The Desert in the Desert: Faith

and the Aporias of Law and

Knowledge in Derrida and The
Sayings of the Desert Fathers
Lori Branch

In this article I consider The Sayings of the Desert Fathers in light of

deconstructive ethical theory. Jacques Derrida's critique of law in favor
of undecidability, the uncertainly of chora or the "desert in the desert,"
and limitless responsibility helps us understand this perplexing work;
wandering in the desert of the Sayings, the reader does not find the law
guaranteeing salvation but, rather, is left searching in each particular
instance for "discernment" and "charity," for "what your soul wills in
following God's will." Amid a contradictory collection of narratives and
advice, the Sayings leaves the reader to find in his or her particular life
the lack or desire that prompts him or her to approach the other in
repentance and yet in hope. The Sayings points to this sort of faith as
much as to deconstructive questioningboth of which take place in this
"desert in the desert"as constitutive of right relations with the other.

H A G I O G R A P H I C A L TEXTS are frequently animated by tensions

surrounding the notion of law, especially in the form of early monastic
codes, such as The Rule of St Benedict^ and a saint's relation to them. The
Lives of pillar-saint Simeon Stylites are prime examples. To Simeon, in
comparison with the incommensurable goodness of God, even a life

Lori Branch is an assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to David Brakke of Indiana University's Department of Religious
Studies, for his kind and generous feedback to an earlier version of this article, and to my research
assistant Heidi LaVine, for her thoughtful work and conversation with me in preparing it.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion December 2003, Vol. 71, No. 4, pp. 811-833
DOI: 10.1093/jarrel/lfglOO
2003 The American Academy of Religion
812 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

not rife with transgression provides sufficient reason for immeasurable

repentance and devotion to God. In the Antonius Life of Simeon, when a
grotesque rope is discovered matted in flesh beneath the young monk's
clothing, Simeon replies, "Let me die as a stinking dog, for so I ought to be
judged for what I have done. For all injustice and covetousness are in me,
for I am an ocean of sins" (Duran: 90). The abbot and monks of the mon-
astery cannot believe that Simeon could have committed sin meriting such
repentance in a legal or calculable sense. But "holy Simeon" replies that his
fault lies not in lawbreaking as much as in the condition of sin, in falling
short of God's perfection even from birth: "The prophet David said:
'Behold, I was brought forth in iniquities, and in sins did my mother con-
ceive me.' I have been clothed the same as everyone else" (Duran: 90).*
Simeon's spirituality and ethics seem purposely to eschew law and rule,
and tellingly the main accusation his fellow monks brought against him is
that he was trying to "undo the rule of the monastery" (Duran: 89)by, it
should be noted, subsuming it and exposing its insufficiency. Similarly, the
appeal of the modern spiritual classic, St. Thrse of Lisieux's Story of a
Soul, lies partly in how her "little way" of charity seems to shortcut earlier,
well-worn, codified paths to love and sanctity, baffling her more exacting
sisters. In Simeon's case his fellow monks clung to the rule for dear life, as it
were, for the rule is what stood between them and the horrors of limitless
responsibility and repentance that Simeon unleashed on himself. The Lives
never present Simeon as having recommended his pillar discipline to
others, but both extreme and "little" ways tend to become paths, and the
Lives themselves seem to have made a rule of sorts out of Simeon's practice,
inspiring countless stylites to make his life the rule for their own. Hagiogra-
phies can be seen as ethical testimony to the uniquely profound lives they
recount; yet these narratives can also serve as readers' guarantees of salvation
in exchange forfrdfillingthe monastic rule or living just as Simeon, Antony,
or Thrse did, in which case the divine shrinks somehow, making the
infinite calculable in exchange.
At its best, religious literature keeps us in precisely this tension,
between representing or testifying to the radically particular sort of good-
ness embodied in the narrative of a life and the temptation to idolatry of
that life as a totality of goodness or as law. As Geoffrey Gait Harpham
writes in The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, describing the
ascetic, indeterminate ethos of monastic literature and of narrative generally:

1
Early Christian discourse against law as the measure of goodness cannot be considered without
acknowledging its frequent use as an anti-Jewish polemic. Noting that, particularly in early Christian and
ascetic contexts, the discourse of the law also transcends that polemic in its own pressing, interior conflicts
concerning the role of God's law, the monastic "rule," and obedience in achieving virtue and salvation.
 Branch: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers 813

At the moment when [we] imagine that [our] story is complete... we have
succumbed to temptation, and must, if we are to obey the imperative to
resist, imagine discontinuity, heterogeneity, and contingency in order to
keep ourselves temptable, maintain the uncertainty of the future, and
preserve the possibility of virtue through resistance. We must imitate the
model; we must not think that the model is or ought to be imitable.
Within these conditions a human life emerges that embraces and is
embraced by principles of unity and coherence, and also multiplicity,
discontinuity, and chance. Temptation is the name for this complex
coupling; narrative, for its representation. (88)

For Harpham, it is narrative that is singularly suited to present the

ethical, to keep the reader in the undecidable moment of reading well
and yet resisting closure and the systematization or idolization of a "final
interpretation" of the text, "embracing and embraced" by "principles of
coherence" yet also faced with irreducible "multiplicity, discontinuity, and
chance."2
Not only religious literature but religion itself is continually engaged
with this opportunity and temptation; the faithful, detailed representa-
tion of the particular, unique good brings with it the temptation to
contain or domesticate the good in a universal, generalizable law of holi-
ness. In "Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of
Reason Alone" Jacques Derrida notes this temptation as the central
conundrum of religion: with respect to rationalistic tendencies toward
abstraction, legalistic formalization, and schematization, he suggests,
religion simultaneously reacts antagonistically and yet still engages in
such systematization (1998: 2).3 Distinguishing between faith and reli-
gion, Derrida points in this essay to two different sorts of faith.4 The first
is a Kantian reflective faith that is formed in relation to reason and the
law, "bound to [them] by the band of their opposition" (Derrida 1998: 2);
however inadvertently, this sort of faith guarantees a radical dissociation

