The Fathers of Nitria and Kellia

The great semi-eremitic colonies of Lower Egypt north of Scetis: Nitria, founded by Amoun around 315–330 and grown half-urban in a single generation; Kellia, “the Cells,” founded for those who sought deeper solitude; and the intellectual, Origenist strand of the northern desert — Evagrius Ponticus and the “Tall Brothers” — that the Origenist controversy of 399–400 scattered into exile. Told soberly, as a real and painful episode.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Egyptian desert monasticism)

Amoun and the Founding of Nitria

The northern desert of the Delta was opened by St. Amoun (Amun) of Nitria, whom Palladius, who knew the region, calls the first to take up the anchoritic life at Nitria and dates roughly a generation after Antony (Palladius, Lausiac History 8; trans. Meyer, ACW 34, 1964). Amoun’s story, as Palladius tells it, is itself a portrait of the movement’s ideals: married against his will, he persuaded his wife on their wedding night to live with him in continence, and after eighteen years of shared ascetic life he withdrew to the desert of Nitria (near modern el-Barnugi, on the desert edge some fifty kilometers south of Alexandria), where a colony of hermits gathered around him (Lausiac History 8). Tradition, preserved in both Palladius and the Apophthegmata, has Amoun consult Antony, and Antony counsel the founding of a remoter settlement — Kellia — for those whom the growth of Nitria had left too crowded for stillness (Antony 34 and Amoun material, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Ward, 1984; Palladius, Lausiac History 8).

Within a generation Nitria had become something between a monastic colony and a desert town. Palladius, who stayed there, reports some five thousand monks living in and around it in his day — some alone, some in twos and threes — with a great church, a guest-house for the many visitors, bakers, physicians, and even the sale of wine; monks supported themselves by weaving linen, and on Saturdays and Sundays gathered at the church for the synaxis (Palladius, Lausiac History 7; the Historia Monachorum 20 similarly describes Nitria’s crowds; trans. Russell, Cistercian, 1981). The numbers are round and rhetorical, but they register a genuinely large settlement (Harmless, Desert Christians, Oxford, 2004, ch. 9).

Kellia — “The Cells”

Because Nitria had grown too populous for those seeking deeper solitude, the more advanced withdrew about a dozen kilometers further into the desert to Kellia, “the Cells” — a scattered colony where, the sources say, the cells were set so far apart that a monk could neither see nor hear his neighbor, and where each lived in silence through the week, meeting the others only at the Saturday-evening and Sunday synaxis (Palladius, Lausiac History 7; Historia Monachorum 20–22; Rufinus and Palladius on the spacing of the cells; Chitty, The Desert a City, Oxford, 1966, ch. 2). Kellia was the home of some of the desert’s most celebrated fathers of the later fourth century — Macarius the Alexandrian (distinct from Macarius the Great of Scetis), and, most consequentially, Evagrius Ponticus. Modern archaeology has recovered the site: French excavations at Kellia from the 1960s uncovered hundreds of cell-complexes across the desert, confirming in mud-brick the picture the texts give of a dispersed colony of hermits (on the excavations, Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 8; Regnault, The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers, St. Bede’s, 1999).

Nitria and Kellia differed in character from Scetis further south. They lay nearer the Greek-speaking world of Alexandria; they drew educated men as well as Coptic peasants; and they became, in the last quarter of the fourth century, the setting for a sophisticated ascetic theology — above all that of Evagrius, the former Constantinopolitan deacon and disciple of the Cappadocians, who settled at Kellia around 383 and there wrote the works (the Praktikos, the Chapters on Prayer, and others) that systematized the desert’s teaching on the eight thoughts (logismoi) and on pure prayer (on Evagrius, Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 11; the eight thoughts are treated in Cassian and the Desert in the West). Evagrius’ theology drew deeply on Origen — on the pre-existence of minds, the cosmology of fall and restoration — and it was this Origenist current that would tear the northern desert apart.

The Origenist Controversy of 399–400

The crisis broke at the very end of the century, and it must be told soberly, for it set holy men against one another. Its outward course is well attested (the fullest ancient sources are Palladius’ Lausiac History and Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom, Socrates and Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical Histories, and the correspondence of Jerome; the standard modern account is Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate, Princeton, 1992).

