The Flight to the Desert

The fourth-century movement into the Egyptian desert — the phenomenon that a modern historian could call the desert “becoming a city” — as it grew out of the world of late Roman Egypt and out of the end of the age of blood-martyrdom. This file sets the social and religious context of the exodus and examines, with due caution, the ancient idea that the ascetic became the “bloodless martyr” who succeeded the martyrs of the arena.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Egyptian desert monasticism)

The Desert Becomes a City

Sometime around the year 270, according to St. Athanasius, a young Egyptian named Antony heard the Gospel command “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor” (Matthew 19:21) read in church, took it as spoken to himself, disposed of his property, and gave himself to the ascetic life — first at the edge of his village, then in the tombs, then in a deserted fort in the outer desert, and at last on a mountain by the Red Sea (Athanasius, Life of Antony 2–3, 8–13; trans. Gregg, CWS, 1980). Antony was not the first Christian ascetic — the Life itself notes that he apprenticed himself to older solitaries living near their villages (Life of Antony 3–4) — but within two generations the movement he came to symbolize had transformed the Egyptian landscape. Athanasius’ famous summary is that under the influence of Antony’s example “the desert was made a city by monks, who left their own people and enrolled themselves for the citizenship in the heavens” (Life of Antony 14; trans. Gregg). Derwas Chitty took the phrase for the title of the standard English history of the movement, The Desert a City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966).

By the last decades of the fourth century the transformation was visible to travelers. The seven pilgrims whose journey the Historia Monachorum in Aegypto records (a tour made in 394–395) report monks beyond counting in the towns and deserts of Egypt — the author claims that at Oxyrhynchus the monks in and around the city nearly outnumbered the secular inhabitants, and that the total number of monks in Egypt approached the population of the towns (Historia Monachorum, prologue and ch. 5, on Oxyrhynchus; trans. Russell, intro. Ward, Cistercian, 1981). The figures are rhetorical and cannot be pressed as census data (Harmless, Desert Christians, Oxford, 2004, ch. 9, on reading the Historia Monachorum), but they register a movement that had, within a lifetime, become a mass phenomenon.

The World Left Behind

The monks were overwhelmingly Copts — native Egyptian peasants of the Nile valley, speaking Coptic rather than Greek, many of them, like Antony, of the farming class, some like Abba Apollo former shepherds or, like the young Moses the Black, brigands (on the peasant and Coptic character of the movement, Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966, ch. 1; Peter Brown, The Body and Society, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, ch. 11). The desert they went to was not a remote and empty Sahara but the near margin: the strip of true wilderness that in Egypt lies a short walk from the cultivated land, so that a monk of Nitria or Scetis could reach the settled world in a day or two and villagers could bring their sick to him. This geography — cultivation and desert lying immediately side by side — is what made the Egyptian movement possible on the scale it reached (Lucien Regnault, The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers in Fourth-Century Egypt, trans. Poirier, St. Bede’s, 1999, on geography and economy).

What the monks fled was, in their own language, “the world” — not merely its pleasures but its whole economy of possession, reputation, litigation, and distraction. The Apophthegmata preserves the recurring counsel that a monk should “flee from men,” keep to his cell, and guard silence: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything,” Abba Moses tells a brother (Moses 6, in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Ward, Cistercian, 1984). Modern historians have set this flight against the specific pressures of late Roman Egypt — the crushing weight of taxation and compulsory public service (the liturgies and the office of decurion), from which flight to the desert was one recognized escape — without reducing the religious motive to the social one (Brown, The Body and Society, 1988; James E. Goehring, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert, Trinity Press International, 1999, ch. 4–5, arguing that monasticism was more woven into village society than the “flight to the desert” image suggests).

Indeed Goehring and others have cautioned against reading the Life of Antony‘s image of a radical departure into empty wilderness as the whole truth: much Egyptian asceticism was village-based and semi-domestic, and the sharp “desert/city” polarity is partly Athanasius’ literary and theological construction, designed to present the monk as a new kind of Christian hero (Goehring, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert, 1999; David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, Oxford, 1995, on Athanasius’ shaping of the ideal). The movement was real and vast; the tidy geography of the sources is itself a topic.

The End of the Age of Martyrs

The most influential ancient interpretation of the movement’s timing binds it to the end of persecution. For two and a half centuries the highest Christian vocation had been martyrdom — the witness (Greek martyria) sealed in blood; Egypt in the “Great Persecution” under Diocletian (303–311) had given the Church so many martyrs that the Coptic Church dates its calendar, the “Era of the Martyrs” (Anno Martyrum), from Diocletian’s accession in 284. With the Peace of the Church under Constantine (the toleration of 313 and after), the arena closed. On the reading the sources themselves suggest, asceticism rose as martyrdom’s successor: the monk became the one who “died daily” (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:31), bearing a lifelong, bloodless witness in place of the single bloody one.

