On June 19, the Church commemorates our Holy Father Paisios the Great (†417), one of the great hermits of Egypt, a disciple of Abba Pambo and the spiritual father of countless monks in the desert of Scetis and Nitria. His Life was written by Saint John the Dwarf, who was his disciple and fellow-ascetic in the same cell, just as Saint Athanasius the Great wrote the life of Anthony. From this first-hand testimony there has come down to us the portrait of a man who pushed abstinence and prayer to the very edge of nature — and who, precisely through the purity thus acquired, saw clearly the inner state of those who came to him.
In Greek he is called “the Great” (ho Megas), a title of honor that the Eastern tradition grants to a few outstanding fathers of the desert. The Greek tradition links this title to the fame of his holiness, which spread quickly, and to the multitude of those who came to him for a blessing and for a word of profit; “great,” then, did not signify a rank or an office, but the recognition of a spiritual height and of a father’s authority. In the Coptic tradition, which honors him in a special way, he is known by his own name, Abba Bishoi.
This article follows a single thread: in Paisios, asceticism and discernment are not two separate gifts, but one. His clear sight of souls is not in him the fruit of a sharp mind or of psychological experience, but the direct consequence of the purity wrought through ascetic labor. Whoever wishes to understand Orthodox discernment at its source finds it here, embodied in a life.
The Disciple of Obedience
Paisios was born in Egypt, the youngest of a faithful and well-to-do family, and was dedicated to God from childhood. When he came to the age of ascetic struggle, he went into the desert of Scetis to Abba Pambo, who had himself been a disciple under Anthony the Great. The first thing he learned was not spectacular asceticism, but obedience. Saint John notes that Paisios “accomplished well the labors of obedience and of patience, doing with diligence all those things which his spiritual father commanded him.”
From this same period comes a command of Pambo’s that shows the direction of his whole life. Seeing that he desired achievements too lofty for a beginner, the elder said to him: “My son Paisios, it is not fitting for the newly-begun to look upon the face of any man, but to bow his head always downward and to think unceasingly with his mind upon things heavenly.” Paisios took the word so seriously that, his disciple writes, “from that time three years passed, in which he kept this command with such firmness that he did not look at all upon the face of a man.”
Here the foundation is seen. Before seeing the souls of others, Paisios learned not to look upon the faces of men, but to gather his mind within. His later discernment grows out of this turning of the gaze away from things outward toward things inward. Obedience was not for him a stage that he left behind, but the root from which everything that followed sprang. He who has not learned to cut off his own will before a father does not come to discern the will of God from his own, for the two always seem to him one and the same. Paisios began by submitting, and only for that reason did he come to see.
The Desert and the Ascetic Struggle
After the death of Pambo, Paisios remained for a time in the same cell with John; then, at a command received through an angel during Matins, the two parted: John remained to guide the multitudes, while Paisios was sent to the western part of the desert, where he hewed himself a cave in the rock. There his ascetic labor grew by degrees: he began to fast the whole week, tasting on Saturday only a little bread and salt, and then he joined together two weeks of fasting at a time.
Concerning this ascent, Saint John gives a testimony which he places under the oath of truth, that the reader might not doubt: through communion every Sunday in the Holy Mysteries, Paisios “spent seventy years, tasting no other bodily food.” The writer does not pass this off as a thing of course, but links it to the creative power of God, “which is without lack and is not wholly subject to the law of nature” — the same power by which Elijah and Enoch were preserved.
His life of solitude was not flight from the world, but a running toward God. The word of his disciple always links the ascetic struggle to prayer and to longing for God: Paisios loved stillness “that he might pray and speak always with God.” Asceticism was for him the road to vision, not an end in itself. The long fast, the vigil, the solitude of the cave were not feats to be counted, but means by which the passions were thinned and the mind was purified, until the heart came to feel the nearness of God. This is the difference between Orthodox asceticism and any struggle that would be content with itself: the starved body is not the goal, but the purified heart, able to see God, according to the promise of the fifth beatitude.
This purity was indeed crowned with the greatest of appearances. The Life testifies that Christ Himself appeared to Paisios, greeting him with the word: “Peace to you, My chosen ascetic!” Coptic iconography depicts him washing the feet of the Lord or carrying Him upon his shoulder — a sign of that familiarity with things divine to which he had attained. Yet it is not these that are the object of our commemoration now, but that which sprang from them: the gift of discernment.
