On Desert Father stories

Desert Father stories tend to belong to a genre of literature called wisdom stories. The purpose of the stories does not tend to be doctrinal, though there are exceptions, but practical. They teach you how to live the Christian life, how to think and behave not only “Christianly” but in a generally ethical manner as well. Like many of Jesus’ parables, the stories of the Desert Fathers force you to think, to puzzle out, to wend your way through the story to get to the nugget of wisdom buried in there. In that sense, they teach you correct thinking patterns because only if your thinking pattern is correct can you find the nugget of wisdom buried there.

The Greeks developed logic and the rules of logic to help you to think correctly. They pushed language around to test its limits. They thought through the logical implications of certain word constructions. They were also very good at seeing which arguments were illogical and why. But the Desert Fathers, and the Middle East in general, took a different path. By and large, the opinion was that if you could not live correctly, then you could not be thinking correctly. Yes, they understood sin, much more deeply in fact than most of us do. But, they would have taken a page from St. James and argued that even demons can think, but to be a human being in a correct relationship to God, to each other, and to the world at large, you have to do much more than just think logically. It is interesting to note that before the high development of Greek philosophy, they also told tales. Just think about Aesop’s Fables and you will realize that they also are tales designed to teach you wisdom.

 The Middle East valued wisdom much more than they did knowledge. They were not the least bit against knowledge. They valued knowledge because knowledge is part of the path towards wisdom. But, they were also aware that knowledge, by itself, could be dangerous. In fact, we have that saying in English about “a little knowlege is a dangerous thing.” But, in our culture we have built up the pursuit of knowledge to the point that knowledge, in and of itself, is a goal that must be pursued regardless of the consequences. We have no conception in our culture that some things might be better not known. But the Middle Easterners would have agreed with the idea that some knowledge could be so dangerous that it is better not known. Think of the legend of Atlantis as told by Plato in Critias. It is a cautionary tale about what happens if you ignore the gods, if you become unwise.

Reading the Desert Fathers is a good antidote for us in our culture. We have intellectualized the faith to the point where the person with the best doctrine is somehow considered to be the closest to God. The Desert Fathers point out that the ones closest to God are those of a humble heart who obey Him. It is a lesson well worth learning. They would have welcomed the knowledge, but been horrified at the thought of someone with much knowledge and little practice, because inevitably that person would not truly understand, which means that he would not truly know as much as he thought he knew.