Sacred Energy

A brother asked an old man how to be saved; the old man said, be silent and do not compare yourself to others

Abba Moses, a former bandit leader whose own past made him famously reluctant to judge others, is remembered for teaching that self-comparison, not solitude or fasting, is the deeper obstacle to a monk's peace.

Abba Moses the Black was, according to the desert tradition, a former robber and gang leader in Egypt before his conversion and entry into monastic life at Scetis in the fourth century — a biography that gives particular weight to his recorded counsel against judging others. Among the sayings attributed to him, a brother's question about how to be saved receives an answer stripped of any technique: sit in silence, and stop measuring yourself against your neighbor. This reflects a broader pattern in the Apophthegmata where the elders redirect questions about ascetic achievement toward interior humility instead, treating comparison as more corrosive to a monk's stability than any single lapse. For a tradition this preoccupied with sexual continence specifically, it is notable that some of its most quoted advice concerns an entirely different discipline: silence about, and indifference to, how one's own struggle measures against everyone else's.

Apophthegmata Patrum

Written about in

• What the celibate traditions say about envy and comparison

  The advice is striking for what it omits. A tradition this preoccupied with sexual continence answers a question about salvation with an entirely different discipline — treating comparison as more corrosive to a monk's stability than any single lapse.