The desert of Egypt held two ascetic sensibilities in tension: the learned, Origen-shaped, “spiritualizing” theology of Evagrius and his circle, which conceived of God as beyond all form and prayer as the shedding of all images; and the simpler piety of many Coptic monks, who prayed to God as to a figure they could picture — the “anthropomorphites,” so called for ascribing a human form to God (Clark, The Origenist Controversy, 1992; Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966, ch. 3). Cassian preserves a moving scene of the aged Coptic monk Serapion, who, forced to give up his mental image of God, wept, “They have taken away my God, and I have none to lay hold of” (Cassian, Conferences 10.3; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57, 1997).

Into this tension stepped Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria. His festal letter of 399 condemned the anthropomorphites as heretics — a stand for the Origenist, “spiritualizing” side. But when a mob of angry Coptic monks descended on Alexandria to protest, Theophilus, in a reversal that the sources read as political, turned against the Origenists instead: he condemned Origen, and in 400 moved against the leading Origenist monks of Nitria — the four “Tall Brothers” (Dioscorus, Ammonius, Eusebius, and Euthymius, so nicknamed for their height) and their followers (Clark, The Origenist Controversy, 1992; Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 6.7; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 8.11–13). Evagrius himself had died in 399, before the storm broke, and so was spared the persecution but not the later condemnation (his teaching would be anathematized at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553).

The consequence for the northern desert was a diaspora. Theophilus drove the Origenist monks from Nitria; the Tall Brothers and some three hundred followers fled — first to Palestine, then to Constantinople, where they appealed to the patriarch St. John Chrysostom, whose reception of them Theophilus turned into one of the pretexts for the campaign that deposed and exiled Chrysostom in 403–404 (Palladius, Dialogue; Clark, The Origenist Controversy, 1992, ch. 1 and 3). Nitria and Kellia never fully recovered their fourth-century intellectual eminence; the “golden age” of the learned northern desert closed in bitterness and exile.

[Disputed: the theological rights and wrongs of the Origenist controversy are not adjudicated here (METHODOLOGY §4). Contemporaries and modern scholars divide over whether Theophilus acted from conviction or from politics, and over how far the condemned "Origenism" was Evagrius' or Origen's own teaching as opposed to a later, more speculative development. Clark (*The Origenist Controversy*, 1992) reads the dispute as much a social and cultural conflict — learned vs. simple, Greek vs. Coptic — as a doctrinal one. Evagrius' works were later condemned (Constantinople II, 553), yet his ascetic writings, often transmitted under other names, remained deeply influential in the very tradition that anathematized his cosmology. The episode is reported here as attested event, its theological assessment left to the sources and the councils.]

What Nitria and Kellia Gave the Tradition

For all the sorrow of its end, the northern desert gave the tradition a great inheritance. It preserved the semi-eremitic form in its most articulate expression; it produced, in Evagrius, the first systematic ascetic theology — the analysis of the eight thoughts, the doctrine of apatheia (dispassion) and pure prayer — which, purged of its Origenist cosmology and often transmitted anonymously or under safer names (including within the Philokalia), shaped all later Orthodox ascetic thought; and it fed, through Cassian and through the Greek and Syriac traditions, into the mainstream of monastic teaching (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 11; on the transmission, see Cassian and the Desert in the West). The colonies themselves declined over the following centuries; Scetis alone, of the great Lower Egyptian centers, survives as a living monastic site to this day (see The Desert of Scetis).

References

Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (Amoun and Nitria, ch. 8; Nitria and Kellia, ch. 7; 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. (Nitria and Kellia, ch. 20–22.)
Cassian, John. The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (Serapion and the anthropomorphite crisis, Conf. 10.3.)
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Antony and Amoun material.)
Clark, Elizabeth A. The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. (The standard modern account of the 399–400 crisis.)
Socrates. Ecclesiastical History 6.7; Sozomen. Ecclesiastical History 8.11–13. (The Tall Brothers and Theophilus.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Nitria, Kellia, and the Origenist crisis, ch. 2–3.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Nitria and Kellia, ch. 8; Evagrius, ch. 11.)
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. (Kellia; daily life.)