The Birth in the Egyptian Desert

Organized Christian monasticism was born in the Egyptian desert across the late third and fourth centuries, in two founding streams: the eremitic (solitary) life whose great exemplar is St. Antony the Great, and the coenobitic (communal) life first organized by St. Pachomius. This file marks that origin and defers the desert itself — its saints, its centers, and its literature — to the dedicated collection, treating only why Egypt became the fountainhead of all later monasticism.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Why the Desert, and Why Egypt

The desert movement is the historic root of everything treated in this collection, and it has its own full treatment here: for the flight to the desert, the Apophthegmata Patrum, the great centers of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis, the desert mothers, and the desert’s teaching, see The Desert Fathers. This file does not retell that story; it marks the origin and identifies the two streams that flowed out of Egypt into the whole later tradition.

Egypt became the fountainhead for reasons at once geographical, spiritual, and historical. The Nile valley is a thin ribbon of cultivation beside an immense and immediate desert, so that the “withdrawal” (anachoresis) demanded by the ascetic ideal was, in Egypt, a physical possibility available at the edge of every village — one could walk from the sown land into the wilderness in a morning (Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City, Blackwell, 1966, on the geography of Egyptian withdrawal). The desert also carried a deep biblical resonance: it was the place of Israel’s testing, of Elijah, of John the Baptist, and of Christ’s own forty days among the wild beasts and the tempter (Mark 1:12–13) — the arena where God is met and the powers of evil are fought. And Egypt at the turn of the fourth century, with the end of persecution, was ready to receive the ascetic ideal that had long existed within the Church (see Martyrdom and Monasticism) and to give it a new and lasting institutional form.

The Eremitic Stream: Antony and the Anchorites

The first stream is the eremitic or anchoritic life — the life of the solitary. Its towering figure is St. Antony the Great (c. 251–356), whose withdrawal into the desert around 285, and whose long life of solitary struggle, were made known to the whole Christian world by the Life of Antony written shortly after his death by St. Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 357) (Athanasius, Life of Antony; trans. Robert C. Gregg, Paulist Press, 1980; on the dating and influence, David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, Oxford, 1995). Antony was not literally the first Christian hermit — Athanasius himself notes an old ascetic near Antony’s village, and the tradition also remembers Paul of Thebes as an earlier solitary — but Antony became the pattern, the “father of monks,” because his Life gave the movement a definitive portrait: the total renunciation, the retreat ever deeper into the wilderness, the warfare with the demons, and the emergence of the tested ascetic as a healer, teacher, and spiritual father (Athanasius, Life of Antony; and see St. Antony the Great, to which his life is deferred).

Around such solitaries there grew up loose colonies of hermits — men living alone in their cells but within reach of a spiritual father and of one another, gathering perhaps on the weekend for the common Eucharist. This is the world of the great semi-eremitic centers of Lower Egypt (Nitria, Kellia, Scetis), whose account belongs to the desert collection. The essential contribution of this stream to the later tradition is the ideal of hesychia — stillness — and of the cell as the monk’s teacher: “Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything,” in the famous saying attributed to Abba Moses (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward, Cistercian, 1984, Moses 6).

The Coenobitic Stream: Pachomius and the Common Life

The second stream is the coenobitic or communal life — monks living together in an organized community under a common rule and a single superior. Its founder is St. Pachomius the Great (c. 292–348), a former soldier who, after his conversion, established around 320 the first fully organized coenobium at Tabennesi in the Thebaid of Upper Egypt (Philip Rousseau, Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt, University of California Press, 1985, on the foundation and its dating; the Lives of Pachomius and the Pachomian Rules survive in Coptic, Greek, and Latin, the last through Jerome’s translation of 404). Pachomius’ innovation was organizational genius applied to the ascetic life: a walled community divided into houses by trade, a detailed daily order of prayer, work, and meals, a common economy, and above all the principle of obedience to a rule and a superior as the school in which self-will is broken and charity learned (Pachomian Rules, in Armand Veilleux, trans., Pachomian Koinonia, 3 vols., Cistercian, 1980–82; Rousseau, Pachomius, 1985). By Pachomius’ death his federation numbered several thousand monks in nine monasteries for men and two for women (the numbers are given in the Lives; see Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia, and Rousseau, Pachomius, 1985). His life and rule are deferred to St. Pachomius the Great.

The Pachomian koinonia (community, fellowship) supplied the later tradition with the model and much of the vocabulary of communal monasticism: the coenobium as an ordered common life in which prayer, labor, obedience, and charity are woven together, and in which the individual’s ascetic effort is subordinated to the good of the whole. When Basil of Caesarea came to legislate for Eastern monasticism a generation later, and when the whole subsequent tradition — Studite, Athonite, Slavic — organized its great houses, it was the coenobitic principle first embodied by Pachomius that they built upon (Rousseau, Pachomius, 1985; and see Saint Basil and the Asketikon).

Two Streams, One Movement

It is a distortion to set the two streams against each other as rivals, or to read them as a straightforward progression from the solitary to the communal. From the beginning they coexisted and interpenetrated: Antony himself, in his Life, both withdraws into deeper solitude and comes forth to organize and counsel the brothers who gather around him, and the Pachomian houses valued withdrawal and stillness within the frame of the common life (Athanasius, Life of Antony; Rousseau, Pachomius, 1985; Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966, on the interplay). The Egyptian desert produced not one form of monasticism but a spectrum, and it was precisely the richness of that spectrum — solitary, communal, and the middle ways between — that the tradition inherited. That threefold typology is the subject of the next file (see The Three Forms).

What Egypt fixed for all time was the conviction that the monastic life is a serious, lifelong, and structured undertaking — a warfare and a discipline, not a mood — and that it can be lived either in solitude or in community, each with its own dangers and its own crown. Every later development, from Basil’s rule to the hesychasts of Athos to the sketes of the Russian north, is a variation on themes first sounded in the Egyptian desert (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966, whose very title expresses the claim that the desert became the true “city” of the Christian ascetic ideal).

References

Athanasius of Alexandria, St. The Life of Antony. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (Antony and the eremitic stream; deferred in full to the St. Antony collection.)
Brakke, David. Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. (The dating and purpose of the Life of Antony.)
Rousseau, Philip. Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The foundation of the coenobium at Tabennesi; the Pachomian koinonia.)
Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia. 3 vols. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1980–82. (The Lives and Rules of Pachomius in translation.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The geography and interplay of the two streams; the desert as “city.”)
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo, MI / London: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (“Sit in your cell…”; the ideal of stillness.)
Scripture: Mark 1:12–13 (Christ in the wilderness).