Welsh Asceticism and the Desert

The monasticism of David’s Mynyw — water-drinking, hard manual labour, silence, absolute poverty, and unceasing prayer — bears an unmistakable family resemblance to the asceticism of the Egyptian desert. That resemblance is real, but it is best explained as a Western reception of the desert ideal, carried to the insular world through the literature that mediated Egypt to the Latin West: Athanasius’s Life of Antony, and above all the Institutes and Conferences of John Cassian, who had lived among the monks of Scetis and wrote their discipline down for the monasteries of Gaul. This file traces that channel of transmission, sets the parallels between the “Watermen” and the Desert Fathers, and treats soberly the romantic but contested claim that Celtic monasticism owed something to direct contact with Egypt.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; patron of Wales)

The Desert in the West: How Egypt Reached the Latin World

The monasticism that took root in fourth- and fifth-century Egypt — the solitaries of Antony’s generation, the cenobitic communities of Pachomius, the cells of Nitria and Scetis — did not stay in Egypt. It became, within a few decades, the common property of the whole Christian world, and the means by which it travelled were chiefly literary. The single most influential text was Athanasius of Alexandria’s Life of Antony (Vita Antonii, c. 357), written shortly after the great hermit’s death and translated into Latin twice before the end of the century, once by Evagrius of Antioch in a free and highly readable version (Athanasius, Life of Antony, esp. §§1–14, 47–48 on the flight to the desert and the warfare with demons; trans. Gregg, Classics of Western Spirituality). The book made Antony the pattern of the monk for East and West alike; Augustine famously records in the Confessions the moment when the story of Antony, told to him by Ponticianus, struck him and his companions like a summons (Augustine, Confessions 8.6.14–15; trans. Chadwick, Oxford). Through the Life of Antony the Latin West received not merely a biography but a programme: withdrawal (anachoresis), the renunciation of property, fasting, vigil, manual labour, and ceaseless spiritual combat.

If Athanasius gave the West the image of the desert, it was John Cassian who gave it the desert’s practice in workable, legislated form. Cassian (c. 360 – c. 435) had spent years as a monk at Bethlehem and then among the desert fathers of Egypt, in Scetis and the Evagrian milieu, before settling at Marseilles in Gaul, where around 420–429 he composed the two works on which Western monasticism would be built: the Institutes (De institutis coenobiorum), setting out the external discipline of the cenobitic life — the monk’s dress, the canonical prayers, and the remedies against the eight principal faults — and the Conferences (Collationes), reporting the teaching of the Egyptian abbas on the interior life, purity of heart, discretion, and unceasing prayer (Cassian, Institutes, Books 1–4 on the externals and 5–12 on the eight faults; Conferences 1 on the monk’s goal as puritas cordis, 9–10 on prayer; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57–58; older trans. Gibson, NPNF II/11). On Cassian as the conduit of Egyptian monasticism to the West, see St John Cassian, the key figure for this whole transmission, and on the desert fathers within the patristic tradition, The Church Fathers.

Cassian’s importance for the Celtic question is that his works were the standard Western handbook of desert discipline, and they reached the insular churches. The Institutes and Conferences circulated widely in Gaul, Italy, and Ireland; the Irish penitentials and monastic rules draw on Cassian’s analysis of the eight principal faults, and his vocabulary of ascetic struggle is woven through insular spiritual writing (Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons 350–1064, 2013; on the diffusion of Cassian into the insular world, see St John Cassian). When the Vita of David presents a monasticism of water, labour, silence, and poverty, it is describing a discipline that the West already possessed in literary form, and whose pedigree ran back through Cassian to the cells of Scetis.

Lérins: The Gaulish Bridge

Between Egypt and the insular world stands Gaul, and within Gaul one house in particular: the island monastery of Lérins, off the southern coast near modern Cannes, founded by Honoratus around 410. Lérins became the great Western seedbed of desert-style monasticism and the training-ground of a generation of bishops; it cultivated precisely the ascetic ideal that Cassian had codified, and indeed Cassian dedicated part of his Conferences to Honoratus and to Eucherius, monks of Lérins (Cassian, Conferences, preface to the second set, addressed to Honoratus and Eucherius; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57; Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 1998). From Lérins and houses like it, the desert ideal passed northward and westward into Britain and, through Britain, into the world of the Welsh and Irish saints.

The Gaulish connection is not a matter of speculation in the British case. The British church of the fifth and sixth centuries was in continuing contact with Gaul: Germanus of Auxerre — himself within the Gaulish episcopal milieu shaped by Lérins-style asceticism — visited Britain twice, in 429 and again around 440, to combat Pelagianism, according to Constantius’s Life of Germanus and Bede (Constantius, Vita Germani; Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.17–21; trans. Colgrave and Mynors, Oxford; see The British Church Before Augustine). Across that same channel of contact the ascetic literature and ideals of Gaul could and did reach the British church. The most economical explanation of the “Eastern” character of Welsh monasticism is therefore this: the desert reached Wales the way it reached the rest of the West — through Gaul, through Lérins, and through the books of Cassian — and not by any exotic short-cut.

