THE DESERT FATHERS
BENEDICTA WARD is a Reader in the History of Christian Spirituality in the University of Oxford; she teaches for the Faculty of Theology and is a Supernumerary Fellow of Harris Manchester College. She has written six books on early monasticism and five on aspects of the Middle Ages, including her most recent monograph, High King of Heaven: Aspects of Early English Spirituality. She is a member of the Anglican religious community of the Sisters of the Love of God.
Translated and with an Introduction by
BENEDICTA WARD
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 2003
1
Copyright © Benedicta Ward, 2003
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 978–0–141–90700–0
Introduction |
Further Reading |
A Note on the Text |
THE DESERT FATHERS |
1 PROGRESS IN PERFECTION |
2 QUIET |
3 COMPUNCTION |
4 SELF-CONTROL |
5 LUST |
6 POSSESSING NOTHING |
7 FORTITUDE |
8 NOTHING DONE FOR SHOW |
9 NON-JUDGEMENT |
10 DISCRETION |
11 SOBER LIVING |
12 UNCEASING PRAYER |
13 HOSPITALITY |
14 OBEDIENCE |
15 HUMILITY |
16 PATIENCE |
17 CHARITY |
18 VISIONS |
Some Names from the Text |
The Mediterranean, the ‘sea among the lands’, was called in the ancient world ‘mare nostrum’, ‘our sea’, not only because it was the main means of communication but also because it provided the physical and cultural identity of the classical world: as Socrates said, ‘We live round the sea like ants and frogs round a pond.’1 The same was true of the early church, founded in Jerusalem at the eastern end of ‘our sea’ but, expanding around it, especially after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, into the Mediterranean-centred world of the Roman Empire. Here, the southern coastline of the Mediterranean, that is, North Africa and especially Egypt, already major factors in Roman civilization as sources of both wealth and of learning, rapidly became of central importance for Christians. These areas produced major accounts of martyrdom such as that of Perpetua and Felicity,2 engendered the first official heresy of Donatism,3 were the centre for the great enterprise of combining the Gospel of revelation with Greek philosophy,4 and also produced the dominant spiritual ideals of the ancient and medieval worlds in monasticism. Alongside Antioch and Rome, Alexandria was one of the three major Christian cities of the ancient world, with its great library and its patriarch, held to be the successor of Peter through his disciple Mark, and its tradition of links with Christ himself in the stories of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt (Matt. 2:13–15). Here the words of the Gospel flourished, both in the towns and in the villages, forming an energetic and enterprising section of the Christian church.
Detachment from selfish concerns was always of the essence for Christianity. The invitation of Jesus to the young ruler, ‘Go, sell all that you have… and come and follow me’ (Luke 18:22) provided a central theme for Christians in the first three centuries; it was seen as the most direct way of discipleship, the surest way to learn what it meant to be with Jesus before the face of the Father. This sense of detachment from this world had also an eschatological dimension; the phrase ‘Maranatha, even so come, Lord Jesus’ (Rev. 22:20) was not a vague hope but an immediate and joyful expectation; ‘Let grace come and this world pass away,’ Christians said in their corporate prayer at the Eucharist.5 There were many ways in which Christians lived out the other-worldly focus expressed in the last verse of the New Testament, but one major way of living constantly in that expectation was by the physical withdrawal from worldly life of the monks: a visitor to Egypt from Palestine wrote of the hermits there in the fourth century:
One can see them in the desert waiting for Christ as loyal sons watching for their father… There is only the expectation of the coming of Christ in the singing of hymns… There is no town or village in Egypt and the Thebaid which is not surrounded by hermitages as if by walls.6
This idea of the immediate return of Christ and the end of the world was given a sharper edge by the fact of living in the first three centuries of the Christian era under the shadow of general disapproval and intermittent persecution. In the Roman Empire Christians were not admired; they were called atheists because they did not worship the gods of the city, and therefore they lived on the edge of political society. The world-renouncing perspective of waiting for the coming of the Lord was maintained even under threat of death and found expression especially in the accounts of those who died rather than compromise.7 By the beginning of the third century this totality of commitment was seen also in the lives of ascetics, that is, those who undertook a poor and celibate life, lived daily and in detail in the light of the cross of Christ in the expectation of the coming of the Lord. These men and women were not trying to adopt the way of life professionally called ‘monastic’; rather, they naturally lived in a way that set them free to wait in expectation of entering into, like the apostles and martyrs, the full life of the Spirit of God.
