A brother asked Abba Bessarion: What shall I do? And the old man answered: Keep silence, and do not measure yourself against yourself.
The brother was perhaps expecting a rule — a particular labor, a canon, a measure of fasting or vigil. Instead the elder gives him two words that seem, at first, as simple as they are hard to carry: silence, and the refusal to measure oneself. Looked at closely, the two are not separate counsels but the same thing said twice — once from the side of the tongue, once from the side of the mind.
For to measure oneself always requires a word spoken, if only inwardly: I am better than this one, humbler than that one, I have advanced, I have fallen behind. Self-measuring cannot exist apart from inner speech — it is a judgment, and judgment requires subject, predicate, comparison. Perfect silence, which the Fathers named not an absence of sound but a state of the soul, cuts precisely the root from which comparison grows: you cannot measure what you refuse to name. This is why Job, after being rebuked by God out of the whirlwind, answers: „Once I have spoken… but I will proceed no further; I lay my hand upon my mouth” (Job 40:4). He does not fall silent out of weakness, but because he has understood: before the One without measure, every word in defense of the self is superfluous. Job’s silence is the natural limit of all self-measuring.
Greek philosophy left posterity an almost symmetrical, opposite formula: „man is the measure of all things,” said Protagoras — and, implicitly, the measure of himself. Whatever is, is for each as it appears to him; there is no criterion outside man by which man can be judged. This is exactly what Abba Bessarion forbids his disciple: do not measure yourself, because to make yourself the measure means to make yourself a judge with no court above you — and a judge with no court above him always ends by acquitting himself. The Apostle Paul, however, places the measure elsewhere: „till we all come… unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). The measure is not man looking at himself, but Christ looked upon by man — a measure from outside, given, toward which one grows, not one built by comparing oneself with the one beside him, or with his own self of yesterday.
Social psychology has described with precision the mechanism Abba Bessarion cuts off at the root. Social comparison theory, formulated by Festinger, shows that man evaluates his worth and state not by a fixed standard but relatively — through upward comparison (with one „above,” which breeds discouragement or envy) and downward comparison (with one „below,” which breeds a passing self-satisfaction). Later research confirmed what might be expected: those who compare themselves frequently, in either direction, report a less stable and lower sense of wellbeing than those who do not anchor their identity in comparison. Modern man has not freed himself from Abba Bessarion’s counsel by outgrowing it, but by forgetting it — and has found instead ever finer instruments for measuring himself without ceasing: not only against the neighbor, but against an idealized image of himself, updated daily.
The elder’s two words, then, remain a single path, not two. Silence is not merely discipline of the tongue but the refusal to enter the marketplace where values are weighed — for only the one who speaks, whether to another or to himself, can compare. And the one who does not measure himself has nothing to defend by speech, and so nothing to speak for. Christ himself gives the key that joins the two: „Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matthew 7:1-2). The only right measure of the self is, in the end, not to measure it at all — and to leave the measure, like the word, in the hands of the One who alone can judge without erring.