2
Harpham's is but one work in a recent flowering of literary studies pertaining to ethics and
frequently the ethico-religious in the last decade and a half. As only three examples encompassing
the works of dozens of scholars, see the January 1999 theme issue of PMLA (114/1) devoted to ethics
and the books Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility and The Ethics in Literature, produced
by the First International Conference on Literature and Ethics held in Aberystwyth, Wales, in 1996.
3
The characteristic gesture of rationalistic logic and its "formal rigor" is, for Derrida, the ceaseless
spiraling or "outbidding" that is itself the logic of the law: "The law itself [is] a necessity that, it is
clear, undoubtedly programmes an infinite spiral of outbidding, a maddening instability among
these 'positions.' The latter can be occupied successively or simultaneously by the same 'subjects.'
From one religion to the other, the 'fundamentalisms' and the 'integrisme' hyperbolize today this
outbidding" (1998: 12-13).
4
Derrida writes: "Distinctions are required: faith has not always been and will not always be
identifiable with religion, nor another point, with theology. All sacredness and all holiness are not
necessarily, in the strict sense of the term, if there is one, religious" (1998: 8-9).
814 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

between God and the moral self, who, in Kant's scheme, by virtue of pure
practical reason must ultimately act not in personal relation to God, hop-
ing for reward, but precisely as though God does not exist (Derrida 1998:
11). Deconstructing this faith produced by the logics of law and the
mechanism of abstraction, Derrida shows that rational religion that ends
in ontotheology, which "determines knowledge as the truth of religion,"
is "distinct from faith, prayer, or from sacrifice" per se and actually
"destroys religion" (1998: 15).
The second sort of faith that Derrida points to is one that resists the
comforts of abstraction and the mechanisms of the law, that resists them
by going through them without stopping at false certainty, toward some
sort of beyond of abstraction, to what he calls the "desert in the desert":
where, beyond the rational outbidding in the quest for knowledge, the
aporias of law and knowledge appear and belief and the experience of the
sacredness of the other might take place (1998: 21, 33).5 This desert in the
desert may indeed, he admits, resemble "desertification" or a destitution
of the possibility of goodness, truth, or ethics, but it can also "render pos-
sible precisely what it appears to threaten" (1998: 17)or, as he has put
it elsewhere, it is "the principle of indeterminism" that, in one way.of
thinking, "makes the conscious freedom of man fathomable" (1984: 8).
In other words, the uncertainty and destitution of the desert in the desert
allow for the possibility for faith, for the flowering of a freedom or a
goodness beyond mere calculation and application of rules.
Drawing together Harpham and Derrida, in this article I read the
sixth-century collection of narratives and sayings known as The Sayings
of the Desert Fathers, or the Apophthegmata Patrum, as just such a text,
one that through not one narrative but, rather, a puzzling, undecidable,
even contradictory compendium of narratives and "apophthegmata"
wanders in and around this desert in the desert, the religious place of
uncertainty and the possibility of goodness. Compiled beginning from
the late fourth century onward and read today mainly in the Eastern
Orthodox Church and by monastics, the Sayings' ethos of desert asceti-
cism was popularized especially through the works of John Cassian
(ca. 360-435), in Benedictine practice, and through the works of Jerome,
Rufinius, and Palladius (Ward 1975: xviii) and can also be seen in Thomas
Kempis's fifteenth-century The Imitation of Christ6 Its far-reaching

5
According to Derrida, religion may or may not "mark the convergence of two experiences that
are generally held to be equally religious: 1) the experience of belief, on the one hand (.. . the act of
faith, fidelity,... the testimonial that is always beyond proof, demonstrative reason, intuition); and
2) the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or o holiness, on the other" (1998: 33).
6
For the dating of various manuscripts of the Apophthegmata Patrum, see Chadwick 1958a.
 Branch: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers 815

influence is perhaps more marvelous in light of the sheer unwieldiness of

its 1,000-plus vignettes and sayings; that, coupled with the fact that many
snippets contradict the others, makes for frustrating reading. The Sayings
has almost no structural coherence or unity except that it contains only
"sayings"; the Latin edition, divided into twenty-two (originally twenty-
one) topical sections, most likely represents an effort to impose coher-
ence on the even more random-seeming alphabetical Greek version.7 It is
no exaggeration to say that, not unlike the Latin version, the bulk of critical
scholarship about the Sayings attempts mainly to impose unity on this
work of gaps and fissures by tracing a "theme" and sometimes counter
theme in it: this is no easy task, given the anthology's contradictoriness,
even in pieces of advice on the same page (see, for example, Ware [1989],
Burton-Christie [1989], and Ward [1985]). Even assuming that these
apophthegmata were not meant to be heard back to back, one is struck by
the impression that the speakers attempted to cover their bases on every
quandary, so to speak, and ended up with a confusing collection of proverbs
in which every one is an exception and none is truly a helpful rule.
This difficulty, though, is arguably the heart and virtue of the book.
As the monastics of the Sayings venture outside the boundaries of the city
and inhabited spaces, their conflicting advice coaxes readers beyond the
encompassing metanarratives of hagiography and monolithic laws for
living. The Apophthegmata confronts the reader in a particularly vivid
way with what Harpham and Derrida value as the disjunctive interpretive
ordeal of the undecidable, an ordeal particularly visible in the centerpiece
and longest section of the Latin text, part 10, "On Discretion" (or "Dis-
cernment"), as well as in part 17, "Of Charity." The contradictory nature
of these central chapters, coupled with the profusion and frequent

7
Chadwick (1958b: 188n) argues that book 22 is a later addition. The authoritative English
translation of the earlier, alphabetical Greek version of the Sayings is Benedicta Ward's The Desert
Christian: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the Alphabetical Collection. Relevant recent monograph
treatments of the Sayings include Graham Gould's The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community
(1993) and Douglas Burton-Christie's The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in
Early Christian Monasticism (1993). Gould argues for the flexibility of lifestyles and goals allowed in
the monastic environment that produced the Sayings and the sort of consensus it represents, and
Burton-Christie examines the character and aim of the desert fathers' scriptural hermeneutic, which,
he argues, ultimately demands that the meaning of a text be expressed in a life. Gould's earlier essay,
"Moving On and Staying Put in the Apophthegmata Patrum" (1989), discusses the criteria by which
monks decide to live a life of renunciation and faith as wanderers or to resist this temptation
to engage the discipline of "staying put," a recurrent conundrum addressed in the Sayings. For
a discussion of the genre of the apophthegma, see Schulz-Flgel's "The Function o Apophthegmata
in Vitae and Itineraria." Schulz-Flgel argues that we must see these saints' lives and similar texts as
types of apophthegmatic literature that bear witness to the intersection of desert spirituality with that
of the Latin West and to a moment when written instructions began to replace personal experience
in spiritual teaching.
816 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

