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Sayings of the Fathers (Systematic Collection, Latin)

tr. Chadwick, 1958; selections

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FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, AND probably from the late fourth century,¹ collections of sayings from the hermits of the Egyptian desert began to be circulated. Smaller collections were gradually assembled into larger, some of which were arranged in alphabetical order of the supposed speakers: other collections appeared where the sayings were arranged, more usefully and intelligently, according to the subject. The known collections have different sayings (apophthegmata) as well as a different arrangement, but often overlap, sometimes with an obvious literary connexion, sometimes dependent on two versions of an oral tradition. Sometimes a conscious extract, from a translation or précis of a written source, can be shown to have been inserted into the collection. Latin collections, for example, contain Latin translations of a Greek précis or translation of the known Latin text of Cassian.

The historical character and authenticity of the substance of these collections is undoubted. In so great and haphazard a collection, it was easy for a saying, originating no one knew where, to be put into the mouth of a famous speaker: it was easy for later material for sermons or conferences, which had grown a little out of the desire to edify, to be incorporated. But no one who knows the other sources for Egyptian monastic history can doubt that these sayings are in the main the authentic representatives of Egyptian monastic spirituality in the fourth and fifth centuries. This is the raw material of history: here we find ourselves close to the men who founded the monastic movement, for we are not seeing the desert through the spectacles of an individual (like Cassian or Jerome or Palladius or Sulpicius Severus) with a particular and unifying interest.

Within the collection of apophthegmata, different varieties of saying have been distinguished.²

The saying, in its “naked” form, is a delivery of the spirit-filled man, of the man endowed with particular gifts of wisdom and discernment from on high. The young man goes to the aged father and asks him, “Speak to me a word, that I may live.” The sentences are not only collections of moral and proverbial sayings, easy to memorize and therefore handed down as part of the lore of the desert tradition. There was believed to be a prophetic quality about what was being said, a quality dependent in part on moral experience and endeavour, but not to be gained by human enquiry or the wisdom of the world. It is the desert form of spiritual direction, the “tradition” of the fathers which Cassian was so anxious to set forth as the guide to the moral heights and the curb upon indiscretion, individualism and eccentricity. The hermit received his “saying”: he meditated upon it in his cell until he could put it into practice: he took it to church at the end of the week, exchanged such sayings with his brother hermits there—and so the wisdom was handed on, often taken out of its personal and particular context and transformed into a pronouncement of general truth and validity.

But other kinds of saying were interwoven with these moral pronouncements. There are mere requests for help in making a decision where to build, or how to spend a legacy: puzzles about the interpretation of different texts of Scripture, or how to understand a virtue or a vice. There are sayings which are not authentic mots of the desert, but simply quotations from an ascetic treatise, or extracts from a sermon, or summaries of edifying incidents in the life of a holy man, anecdotes of the miraculous or of supernatural apparitions.

… But it always possesses the purity of the best kind of simplicity, the clear vision of an unimpeded moral integrity, that earnest or smiling discernment which they cultivated as among the supreme virtues.

Soon translations into other languages were circulating, particularly into Syriac, Coptic and Latin. Our versions for these three collections date from an earlier period than any of the extant Greek collections. The most complete of these Latin collections is that of which a large part is here given in translation. This collection was translated, from a lost Greek source, as early as the middle of the sixth century, probably by two Roman clerics, the deacon Pelagius and the sub-deacon John, who may possibly (as “tradition” suggested) have been those who later became Popes Pelagius and John. This collection was known (almost certainly) to St Benedict when he wrote his Rule (for he appears to quote it), and was the most influential of all the collections upon the history of monasticism in the west. For western monasticism lost neither its memory of the origins of the newcomers in Egypt, nor its consciousness of the flowering of desert spirituality. Whether you read of Peter Damian and the Italian revival of the eleventh century, or of the origins of the great medieval orders like the Cistercians or the Carthusians, the memory of Egypt will be found to be among the sources of the ideas which were there proclaimed.

The standard and celebrated edition of this collection is that printed by the Jesuit Heribert Rosweyde at Antwerp in 1615 (and at Lyons in 1617; revised edition of 1628). Rosweyde, keeping to the pattern of early monastic collections which he had inherited from the later Middle Ages, printed the collection as Books V and VI of Vitae Patrum, and this was reprinted by Migne in Patrologia Latina, vol. 73, col. 855–1022. Though the work is thus divided into two books, according to the probable Latin translators, and although there are manuscripts of the twelfth century (Troyes 716: Bodleian Douce 351, etc.) already with this division, the collection is a single book, and the division is fortuitous.

I have therefore translated Parts I–XVII of Rosweyde’s edition of The Sayings of the Fathers (the proper title, found in most early manuscripts, is Adhortationes Patrum: but Verba Seniorum has become traditional and is appropriate). I have translated this version, partly because it seems to have been the earliest of the western collections: partly because it forms a coherent group, in the early history of western monasticism, with Cassian and Benedict, whose writings are also translated in this volume: and partly because it was probably the most influential of the collections in western monastic history.

The translation of The Sayings of the Fathers has this difficulty. Rosweyde appears to have known only two manuscripts of first-class importance, and he was very cautious in his use of them. I have therefore gone to the pre-Carolingian manuscripts to secure that the translation shall represent, so far as is possible in the present state of knowledge, the authentic text. I have not attempted to provide a full apparatus: but in the Appendix will be found sufficient readings to offer some justification for the many passages where the translation is found to diverge significantly from Rosweyde’s text.³ The appendix is intended for use with Rosweyde’s text.

Of translations, much parallel material from the Syriac was translated by E. A. Wallis Budge, The Paradise of the Fathers (1904), a version the text of which is not negligible for the text history of the Latin version. Charles Kingsley tried his romantic hand in The Hermits. In The Desert Fathers (1936) Miss Helen Waddell, one of the most remarkable translators of our time, gave an enchanting and incomparable English rendering of a select number of the sayings. There is also an English incunabulum which translated (from the French) many of these sayings—a fine 1495 edition attributed to “St Jerome,” translated by William Caxton, who finished the translation on the last day of his life, and printed at Westminster by Wynkyn de Worde with charming woodcuts.

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