At first this was done in the urban centres of Christianity, but gradually a need for a more absolute retirement for this way of life caused people to seek places of solitude away from social, political and economic demands. This was given a further impetus with the end of persecution at the beginning of the fourth century under the first Christian emperor, Constantine, when the church, as a recognized and legal institution, began to turn world-forsaking Christians into respectable citizens of this world. Many who found the new ways of Christian life alien knew themselves called to continue to live in an eschatological dimension that they could now only find outside the cities. The places especially used in this way were the deserts of Syria, Palestine and above all Egypt.8 Here earnest and devoted Christians were apart from the immediate demands of society, family and church organization; even the duties of care for the poor, the sick, and the needy were at a remove from their daily life. They were free to concentrate most of all on exploring the motives of conduct and thought within themselves so that what was disordered could be brought to light and redeemed by encounter with the forgiveness of God. Instead of dealing with the manifestations of evil in daily life, they were concerned with the source of sin in the human heart. Since they were considered to be representatives of all creation, it was this aspect of their lives which caused them to be regarded as intercessors for all humanity.
The early Christian ideal of standing where Christ stands was gradually combined with a much older and essentially dualist way of life, common to all religions, that is, the way of the monk, the monos, ‘the one’, who lived not in company with another but alone before God. Thus there emerged in the third, fourth and fifth centuries a Christian version of the ancient form of religious life known as monasticism. These new monks combined the early ways of Christianity with similar monastic practices such as life-long celibacy, fasting, solitude, silence, vigil, prayer and poverty. It is these men and women who have become known as the ‘desert fathers’, as distinct from the early Christian theologians who were known as ‘fathers of the church’. It is a term which suggests that their influence was as vital to Christian life as the theology of the ‘fathers’ but that it grew out of the desert and solitude, rather than out of the debates of councils and bishops.
These men and women lived alone as hermits, or with disciples living near by, or, as training became more urgent, in larger groups in monasteries. At the beginning this was a way of life largely unstructured by theological reflection. These people were ordinary Christians who chose to live out their evangelical commitment in terms of the monastic way of life, and in doing so they transformed both Christianity and monasticism in both its details and its ideology. Most of the first Christian monks in Egypt were neither clerics nor scholars; they were laymen, uneducated peasants, like Apollo who was a shepherd, or itinerant traders like Macarius, though there were also some, like the Roman nobleman Arsenius and the scholar Evagrius, who were learned in the classics and sophisticated in behaviour.9
Living in solitude, or with a few companions, the desert fathers, whatever their background, undertook a lifestyle of great simplicity. They did not at first wear a specifically monastic dress but rather the ordinary clothes of a working man in Egypt. Some lived in caves, others built small bare huts for themselves, out of sight of one another but within reasonable reach of water. There they meditated on as much of the Bible as they knew by heart, especially the psalms, absorbing it through memory into their physical being and exploring themselves in its light more deeply all the time. They undertook simple repetitive tasks such as rope-making or basket-weaving, so that they could earn their living without distraction and not have to leave their cells. This stability of remaining in one place was a vital part of their asceticism: ‘Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything’ they said.10 Sometimes a newcomer would live near a more experienced monk, or three or four might live as a group; in some parts of Egypt, larger groups were formed round a well-respected guide, and these evolved a corporate life of liturgical prayer, work and shared meals. After the first generation had died, there was an increasing need for this kind of group monasticism, with explicit teaching and training for newcomers, care for the old and a more clearly formulated external organization and discipline that developed into the great religious houses of the monastic tradition.
The desert fathers saw themselves as poor men, as sinners in need of mercy, as those who were not strong enough to endure the friction of worldly life. But the hermits were seen by outsiders as holy men, nearer to heaven than earth, and therefore available as intercessors: as a visitor wrote, ‘These are they by whom the world is kept in being.’11 What visitors to Egypt most noticed was that the hermits lived a life of physical hardship, which those who came from a more gentle world thought was beyond the capacity of most. Some of the monastic extremes of physical discipline, such as going to the limits of existence with as little sleep, food, drink and companionship as possible, were a cause for wonder, then and later, not always of a complimentary kind.12 But undertaking dramatic feats of asceticism was not, in fact, the way of life favoured by the majority of the monks. In the enthusiasm of the first years they experimented with many kinds of ascetic practices, but they soon realized that detachment from self could be explored better by methods that were less extreme and could therefore be sustained. There is a story in this collection that shows the uninstructed enthusiasm of some and its relation to the general understanding of life, about two monks who understood literally the saying of Christ ‘if your right hand offend you, cut it off’ (Matt. 5:30). They therefore took the extreme step of castrating themselves. Thinking this was admirable, they asked for official approval from both bishops and monks and were dismayed when it was universally refused.13 Christianity in the desert was not about death but about new life. Moreover, the monks were careful to note that external ascetical practices might lead to the worst sin of all, pride, and they therefore judged it more prudent to shun external displays in favour of equally arduous but less dramatic ways of Christian living.