anonymity of the monastics being quoted, suggests a way that hagiography

and religious narrative can be assimilated in a reader's life with integrity,
without being made over into rule or law. Through this collection of
story after story in which the abbas and ammas of the desert invoke rules
only to break them in the name of discernment and love, the reader can
accept only some of these teachings, necessarily rejecting others without
any guiding rule, until the ascetic, ethical, or religious life is a perfectly
personal, unique trajectory of desire and resistance beyond impersonal,
abstract law, succeeding at Harpham's ethical, ascetical goal for narrative
by providing the "discontinuity, heterogeneity, and contingency" that
preserve "the possibility of virtue" (88).8 In the terms of the Sayings, the
reader must always be discerning and seeking to discern while, in Derrida's
words, taking religion's rules and moral teachings into account, not from
a framework of certainty but, rather, in the desert of undecidability
where one is faced with the radical contingency of one's self and the utter
particularity of every decision or act to the self that makes it. After examin-
ing a deconstructive ethics not of law but of undecidability and limitless
responsibility, this article turns to The Sayings of the Desert Fathers with
an eye toward the epistemological, ethical desert in which its radically
contingent discernment and love blossom, resisting codification as law
per se.

"THE LAW IS NOT JUSTICE": ETHICS, UNDECIDABILITY,

AND LIMITLESS RESPONSIBILITY
Kafka's famous parable "Before the Law" dramatizes the conundrums
of seeking to be "inside" the law, of seeking goodness or divinity in or as
rule itself. "Before the Law stands a doorkeeper," the tale begins: "To this
doorkeeper there comes a countryman and prays for admittance to the
Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the
moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in
later. Tt is possible,' says the doorkeeper, but not at the moment'"
(Kafka: 3). The doorkeeper goes on to tell the man that while he could try

8
The disjunction of the sayings transgresses the all-encompassing pretensions of narrative,
simultaneously supporting and challenging Harpham's defense of narrative in chapter 4 of The
Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism. Unlike Alasdair Maclntyre, Harpham entertains the
possibility of "mess and . . . creative disunity" (87) as part of successful storytelling and a way of
tempering the tyranny of which narrative is often accused. But Harpham does still defend narrative
as a unity of resistance, as the chronicle of a successful (or not-so-successful) hero or saint. The
Apophthegmata Patrum, however, seems to assert that one can resist temptation without one
overarching metanarrative, and even that one must, because narrative gives one the feeling of law, of
knowing what will happen, which eliminates risk, undecidability, and the necessity of belief.
 Branch: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers 817

to get past him, he is only the first of many doorkeepers, the others of
which are so ferocious that the first doorkeeper cannot even bear to look
at them. The countryman waits there for years, giving all his possessions
as a bribe to the doorkeeper, who accepts each with the remark, "I am
only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything"
(Kafka: 3). As the countryman nears death, he asks, "Everyone strives to
reach the Law . . . so how does it happen that for all these many years no
one but myself has ever begged for admittance?" The story ends with the
doorkeeper yelling in the man's ear: "No one else could ever be admitted
here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it"
(Kafka: 4).
In Derrida's analysis of Kafka's tale, he notes: "What is deferred
forever till death is entry into the law itself, which is nothing other than
that which dictates the delay The secret [of the law] is nothingand
this is the secret that has to be kept well, nothing either present or
presentable, but this nothing must be well kept" (1992a: 203-205). The
"secret of the law" is its nothingness, its failure as the present guarantor
of goodness or justice in every situation. Derrida's strongest critique
bears on the cruelty of law posing as an end or as anything in itself; the
cruelty of the law is in the lie of its presence, in its actual nonpresence and
"nonpersonness" or "-personalness." The law beckons us individually by
its silence and our own quest for codifying goodness once and for all, and
then it leaves us in that silence, never responded to and never rewarded
for our efforts to be before or inside the law, for the law cannot be gotten
inside of, and no one can truly stand before "it." It is we ourselves who
have made the law and sought to make the law the ultimate end in itself.
This task of problematizing the conflation of law with justice is one
Derrida places at the very heart of deconstruction. Deconstruction takes
on itself, he writes, the task of "destabilizing or complicating . . . the
opposition between nomos and physis, between . . . law, convention, the
institution on the one hand, and nature on the other" (1992b: 8). Against
those who contend that this destabilization of law entails the destruction
of truth and justice, Derrida claims to problematize the foundations of
law and morality in the very name of justice (1992b: 8-10, 15), critiquing
what Drucilla Cornell has called "law dressed up as justice."9 In "Force of
Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" Derrida's keynote address
at the conference "Deconstruction and the Possibilities of Justice,"

9
In The Philosophy of the Limit Cornell proposes renaming deconstruction "the philosophy of the
limit." Chapter 6 of this book is entitled "The Violence of the Masquerade: The Law Dressed Up as
Justice," and in large part it is an elucidation of Derrida's "Force of Law" in response to Dominic
LaCapra's critique of it, "Violence, Justice, and the Force of Law."
818 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Derrida highlights the constructedness of law, exposing the way that its
authority is always grounded on "mystical" foundations; all law has its
root in violence and cannot be separated either from the violence that
established it (whether by revolution or by divine revelation to one
people and not to another group) or from the violence that sustains and
upholds its "authority." This constructed law only gestures toward a jus-
tice that rule and regulation can never contain, and it is precisely because
of the constructed nature of law that law can be deconstructed: "Justice
in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not decon-
structible. . . . Law . . . is constructible and so deconstructible" (Derrida
1992b: 14-15). For Derrida, justice is outside or beyond the law, as it were,
for law is a construct, and undeconstructible justice is necessarily not
contained by the constructs of the law. True justice is not "calculable,"
not a matter of economics or algorithm: "Law is not justice. Law is the
element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incal-
culable, it requires us to calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic
experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of
justice, that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and
unjust is never insured by a rule" (Derrida 1992b: 16).
It is precisely through this "calculating with the incalculable," Derrida
writes, that we approach justice; our decisions and experiences, by grap-
pling with the incalculable or the aporetic, become something excessive
that might be beyond deconstruction. Recalling Kierkegaard's treatment
of Abraham and the Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling, Derrida
writes that the experience of "impossibility," of undecidability, provides
the moment for belief, a moment of utter tension when there are both the
room and the call for something as immeasurable as justice:

