On Abba Anthony’s saying about the physicians of the desert
„The fathers of old went out into the desert, healed themselves, and became physicians. Returning from there, they healed others. But we, as soon as we have left the world, before healing ourselves, want to heal others. Therefore sickness returns upon us, and our last state becomes worse than our first. And we hear from the Lord the word: Physician, heal thyself first.” (Abba Anthony)
There is an order to healing that haste overturns without appearing to overturn anything. Abba Anthony does not say that leaving the world is wrong, nor that healing another is evil. He says something finer: that order matters, and disregarding it turns even the good deed — the healing of another — into the very way our own sickness grows stronger.
Evagrius Ponticus places the same order at the heart of the spiritual life: praktikē before theōretikē, the purification of the passions before contemplation, the contemplation of created things before the contemplation of God. No one skips a step without paying for it, because each step is, in fact, an organ being formed. One who wants to see before being purified does not see more — he sees crookedly, and mistakes his own flowering blindness for sight. In the same way, one who wants to heal before being healed does not heal — he projects. His still-sick spirit puts on the physician’s cloak, but beneath the cloak the wound keeps suppurating, now hidden from others and from himself alike.
Here St. Maximus the Confessor names the exact root: philautia, disordered self-love, the mother of all the passions. It does not vanish when a man leaves the world — it merely changes clothes. The one who, in the world, sought to be seen as rich or powerful may now, in the desert, seek to be seen as a physician. It is the same root, transplanted to different soil, bearing a different fruit — but the fruit is still bitter. And Evagrius places this very thought, kenodoxia, vainglory, immediately after the bodily passions and before pride, for a precise reason: vainglory needs a witness. It cannot exist in secret. So the haste to heal another, before its time, is often not love but thirst for a witness — the soul needs someone to see it healing, because alone, before its own unhealed sickness, it cannot bear itself.
Modern psychology has named this pattern without knowing its patristic depth: Jung’s archetype of the wounded healer. In its healthy form, the idea holds that one who has integrated his own wound can, precisely through that, accompany another’s wound — not because he has escaped it, but because he descended into it and came out knowing the way. But Jung himself noted the shadow of this archetype: the physician who has not healed his wound but fled it, burying it beneath the role of healer, does not accompany the other — he uses him. He needs the other’s sickness so as not to look at his own. And when the other is healed or leaves, the old, untreated wound returns swifter and crueler, because the time spent fleeing it fed it rather than extinguishing it. This is exactly what Abba Anthony says: sickness returns upon us.
Aristotle, in another register, shows why this is a law and not merely a moral coincidence: virtue is born of hexis, of repeated habituation, and habituation always forms first in the one who acts, not in the one acted upon. He who has not trained himself in silence cannot give another silence — he gives him his own noise, dressed in words about silence. He who has not trained himself in humility cannot teach another humility — he teaches him, unknowingly, the subtle shape of his own pride, because he cannot transmit a state he does not possess.
This is why the Lord’s word quoted by Abba Anthony — „Physician, heal thyself” (Luke 4:23) — is not a rebuke thrown out at random. It is spoken in the synagogue at Nazareth, to those who knew Him „from home” and demanded signs as at Capernaum, without first receiving the inward healing that His presence required. The word exposes an old temptation: to demand or offer the outward sign while skipping the inward change. And the end of such a leap is described by the Lord Himself elsewhere, in words almost identical to Anthony’s: the house swept and put in order, but empty, receives seven spirits worse than the first, „and the last state of that man is worse than the first” (Matthew 12:45). An untreated sickness does not wait passively — it occupies the space that hasty, superficial healing has left empty.
One path alone remains, then, and the desert of the fathers shows it plainly: first, to dwell before one’s own wound as long as needed for the healing to be real and not merely postponed; only then, as an overflow of grace received rather than a flight from self, to turn toward the other. Not because the unhealed have no love — but because love without inward healing becomes, unwittingly, a more refined form of the very sickness it believes it is curing.