The picture that emerges from these primitive sources is of entirely, indeed ruthlessly, committed but sensible men and women, learning to live with nature and with others in a harmony that grew out of a prayed life, where the command of St Paul to ‘pray without ceasing’ (1 Thess. 5:17) had gradually become the framework of each day and night. This centre of prayer to God affected their relationships with both the created world and other people. The natural world was not to them an area for sentimental or romantic self-indulgence but the place where the presence of God was revealed through their new life in Christ. There are many stories in these collections about the good relationship of the hermits with animals, but these are not instances of sentimentality. They are rather part of a theology that saw the initial relationship of Adam with creation as disrupted by his sin, and here being restored in Christ, the second Adam, with the result that those who shared in the life of Christ could again name and control creation as its head. Typical of such stories is the account of how Macarius healed the blind cubs of a hyena, but extracted a promise from her not to kill sheep any longer,14 or of Bes, renowned for his gentleness to all creation but who when a hippopotamus ravaged the district asked it politely to go somewhere else.15 The animals encountered were at times described under the poetic images of the classical world, which suggests that redemptive love extended back into the past. Antony the Great encountered two such creatures on his way to visit the hermit Paul:
He caught sight of a creature who was half man and half horse, to which the poets have given the name of Hippocentaur. At the sight of it he protected himself by making the life-giving sign on his own forehead, and said, ‘Hey you, where does the servant of God live?’ The creature… indicated a desire for friendly communication. Stretching out his right hand he indicated the route that Antony was seeking.
In the next valley Antony met a weeping fawn, who brought him food and asked for his prayers: Antony also wept for wonder that the light of Christ had touched these creatures with new life and glory.16
With the created world the hermits were firm and reverent but with themselves they were unrelentingly severe since they knew, none better, their own weaknesses:
When Cyrus of Alexandria was asked about the temptation of lust, he said, ‘If you are not tempted, you have no hope; if you are not tempted, it is because you are sinning. The man who does not fight sin at the stage of temptation is sinning already in his body. The man who is sinning in his flesh has no trouble from temptation.’17
There was no gentleness about the conduct of their own lifestyle but their approach to others was different. They believed always in the sincerity of the commitment of each one and therefore behaved to each other in ways that would help and encourage them in the life they had chosen. If there was failure or weakness in anyone, it was at once understood that this was not what that person really desired, and therefore the weak were not blamed but encouraged to start again. Above all, they did not judge one another:
They said of Macarius the Great that he became as it is written a god upon earth, because just as God protects the world, so Macarius would cover the faults which he saw, as though he did not see them, and those which he heard, as though he did not hear them.18
When some monks planned to discipline a brother who was guilty of sin, they were reminded of this basic rule of non-judgement by the acted parable of one of the most loved and respected of the hermits:
They assembled the brothers, and sent a message to Moses telling him to come. But he would not come. Then the presbyter sent again saying, ‘Come, for the gathering of monks is waiting for you.’ Moses got up and went. He took with him an old basket which he filled with sand and carried it on his back. They went to meet him and said, ‘What does this mean, abba?’ He said, ‘My sins run out behind me and I do not see them and I have come here today to judge another.’19
Their love for each other therefore was expressed in leaving each other free for their chosen way of life, though even at times admitting ruefully that this distancing was not easy. Curiosity about each other could get the better of them, as, for instance, when two rather delicate young men came asking to live as monks in a cell near Macarius. When he talked about them later, he said that he had reluctantly agreed to help them with bare necessities only, thinking this would test and discourage them, but ‘they with patience did all that I had told them and for three years they did not come to see me.’ Macarius, telling the story against himself, was overcome with curiosity about these independent strangers: ‘I wrestled with my thoughts, thinking, what is their way of life? Why do they not come to ask me about their thoughts?’ and in the end he went to visit them to see what they were doing.20
The life was hard and temptation severe, but when as a young monk Moses thought he could endure it no longer, Isidore whom he consulted did not suggest that he abandoned or alleviated his chosen way of life; instead:
He took him out on the terrace and said to him, ‘Look towards the west’; he looked to the west and saw hordes of demons flying about and making a noise before launching an attack. Then he said, ‘Look towards the east’; he turned and saw an innumerable multitude of holy angels shining with glory. Isidore said, ‘Those who are with us are more in number than those that are against us.’21
The desert fathers showed by simple but practical living that the gospel is both true and real, not intellectually difficult or for a rich or clever select few, but open for all who in sincerity wanted it. The stories about women who had been prostitutes and had been converted and then lived the rest of their lives in the desert as penitents especially illustrated this fact.22 In particular the story of Mary of Egypt, a prostitute for many years in Alexandria, who changed her life completely and lived alone in the deserts of Palestine with no help or counsel of any sort, showed the possibilities open to anyone willing to respond to the call of God. In later versions of this collection, the story of the prostitute Thais was sometimes included to illustrate this fact.23
Another aspect of their choice of lifestyle was the desire of the hermits to be without material possessions and so freed from self and capable of charity towards all. When Arsenius was told that a relation had died and made him his heir he wanted to tear up the will, saying ‘I was dead long before this senator who has just died’.24 Again and again, outsiders who wanted to alleviate the simplicity and austerity of their way of life found no one ready to receive the money or goods offered. Thieves were therefore no threat, partly because the hermits had nothing worth stealing but also because they wanted to have less not more:
When Macarius was living in Egypt, one day he came across a man who had brought a donkey to his cell and was stealing his possessions. As though he was a passer-by who did not live there, he went up to the thief and helped him to load the beast, and sent him peaceably on his way, saying to himself, ‘We brought nothing into this world (1 Tim. 6:7) but the Lord gave; as he willed, so it is done: blessed be the Lord in all things.’25
Life in the desert was austere and relentlessly harsh but the hermits’ attitude was not one of grim endurance. There is a vein of humour in these stories, some of it unconscious but some of it deliberate, as, for instance, in the account of the two brothers who lived without quarrelling:
Two hermits lived together for many years without a quarrel. One said to the other, ‘Let’s have a quarrel with each other, as is the way of men.’ The other answered, ‘I don’t know how a quarrel happens.’ The first said, ‘Look here, I put a brick 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 brick between them, and one of them said, ‘That’s mine.’ The other said, ‘No; it’s mine.’ He answered, ‘Yes, it’s yours. Take it away.’ They were unable to argue with each other.26
Moses the Black, who came from a different part of Africa, was one of the most revered of the hermits; he was a warm and loving man and the affection in which he was held was expressed at times by teasing him about the colour of his skin; he returned these comments with no resentment but with good humour: ‘Black outside’, he would say, ‘but white inside.’ When a party of visitors criticized a hermit, thinking the generous welcome he had given them suggested that he always lived like that, he gave them a message to the next hermit they were to visit saying, ‘Do not water the vegetables,’ with the result that their next host made no preparation for them, and they soon found the ordinary way of hermit life there beyond what they could stand.27 Even Antony the Great knew that relaxation matters especially within a severe way of life:
A hunter happened to come by and saw Antony talking in a relaxed way with the brothers, and he was shocked. The hermit wanted to show him how we should sometimes be less austere for the sake of the brothers, and said to him, ‘Put an arrow in your bow, and draw it.’ He did so, and Antony said, ‘Draw it further’ and he drew it further. He said again, ‘Draw it yet further,’ and he drew it some more. Then the hunter said to him, ‘If I draw it too far, the bow will snap.’ Antony answered, ‘So it is with God’s work. If we always go to excess, the brothers quickly become exhausted. It is sometimes best not to be rigid.’28
When Poemen was asked how he dealt with any brother who fell asleep during public prayer, he replied, ‘I put his head upon my knees and help him to rest.’29
The fame of the desert fathers spread rapidly and visitors came to see this wonder. This presented a problem for those who had chosen solitude and here the stories show their prudence and common sense in receiving the ones who came. Serious visitors would be received and helped but inquisitive tourists would be urged to go elsewhere. It was no use receiving the world into the hermitage when to do so would destroy it. It is here that the humility of the hermits was most prominent; they fled from praise and attention as from fire because pride, the self-consciousness that undermines simplicity, was their chief enemy. Their external asceticism was what attracted notice, but such things could be achieved by human or even diabolical effort; that was not the inner essence of their life:
Macarius was once returning to his cell from the marsh carrying palm-leaves. The devil met him by the way, with a sickle, and wanted to run him through with it but he could not. The devil said, ‘Macarius, I suffer a lot of violence from you, for I can’t overcome you. For whatever you do, I do also. If you fast, I eat nothing; if you keep watch, I get no sleep. There is only one quality in which you surpass me.’ Macarius said to him, ‘What is that?’ The devil answered, ‘Your humility; that is why I cannot prevail against you.’30
The same humble self-deprecation was evident in their attitude to extraordinary gifts of prayer. They had very little to say about visions and wonders, and indeed rejected them outright:
The devil appeared to a monk disguised as an angel of light, and said to him, ‘I am the angel Gabriel, and I have been sent to you.’ But the monk said, ‘Are you sure you weren’t sent to someone else? I am not worthy to have an angel sent to me.’ At that the devil vanished.31
These hermits were not aiming at or expecting mystical experience in this world as a result of their efforts. They followed a specific path of self-knowledge in the light of God that would lead them eventually into the redeemed life of the friends of God, only fully realized after death. They were engaged in the work of prayer and self-knowledge, and were not concerned with either the service of others or with the sacramental life of the church. They resisted ordination for fear of conceit; those monks who were unwillingly ordained might choose never to exercise their ministry at all.32 Though they all knew the Bible by heart and made it the basis of their meditation, the majority could not read or write and those who could learned to be cautious about relying on this ability in any way that would make them despise others or neglect the interiority of the Scriptures. They affirmed that it was the content of the Gospel that they were to practise; they were not to be distracted by a learning that stayed with the surface meaning and might encourage them to both possessiveness and boastfulness. The well-educated Arsenius was questioned about his habit of consulting the simple Egyptian peasant-monks:
‘How is it that you with such a good Latin and Greek education ask this peasant about your thoughts?’ He replied, ‘I have indeed been taught Latin and Greek but I do not know even the alphabet of this peasant.’33
Their work was to live in stillness and know themselves thoroughly, so that the redemption of Christ might come upon their whole lives from beginning to end; they would live therefore at the limits of nature, and of human endurance, because of the glory ahead of them; and it is in this positive perspective that their asceticism is best understood. They did not talk, not because they hated conversation, but because they wanted to listen intently to the voice of God in silence; they did not dislike eating, but were feeding on the Word of God so that they did not have room for earthly food or time to bother with it; they did not avoid company because it bored them, but, as one of them said, ‘I cannot be with you and with God.’34 It was not a dislike of sleep that made them keep vigil, but an eager and longing attitude of waiting for the coming of Christ:
On Saturday evening preparing for the glory of Sunday, Arsenius would turn his back on the sun and stretch out his hands in prayer towards heaven till once again the sun shone on his face.35
Living at the limits of the use of clothing, shelter, food and drink, the hermits needed very little. They chose to do simple repetitive work in their cells, such as weaving baskets, and the results were sold in the villages in return for the bare essentials of life in the harsh desert. This sense of living at the limits extended to their prayer towards God for mankind. They were living on the boundaries between human and animal, between the cultivated lands and the wilderness, between angels and men, which made them mediators with God for all creation. It is in this perspective that it is possible to understand an extremist such as Simon Stylites, who stood for years on top of a pillar, suspended between heaven and earth, a living icon of the place of the monk as part of the intercession of Christ.36
The bright vigour and delight of the early days of the first monks was in fact circumscribed; the end of the monastic way of life in Egypt came with the attacks of nomadic tribesmen from the western desert, known as Mazices, who from 407 onwards devastated Egypt. But the ideal of the hermit-life, whether lived out alone or near others, had already spread away from the Mediterranean into northern Europe, through both written and verbal accounts of visitors to the hermits, leading to the formation of groups of monks as well as hermits. Both the difference of climate and of political ethos caused adaptations of the practical way of life for the northern monks, but the calling remained the same.