But in the moment that an axiom's credibility is suspended by deconstruc-

tion, in this structurally necessary moment, one can always believe that
there is no more room for justice, neither for justice itself, nor for theoreti-
cal interest directed toward the problems of justice. This moment of
suspense, this period of pokh, without which, in fact, deconstruction is
not possible, is always full of anxiety, but who pretends to be just by econo-
mizing on anxiety? And this anxiety-ridden moment of suspense... cannot
be motivated, cannot find its movement and its impulse . . . except in the
demand for an increase in or supplement to justice, and so in the experi-
ence of an inadquation or an incalculable disproportion . . . in this always
unsatisfied appeal, beyond the given determinations of what we call, in
determined contexts, justice, the possibility of justice. (1992b: 20-21)

Holding that a decision must be in some sense undecidable or, in

other words, must fall in the realm of belief in order to be just does not in
 Branch: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers 819

any way suggest that the undecidable nature of a situation is grounds for
shirking responsibility. Rather, the deconstruction of accepted rules
"may seem like a move toward irresponsibility at the very moment that,
on the contrary, deconstruction calls for an increase in responsibility"
(Derrida 1992b: 20). Derrida describes in positive terms what he means
by undecidability and its relation to freedom and responsibility:

The undecidable is not merely the oscillation between . . . two contradict-

ory and very determinate rules, each equally imperative (for example
respect for equity and universal right but also for the always hetero-
geneous and unique singularity of the unsubsumable example).... [It]
is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the
order of the calculable and the rule, is still obligedit is of obligation
that we must speakto give itself up to the impossible decision, while
taking account of law and rules. A decision that didn't go through the
ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only
be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process.
It might be legal, but it would not be just. (1992b: 24)

While we may justly take account of law and rules, in Derrida's view, it is
the experience of an alterity that is "foreign to the order of the calculable
and the rule" that is both the grounds of our freedom and responsibility
and our motive for exercising it well. His term ordeal in describing the
undecidable is aptly chosen, for Derrida explicitly states his agreement
with Kierkegaard that "the instant of decision is a madness": "This is
particularly true of the instant of the just decision that must rend time
and defy dialectics. It is a madness. Even if time and prudence, the
patience of knowledge and the mastery of conditions were hypothetically
unlimited, the decision would be structurally finite, however late it came,
[a] decision of urgency and precipitation, acting in the night of non-
knowledge and non-rule" (1992b: 26).
This ordeal of undecidability, then, lends to the just decision or act
the excessiveness that allows it to supersede the law and so become some-
thing more than calculation, something just and beyond the law. In the
interview "Eating Well, or, The Calculation of the Subject" Derrida
expands on his conception of responsibility not based in a Cartesian
subject of knowledge and responsibility before the law. He says that the
questions related to "who comes after the subject"of who it is that asks
this question, of what is made possible by the power of this question
are overwhelmed by something more interesting than the questions
themselves, by "the experience of an 'affirmation,' of a 'yes' or of an
'en-gage' (this is the word I use in De Vesprit to describe Zusage, that
acquiescing to language, to the mark, that the most primordial question
820 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

implies), that 'yes, yes' that answers before even being able to formulate a
question, that is responsible without autonomy, before and in view of all
possible autonomy of the who-subject, etc." (1991: 100). This obligation
that preexists knowledge and the law is for Derrida interconnected with
the unavoidable obligation to interpretation (amid all the "iterability"
and indeterminacies of language) inherent in being "in" language
itself.
Much like Lvinas in "Ethics as First Philosophy," Derrida finds the
hint of this kind of responsibility in the "response-before-the-response,"
the fact that we are in the game of language before we choose to be and
that this is an affirmative mode of being, of responding to the "call from
nowhere" even when we think that we are not responding. The "who" of
responsibility "is a singularity that dislocates or divides itself in gathering
together to answer to the other, whose call somehow precedes its own
identification with itself, for to this call I can only answer, have already
answered, even if I think I am answering 'no'" (Derrida 1991: 100-101).
The responsibility of any new conception of the subject must always be in
reference to this eternal and prexistent "yes" of relatedness to the other
in language (Derrida 1991: 105). This responsibility, prior to law and
reason, is hinted at in the very structure of language and is rooted in the
other's alterity. Like the other's alterity, this responsibility is incalculable,
fulfilling any law of goodness or ethics and going beyond it. Indeed,
though he calls the alterity of the other "a law" and the upper limit of
goodness a "rule," Derrida says that if there can be a metonymy for radical
goodness, it would be a law unlike all the usual imperatives: bien manger,
eating well. He writes, "'One must eat well' does not mean above all
taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-
to-give-the-other-to-eat. One never eats entirely on one's own: this
constitutes the rule underlying the statement, 'One must eat well.' It is
a rule offering infinite hospitality" (1991: 115).
Derrida goes on to say that the question is never whether to eat or not
to eatfor, he implies, we are always already incorporating the other in
languagebut, rather, of how to eat well. This is not a law that can be
fulfilled once and for all, that can be calculated or obeyed by simply
refraining from something; as we are always appropriating something
else in order to live or the words of the other in order to think, the question
is never to eat or not to eat but, rather, how to eat well. It is a "rule" that
is ever growing, approaching infinity, and beckoning us out to follow
itthe rule of infinite hospitality. If we have missed the "point" of the
way this rule is distinguished from law that so often sets itself up as
justice or goodness, Derrida emphasizes its excessiveness: "The surplus
of responsibility of which I was just speaking will never authorize any
 Branch: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers 821

silence [regarding the mistreatment of the other]. I repeat: responsibility

is excessive or it is not a responsibility. A limited, calculable, rationally
distributed responsibility is already the becoming-right of morality; it is
at times also, in the best hypothesis, the dream of every good conscience,
[and] in the worst hypothesis, [the dream of] the small or grand
inquisitors" (1991: 118).
In this passage Derrida emphasizes that true responsibility, justice,
and goodness cannot be circumscribed by rote application of the law,
though true goodness may include law. Law may be the dream of every
good conscience or of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, who presumes to
know the wretched smallness of most people and to act accordingly, or of
smaller inquisitors, who simply wish to map out carefully their obliga-
tions to others so that they can be written off. In "Faith and Knowledge"
Derrida echoes this formulation and the dual possibility that law and its
deconstructability afford when he describes chora, the place of absolute
heterogeneity that resists being dominated by any instance or generalization.
Chora "says the immemoriality of a desert in the desert of which it is neither
a threshold nor a mourning. . . . Respect for this singular indecision . . . is
this not at once the chance of every responsible decision and of another
[circumscribed] reflecting faith, of a new 'tolerance'?" (Derrida 1998: 21).
The blankness of this desert of uncertainty makes possible both the pre-
sumptions of "tolerance" and faith's radical openness to the other, which
Derrida describes as "messianic" beyond various "messianisms":

