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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Ammonas of Egypt
died c. 396Patristic
Anthony's own disciple and successor at Pispir, who spent fourteen years in the desert praying night and day for one victory over himself.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The First Council of Nicaea — Vasily Surikov (1876), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 396.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
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).
What was happening while he lived7 moments · AD 313–600
- 325The Council of NicaeaAbout three hundred bishops met in a lakeside town in what is now Turkey to answer Arius, an Alexandrian pastor who taught that the Son was God's first and greatest creature, glorious, but made, so that "there was when He was not." The council answered with one word: the Son is *homoousios* with the Father, of the very same being, begotten, not made.
- 335Athanasius is exiled for the first timeThe bishop of Alexandria, who had been at Nicaea as a young deacon, was banished to Trier in Germany after a rigged synod. Four more exiles followed; he spent roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop away from his city.
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
- c. 397–400Augustine writes the *Confessions*He told his whole story, theft, ambition, a long affair, a slow surrender, as one long prayer addressed to God. Nothing quite like it had been written before, and it invented the spiritual autobiography.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Ammonas of Egypt at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Anthony's successor in the desert, who wrote letters about bearing patiently with other people's faults.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.