A brother asked Abba Pimen, saying: Tell me how to become a monk. And the Elder said: If you want to find rest both here and in the age to come, say to yourself at every task: Who am I? And judge no one.
The brother asks for a path; the Elder gives him a question with no answer. Not a method, not a rung, not a rule of ascesis — a single utterance, repeated at every task: Who am I? Pimen is clearly not pointing toward introspection, toward the Socratic gnōthi seauton that seeks to fill the mind with content about itself, a map of one’s own virtues and faults. The patristic question does not gather; it empties. It never closes into an answer that could be carried forward like a title — „so this is who I am” — but stays suspended, a threshold the soul touches again at every task, every encounter, every moment it might rise up against another. It is what Simone Weil called decreation: not the destruction of the self, but its withdrawal from the central place it assigns itself without having received it — so that into that emptied space the other might enter, incomparable, as he is.
Contemporary psychology has a technical name for the disease Pimen cures before naming it: the fundamental attribution error. When the other fails, we explain the act by character — he is lazy, he is cruel, he lies; when we fail, we explain the act by circumstance — I was tired, I was provoked, I had no choice. The same act, two laws of judgment, one for each side of the mirror. Self-serving bias reinforces the lie further: we credit ourselves for success and the world around us for failure. The brother asking Pimen how to become a monk probably wants a technique that would place him above this asymmetry — but the Elder turns him directly back into it, asking him to invert it: not the circumstantial excuse for the self and the characterological verdict for the other, but the first question turned always toward the self, „who am I to…,” before any movement toward the neighbor.
Here it becomes clear why Evagrius places vainglory before pride in the order of the passions: judging another does not require a soul already fallen beyond repair — only a single instant in which I compare myself and, in imagination, come out ahead. St. Dorotheos of Gaza states the same thing plainly in his discourse on not judging one’s neighbor: self-justification — believing oneself right through a silent comparison with another’s fault — is the root of every act of condemnation, and the remedy is not sharper moral clarity but less attention paid to the other and more to oneself. St. John Climacus says the same thing more sharply still: whoever truly knows his own sins no longer has eyes for another’s — not because he forces himself to look away, but because his sight is entirely occupied by his own debt. Kant asked that a human being never be treated merely as means, but always also as end — yet hasty judgment does exactly the opposite: it uses the other as means to its own reassurance, as raw material out of which, by contrast, I build a flattering image of myself. Karen Horney called this construction the idealized self-image — not the real self, but the imagined one, kept standing by comparisons already won.
This is why Pimen binds the two commands into a single sentence rather than two: the question and the silencing of judgment are not two separate ascetic labors but one, seen from two angles. As long as the question „who am I?” stays open, with no answer that would exalt me, judgment of the other has nowhere to begin — because judgment, to be born, needs a fixed place from which to look down. Empty that place, and judgment has no ground left to stand on. Romans 14:4 asks nearly the same question: „Who are you to judge another’s servant?” — and James 4:11-12 adds that whoever judges the law, rather than keeping it, sets himself above it, forgetting that there is only one Lawgiver and Judge. Genesis shows the first face of this flight from the question: after the fall, God does not condemn Adam first, but asks him — „Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9) — and Adam, instead of answering the question about himself, shifts the blame onto the woman, and the woman onto the serpent. History’s first judgment is, in fact, the first refusal of the question „who am I” — and every condemnation since has done nothing but repeat that original refusal.
The rest Pimen promises — „both here and in the age to come” — is not the reward of a mastered technique, but the natural consequence of emptying the place from which judgment used to be born. A soul that no longer stands securely enough on itself to look down on another no longer has anything to defend, and so nothing left to strive for. St. Isaac the Syrian says this state — the merciful heart, which no longer separates the deserving from the undeserving of mercy — is precisely the sign of the renewed nature, as close as is possible in this present age to the nature of God Himself. It is no accident that Pimen gave the brother no answer to „how do I become a monk?” — for to become a monk, in its deepest sense, is not a state one arrives at, but a question one never stops asking.