This abstract messianicity belongs from the very beginning to the experi-
ence of faith, of believing, of a credit that is irreducible to knowledge and
of a trust that "founds" all relation to the other in testimony. This justice,
which I distinguish from right, alone allows the hope, beyond all "messi-
anisms," of a universalizable culture of singularities. . . . This justice
inscribes itself in advance in the promise, in the act of faith or in the appeal
to faith that inhabits every act of language and every address to the
other. (1998:18)

Echoing Lyotard's language in The Diffrend, Derrida describes this

desert of uncertainty as the very structure of the "link" itself (1998: 16):
that moment when, not from a condition of knowledge or of certainty
but, rather, in contingency and faith, we link words and ideas together
we interpret, we construct, we respond and actin the ever incomplete
gesture of doing justice to the other.10

10
In a related argument I have drawn together works of Lyotard, Derrida, and Russian liturgical
theology to argue for the repetitions and rereadings of liturgy as similarly paradigmatic of a sacred
approach to the other in faith, rather than in knowledge or through the law; see West.
822 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

DISCERNMENT AND CHARITY: FAITH AND

UNCERTAINTY IN THE DESERT
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers inhabits precisely this sort of desert
of uncertainty, in which one wanders between contradictory examples and
dicta and in which "discernment" and "love" are the names for seeking to
approach the other well, in limitless responsibility: not from within the
law, or in an instance governed by a rule, but in an effort to "eat well" or
do justice to the sacredness or alterity of the particular other. The Sayings
literally embodies the centrality of desert-like uncertainty to any possibility of
good relations to the other, in that the structural and conceptual center
of the book and its longest section, part 10, is concerned foremost with
recognizing when to apply the law and when to eschew it; discretion or
discernment is that undecidable place where a larger responsibility calls
the law itself into question.
The very first saying in the collection opens with the question of law,
only later to disrupt it: "Someone asked Abba Antony: 'What rules shall
I keep to please God?' The old man replied: 'Keep my instructions, and
they are these: Wherever you go, recollect God in your mind's eye. What-
ever you do, do it after the example of Holy Scripture. And wherever you
stay, be in no hurry to move. If you keep these three rules, you will be
safe'" (Chadwick 1958b: 37, #1). Difficult though these three rules may
be, the seeker may still be comforted with the surety of an answer. But
only ten sayings later, the quest for the one right rule is itself called into
question:

A brother asked an old man: "What thing is so good that I may do it and
live by it?" And the old man said, "God alone knows what is good. Yet
I have heard that one of the fathers asked the great Abba Nesteros, who
was a friend of Abba Antony, and said to him, 'What good works shall
I do?' And Abba Anthony replied, 'Cannot all works please God equally?
Scripture says, Abraham was hospitable and God was with him. And
Elijah loved quiet, and God was with him. And David was humble and
God was with him. So whatever you find your soul wills in following
God's will, do it, and keep your heart."' (Chadwick 1958b: 38-39, #11)

The Sayings begins with the search for the law of righteousness and
almost immediately sends the seeker back to his or her own heart, which,
like Kafka's countryman, has made out goodness in the shape of law to
start with. A person must find something in his or her own heart, the text
implies, that is truly its own and also pleasing to God.
Contrary to the novice's opening quest for a rule, the Sayings goes on
to reveal how goodness is often found precisely in not applying the law to
 Branch: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers 823

others. When Abba Joseph asks Abba Poemen how to become a monk,
the elder replies, "If you want to find rest in this life and the next, say at
every turn 'Who am I?' and judge no man" (Chadwick 1958b: 103, #5).
Similarly, another saying recounts a brother asking Abba Poemen, "If
I see my brother sin, is it good to tell no one about it?"clearly weighing
telling the truth against some other responsibility. Abba Poemen's reply
gets to the heart of something besides knowledge and truth at the heart of
goodness: "Whenever we cover our brother's sin, God will cover our sin,"
he replies: "Whenever we tell people about our brother's guilt, God will
do the same with ours" (Chadwick 1958b: 103, #6). What is good about
forgiveness, mercy, and not judging"covering another's sin"is
precisely not its scrupulosity. The collection brings us to the notion that the
other must be approached with something besides simple truth, with care
and discernment; and indeed, the collection's heterogeneous pieces of
advice seem to build toward "On Discretion," also translated as "On Dis-
cernment," as though it is the collection's heart and pinnacle. John Futrell
defines discernment in the Sayings and the early church as arriving "at the
choice of authentic Christian response to the word of God in each concrete
situation in life" (in Lienhard: 505), and Joseph Lienhard writes more
specifically that "discernment is, in some sayings, one of the monk's virtues
or tools; in others it is the one virtue or ability which enables the others to
flourish. But further, discernment is also a kind of superior insight, an
ability to see beyond single rules and practices and comprehend the total
effect of an action Discernment is the ability to comprehend the spirit
of the rule rather than the letter, and functions in the Apophthegmata as
epikeia does in later moral theology" (521). Lienhard maybe exhibiting
a bit of an intellectual bias in stressing sheer comprehension of the "spirit
of the law," but nonetheless he seems close to the mark in his estimation of
discretion as central to all other virtues in the Sayings.
In the passages on discernment, the other and the particular excep-
tion do not proverbially make the rulethey become it and supplant it.
Rather than viewing the law as the norm for the ascetic life and the occa-
sional discrepancy from it as a judicious exception, the discerning excep-
tion becomes the rule, to the point that every decision becomes new and
undecidable, in which the ascetic "calculates with the incalculable" of his
soul, his brothers' souls, and the mercy and judgment of God. In part 10
"discretion" is that ability to go beyond the law and its calculations, to
calculate with the incalculable, to make a good decision in the face of
undecidability. The first saying makes it clear that the point is not follow-
ing a strict rule but, rather, discerning the self and God: "Abba Antony
said: cSome wear down their bodies by fasting. But because they have no
discretion, it puts them further from God'" (Chadwick 1958b: 105, #1).
824 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Likewise, in the space of a page we encounter two very different "rules"