The Watermen and the Desert Fathers: Real Parallels

Read against this background, the parallels between David’s “Watermen” and the Desert Fathers are striking and genuine. Rhygyfarch’s Vita Sancti David (c. 1090) describes the monks of Mynyw as the Aquatici, the “Watermen,” because they drank only water, abstaining from wine and beer — the discipline that gave David his Welsh byname Dewi Ddyfrwr, “the Water-drinker” (Rhygyfarch, Vita Sancti David §21; ed. and trans. Sharpe and Davies, in Evans and Wooding 2007; see The Rule of the Watermen). The features the Vita assembles map closely onto the Egyptian pattern:

Manual labour. Rhygyfarch’s monks yoke themselves to the plough in place of oxen, each man his own beast of burden, sustaining the house by the toil of their own hands (Rhygyfarch, Vita §22–23; ed. Sharpe and Davies 2007). The Desert Fathers made manual labour — chiefly the plaiting of ropes and baskets from palm-leaves — a pillar of the monastic day, both to support the monk and to fence out idleness, the mother of temptation; the Apophthegmata and Cassian alike insist that the monk who works is delivered from the demon of acedia (Cassian, Institutes 10 on acedia, citing the Egyptian rule that the brother labour with his hands; Sayings of the Desert Fathers, e.g. the sayings of Antony and Lucius on work and prayer; trans. Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 1975).
Water-drinking and a meagre diet. The abstention from wine and the diet of bread, salt, and herbs recall the radical fasting of the desert, where the monks took bread, salt, and water and counted wine a rare concession (the dietary rigour of the Apophthegmata; Cassian, Institutes 5 and Conferences 2 on discretion in fasting; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57–58).
Silence. The brethren of Mynyw keep silence at work and table, speaking only what necessity demands (Rhygyfarch, Vita §22, §26–28). Silence (hesychia) and the guarding of the tongue are central to the desert ethos, from Arsenius’s “I have often been sorry for having spoken, but never for having held my peace” to the steady counsel of the Apophthegmata to keep silence (Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Arsenius 2 and 40; trans. Ward 1975).
Absolute poverty. No monk of Mynyw might call anything his own — to say “my book” was a fault (Rhygyfarch, Vita §24–26). The renunciation of personal property to the point of policing the word “mine” is a desert and cenobitic commonplace; Cassian’s Institutes devote a book to the vice of avarice and the monk’s total dispossession (Cassian, Institutes 7 on philargyria; trans. Ramsey, ACW 58).
Unceasing prayer and vigil. The night divided so that the praise of God is unceasing (Rhygyfarch, Vita §26–28) is the desert’s ideal of adialeiptos proseuche, the prayer without ceasing that Cassian’s Conferences 9–10 expound as the summit of the monastic life (Cassian, Conferences 9–10; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57).

The kinship is therefore real at the level of ideal: the same renunciations, the same suspicion of bodily comfort, the same conviction that the body must be subdued so that the spirit may pray, animate both the Greek and Coptic fathers and the picture Rhygyfarch draws of David’s monks. On the Orthodox monastic ideal within which all of this is read, see Monasticism.

How Did the Eastern Model Reach Wales?

That the ideal is Eastern is not in doubt; the historical question is the route. Three answers have been proposed, and they are not mutually exclusive.

Via Gaul and Cassian. This is the mainstream and best-evidenced view. The desert reached the insular churches through the ordinary channels of Western Christendom — the Life of Antony, Cassian’s Institutes and Conferences, the monasticism of Lérins, and the continuing Gaulish contact attested by Germanus’s British visits (Charles-Edwards 2013; Stewart 1998; Nora Chadwick, The Age of the Saints in the Early Celtic Church, 1961). On this reading the “Eastern” colour of Welsh monasticism is the colour of all serious Western monasticism, which was Egyptian by descent.

Via Ireland. The Welsh and Irish churches were closely linked, and the Irish penitential and monastic tradition, itself steeped in Cassian, fed back into the Welsh. The two insular churches shared saints, texts, and ascetic ideals across the Irish Sea, so that influence could move in either direction (Charles-Edwards 2013; on the wider insular church, see The British Church Before Augustine). But Irish monasticism is itself a recipient of the desert tradition through Gaul, so this route does not bypass Cassian — it relays him.

