Anchorites, Cenobites, and the Middle Way

The three forms the ascetic life took in fourth-century Egypt: the solitary (eremitic) way associated with Antony, the fully communal (cenobitic) way founded by Pachomius, and the semi-eremitic “middle way” of the great lavra-settlements — Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis — where hermits lived apart through the week and gathered on weekends. This third form produced most of the Sayings.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Egyptian desert monasticism)

Three Forms, One Movement

Ancient and modern writers alike divide early Egyptian monasticism into three types, and the division, while schematic, is genuinely useful. St. John Cassian, writing in Gaul around 420–429 from his own years in Egypt, describes for his Latin readers the kinds of monk he had known: the coenobites, who live together under a rule and an abba; the anchorites, who after training in community withdraw to the solitude of the desert; and — a third and, in his account, degenerate class — the sarabaites, self-willed ascetics who keep no discipline (Cassian, Conferences 18.4–8; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57, 1997). Cassian’s typology is partly polemical, but the first two categories name real and enduring forms, and to them historians add a fourth that Cassian’s Egypt knew better than his scheme admits: the semi-eremitic settlement, neither full solitude nor full community, which was in fact the characteristic Lower Egyptian form (Chitty, The Desert a City, Oxford: Blackwell, 1966, ch. 1–2; Harmless, Desert Christians, Oxford, 2004, ch. 8).

The Anchorite: The Way of Antony

The anchorite (Greek anachōrētēs, “one who withdraws”) is the solitary — the hermit who lives alone, often after years of apprenticeship, in a cell in the deep desert. Antony is the archetype: Athanasius traces his progressive withdrawal from the village edge, to the tombs, to the abandoned fort at Pispir, and finally to the “Inner Mountain” by the Red Sea where he spent his last decades (Athanasius, Life of Antony 8–13, 49–50; trans. Gregg, CWS, 1980; the details are deferred to St. Antony the Great). The anchoritic life was regarded as the summit and also the most dangerous form — undertaken too soon or without formation, it exposed the monk to delusion and to the demons without the protection of obedience and community. Hence the desert’s insistence that solitude be earned: “As fish die if they stay too long out of water, so the monks who loiter outside their cells… lose their intensity of inner peace,” runs a saying under Antony’s name (Antony 10, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Ward, Cistercian, 1984) — but the same collection is full of warnings against solitude sought prematurely (Gould, The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community, Oxford, 1993, on the role of the abba in preparing for solitude).

The Cenobite: The Way of Pachomius

At the opposite pole stands the coenobium (Greek koinos bios, “common life”) — the fully organized community in which monks live together, hold all things in common, work, eat, and pray by a rule, under an abbot. Its founder was St. Pachomius (c. 292–348), a former soldier who around 323 established at Tabennesi in the Thebaid (Upper Egypt) the first great communal monastery, and went on to found a federation of houses for men and women bound by a written Rule and a common economy (on Pachomius, Philip Rousseau, Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985; the founding is deferred to St. Pachomius the Great). The Pachomian koinonia was a disciplined, almost cellular society — monks divided into houses by trade, a weekly and yearly rhythm of assembly, a novitiate, and a distinctive stress on obedience and communal charity as the very substance of the ascetic life. Where the anchorite sought God in solitude, the cenobite sought Him in the mutual service, obedience, and patience of the common life; Pachomius’ tradition held that to bear with one’s brothers was itself the road to God (Rousseau, Pachomius, 1985; see The Coenobitic Revolution).

The Middle Way: Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis

Between the solitary and the community lay the form most characteristic of Lower Egypt and most productive of the Apophthegmata: the semi-eremitic settlement, sometimes called by the later Greek term lavra (a “lane” or cluster of cells around a common center) and, in its Egyptian instance, the skete. Here monks lived alone or two or three together in scattered cells through the week — praying, weaving rope and baskets, keeping silence — and gathered on Saturday and Sunday at a common church (the katholikon) for the synaxis, the Eucharist, and a shared meal (agapē), returning afterward to their solitude (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966; Regnault, The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers, St. Bede’s, 1999, ch. 1–2). This was solitude tempered by a minimal community: enough companionship for guidance, correction, and the sacraments, enough solitude for stillness.