for fasting, a professedly "moderate" approach and the "sterner abstinence"
of Scete (Chadwick 1958b: 120-121, #72,76), and neither is advocated over
the other.
In another saying one "old man," full of discretion, lies to a brother
who asked to borrow money of him because he knew it would harm the
young man's soul and bring the monks trouble: "I thought it better to
transgress one commandment than ten" (Chadwick 1958b: 126, #93)
which is admittedly a calculation of sorts but one that calculates with care
for the other. Just two sayings later, another old man, asked by a brother
how he may find Godthrough fasts, labors, vigils, or works of mercy
makes a reply similar to Antony's: "In all that you have said, and in dis-
cretion. I tell you that many have afflicted their body, but have gained no
profit because they did it without discretion. Even if our mouths stink
with fasting, and we have learnt all the Scriptures, and memorized the
whole Psalter, we still lack what God wantshumility and chastity"
(Chadwick 1958b: 125, #91). Discretion is here aligned not with the
"rule" but with a humility and chastity that seem somehow beyond rule
or performance and with the clear implication that keeping the law
would not do justice to what God desires or deserves, that is, it would be
nothing more than calculable duty. Again, a few sayings later we find
a humorous story of some young brothers who visit a hermit, seeming
to want to gain entry to the law, again much like Kafka's countryman.
When the hermit feeds them outside the appointed schedule and short-
ens his prayer service out of hospitality, they are scandalized and move
on to another hermit, to whom the first sends a veiled message: "Do not
water the vegetables" (Chadwick 1958b: 127, #97). Understanding the
previous host's meaning, the second hermit makes the visitors work and
fast even after their tiring journey and lengthens the prayer services from
night until dawn, so that the miserable brothers eventually sneak away in
the night (Chadwick 1958b: 128). Having thought that they wanted to be
inside the law, on closer inspection they decide otherwise.
Discretion in the Sayings also calls to mind Derrida's notion of the
incalculable, in that discretion and responsibility are portrayed as poten-
tially limitless. The abbess Sarah is recorded as saying, "If I asked God
that all men should be edified in me"if her example would be perfect
and complete"I should be doing penance at the door of everyone,"
a prospect limited only by the world's population, it would seem. "I pray
rather," she said, "that my heart should be pure in all things" (Chadwick
1958b: 121, #74)a prospect at least as limitless as the first or perhaps
the only ground for approaching any number of others in a respectful,
beneficial way. Another saying records one old man's response to the
 Branch: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers 825

question of whether a person is polluted by evil thoughts. Replying

neither affirmatively nor negatively, he answers that "everyone is required
to do according to his capacity" (Chadwick 1958b: 123, #78). He gives
a brief parable to explain his answer, seeming to suggest that people must
do their best not because the standard is variable but because the respon-
sibility for each is truly without bounds, and so all alike must seek the
limit just as all alike fall short of it, though by differing degrees. Perhaps
one of the sternest sayings in the section states tersely, "If a monk knows
a person with whom he would make progress, but in a place where the
life would be hard, he is an atheist if he does not go there" (Chadwick
1958b: 128-129, #103B). The sobering implication here is that to shy
from limitlessly approaching the limit of virtue is to deny the existence of
the excessive goodness and alterity of God, which calls for this limitless
responsibility. And yet it takes discernment to find the path that one can
authentically follow along that trajectory.
In the fourteenth saying on discretion, three old men, one of whom
had a bad reputation, came to Abba Achillas. When the first two asked
him a favor, he refused, but when the last man asked for a fishing net, he
made it gladly. When the first two questioned him about this, he
explained: "If I did not do it for this man, he would say, 'the old man has
heard my reputation and for that reason has refused to make me a net.'
So immediately I set to work with the string, to soothe his soul and
prevent him from being sad" (Chadwick 1958b: 108, #14). The end of
discretionof negotiating between the demands of the law and the needs
of the particular personand of all the works and moral teachings of the
Sayings is love, and the Sayings links the need for discernment to love and
the other's alterity: to discerning the particular needs of the other in
compassion. Thus, it structurally makes sense that the last moral section
of the book is part 17, "Of Charity."11 If discernment ultimately problem-
atizes the quest for the "one rule" that would fulfill and so write off one's
obligation to God and neighbor, then the Sayings points toward that
unnameable, caring, hopeful openness to the other that supersedes law as
charity or love.
In a section as unsettling and uncentered as the one on discretion, the
opening saying of this section references I John 4:18: "Abba Antony said:
'Now I do not fear God, but I love him: for love casteth out fear'" (Chadwick
1958b: 181, #1). The most striking connection among the stories in this

11
Parts 18-22 are made up of supernatural signs, visions, and miscellanies. The degree to which
these sayings are meant to serve as convincing "proofs" of the faith again underline, to my mind, the
abiding ethical, religious tension between faith and truth to which Derrida points in "Faith and
Knowledge."
826 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

