A name that turned out to be a description The Shepherd of Scetis
Editor's note
Poemen means shepherd. He never held office, never founded a house, never wrote a line, and refused almost every kind of prominence that was offered to him. He is nonetheless the most cited man in the literature of the desert: roughly a quarter of the alphabetical Sayings of the Desert Fathers are his, or are about him, or are answers he gave to someone who had walked a long way to ask.
He was an Egyptian, born around the middle of the fourth century, and he went out to the desert of Scetis as a young man with his brothers. Anoub was the eldest, Poemen the middle, and Paisios the youngest, and there were others, and the family 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. She came out to the desert to see her sons and they would not come out to her, and she waited at the door of the church, and Poemen spoke to her 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. The desert produced men who competed at fasting and men who ruined their bodies, and Poemen is the father the sources use to correct them. He is on record telling monks to eat, telling them to sleep, telling a man who had tortured himself into a stupor that this was no achievement, and insisting over and over that the measure of a monk is what happens to his heart, not what happens to his stomach.
The sack of Scetis
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