Athanasius makes the connection explicit. During the persecution under Maximinus (c. 311) Antony went up to Alexandria openly ministering to the confessors and longing himself to be martyred; when the persecution ceased and he returned to his cell, Athanasius writes, “he was there daily a martyr to his conscience, and contending in the conflicts of faith” (Life of Antony 46–47; trans. Gregg). The idea of asceticism as a “daily martyrdom” became a commonplace of the fourth-century Fathers.

The vivid tripartite scheme of “red, white, and green” martyrdom that is sometimes read back into the desert is, however, a later and specifically insular formulation. [Disputed: the phrase "white martyrdom" and its systematic contrast with "red" (bloody) and "green/blue" martyrdom is not a fourth-century Egyptian term. Its classic statement is the early Irish *Cambrai Homily* (7th–8th c.), which distinguishes white martyrdom (renunciation of what one loves for God), green or "blue" martyrdom (penance and mortification), and red martyrdom (death). The underlying idea that ascetic self-denial is a bloodless martyrdom succeeding the age of persecution is genuinely fourth-century and patristic (so Athanasius, *Life of Antony* 47, on Antony as "daily a martyr"; and widely in the Cappadocians), but the tidy color-scheme is a later, Western/Celtic crystallization and should not be projected onto the Egyptian sources as their own vocabulary. So Edward E. Malone, *The Monk and the Martyr* (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1950), tracing the "monk as martyr" theme; and the *Cambrai Homily* for the color-triad.]

The martyrdom-succession thesis should also be held loosely as historical explanation. Antony’s own withdrawal, on Athanasius’ chronology, began around 270 — decades before the Peace of the Church — and the deepest roots of Christian asceticism (virginity, continence, voluntary poverty, the apotaktikoi or “renouncers”) reach back into the second and third centuries, well within the age of the martyrs (Brown, The Body and Society, 1988, on pre-Constantinian asceticism; Susanna Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity, Oxford, 1994). The end of persecution did not create the ascetic impulse; it removed the supreme rival to it and left ascetic renunciation as the recognized summit of the Christian life. The desert fathers themselves prized this continuity: they saw their combat with the demons as the same warfare the martyrs had waged, transposed from the arena to the cell (Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, Harvard, 2006, on the monk as heir to the martyr’s combat).

Why the Desert

Why the desert specifically? The sources give a layered answer. Scripturally, the wilderness is where Israel was tested and fed (Exodus; Deuteronomy 8), where Elijah and John the Baptist dwelt, and where Christ himself was led by the Spirit to be tempted (Matthew 4:1–11) — so that going to the desert was understood as following Christ into the place of trial and encounter with God (Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, Oxford, 1993, on the scriptural desert). Spiritually, the desert was believed to be the dwelling of the demons, the “dragon in the waters,” so that to go there was to carry the war into the enemy’s own country: Athanasius has Antony enter the tombs and the fort precisely to meet the demons on their ground (Life of Antony 8–10, 12–13; Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 2006). Practically, the desert offered the hesychia — the stillness, the freedom from distraction — that the monks sought above all else (see Hesychia, Nepsis, and Unceasing Prayer).

The flight to the desert was thus at once a social withdrawal, a return to the biblical wilderness, an offensive against the powers of evil, and a search for stillness before God. Out of it, within a single century, came the anchorites of Antony’s line, the great communities of Pachomius, the semi-eremitic colonies of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis, and the literature — above all the Apophthegmata Patrum — through which the desert would teach the whole later Church.

See Also

References

  • Athanasius. The Life of Antony. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (Antony’s call; “the desert a city,” ch. 14; Antony as “daily a martyr,” ch. 46–47.)
  • The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto. Trans. Norman Russell; intro. Benedicta Ward. Kalamazoo / London: Cistercian Publications, 1981. (The 394–395 journey; the numbers of monks at Oxyrhynchus.)
  • The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo / London: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Moses 6, “your cell will teach you.”)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The standard narrative history; the phrase from Life of Antony 14.)
  • Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. (Pre-Constantinian roots of asceticism; the social world of Egyptian monasticism.)
  • Goehring, James E. Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999. (The village character of much Egyptian asceticism; the “desert/city” polarity as construction.)
  • Brakke, David. Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. (The monk as heir to the martyr’s combat; the desert as demonic territory.)
  • Brakke, David. Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. (Athanasius’ shaping of the monastic ideal.)
  • Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Ascetic roots before the Peace of the Church.)
  • Malone, Edward E. The Monk and the Martyr: The Monk as the Successor of the Martyr. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1950. (The “monk as martyr” theme.)
  • 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. (Geography, economy, daily life.)
  • Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Reading the Historia Monachorum and the numbers.)
  • The Cambrai Homily (Old Irish, 7th–8th c.) — the classic statement of the red/white/green martyrdom triad.
  • Scripture: Matthew 19:21; Matthew 4:1–11; Deuteronomy 8; 1 Corinthians 15:31.