section is that, almost wholly without mention of love or charity per se,
what they trace is the notion of a shared life between people, and even of
responsibilityboth goodness and guiltshared and given between
them, out of the freedom that comes from uncertainty. In one story an
older monk with "a clean heart" asks a younger brother to stay with him,
but the younger resists, embarrassed for the old man to know that he is
troubled by lust. After a week of putting him off, he tests the old man by
telling him not just that he had lusted but that he had given in to lust: "
succumbed to a great temptation this week, Abba. When I had gone to
the village on an errand, I lay with a woman.' The old man said: 'Are you
penitent?' And the brother said: 'Yes.' The old man said: will carry half
the burden of the sin with you.' Then the brother said: 'Now I know that
we can stay together.' And they remained together till death parted them"
(Chadwick 1958b: 184, #14). A willingness to share the other's burden
and sinor not to allot responsibility strictly to the agent before the
lawis in this vignette the very grounds for community.
"Of Charity" is full of this kind of sharingand of consuming or
eatingof the good and ill of the other that is at once the opposite of
individual moral responsibility before the law and the height of responsi
bility and love to and for the other. One father advises that in every gift,
even if someone forces you to give it, "let your heart be in the gift"
(Chadwick 1958b: 184, #15). But charity also means learning to receive
the love of the other. When one old man is ill and craves some soft, fresh
bread, one of his brothers travels from Scete to Egypt to sell his stale
bread crusts for fresh bread. Mortified by his friend's sacrifice, the old
man refuses to eat it, saying, "It is the blood of this brother." But the
others beg him, "For God's sake eat, so that his sacrifice is not vain"
(Chadwick 1958b: 184, #17). To echo and revise Derrida, in the Sayings
charity is both giving to eat and learning to be given to eat.
In particular, three concluding stories in "Of Charity" come full circle
from the Sayings' opening question"What rule shall I keep to please
God?"and underline the notion of love as positing and embracing in
faithnot in knowledgea mode of living that reflects shared, intercon
nected care and responsibility for all. The first tells how the elders of one
community would care for young brothers who suffered temptation and
hurt trying out the solitary life: "If they found anyone who had taken
harm, they brought him to a church. A basin was filled with water. Then,
after they had all prayed for the one who was suffering under temptation,
all the monks washed their hands in the basin: and then the water was
poured upon the tempted brother, and he was at once cleansed" (Chadwick
1958b: 186, #21). Not the sinful brother but, rather, the more established
monks wash their hands, as though at once taking on his sin, repenting of
 Branch: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers 827

it, and acknowledging their own. It is also as though the older monks
wash their prayers and good deeds from their handstheir charityand
share them with their brother, literally washing him in them and healing
him. Where Pilate proverbially washes his hands of responsibility for the
crucifixion, in their washing these monks replenish their brother's lacking
responsibility with their own.
This moving story is followed immediately by one of the funniest in the
collection, one that deals with the concept of self and possession at the core
of law and disputation that is the primary hindrance to this shared life:

Two old men lived together for many years without a quarrel. One said
to the other: "Let us have one quarrel with each other, as is the way of
men." And the other answered: "I do not know how a quarrel happens."
And the first said: "Look, I put a tile between us, and I say, That's mine.
Then you say, No, it's mine. That is how you begin a quarrel."
So they put a tile between them, and one of them said: "That's mine."
And the other said: "No; it's mine." And he answered, "Yes, it is yours.
Take it away." And they went away unable to argue with each other.
(Chadwick 1958b: 186, #22)

Coming on the heels of the previous vignette, this exchange highlights not
only love's embrace of shared life but alsoby the same logic that "Eating
Well" begins as a discussion of "Who comes after the subject?"the prob-
lems and even the silliness of imagining possessive, private selfhood at all.
The last story in "Of Charity" is both particularly beautiful and
grotesque: "There was a brother who served one of the fathers. The old
man's body happened to be badly hurt, and evil-smelling pus flowed out
of the wound. The serving brother thought to himself: 'Get out of here.
You cannot bear the smell of gangrene.' To quell the thought, he took a
bowl, washed the wound, and kept the water which he used: and when-
ever he was thirsty, he drank from it" (Chadwick 1958b: 186, #25). In this
haunting tale the younger brother physically realizes to himself that to
think of running away from the other is the same as drinking the gangren-
ous pusas taking into himself whatever disease, problem, or unseem-
liness it is that he allows to drive him away from the other. The young
monk also goes on to realize that it is not even enough to serve another
while keeping an interior distance from his abjection: "But the thought
began to trouble him again, saying to him: 'If you will not go away, at
least do not drink this pus.' The brother struggled away with endurance,
and went on drinking the washing water. And God saw his charity as he
ministered to the old man; and God turned the washing water into the
purest water, and by some unseen means healed the old man" (Chadwick
1958b: 186-187, #25). Literally and abjectly embodied in this saying,
828 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

charity means taking the sickness and suffering of the other into oneself,
not turning away from the other in disgust or perceived threat. Where the
law is impersonal, constructed yet masking this construction in mystical
"authority," ever delayed and denying presence, charity is here abjectly
present to the unknown, shocking foreignness of the other, plagued with
anxiety and uncertainty even as it struggles to stay and care for the other,
without any guarantee of healing or of itself not being compromised.

SETTING OUT THE LAMP: RELIGION

BETWEEN CRITIQUE AND FAITH
In the Sayings, then, goodness is about what we might think of as a
deconstructive structure of ceaseless critique and self-questioning in the
quest for right relations to the other, wandering about in the desert in the
desert, a sort of ethical, spiritual uncertainty, faced with relations to the
other unguaranteed by the law or rule that it set out in search of. But
goodness does not rest simply in the deconstructive movement of
critiquing the self or in a stoic achievement of eradicating all self-need or
desire, which would be another form of totality or mastery (the selfs
total mastery of its desire) and another form of law. Nor is it even in the
perfect discernment of what it is to love the other. In the Sayings good-
ness is also about the uncertainty of approaching the other with the guilt,
weaknesses, and needs that one is powerless to eradicate beforehand: it is
about giving as well as receiving well in lived, particular relation and
interaction with others who, human or divine, are and remain truly other
and on whom one calls, always acknowledging their room unpredictably
to respond or to remain silent. How does one provide this room for the
other to act freely and to be perceived in his or her alterity? One of the
longest and most moving stories in the Sayings tells of "a very old hermit,
of saintly life," who was tempted to go into town by the virtuous thought
that he should be helping others. In the city he committed fornication,
and on the brink of throwing himself into the river in despair, finally "at
the last moment he found his right mind again" and went back to his cell
and imposed a harsh year-long penance on himself:12 "He fasted, and

