic loss. His response is that of the shepherd faced with the waywardness of the hundredth sheep, of Christ seeing Zacchaeus in a sycamore tree. Even as the Son of Man came ‘to seek and to save the lost’, Pambo cannot bear to see a woman made for communion with God reduced, and reducing herself, to an object of lust. He yearns for her finding, her redeeming. Thereby he presents a pastoral criterion. It is easy enough for Christians to spout moral principles and to utter sanctions against deviant behaviour. In the loud defence of the moral high ground lurks, though, the seductive temptation of vainglory. The Fathers were on the look-out for it as for a venomous snake. For if I set out to correct, or worse, to condemn, another on the basis of bitterness, anger, or revulsion, my words, however tinged with glacial piety, will bring no blessing; no, they are likely to do harm, perhaps even to induce despair, causing little ones to sin while readying my own stiff neck, the support of my conceited head, for the millstone. Only when sorely pricked by the thought of others going to their loss will I be able to recall them to the true path with Christlike authority. Only truth spoken in love has power to awaken another’s conscience. Pambo’s tears are for us a model and a test.
His next remark shows that his heart was not only compassionate. It was also pure. In this woman dressed up in fineries he saw not merely flaunted attraction but a corrective to his lukewarmness in spiritual pursuit. ‘Ah!’, he cried, ‘if only I had such zeal to please God as she has to please shameless men!’
To look at a person who embodies the diametric opposite to all one’s convictions and yet to hear a call to conversion: this is a mark of maturity that shows what fruit compunction can bear. Relieved of self-righteousness, Pambo looks on the world convinced that everyone has something to teach him. It is natural for him to take the last place. From that position he exudes that sweet ‘aroma of Christ’ which purifies and renews the atmosphere.
We glimpse in this scene, too, another mysterious aspect of Desert literature: a kind of complicity uniting great saints to great sinners. Speaking of complicity, I do not mean that the Fathers countenanced sin. They loathed it. But their wise hearts knew that sometimes women and men bent on schemes of apparent self-destruction are driven by a longing, disastrously gone off course, for the absolute; and that what matters is not to put the longing to death, but to re-orient it towards a worthy, beatific goal. Some fathers and mothers of the desert had known such reorientation personally. Therefore they could bear witness to it with authority.
Crozier from the abbey of Clervaux. The image of the pelican shows that the sole foundation of effective pastoral ministry is self-outpouring in love.