The Life
Poemen was born in Egypt around 340 to a pious Christian family. As a boy he visited the great desert fathers and gathered their wisdom. The elder Paisios said of him: “This child will save many.” He became a monk at Skete with several of his brothers under their eldest brother Anoub. When their mother came to visit, Poemen would not let her in but spoke to her through the door: “Mother, do you wish to see us here, or there in eternity?” She accepted his answer with joy. Many years later, after raids destroyed Skete, Poemen withdrew to a cave near Terenuthis and became famous as one of the gentlest spiritual fathers of the desert. He took in failing monks with tenderness. He once said, “When I see a brother sleeping during the night office, I put his head on my knees and let him rest.” He believed that humility and the fear of God were like the air we breathe, and he wept daily for his own sins. He reposed at a great age around 450.
Poemen was a child of unusual piety. His parents took him on visits to the famous desert fathers of the time, and the boy listened with great attention. He gathered their sayings “like a bee gathers honey from flowers.” Once he begged the elder Paul to take him to see Saint Paisios. When Saint Paisios saw the boy, he turned to Paul and said: “This child will save many. The hand of God is upon him.” From that early age Poemen knew what he wanted to be.
After Poemen and several of his brothers had become monks at Skete, their mother came one day to visit them. She had not seen her sons for many years. She wanted to embrace them. Poemen, however, would not allow her into the cell. He spoke to her through the closed door. “Mother,” he asked, “do you desire more to see us here, in this passing life, or there in eternity?” She was silent for a long time. Then she answered: “Since I will surely see you there, then I do not desire to see you here.” She blessed her sons through the door and went home with great joy. They had each made the same choice: to be united in the kingdom of God forever, even at the cost of separation now.
In the early fifth century, the wilderness of Skete was raided by barbarian invaders. Many of the desert fathers were killed; the cells were burned; the great monastic federation was scattered. Poemen and his surviving brothers were forced to leave the wilderness they had known for decades. They withdrew to a cave near the ruins of Terenuthis. There Poemen, now a man of middle age, began what would become his second monastic life. Brothers who had survived the raids and brothers who came new to the desert began to gather around him. He received them with great pastoral love. He became, almost without intending it, the central spiritual father of a small community of refugees and inquirers. He stayed in that cave for the rest of his life.
The deepest teaching of Saint Poemen, repeated many times in different ways across his sayings, is that humility is the foundation of the Christian life. He said: “Humility and the fear of God are above all the virtues.” He said: “Man needs humility and the fear of God as much as he needs the air which he breathes.” He said: “The most useful tools for the soul are humility, self-reproach, and disdain for one’s own will.” He believed that without humility no other virtue could grow, and that with humility every other virtue would in time follow. He himself was the practical proof of this teaching. The brothers who came to him saw in him a man of simplicity, of unbroken peace, of patient love, all of which flowed from the deep humility he had spent seventy years acquiring.
Some of the older monks once came to Poemen to ask his advice. They said: “Father, what should we do when a brother falls asleep during the night office? Should we shake him awake?” They were inclined to discipline the failing brother sharply. Poemen answered them with one of his most beloved sayings: “For my part, when I see a brother who has dozed off, I put his head on my knees and let him rest.” He had remembered, perhaps, the Lord’s own gentleness with the sleeping disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Lord had not shaken Peter awake; he had returned three times to find them sleeping and had spoken to them with tenderness. Poemen was teaching the brothers the same kind of tenderness.
A brother of the desert was living openly with a woman — a serious failure for a monk. Some of the brethren came to Poemen and demanded he be expelled or harshly disciplined. Poemen did neither. Instead, he quietly sent the failing brother a bottle of wine as a friendly gift, with no rebuke and no instruction. The brother, receiving the wine, was so struck by the kindness that he was overcome by his own conscience. He had expected anger from the desert fathers; he had received instead an unexpected mercy. He sent the woman away of his own accord and returned, on his own initiative, to a chaste life. Poemen had not shamed him; he had loved him into repentance.
The Lord called himself the Good Shepherd. Poemen, whose name in Greek means “Shepherd,” was given by the Lord a particular vocation to embody this image in the desert. He shepherded the failing brothers with gentleness. He laid down his ease for them, hearing their confessions, bearing their burdens, refusing to give up on the weak. He spent his life in the simple work of shepherding souls in the wilderness of Skete and in the cave at Terenuthis. The Lord is the true Good Shepherd; Poemen was a small living icon of him in the deserts of Egypt.
Saint Poemen stayed in his cave near Terenuthis for some thirty or forty years after the destruction of Skete. The brothers came; he received them; he taught them; he wept for his sins; he gave thanks for the Lord’s long mercy. He never returned to public life. He never wrote a book. He simply sat in his cave and shepherded the souls who came to him. He reposed at a very great age, around the year 450, with his disciples around him. The Apophthegmata Patrum, gathered in the next generation, preserves more sayings from him than from any other desert father. The wisdom he had given so quietly across so many decades became, through that book, one of the great treasures of the Christian Church.
Poemen gives the Christian Church a particular gift: the model of the gentle pastoral father. He stands somewhat apart from the more austere figures of the desert tradition. Where Anthony fought demons and Arsenius kept silence and Macarius wept for sixty years, Poemen sat in his cave and received the failing brothers with the deep mercy of the Lord himself. He laid the sleeping brother’s head on his knees. He sent the bottle of wine to the failing monk. He refused to give harsh penances. He taught humility as the air the soul breathes. He believed that humility was greater than asceticism, that mercy was greater than discipline, that example was greater than rules. We may not be called to the desert. But we may all be called to be small images of his pastoral love in our own places. We are surrounded every day by failing brothers and sisters who need from us the bottle of wine, not the rebuke. Poemen gives us the pattern of how to give it.