12
Like so many others in the Sayings, this vignette brings up the question of Christian sexual
ethics: on one hand, the problem of seeing all sexual contact as sinful (even in marriage, if one leaves
the monastery for it [see Chadwick 1958b: 70-71, #34]) and, on the other, the possibility of seeing
sexuality as the fullest sort of openness to the other. To take up the debate as to whether the
Christian stand against fornication in the ancient world was or was not an ethical advance in its
historical context is beyond the scope of this article. For a fascinating account of the medieval female
Christian mystic Hadewijch and her writings as portraying sexuality as the best metaphor for mutual
relations with and enjoyment of God, see Milhaven 1993,1995.
 Branch: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers 829

watched, and became thin with his austerity; and still he did not think he
had made fit penance or satisfaction" (Chadwick 1958b: 76). The other
monks were scandalized by his penance because they had thought him
such a holy man, and like Abraham in Kierkegaard's telling, "he found no
means of explaining himself to them" (Chadwick 1958b: 76, #41):

For a whole year he fasted rigidly, and did penance. On Easter Eve, he
took a new lamp and put it on a new pot, and covered it with a lid. At
evening he stood up to pray, and said, "Merciful, pitying Lord . . . I flee
to thee . . . Thou, Lord, who pitiest even the wicked, even the pitiless,
thou who commanded us to show mercy to our neighbors, have mercy
upon me humbled before thee. With thee nothing is impossible: for in
the mouth of hell my soul was scattered like dust. Have pity on thy
creation because thou art kind and merciful, thou who wilt on the day of
resurrection raise up even bodies that are not. Hear me, O Lord, for my
spirit has failed, and my soul is wretched. I have polluted my body, and
now cannot live, because I did not believe. Look at my penitence and
forgive my sin, a sin that was double because I despaired. Send life into
me, for I am contrite: and light this lamp with thy fire. So I may be
enabled to receive confidence in thy mercy and pardon, to keep thy
commandments, to remain in thy fear, to serve thee more faithfully than
before, for the rest of the span of my life which thou hast allotted to me."
(Chadwick 1958b: 76)

The monk prays and weeps, lifts the lid, and finding the lamp unlit,
weeps and prays again and finds the lamp still unlit:

When he had prayed three times, God heard his prayer. He rose up and
found the lamp burning brightly. And his heart leapt with hope, and
happiness, and he worshipped God's grace who had thus forgiven his
sins, and answered his soul's prayer. And he said: "I thank thee, O Lord,
that thou hast pitied me who am unworthy to live in this world, and hast
given me confidence by this great new sign of thy power; thou art merci-
ful to spare the souls which thou createsi. " He was still praying thus
when the dawn came. And forgetting his need for food, he rejoiced in
the Lord. All his life he kept that lamp alight, pouring in oil from the top
to prevent it going out. And so, once again, God's Spirit dwelt within
him, and he was famous among all the monks, and showed humility and
joy in his praise and thanksgiving to God. A few days before his death it
was revealed to him how he should pass to another life. (Chadwick
1958b: 76-77)

In this story the monk's penance and prayer flesh out the paradox of
calculation and the incalculable. The monk feels that even a great penance
is not as much as is owed; there is obligation to the other, but there is no
830 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

fulfilling or finishing of that obligation. But the life in him and the light
in the lamp are both a gift from God, who apparently is not interested in
accounting or a predictable "demand and answer"or just in his repent
ant, deconstructive self-questioningbut, rather, in being approached
with a belief in his kindness, in responding to a person's prayer, and in
being responded to again in turn by the hermit, tending his lamp each
day with happiness.
Hearkening back to the earlier discussion of narrative becoming its
own sort of law, a binding religious or ethical precedent, a reader may
approach this story in various ways, as a rule for repentance or as a chal
lenge to attempt the personal, unique, radical faith that the hermit has in
the goodness of God in his exact scenario. And it is this radical sort of
faith in the goodness of the other, across an abyss of uncertainty, that the
charity section of the Sayings ends with. Near its end is a brief dictum:
"An old man said: never wanted a work to be useful to me while causing
loss to my brother: for I have this hope, that what helps my brother will
bring fruit to me'" (Chadwick 1958b: 186, #24). At first glance this may
seem a self-centered altruism, but in the context of the surrounding
stories it expresses hope, amid uncertainty, for a shared, common life
between them, and it points to this as faith, as a decision to hope: a belief
investment made in exactly the sort of lack of knowledgethe "night of
non-knowledge and non-rule"that predicates a good or just act for
Derrida. The opportunity for the hermit's lamp to be lit lies in his act of
placing it there, in his approach to God believing that he is merciful and
kind, in one brother looking at the other and believing that their lives
and ultimate good are intertwined.
This movement toward love and good relation in the Sayings is not
made solely by rational self-critique but at some point also by hope and
faith: not by deconstruction down to some bedrock, undeconstructible,
propositional truthitself a fantasy of being somehow inside the law or
naturebut ultimately, necessarily, by radical construction in the "night
of non-knowledge and non-rule." In this night one can approach the
other in suspicious questioning or guilty fearwhich may very likely
foreclose the very possibility of perceiving the other's kindness, even if it
were offered. Approaching the other expecting only death for one's sins is
to approach by the logic of the law and its rational calculation. To
approach the other in faith, however, setting out a lamp and waiting,
hoping for desired forgiveness, enlightening response and ongoing
relations that cannot be a matter of any mere obligation to forgive, is
a sort of imaginative positing of the goodness of the other and what that
goodness would look like in one's particular case, which is both pre
sumptive in the face of one's lack of knowledge and the other's alterity
 Branch: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers 831

and the only grounds for mutual relations that are paradoxically both
free and circumscribed by the other.
In The Sayings of the Desert Fathers and the desert in the desert, one
does not find the law that will guarantee salvation or right relations to the
other; one is left to "find what your soul wills in following God's will"
(Chadwick 1958b: 39, #11). Amid a contradictory, undecidable collection
of others and their words and narratives, all undistinguishable under the
name of the desert "fathers" and mothers, of saints and hagiography, the
Sayings leaves the reader to find in his or her own particular life the lack,
need, guilt, or desire that prompts him or her to approach the other in
fear, vulnerability, repentance, or guilt and yet in hope, with an emblem
for that hope of shared life and subjectivitythe setting out of what sort
of lamp, as it wereas an ever undecidable and unique matter of infinite
particularity. Setting out the lamp is a religious, not a deconstructive,
movement made possible, though, by the same uncertainty. Through the
emblem of this gesture the Sayings points to this sort of faith as much as
to deconstructive questioning as constitutive of right relations with the
other, made possible by radical contingency and uncertainty, by the
"desert in the desert.

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