Ammonas of Egypt

Ammonas was a disciple of Anthony the Great and, after Anthony withdrew to the Inner Mountain by the Red Sea, his successor at Pispir on the Nile. He had already spent fourteen years in the desert of Scetis before that. Athanasius, on Anthony's own recommendation, later ordained him bishop, and he served in the region of Oxyrhynchus. He is thought to have died near the end of the fourth century. The sayings preserved under his name are unusually raw. He said of himself: "I have spent fourteen years in Scetis asking God night and day to grant me victory over anger." That is a man reporting his own progress honestly, and it is why later monks trusted him. The most repeated story about him is a small one. A woman had been hidden by a monk, and the brothers came to search his cell. Ammonas got there first, saw the situation, and sat down on the large barrel she was hiding in. When the brothers arrived he told them to search. They found nothing, and he sent them away with a rebuke for suspecting a brother. Then he took the monk's hand and said only, "Brother, be careful of yourself" — and left. Fourteen letters survive under his name, in Greek, Syriac, Georgian and Armenian. They are addressed to monks and they circle back again and again to the same themes: keep silence; do not judge; bear patiently with other people's faults; do not leave your cell looking for a better place, because you will bring yourself with you. He writes about the long stretch of dryness that comes after a beginner's first fervor burns off, and he insists that the Spirit is given to those who wait through it rather than to those who force it. He also warns bluntly against premature teaching — against the monk who has tasted a little of God and immediately wants to instruct others. Power, in his letters, is a danger to the one who holds it. His writings were read across the Eastern monastic tradition and fed into the later hesychast literature. Alongside Anthony's own scattered sayings, they are the closest thing we have to the teaching of the very first generation of the Egyptian desert. Sources: The Letters of Ammonas, translated by Derwas J. Chitty; The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum); Palladius, Lausiac History; Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City (1966).