Via direct contact with Egypt. Here lies the romantic and contested claim, and it must be handled with care. A persistent strand of writing on the “Celtic Church” has held that Celtic monasticism owed something to direct, unmediated contact with the Egyptian and Eastern East — pointing to supposed parallels in art and liturgy, to the litany-tradition that names “seven Egyptian monks” (the Saith mynach o’r Aifft) said to lie buried in Ireland (in the medieval Irish Litany of Pilgrim Saints), and to occasional finds of eastern Mediterranean material in insular contexts. This is a real tradition in the sources, but it is weak evidence for direct monastic contact:

[Disputed: whether Celtic monasticism owed anything to *direct* contact with Egypt — (A) the romantic "Egyptian connection" view holds that the parallels (the eremitic ideal, the "desert" place-names such as *Diseart*/Dysart, the litany of the "seven Egyptian monks buried in Ireland," and supposed art-historical echoes) point to direct or near-direct contact between the Celtic and Coptic worlds (a view popularised in older and devotional Celtic-Church literature and still occasionally pressed); (B) the mainstream scholarly view holds that the parallels are fully explained by the *mediated* transmission of the desert ideal through Athanasius, Cassian, and Lérins, that the "seven Egyptian monks" notice is a late and legendary litany-entry rather than a historical record, and that there is no documentary or solid archaeological evidence for direct Egyptian–Celtic monastic contact (Charles-Edwards 2013; Nora Chadwick 1961; the cautionary critique of the "Celtic Church" construct in Wendy Davies, "The Myth of the Celtic Church," in *The Early Church in Wales and the West*, ed. Edwards and Lane, 1992).]

The honest verdict is that the parallels are genuine but the direct-contact explanation is unproven and, on present evidence, unnecessary. The “seven Egyptian monks” buried in Ireland belong to the world of devotional litany and legend, not to documented history; they testify to how thoroughly the insular church had absorbed the idea of Egypt, not to monks who actually sailed from the Thebaid. The desert reached Wales as it reached Gaul and Italy — in books and through Lérins — and that is explanation enough.

Sober on the “Celtic = Eastern” Enthusiasm

A wider caution belongs here. Much popular writing has constructed a “Celtic Christianity” imagined as a free, nature-loving, quasi-Eastern alternative to a legalistic Roman West — and has enlisted the genuine desert parallels of Welsh and Irish monasticism in support of that picture. Scholars have warned repeatedly that this “Celtic Church” is largely a modern construction, projecting later (often Romantic, sometimes Protestant, sometimes New-Age) ideals back onto the insular churches, which were in fact part of the one Western Church and in continuing communion and contact with Rome and Gaul (Wendy Davies, “The Myth of the Celtic Church,” 1992; Charles-Edwards 2013). The proper conclusion is balanced: the Eastern, desert character of David’s monasticism is real and important — it was an austere, Egyptian-descended asceticism, and rightly recognised as such — but it is the Eastern character of all serious early Western monasticism, received through the ordinary channels, and not the badge of a separate “Celtic” Christianity standing apart from the Western Church. The undivided Church of David’s day held East and West together; the desert in Wales is one sign of that unity, not of a Welsh exception to it (on the undivided Church of the period, see Pre-Schism Church; on the methodological handling of contested claims, Methodology).

References

Rhygyfarch (Rhigyfarch). Vita Sancti David (c. 1090). Ed. and trans. Richard Sharpe and John Reuben Davies in J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds., St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation. Studies in Celtic History 24. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. (The Aquatici / “Watermen” and water-drinking at §21; the diet at §21–22; the self-yoked ploughing at §22–23; the renunciation of property and the forbidden “mine” at §24–26; the horarium of prayer and vigil at §26–28.)
James, J. W. Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David: The Basic Mid-Twelfth-Century Latin Text. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967. (Latin text and translation of the monastic rule.)
Athanasius of Alexandria. The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (The Vita Antonii, c. 357; the flight to the desert and the warfare with demons.)
Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. (The story of Antony and Ponticianus at 8.6.14–15.)
John Cassian. The Institutes. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58. New York: Newman Press, 2000. (The externals of the cenobitic life and the eight principal faults; avarice in Book 7; acedia and manual labour in Book 10.)
John Cassian. The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (Purity of heart as the monk’s goal in Conference 1; unceasing prayer in Conferences 9–10; the dedications to Honoratus and Eucherius of Lérins.)
John Cassian. The Works of John Cassian. Trans. Edgar C. S. Gibson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. (Public-domain translation of the Institutes and Conferences.)
Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. London: Mowbray, 1975. (The Apophthegmata Patrum; the sayings of Antony, Arsenius, and others on work, silence, and prayer.)
Constantius of Lyon. The Life of St Germanus of Auxerre. (Vita Germani; Germanus’s British visits of 429 and c. 440.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Germanus in Britain at 1.17–21.)
Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. (Cassian’s Egyptian formation, the Lérins dedications, and the transmission of desert monasticism to the West.)
Chadwick, Nora K. The Age of the Saints in the Early Celtic Church. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. (The desert character of insular monasticism and the question of its transmission.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Wales and the Britons 350–1064. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (The Gaulish and Cassianic transmission of the desert ideal; the insular churches within the Western Church.)
Davies, Wendy. “The Myth of the Celtic Church.” In The Early Church in Wales and the West, ed. Nancy Edwards and Alan Lane. Oxbow Monograph 16. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1992. (The critique of the “Celtic Church” construct and of direct-contact theories.)