The influence of the hermits did not remain only within the context of monasteries themselves. Monasticism was a major influence in shaping European society and because the roots of its spirituality were to be found in the early days of Egyptian experimentation, medieval Christendom inherited an attraction for the desert. The desert fathers’ stories and sayings were recorded in the fourth century as a special but vital aspect of Christian life in the early church. They were widely read and the influence of these texts could be dramatic. For instance, in the year 386 a young man was talking with some companions in a private garden in Milan, when visitors arrived who described how two of their friends in the Imperial Civil Service had left the world recently in order to become monks after reading about the way of life of Antony of Egypt, the most famous of the desert fathers. Unspeakably moved, their host left them, and, as he wrote later:
I flung myself down beneath a fig tree and gave way to tears… all at once I heard the singsong voice of a child, ‘Take it and read it, take it and read it’… I opened the book of the Scriptures and read the first passage my eye fell on, for I had heard the story of Antony, and I remembered how he happened to go into a church while the Gospel was being read and taken it as a counsel addressed to himself when he heard the words, ‘Go and sell all that you have and give to the poor and come and follow me.’37
He exclaimed, ‘What is the meaning of this story? These men have none of our education and yet they stand up and storm the gates of heaven’.38 In this way, the story of an uneducated Egyptian peasant farmer and his adoption of solitude in the desert for life proved the turning point in the conversion of Augustine, the formative theologian of Europe.
Augustine was not alone in being deeply affected by stories from the deserts of Egypt. Jerome, Paula, Melania and Rufinus visited the Egyptian hermits before imitating their way of life in Bethlehem, and Postumianus claimed to have been there before returning to Tours and the monastery of St Martin. Most of those who either saw the hermits or read about them were positively impressed, but there were others who were astonished but appalled: Rutilius Namantianus, for instance, wrote of a friend who had gone into the desert as:
Driven by the furies out from men and lands,
A credulous exile skulking in the dark
Thinking, poor fool, that heaven feeds on filth.39
But the attraction of the radical simplicity of response to God in the desert continued to move and inspire; by 300, in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus alone there were said to be ‘ten thousand monks and twenty thousand nuns’.40 The desert, they said, had become a city because of the number of the monks living there. After the fourth century the texts describing early hermits and monks circulated widely and were constantly referred to as wisdom both well known and reliable. To take a few instances at random: in the sixth century, the Rule of St Benedict, the monastic pattern most followed in Western Europe, referred explicitly to the traditions of the Sayings of the Fathers and the Conferences of Cassian as the basis for monastic life.41 When in the eighth century Felix wrote the life of the Anglo-Saxon hermit Guthlac of Crowland, he not only relied upon the Life of St Antony in describing Guthlac but attributed his way of life to having ‘read about the solitary life of monks of former days’, and in writing about Guthlac’s temptations he made the devils refer to ‘those famous monks who inhabited Egypt’. Guthlac was ‘walking with Christ’ like Arsenius, Macarius and Antony.42 A contemporary of Guthlac, Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, after a long apprenticeship in a monastery and in a diocese, embraced with simple joy the solitude of hermit life on the island of Farne, where the sea replaced the sands of the first monks as his ‘desert’.43 In the twelfth century, in his letter to Heloise advising her and her sisters about monastic life, Peter Abelard quoted extensively from the Sayings,44 while William St Thierry could find no greater praise for the twelfth century Cistercian monastic reforms than to compare them to the desert fathers.45 The Middle English text of the Ancrene Wisse, written in the twelfth century for the use of a group of women living together in solitude, is filled with quotations from desert texts.46
It is astonishing to realize how this literature, now over one and a half thousand years old, has had a continuing influence far beyond the world in which it was first created. One of the most familiar phrases for late medieval devotion was ‘Naked to follow the naked Jesus’;47 it resounds with all the personal piety of the fifteenth century. But this phrase was not first used in the ethos of Thomas à Kempis and the Brothers of the Common Life, but by one of the most austere of the fourth century fathers of the church, Jerome, writing to the desert monk Rusticus from his cell in Bethlehem, after a lifetime spent in the midst of the world of early desert monasticism.48 This is very often the case: a story or saying that seems entirely appropriate to the medieval or modern setting where it is used, can often be found among the sayings and stories of these first Christian monks. The story told, for instance, in this collection about the monk who woke up his dozing brothers by introducing secular gossip into his theological discourse to them, leads straight to the same story told by a Cistercian abbot in the thirteenth century; the only difference is that there the secular matter the abbot spoke of was King Arthur and his knights.49 Again the story told here of the Protestant-minded monk who did not believe in the real presence of Christ under the forms of bread and wine and needed to be shown the truth by a vision of a child slain on the altar seems to belong to the thirteenth century and the disputes about transubstantiation, but is in fact centuries older.50 This continuity suggests both the profound influence of these texts and also their continuing adaptability, although they emerged from a way of life that seems superficially the antithesis of the modern world.
