Where the Sarabaites Came From, and How They Live

The Christian religion was rejoicing in these two orders of monks, though this system had begun by degrees to decline. Then there arose afterward that disgusting and faithless kind of monks. Or rather, that deadly plant revived and sprang up again which first shot up in the persons of Ananias and Sapphira in the early church and was cut off by the severity of the apostle Peter. Among monks this kind has long been considered detestable and accursed, and no one took it up anymore so long as the dread of that very severe sentence stayed stamped on the memory of the faithful. For in that sentence the blessed apostle not only refused to let the first authors of this new crime be cured by repentance or any amends, but destroyed that most dangerous seed by their swift death. [a]

But by degrees, through long carelessness and the forgetfulness that time brings, that example, punished with an apostle’s severity in the case of Ananias and Sapphira, faded from the minds of some. Then there arose the race of Sarabaites. Because they have broken away from the communities of the coenobites and each look after their own affairs, they are rightly named Sarabaites in the Egyptian language. They come from the number of those we have mentioned who wanted to imitate the perfection of the gospel rather than truly aim at it, spurred on by rivalry or by the praise given to those who preferred the complete poverty of Christ to every kind of riches.

In their feeble minds these men put on a show of the greatest goodness, and they are driven by necessity to join this order. They are eager to be counted under the name of monks without copying their pursuits. So they in no way practice discipline, or submit to the will of the elders, or, taught by their traditions, learn to govern their own wills, or take up and properly learn any rule of sound discernment. They make their renunciation only as a public profession, that is, before the eyes of men. Then either they stay in their homes, busy with the same occupations as before, though dignified by this title, or they build cells for themselves, call them monasteries, and stay in them perfectly free and their own masters. They never submit to the commands of the gospel, which forbid them to be busy with any anxiety over the day’s food or troubles about household matters. Those commands are fulfilled without unbelieving doubt only by those who have freed themselves from all the goods of this world and have so subjected themselves to the superiors of the coenobia that they cannot admit they are their own masters at all.

But those who, as we said, shirk the severity of the monastery live two or three together in their cells. They are not content to be under the charge and rule of an abbot. Their chief arrangement is this: to get rid of the yoke of the elders and be free to carry out their wishes, to go out and wander where they will, and to do what they like. These men are more taken up, day and night, with daily work than those who live in the coenobia, but not with the same faith and purpose. For these Sarabaites do it not to submit the fruits of their labors to the will of the steward, but to get money to lay by.

And see what a difference there is between them. The others give no thought to tomorrow and offer God the most acceptable fruits of their toil. These stretch their faithless anxiety not only to tomorrow but over the space of many years, and so imagine that God is either false or powerless, as though he either could not or would not grant them the supply of food and clothing he promised. The one group asks this in all their prayers: that they may gain complete dispossession, the lack of all things, and lasting poverty. The other asks that they may secure a rich store of every kind of supply. The one group eagerly strives to go beyond the fixed rule of daily work, so that whatever the sacred uses of the monastery do not need may be given out at the abbot’s will, to the prisons, or to the guesthouse, or to the infirmary, or to the poor. The other strives so that whatever the day’s gorging leaves over may serve extravagant wants, or else be laid by through the sin of greed.

Finally, even if we grant that what they have gathered with no good purpose is disposed of in better ways than we have mentioned, not even so do they rise to the merit of goodness and perfection. For the others bring such returns into the monastery, and report to it daily, and remain in such humility and subjection, that they are deprived of their rights over what they gain by their own efforts, just as they are of their rights over themselves. So they constantly renew the fervor of their first act of renunciation, while every day they strip themselves of the fruits of their labors. But these men are puffed up because they give something to the poor, and every day they fall headlong into sin. The one group, by patience and by the strictness with which they hold devoutly to the order they have once embraced, so that they never do their own will, are crucified daily to this world and made living martyrs. The others are cast down into hell by the lukewarmness of their purpose.

These two kinds of monks, then, compete with each other in almost equal numbers in this province. But in other provinces, which the needs of the catholic faith compelled me to visit, we have found that this third class, the Sarabaites, flourishes and is almost the only one. In the time of Lucius, a bishop of the Arian false belief, in the reign of Valens, we carried alms to our brothers from Egypt and the Thebaid who had been sent to the mines of Pontus and Armenia for their steadfastness in the catholic faith. Though we found the coenobia in some cities few and far between, we never discovered that even the name of anchorites was heard among them.