St. Pimen the Great

He was born in Egypt around the middle of the fourth century and went out to the desert of Scetis as a young man with his brothers, Anoub the eldest and Paisios the youngest, and they lived as a small community under one roof, which is the setting of a great many of the stories about him.

The tradition preserves the visit of their mother, who came out to the desert to see her sons and was not admitted, and to whom Poemen spoke through the closed door: that if she saw them here she would not see them there. She went away comforted, which is the detail that keeps the story from being merely hard.

He was not an extremist, and the desert used him to correct its extremists. He is on record telling monks to eat, telling them to sleep, and telling a man who had fasted himself into a stupor that this was no achievement. His measure of a monk is what has happened to the heart, not what has happened to the stomach.

Around the year 407 the Mazices came down on Scetis and destroyed it, and Poemen and Anoub led a small group to Terenuthis on the Nile and sheltered in an abandoned pagan temple. He lived on to great old age, and his cell became a place people traveled to with the questions monks actually have. The answers were written down by whoever was standing there, which is why the Sayings read like real conversation rather than a treatise.

His themes are three, said a hundred ways: weep for your own sins and not your neighbor's; guard the thoughts at the point of entry rather than fighting them after they have settled; and let discernment rank above zeal, because a good thing done at the wrong measure is not a good thing. Through John Cassian, who visited Egypt in these very years, that teaching passed into the whole later hesychast tradition. The Church keeps his memory on the twenty seventh of August.