Desert Fathers

In the second half of the third century, Christians began walking out of the Egyptian towns into the desert. By the middle of the fourth there were thousands of them, and by the fifth, tens of thousands. They are called the Desert Fathers, and the Desert Mothers with them.

Three settlements dominated. Nitria, near the western edge of the delta, was the closest to civilization and had a bakery, a doctor and shops. Kellia"the Cells" lay further out for those who wanted more solitude. Scetis, deepest in, was the hardest of the three; the monasteries of the Wadi el-Natrun still stand on its site, inhabited without interruption for over sixteen hundred years.

They did not organize themselves alike. Anthony's model was the solitary in his cell. Pachomius's was the walled community under a written rule. Amoun's at Nitria was a middle way, hermits living near enough to gather on Saturday and Sunday. All three patterns went out to the rest of the world.

They worked with their hands, plaiting rope and weaving baskets from palm leaves, and sold the work to buy bread and give alms. They recited the psalms through the night. They kept the cell: "Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything" one of them said. And they refused to judge, over and over, more insistently than they refused anything else.

Their words were collected. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers is a book of anecdotes and one-line answers, a young monk asks an elder for a word, and gets one. There is nothing systematic about it. Among the named voices: Anthony, the first; Macarius the Great of Scetis and Macarius of Alexandria; Poemen, the most quoted; Arsenius, a Roman tutor to the imperial family who fled the palace for the sand; Moses the Black, a runaway slave and bandit who became one of the gentlest of them; Sisoes; Pambo; John the Dwarf. Among the women, called ammas: Syncletica, Sarah, and Theodora, whose sayings sit in the collection beside the men's.

Outsiders came to look. Palladius wrote the Lausiac History about what he saw; an anonymous group of monks from Jerusalem wrote the History of the Monks in Egypt, which Rufinus translated into Latin. John Cassian spent years among them and carried their teaching to southern Gaul in his Institutes and Conferences, and through Cassian it reached Benedict and the whole Western tradition.

A raid by desert nomads shattered Scetis in about 407. The monks scattered, and the movement spread further.

Sources: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum); Palladius, The Lausiac History; The History of the Monks in Egypt (Historia Monachorum in Aegypto); John Cassian, Institutes and Conferences.