In the twentieth century, many monastic reforms have referred back specifically to Egypt and the desert fathers. As well as the continued monastic interest in this material from the desert, these Sayings have been translated into many languages and continue to provide spiritual nourishment far beyond the cloister.51 They have inspired poetry, drama, opera and art as well as withdrawal into solitude and prayer. The facts that these early monks were living on the fringes both of civilization and of the institutional church, that they were not scholars or clerics, wealthy or with positions in society but just ordinary people who were sincerely concerned to live out their understanding of the Gospel, are perhaps what make them so universally popular. This is material which has in it an air of eternity, making it available to anyone; as Antony the Great said:
(some) leave home and cross the seas in order to gain an education, but there is no need for us to go away on account of the Kingdom of God nor need we cross the sea in search of virtue. For the Lord has told us, ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’ All that is needed for goodness is that which is within, the human heart.52
1. Plato, Phaedo, tr. by H. Tredennick, p. 90, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, Bollingen Series 71, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
2. ‘The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity’ in H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, pp. 106–32.
3. See W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A movement of protest in Roman North Africa, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
4. For an anthology of texts see Alexandrian Christianity, compiled by J. E. L. Oulton and H. Chadwick, London: SCM Press, 1954. For a general introduction see A. Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. An older general discussion of the main theologians of Alexandria will be found in C. Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886.
5. The Didache, tr. J. B. Lightfoot, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1976, p. 27.
6. The Lives of the Desert Fathers (hereafter Lives), tr. Norman Russell, introduction by B. Ward, London: Mowbray/Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981, p. 50.
7. For texts concerning martyrdom cf. H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, and ‘The Letters of Ignatius’, in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. and tr. Kirsopp Lake, Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann/Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1912.
8. Syria: cf. Theodoret of Syrus, A History of the Monks of Syria, tr. R. Price (with an excellent introduction), Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985. Palestine: for a general introduction see D. Chitty, The Desert a City, Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. Egypt: see vol. 2 of H. G. Evelyn-White, Monasteries of the Wadi ’n Natrûn, 3 vols., New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1926–33.
9. Sayings of the Desert Fathers (hereafter Sayings), tr. B. Ward, London: Mowbray/Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975: Apollo, p. 31; Macarius, pp. 105–16; Arsenius, pp. 7–17; Evagrius, pp. 53–5.
10. This text, 2:9, p. 10.
11. Lives, p. 50.
12. For example, ‘The deserts of the Thebais are now peopled by a race of wild yet submissive fanatics’, E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981, ch. x, p. 425.
13. This text 15:88, pp. 167–9. Also Sayings, Macarius, 11, pp. 109–10.
14. Lives, Macarius, 15, p. 110.
15. Lives, Bes, 3, p. 66; Sayings, Macarius, 32, p. 113.
16. ‘The Life of Paul of Thebes by Jerome’, in Early Christian Writings, tr. C. White, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998, pp. 78–9. See the cover illustration for a picture of this encounter.
17. This text, 5:5, p. 35.
18. Sayings, Macarius, 32, p. 134.
19. Ibid. Moses, 2, pp. 138–9.
20. Ibid. Macarius, 33, p. 135.
21. Ibid. Moses, 1, p. 138.
22. For an introduction to the accounts of these prostitutes, with translations of the texts and comments on them, see Harlots of the Desert, A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources (hereafter Harlots), B. Ward, London: Mowbray/Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987.
23. The story of Thais was sometimes included with this text in section 16, Patience; a translation can be found in Harlots, pp. 76–85.
24. Sayings, Arsenius, 29, p. 14.
25. This text, 16:6, pp. 171–2.
26. Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, tr. B. Ward, Oxford: SLG Press, 1975, No. 221, p. 60; this text, 17:22, p. 181.