Zeal for the Right Faith
Before seeing how Paisios exercised discernment in the souls of men, it is fitting to see how unshaken he himself was in the truth of the faith. Discernment does not float above dogma, but rests upon it; he who does not hold rightly the truth about God cannot rightly discern God’s working from that of the evil one.
The Life relates that an elder who dwelt in a village on the edge of Egypt had fallen, through ignorance, into an error: he said that it is fitting for Christians to honor only the Father and the Son, but not to serve the Holy Spirit, nor to call Him God. This touches the very heart of the faith, for it denies the divinity of one of the Persons of the Trinity. Paisios did not overlook the error as an opinion without consequences, but met it with all his zeal, as a mortal danger to the soul. For him, the truth about God was not a matter of nuances over which one may close one’s eyes, but the boundary between life and perdition.
Here is seen a trait of which our age has need to be reminded. Authentic discernment does not mean an indulgence that receives everything under the pretext of love. Paisios loved — and precisely for that reason he did not let error rule the soul of his neighbor. His gentleness toward men and his severity toward deception did not contradict each other, but sprang from the same care for the other’s salvation. To confound discernment with indifference toward the truth is a distortion that the life of this saint scatters.
A Discipleship of Measure
Paisios’s discernment did not mean boundless severity either. He did not treat all alike, but read the state of each. Many ran to him desiring to withdraw at once into the hermit’s life, but not for all was the same path of profit. Those who sought stillness “he taught to speak together with God through prayer,” while those who had need of obedience “he set to dwell in the common life, together with other brethren,” appointing for them also the handiwork suited to them.
This is a foundational trait of right discernment: it does not demand of all the same measure, but weighs the strength of each and gives him what he can bear. A beginner burdened with labors beyond his measure breaks; a soul capable of more, left in idleness, is wasted. The father with discernment sees which is the measure fitting for each, and this is not learned from general rules, but from the purity that sees the man before him as he truly is.
Here also belongs his answer to a beginner who complained that he was being warred upon “terribly by demons.” Paisios, seeing that the man was in fact doing his own will, told him that he was not struggling with the demons, “for they have not yet noticed that you have come into the desert,” but with his own thoughts. The word cuts to the root a very widespread self-deception: that of laying upon the enemy the struggles that our own unsubdued will gives birth to. He who has not yet cut off his own will has not even arrived at the true struggle; he merely contends with his own desires, which, in ignorance, he names temptations of the devil. To discern the true struggle from this imagining of struggle is a work to which the mind alone, without purity, does not attain — for the unsubdued mind always deceives itself in its own favor.
The Heart of the Account: The Disciple Who Fell Without Knowing
The clearest manifestation of Paisios’s discernment is the account of one of his disciples, a simple and obedient man. Sent into Egypt to sell handiwork, the man met on the road a Jew, who told him that the Crucified One is not the true Messiah, but that another is to come. The disciple, out of simplicity, answered without weighing it: “Perhaps it is so, as you say.” That was all. Not a deliberate denial, not a conscious passage to another faith — only a careless assent to a blasphemy.
Returning to the desert, the disciple did not know himself changed in anything. But Paisios, meeting him, “would not receive him at all, nor even look upon him.” And when the disciple, grieved, asked him why he turned away from him, the elder answered with words that show exactly what he saw: “That disciple of mine was a Christian and had Baptism; but you are not like him! And if you are that disciple of mine, then Baptism and the marks of Christians have fled from you!”
Here lies the whole teaching. The disciple felt nothing; Paisios saw that the grace of Baptism had left him. His discernment did not read outward deeds — the man had confessed nothing — but the state of grace within the soul. Only when questioned did the disciple recall the exchange of words with the Jew and understand what he had lost through a word cast out in carelessness. At Paisios’s prayer, grace returned: Saint John writes that Paisios himself “saw the Holy Spirit entering like a dove into the mouth of the disciple; and the spirit of blasphemy went out like smoke, scattering into the air.”
Two things must be retained from this account. First, the gravity of the word: a lazy assent to blasphemy, without clear intent of denial, worked a real fall from grace. The faith is kept not with the mind alone, but with the watchfulness of the heart in every moment; a single word spoken without attention can empty the soul of what years of ascetic labor had gathered. Second, the nature of discernment: Paisios did not deduce the fall from signs, but saw it, because the eye purified by ascetic labor sees what is unseen by others. The disciple himself did not know his own fall; his father saw it more clearly than the fallen one saw it. This is the difference between a human judgment, however keen, and the spiritual gift of discernment: the first weighs what appears, the second sees what is.
