Joseph and Pior

Pior, and the vow

Pior was an Egyptian who, on leaving his parents' house for the desert, bound himself by a covenant with God that he would never see any of his kindred again — the sharpest form of the renunciation the fathers of that generation practised, and one that reads harshly until it is set against the family claims that pulled a fourth-century Egyptian back into the world if he left any door open at all.

He kept it for fifty years. At the end of that time his sister, grown old and having learned that her brother was still alive, wanted so badly to see him that she petitioned the bishop, who wrote to the desert and ordered Pior to go to her. He obeyed the order — and kept the vow. He walked to the house, stood at the door with a companion, called out that he had come, and shut his eyes; and he said to his sister that she might look at him as long and as much as she wished, but that he would not look at her. Then he went back to the desert without entering the house.

The bitter well

Pior dug a well at his cell and found the water bitter. He drank it for the rest of his life and never moved. Asked why he did not go where the water was sweet, he answered — the sense of the saying is preserved in several forms — that if he moved for the water he would move for the next thing, and the devil, having got him going, would keep him going from place to place for ever, and he would never do anything at all. It is the classic desert teaching on stability, argued from a well rather than from a rule.

The counterpart is told of the same father: when the monks of Scetis were digging for water and found none, Pior prayed, struck the ground three times with the spade, and the spring came up.

Eating on the move

He would not sit down to a meal but ate as he walked. Asked why, he said that he did not want eating to become a business of his own, and did not want his mind to take pleasure in it as a work. The saying is characteristic of the Egyptian fathers' handling of the body: not a war on food, but a refusal to let a necessary thing acquire the dignity of an occupation.

Joseph

Of Joseph, commemorated with him and likewise called a disciple of Anthony the Great, the calendars preserve only the name. The desert of the fourth century is full of Josephs — Abba Joseph of Panephysis, whose fingers became like ten lamps of fire; Abba Joseph of Thebes — and the day's notice gives nothing by which this Joseph can be identified with any of them. This entry does not guess. Where the record is a name, the corpus prints the name.