Three great centers embodied this form, strung out into the desert south and west of the Nile Delta:

Nitria (near modern el-Barnugi), founded by Amoun around 315–330 on the advice, tradition says, of Antony — the nearest to the settled land and the largest, with, Palladius reports, some five thousand monks in his day, a bakery, a guest-house, and even physicians (Palladius, Lausiac History 7–8; trans. Meyer, ACW 34, 1964).
Kellia (“the Cells”), founded a little later when Nitria grew too crowded and populous for those seeking deeper solitude; Palladius and the Historia Monachorum describe cells spaced so far apart that no monk could see or hear his neighbor, to which the more advanced withdrew from Nitria (Palladius, Lausiac History 7; Historia Monachorum 20–22, on Kellia; trans. Russell, Cistercian, 1981). Antony is said to have counseled Amoun to establish it (Antony’s role in Lausiac History 8).
Scetis (Coptic Shiit; the Wadi al-Natrun), the remotest and most austere, founded by St. Macarius the Great around 330, a full day’s journey beyond the others into the salt desert — the setting of the greatest of the old men, Macarius, Moses, Poemen, Arsenius, and Sisoes (on Scetis, see The Desert of Scetis; the founding is deferred to St. Macarius the Great).

The precise founding dates of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis are given as approximations in the scholarship, reconstructed from Palladius, the Historia Monachorum, and the Apophthegmata rather than from any dated document. [Disputed: the foundation dates of the Lower Egyptian centers are reconstructions, not documented. Nitria is placed c. 315–330 and Scetis c. 330 by Chitty (*The Desert a City*, 1966) on the basis of the ages and relationships of the monks named in the sources; Amoun's floruit and the sequence Nitria → Kellia → Scetis are secure, but exact years are not. Ranges, not fixed years, are the honest form.]

Why the Middle Way Mattered Most for the Sayings

It is no accident that the Apophthegmata Patrum — the “Sayings of the Desert Fathers” — comes overwhelmingly from the semi-eremitic world of Scetis and its neighbors rather than from the Pachomian cenobia. The very shape of the skete generated sayings: a younger monk would walk to an old man’s cell and ask, “Abba, give me a word,” and carry the answer home to ponder in his own solitude (Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, Oxford, 1993, ch. 3, on the “word” and its setting; see Reading the Sayings). The cenobium, governed by a written Rule and a settled routine, needed fewer such individual “words”; the semi-eremitic life, in which each monk bore the daily weight of his own discernment, lived on them. The forms of the desert and the forms of its literature are of a piece.

The three ways were never wholly separate, and the tradition came to see them as complementary rather than rival — a theme the desert itself developed and later monasticism inherited (see The Two Paths of the Desert). St. Basil of Caesarea, drawing on his own visit to Egypt, would give the coenobitic ideal its classic theological defense; St. Benedict in the West would build on Cassian’s transmission of both; and the later Byzantine and Athonite tradition preserved all three — the coenobium, the skete, and the hermitage — side by side on a single Holy Mountain (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966; see The Desert and All Later Monasticism).

References

Cassian, John. The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (The typology of monks, Conf. 18.4–8.)
Athanasius. The Life of Antony. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (Antony’s stages of withdrawal.)
Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (Amoun and Nitria, ch. 7–8; Kellia; the five thousand monks.)
The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto. Trans. Norman Russell; intro. Benedicta Ward. Kalamazoo / London: Cistercian Publications, 1981. (Kellia, ch. 20–22.)
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Antony 10, on fish out of water.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The three/four forms; the foundation of the centers.)
Rousseau, Philip. Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The coenobitic ideal.)
Gould, Graham. The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (Community, the abba, and preparation for solitude.)
Regnault, Lucien. The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers in Fourth-Century Egypt. Trans. Étienne Poirier. Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1999. (The weekly rhythm of the skete.)
Burton-Christie, Douglas. The Word in the Desert. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (The “word” and the semi-eremitic setting.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Survey of the forms.)