Discernment, the Greatest of Gifts
Here it is fitting to pause upon what the Fathers of the desert called, with a word hard to translate, diakrisis — discernment, right judgment, discretion. The Eastern tradition does not reckon it one virtue among others, but the one that orders all the rest. Saint Anthony the Great, asked which is the highest deed, set above fasting, vigil, and all ascetic labors precisely right discernment, for without it the others can turn against the one who works them. Fasting without discernment leads to the weakening of the body without profit to the soul, or to the pride of one who thinks himself arrived; ascetic labor without discernment breaks the beginner or puffs him up with self-conceit. Discernment is the eye that sees where each work leads, and therefore it governs all the other virtues, like a charioteer holding the reins.
What the life of Paisios shows with a rare clarity is whence this gift comes. It is not won by much reading, nor by the natural sharpness of the mind, nor by accumulated years. It comes from purity. So long as the soul is troubled by the passions, its sight too is troubled, for each passion bends judgment in its own direction: he who is ruled by anger sees enemies everywhere, he who is enslaved to vainglory weighs everything by whether it increases or diminishes his esteem, he who is weighed down by greed no longer discerns need from desire. Only as the passions are purified does the sight grow clear, until the soul comes to see things as they are, not as the passion colors them. Therefore discernment is, properly speaking, the fruit of purity: not a faculty added from without, but the clarity that rises from within once the turmoil has been stilled.
It is understood, then, why the order cannot be reversed. You cannot have first discernment and then purity, for discernment is the sight that purity gives. Whoever seeks the gift of discernment without passing through the struggle with the passions seeks a fruit without a root. And whoever has truly struggled gains discernment almost without seeking it, as something that comes of itself together with the purified heart. Paisios did not read souls because he strove deliberately to read them, but because for seventy years he had kept his mind before God, and from this steadfastness of purity came his sight, like light through a washed window.
First It Judges You
There is one more aspect of discernment that the life of this saint illumines and that our age forgets most easily. True discernment turns first upon the one who has it, and only afterward upon others. This order is not by chance. He who has learned to see his own passions, his own thoughts, his own falls, that one comes to see also those of others — not in order to condemn them, but to heal them. And he who leaps to examine the souls of others without first having examined his own does not have discernment, but an imagining of it, which almost always turns into condemnation.
This distinguishes the sight of the saint from the prying of the clever man. The saint sees the infirmity of his neighbor and grieves over it, because he knows first his own infirmity and knows how hard a man rises. Paisios, seeing the fall of his disciple, did not drive him away as one cast off, but prayed for his return until grace returned. His sight served mercy, not judgment. Where discernment is not born of humility, it quickly turns into a cold sharpness that sees the faults of all and heals no one — a sure sign that it is not a spiritual gift, but a passion disguised as clear-sightedness.
From this comes also a practical measure for the one who seeks guidance today. The father in whom you know the fruit of humility, who condemns himself first and covers the infirmity of the other, has the true sight. He who speaks always about the faults of others, about the delusions of all, without pain and without numbering himself among the infirm, however penetrating he may seem, shows not the marks of right discernment, but those of an enslaved mind. Discernment is known by its root, and its root is humility.
Why It Matters Today
The life of Saint Paisios sets before us an order that our age easily turns upside down. First comes purity, then sight. First the gaze is turned away from the faces of men and the mind is gathered in prayer, and only out of this inner labor is born the power to discern good from evil, grace from its absence, the true struggle from the imagined one, the right faith from error.
We live in an age that prizes information much and purity little, that believes discernment is won by reading more, by comparing more opinions, by sharpening the mind harder. The life of this saint says otherwise. Discernment is not a faculty of intelligence, nor a technique that can be learned from books. It is the fruit of a purified life. Therefore the Fathers call it the greatest of gifts and at the same time the rarest, because it presupposes all the labor that precedes it. Whoever wishes to discern rightly must first be purified; there is no shortcut.
For the one who seeks today a father or a way, this account is also a measure. True discernment is known by its root: by the purity and humility from which it rises. Where these are lacking, sight too is lacking, however confident the word may sound. And where ascetic labor, prayer, and the cutting off of one’s own will have truly worked, the discernment of spirits is done naturally, without noise and without arrogance, just as Paisios met his disciples knowing their thoughts before they spoke them. Sight was not in him the first thing, but purity; sight came afterward, as the gift that God sets in the heart that has made itself worthy to bear it.
Holy Father Paisios, pray to God for us.