27. This text, 10:97, p. 112.
28. Sayings, Antony, 13, pp. 3–4; this text, 10:2, p. 88.
29. Ibid., Poemen, 92, pp. 179–80.
30. Ibid., Macarius, 11, pp. 109–10; this text, 15:26, p. 155.
31. This text, 15:68, p. 164.
32. This text, 15:27, pp. 155–6.
33. Sayings, Arsenius 6, p. 8; this text, 15:7, p. 148.
34. Ibid. 13, p. 9; this text, 17:5, p. 176.
35. Ibid. Arsenius 30, p. 12; this text, 12:1, p. 130.
36. For Simon Stylites, cf. Theodoret, A History of the Monks of Syria, ch. 26, pp. 160–77.
37. St Augustine, Confessions, tr. William Watts, Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann/Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989, bk 8, ch. 12, p. 463.
38. Ibid. ch. 8, p. 443.
39. Rutilius Namantianus, ‘De Reditu Suo’, 11, pp. 519ff. Tr. Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers, Constable, 1936, p. 22.
40. Lives, p. 67.
41. Rule of St Benedict, tr. J. McCann, London: Sheed and Ward, 1976, ch. 73.
42. Felix, Life of St Guthlac, ed. and tr. B. Colgrave, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956, ch. 24, p. 87.
43. Bede, Two Lives of St Cuthbert, ed. and tr. B. Colgrave, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940.
44. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, tr. Betty Radice, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974, pp. 84, 169, 188, 190, 192, 196, 201, 234, 254.
45. William of St Thierry, Life of St Bernard of Clairvaux, Patrologia Latina, ed. J. Migne, vol. 185, col. 247. Tr. C. Webb and A. Walker, London: Mowbray, 1960.
46. Ancrene Wisse, in Anchoritic Spirituality, tr. A. Savage and N. Watson, New York: Paulist Press, 1991, pp. 41–199.
47. See Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ, tr. Leo Sherley-Price, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1952. It is interesting to note that Jerome’s phrase is ‘naked to follow the naked Christ’ whereas the later version changed ‘Christ’ to ‘Jesus’, indicating a difference of theological emphasis from the following of Christ in His act of redemption to the following of Jesus as the man of Galilee.
48. Jerome, Letters, tr. F. A. Wright, Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann/Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954, Letter 75, ‘Letter to Rusticus’, p. 438.
49. This text, 11:18, p. 121. See Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, tr. H. von E. Scott and C. C. S. Bland, London: Routledge and Sons, 1929, vol. 1, bk 4, ch. 36, p. 233.
50. This text, 18:3, pp. 184–5.
51. There are modern translations of this material into French, German, Spanish, Romanian, Italian, Icelandic, Arabic, Chinese.
52. Athanasius, Life of St Antony, tr. Robert T. Meyer, London: Longmans Green, 1950, p. 37.
The Latin text of this translation of Vitae Patrum Book V was edited by Heribert Rosweyde, 1615, 1617, 1628; it was reprinted, and is accessible in the edition of J. P. Migne Patrologia Latina (hereafter PL) vol. 73, cols. 851–1024. (Paris: 1860)
Owen Chadwick, Western Asceticism, in Library of Christian Classics, vol. 12, pp. 13–181, London: SCM Press, 1958; this has an appendix expanding the text of Migne by reference to other manuscripts.
Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers, pp. 81–185, London: Constable, 1936
Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources. Commentary and translation by Benedicta Ward, London: Mowbray/Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987(Part of Book 1 of Vitae Patrum, PL vol. 73, cols. 651–71)
The Lausiac History of Palladius, tr. R. T. Meyer, London: Longmans Green, 1965(Book 8 in Vitae Patrum, PL vol. 73, cols. 1065–1215)
The Lives of the Desert Fathers, tr. Norman Russell, with a monograph by Benedicta Ward, London: Mowbray/Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981 (Book 2 of Vitae Patrum, PL vol. 73, cols. 707–39)
Pachomian Koinonia, tr. A. Veilleux, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 3 vols., 1980–82
Sayings of the Desert Fathers, tr. Benedicta Ward, London: Mowbray/Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975(The Greek Alphabetical Series, Patrologia Graecia (hereafter PG) 65, cols. 71–440)
Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, tr. Benedicta Ward (Greek Systematic Series, part 1), Oxford: SLG Press, 1975
The World of the Desert Fathers, tr. Columba Stewart (Greek Systematic Series, part 2), Oxford: SLG Press, 1986