Pambo of Nitria

The desert of Nitria

The mountain of Nitria, named from the natron lakes at its foot, lay some forty miles south-east of Alexandria, and was the first of the three great monastic settlements of Lower Egypt — Nitria, the Kellia ("the Cells"), and Scetis — founded by Ammon about the year 330 on the counsel of Antony the Great. By the time Palladius saw it, some five thousand monks lived on that mountain, and this corpus keeps its collective memory as the Ten Thousand Fathers of Nitria (July 10). Pambo belonged to its first generation and was one of the four or five names — with Ammon, Arsisius, Serapion and Paphnutius — by which its authority was represented to the rest of the Church.

He was an Egyptian, born about the year 303, and came to the mountain as a young man, unable to read.

The psalm he never finished learning

The account of his beginning is given in the Apophthegmata and is the most famous thing about him. Being illiterate, he asked one of the brothers to teach him a psalm. The brother began the thirty-eighth psalm, and had read the first verse — "I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue" — when Pambo shut him off and went away, saying he would learn that one first. He did not come back. When, long afterwards, the brother reproached him for having stayed away, he answered that he had not yet succeeded in doing the verse; and to another who asked him about it he said that nineteen years had gone by and he had not yet accomplished it.

The whole of his ascesis follows from that verse. He held silence, weighed every answer, and was not ashamed to be seen deliberating: brothers who came to him with questions sometimes waited three months for the reply, and were sometimes told at the end that he had not found what to say. The desert did not read this as slowness but as the exact opposite of the fluency it distrusted; a word of Pambo's was known to have been paid for.

Work, poverty and the rule of the hands

He lived by the labour of his hands, plaiting ropes and baskets of palm-leaf, and would eat no bread but what he had earned. He said at the end of his life that he did not remember eating bread that was not his own, nor repenting of any word he had spoken since he left the world. Asked what a monk's clothing should be, he answered that it should be such that if he threw it out of his cell it would lie there three days and nobody would think it worth taking. And to those who wanted a rule he gave the shortest one in the collection: "If you have a heart, you can be saved."

The face like Moses

The fathers report — Palladius and the Apophthegmata alike — that the face of Pambo shone like lightning, so that the brothers could not look at him steadily, and that he sat among them "like a king upon his throne"; the same was said of Sisoes and of Silvanus, and behind all three lies the face of Moses coming down from the mountain. This is not told of him as a wonder but as a symptom: the desert took the shining face for the visible mark of a man whose inner life had become continuous.

Athanasius the Great, who governed Alexandria through the Arian storms and knew the monks as his allies, once summoned Pambo down to the city. There he saw an actress on the street, and wept. Asked why, he said that two things had moved him: her destruction; and that he did not take as much trouble to please God as she took to please men.

Melania and the three hundred pounds of silver

About the year 373 the Roman noblewoman Melania the Elder, widowed and newly arrived in Egypt, came out to Nitria and put into Pambo's hands a chest containing three hundred pounds of silver. He was weaving a basket, and did not look up. He said only, "May God reward you," and told his deacon to take the money and distribute it among the poorer monasteries of Libya and the islands, which were the neediest. Melania, standing there, waited to be thanked as the sum deserved; and when she said, more or less, that he ought to know how much it was, he answered that He to whom she had offered it did not need to be told the amount — He who weighed the mountains in a balance knew the measure of her silver better than she did. It is the single most quoted rebuke in the literature of Christian almsgiving.

Repose

He died about 373–375, aged about seventy, weaving to the last. Melania was with him at the end; he gave her the basket he had in his hands, and she kept it to her own death. His last words, spoken to the monks gathered round, were that he was going to the Lord as one who had not yet begun to serve God. He had never, in illness or in health, ceased his work, and the Lausiac account remarks that he was never sick.

Disciples and legacy

His disciples included Dioscorus, afterwards bishop of Hermopolis, and Ammonius, Eusebius and Euthymius — the four brothers of extraordinary stature whom Egypt called the Tall Brothers, and whose expulsion from the desert as Origenists by Theophilus of Alexandria brought them to Constantinople and set in motion the persecution of John Chrysostom. Pambo himself died a generation before that quarrel and had no part in it, but his household stands at the head of it, as Melania the Elder's does. Through Palladius, who came to Egypt a decade after his death and collected the memory of him on the spot, and through the alphabetical Apophthegmata, where fourteen sayings stand under his name, he became one of the fixed authorities of Byzantine and Slavonic ascetic literature.