On 28 August, the Greek Orthodox Church commemorates one of the most striking figures of the early Christian desert: a former robber whose life became a story of radical repentance, humility and transformation.
Saint Moses the Ethiopian, also known as Moses the Black of Scete, lived in Egypt in the fourth century and became one of the celebrated Desert Fathers, the ascetics whose lives and teachings helped shape early Christian monasticism. His feast falls today, on the 13th Friday after Pentecost in the Greek Orthodox calendar.
The surviving accounts of Moses belong largely to the hagiographical and monastic tradition rather than biography in the modern sense, and some details vary between sources. Yet the broad outline is remarkably consistent. He began life far removed from the image of a saint.
Orthodox accounts describe Moses as an Ethiopian who had been enslaved and later expelled by his master. He turned to robbery and became the leader of a band of brigands, acquiring a reputation for violence and physical strength. The Orthodox Church in America records that his crimes included robbery and murder. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese similarly describes him as having become a “ruthless thief” before his eventual conversion.
What prompted that conversion is less certain. Later tradition places him among the monks of the Egyptian desert, where the life that followed bore almost no resemblance to the one he had left behind.
Moses entered the monastic world of Scetis, an important centre of early Egyptian monasticism in what is now Wadi El Natrun. He came under the guidance of Abba Isidore and devoted himself to prayer, fasting and the difficult work of reshaping habits formed during his former life. He was eventually ordained a priest and became respected as a spiritual father in his own right.
The significance of Moses in Orthodox tradition, however, lies less in the drama of a criminal becoming a monk than in what happened afterwards.
His past did not disappear. In the stories preserved about him, it appears to have become the source of an unusually severe understanding of his own shortcomings, and an equally unusual reluctance to condemn the shortcomings of others.
One of the best-known episodes concerns a monk who had committed a fault. The fathers of the community assembled to judge the matter and summoned Moses. He initially refused to attend. When they insisted, he arrived carrying a damaged basket filled with sand, which fell from it as he walked.
Asked what he was doing, Moses replied:
“My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them.”
Yet, he continued, he had come to judge the faults of another man. According to the account preserved by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, the monks understood his point and did not condemn the brother.
It is a remarkably economical image. A man with a past that could hardly be romanticised refuses to use his own transformation as grounds for moral superiority. The farther he moves from the person he once was, the less interested he appears to become in judging anyone else.
That quality is central to the portrait of Moses preserved in the Apophthegmata Patrum, or Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The collection, one of the important bodies of early Christian monastic literature, includes sayings and anecdotes associated with Moses alongside figures such as Macarius the Egyptian and Poemen.
His is not, in other words, a story in which conversion simply divides a life neatly into a bad beginning and a virtuous ending. Orthodox accounts describe years of struggle after Moses entered the desert. The violent man had to learn gentleness. The man accustomed to acting on desire had to acquire restraint. The process was neither immediate nor presented as effortless.
That makes his commemoration particularly interesting today.
The Gospel appointed by the Greek Orthodox Church for Friday, 28 August is Mark 4:1-9, Christ’s Parable of the Sower. A sower scatters seed. Some falls on a path, some on rocky ground and some among thorns. Other seed finds good soil, where it grows and produces an abundant harvest.
In Orthodox interpretation, the seed is the word of God and the soil is the human heart. The distinction is not between people permanently designated as good or bad, but between different conditions in which that word is received. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese describes spiritual growth as requiring choice, commitment and action, with even unreceptive soil capable of becoming fertile.
Read alongside the life of Moses, the image acquires particular force.
Few beginnings could appear less promising. The tradition remembers a man formed by violence, feared by others and apparently headed towards a very different end. Yet Orthodoxy remembers him not primarily for what he had been, but for what he became.
Even his death is told through the prism of that transformation. Orthodox tradition holds that when raiders approached Scetis late in his life, Moses refused to flee. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese records that he remained with six other monks and was killed, bringing the life of a man once responsible for violence to an end without returning violence for violence.
There is a temptation in modern retellings of saints’ lives to make them reassuring. Moses is more demanding than that.
His story does not suggest that the past is irrelevant, nor that change is a matter of deciding one morning to become a better person. His past remains present throughout the tradition surrounding him. What changes is his relationship to it. The man who once inspired fear eventually becomes remembered for humility. The man who judged life through force becomes the monk who will not judge another man’s sin.
For Orthodox Christians marking his feast on 28 August, that may be the enduring point.
The life of Saint Moses is not compelling because he began as a saint. It is compelling precisely because he did not. In a religious tradition founded on repentance, his story leaves remarkably little room for the idea that a person must forever remain the worst thing he or she has been.
The soil, after all, is not necessarily fixed.
Read also The Day the Mona Lisa Disappeared
