Abba Pambo asked Abba Anthony, saying: What should I do? The elder said to him: Do not trust in your own righteousness, do not dwell on what is past, and be restrained in tongue and belly.
Three words, but one single spirit runs through them: do not lean on yourself. Not on your judgment of yourself, not on your memory of yourself, not on your appetite for yourself. Abba Anthony gives Pambo no list of rules; with a physician’s hand he draws three threads from a single fabric — philautia, self-love, which hides precisely when we least suspect it, or rather does not hide at all, but shows itself endlessly under another face.
The Righteousness That Must Be Sifted
Peter said: though all men shall be offended, yet will I never be offended (Matthew 26:33). He was not lying. He believed it. And that very confidence in his own strength was the sieve through which Satan asked to sift him as wheat (Luke 22:31). One’s own righteousness does not fail because its content is false — often it is true, the man really did fast, really did forgive, really did not lie today — but because it becomes a foundation. Isaiah sees it exactly this way: all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment (Isaiah 64:6), not because the good is not good, but because, set at the foundation in place of God, it spoils like manna kept overnight.
The Pharisee in the parable (Luke 18:9-14) does not lie in his prayer: he fasts, he tithes, he is not like other men. His figures are accurate. The error is not in the numbers, but in the scale itself: he weighed himself and came out justified by his own judgment. The tax collector brought no scale at all, only a plea. And he went down to his house justified rather than the other (Luke 18:14).
Psychology today names this mechanism self-righteousness bias and, closely related, moral licensing — the person who, having done one good deed, feels entitled to relax moral vigilance in the next act, as though yesterday’s good were a credit to be spent today. But that scale is broken from the outset, because no one can weigh himself without pressing, unwittingly, a finger on the balance. St. Isaac the Syrian states it plainly: he who has seen his own sin is greater than he who has raised the dead — for he has finally seen with which scale a man must be weighed: not his own.
What Is Past and No Longer Carried
Anthony’s second word seems, at first, gentler: do not be anxious about what is past. But here lies the other face of the same philautia — not self-justification, but self-rumination. St. Paul states it briefly: forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before (Philippians 3:13). This is not a command to forget what happened, but to stop carrying on one’s back a weight that no longer exists except in a mind that refuses to set it down.
Judas and Peter both fall. The difference between them is not the size of the sin — Peter’s betrayal was no small thing — but what each does with the past once fallen. Peter went out and wept bitterly (Matthew 26:75) — a grief that gives itself over to God. Judas repented, but his repentance turned back upon himself; he went and hanged himself (Matthew 27:5) — a grief that stays closed within the past event, keeping the man forever weighing himself against his own deed, never stepping out toward God. It is the same philautia, only with the sign reversed: not self-justification but self-condemnation — yet the self remains the center either way, the self remains what is watched over.
Psychological research on rumination shows something parallel on another plane: repeatedly returning to a negative event does not heal the wound but deepens it, feeding depression more than the event itself ever did. The mind believes that by keeping the past continually in hand it controls it. In fact the past holds the mind. Kierkegaard called recollection the backward movement that impoverishes, as against repetition, the forward movement that receives the same gift anew, transfigured. Anthony asks for exactly this repetition: not a return, but a new receiving, today, of a grace that does not remember the way a man remembers.
The Bridle on the Tongue and the Discipline of the Belly
The third word seems the most „practical,” and precisely for that reason Evagrius and Cassian place it first in the ordering of the passions: gluttony opens the door to all the others, being nearest to the body, easiest to feed unnoticed. The tongue is its immediate neighbor — what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart (Matthew 15:18), and a heart full of itself finds in speech the cheapest altar on which to sit. St. James is blunt: the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity (James 3:6) — a small fire that sets a whole forest ablaze.
This is why the psalmist does not ask to stop speaking altogether, but sets a guard before it: set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth (Psalm 140/141:3). It is not a virtue of externally imposed silence, but of a restraint that watches the threshold between thought and word, between appetite and act. Aristotle called this sophrosyne, temperance — not the suppression of appetite, but its placement under the measure of reason. But where the philosopher stops at the balance between excess and deficiency, the patristic witness shows why that balance is so hard to hold without grace: because the appetite of the belly and the appetite of speech are both fed by the same root, philautia, which always seeks the cheapest, nearest, most immediate pleasure.
Contemporary research on self-regulation confirms, from another angle, what the desert already knew: tongue and belly wear each other down together — a man who is tired, hungry, or overfed speaks idly more easily, judges another more easily, falls into unweighed speech more easily. It is no accident that the Church’s fasts bind restraint at table to silence and to more frequent prayer: the three are not three separate labors laid side by side, but one single labor, carried through three doors.
One Single Bridle
Anthony’s three words are not three different pieces of advice but a single cord braided of three strands: do not lean on your own judgment, do not lean on your own memory, do not lean on your own appetite. Everything that is „yours” — your righteousness, your past, your mouth, your belly — must be taken out of the center, not because it has no worth, but because only One can hold the center without being ruined by holding it. I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me (Galatians 2:20). This is the scale that does not break, the memory that does not weigh down, and the bridle that holds without strangling.
