Nothing of One’s Own

The messenger had made the journey to the Scetis desert in vain. He brought an old monk a will: a senator relative had just died, leaving him a vast inheritance. The monk first wanted to tear up the document; the officer threw himself at his feet—his life depended on it—and begged him not to. Then Arsenius answered with a single sentence and sent the man away with the will untouched.

How could he have made me his heir, having died only recently, while I myself have been dead for a long time?

The answer is no play on words. Arsenius considers himself dead to the world, and the dead inherit nothing. The inheritance, searching for him, knocked at an address no one inhabits.

This destitution is no endured deprivation: it is a chosen withdrawal, a clean break with the age. The monk refuses fortune not because he has lost taste for it—he had known it better than most—but because he has already moved beyond the reach of what it promises.

Behind Arsenius’s refusal lies an older gesture, the one that paved the way. Anthony, young, inherits considerable wealth from his parents. One morning in church, he hears the Gospel read as if addressed to him alone and immediately goes out to conform to it.

He abandoned a hundred and fifty acres of excellent land to the villagers and sold his furniture, giving the money to the poor, keeping only a portion for a young sister he had.

The desert path opens with an emptying hand. The Greeks had a word for this discipline: aktēmosynē, non-possession—not the poverty one endures, but that which one chooses, the first of ascetic practices. To hold nothing as one’s own, so that nothing holds you, and the heart, lightened, turns wholly elsewhere. The movement is outward: the thing must leave the hand. One gives—to the village, to the poor—and one departs.

A Stoic master offers a very different path to the same freedom. Epictetus, a freed slave, asks neither that one give away one’s lands nor that one leave them. He keeps the use of things; what he shifts is a single word—the one spoken when they depart.

Never say of anything, ‘I have lost it,’ but ‘I have returned it.’ Your child is dead? You have returned him. Your wife is dead? You have returned her. ‘My land was taken from me.’ Yet another thing you have returned. ‘But it was a wicked man who took it.’ What does it matter by whose hands the giver reclaims what was given? As long as it is left to you, use it as something not your own, as travelers use an inn.

Nothing, for him, was ever truly one’s own. The world lends; when it takes back, the right word is not “lose” but “return.” The traveler, at the inn, uses the bed and the fire without calling anything his own, and leaves without mourning. The Stoic remains in the world, his hands sometimes full; what loosens is the judgment, the silent label—“mine”—that he refuses to attach to things. His distinction between what depends on us and what does not places possessions on the side of the foreign: one uses them, one does not identify with them.

Why does the monk give away what the Stoic keeps?

Because they sever the same knot from two ends. Anthony fears that the thing kept will in turn keep him: he removes it. Epictetus holds the thing harmless so long as judgment remains sound: he keeps it and corrects the judgment. One acts on the object, the other on the mind. The first empties the inn; the second sleeps there without unpacking. The two paths do not meet along the way: the monk would not recognize the sage who keeps his fields, and the sage needs no God to be free.

Yet they ascend to the same summit. What weighs on a life is not the object, but the grip—the conviction that it is mine, and that losing it would be losing oneself. Anthony opens his hand until it holds nothing; Epictetus loosens the grip while the hand remains full. He who has given everything and he who keeps the use of everything sleep the same sleep: neither watches for the thief, for in neither cell is anything, in the end, one’s own. To empty the room or to hold nothing in it as one’s own: two gestures for a single deliverance, not to be possessed by what one possesses.

The question the desert leaves is not one of quantity—how much one holds—but of a meaning that reverses: at what point has what one possesses, silently, begun to possess you?

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