The Desert of Scetis

Scetis (Coptic Shiit; the Wadi al-Natrun) — the remotest, most austere, and most celebrated of the semi-eremitic centers of Lower Egypt, founded by St. Macarius the Great around 330 and the heartland from which the greater part of the Apophthegmata comes. This file treats Scetis as a place: its founding (deferred to Macarius’ collection), its life and organization, and the barbarian devastations from 407/408 onward that scattered the monks and helped occasion the writing-down of the tradition.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Egyptian desert monasticism)

The Salt Desert

Scetis lay deepest of the three great Lower Egyptian centers — a day’s hard journey beyond Nitria and Kellia into the salt-crusted depression that the Copts called Shiit and the Greeks Skētis, the modern Wadi al-Natrun, some sixty-five kilometers southwest of the Delta into waterless desert (Chitty, The Desert a City, Oxford, 1966, ch. 2; Regnault, The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers, St. Bede’s, 1999, on the geography). Its remoteness was its meaning: where Nitria stood on the desert’s edge and drew crowds and visitors, Scetis was chosen for its severity and isolation, and it became the tradition’s very image of the deep desert — the place a monk went when he was serious. “Scetis” would pass into the later monastic vocabulary of the whole Church as skete, the name for the small semi-eremitic settlement (as on Mount Athos to this day), a linguistic monument to the place’s authority (see The Desert and All Later Monasticism).

Macarius and the Founding

Scetis was founded, tradition holds, by St. Macarius the Great (Macarius the Egyptian, c. 300–391), a former camel-driver and dealer in natron from the Delta, who withdrew to the salt desert around the age of thirty — placing the foundation about 330 — and gathered around himself the colony that became the greatest school of the desert (Palladius, Lausiac History 17, on Macarius the Egyptian; Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966, ch. 2). Macarius’ own life, his sayings, the gift of gentleness and tears for which the Apophthegmata remembers him, and the vexed question of the “Macarian” homilies are treated in his own collection — see St. Macarius the Great. What matters here is his role as founder: it was under Macarius and his generation that Scetis took shape as a semi-eremitic colony organized, by the later fourth century, into four congregations, each with its own church and priest, the monks living alone or in small groups through the week and gathering for the weekend synaxis (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966; Regnault, The Day-to-Day Life, 1999, on the four churches of Scetis).

Ordained a priest so that the growing colony might have the Eucharist, Macarius set the pattern of Scetan authority — leadership exercised not by administrative rule but by the spiritual weight of the old man, the geron, to whom younger monks came for a “word” (see Poemen, Arsenius, Moses, and Sisoes). This was the world that produced the Apophthegmata: a colony of hermits bound loosely by a common church and a common veneration for its elders, generating and transmitting the sayings by which it lived (see The Sayings and Their Collections).

The Life of Scetis

The daily life of Scetis is recoverable in detail from the Apophthegmata and the travelogues (Regnault, The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers, 1999, reconstructs it comprehensively). The monk lived in a cell of mud brick, often of two small rooms, and supported himself by the labor of his hands — above all the weaving of rope and baskets from palm leaves and reeds, sold through middlemen to the valley, the proceeds going to food and to alms. He ate once a day, after none (mid-afternoon), or less; his food was bread, salt, and water, with a few vegetables, oil reserved as a luxury or a concession. He kept the “little rule” of psalmody, prayer, and manual work through the week, and walked to the church for the Saturday-evening vigil and the Sunday Eucharist and common meal. Silence, fasting, vigil, and the guarding of the thoughts were the substance of the life (Regnault, The Day-to-Day Life, 1999; Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, Oxford, 1993, on the economy and rhythm; the details fill the Sayings, e.g., the rope-making of Arsenius and the sale of baskets in the Poemen and Agathon material, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Ward, 1984).

Scetis was not a hermitage of total isolation but a school of formation: the young monk was placed under an old man, learned obedience, silence, and the discernment of thoughts, and only slowly earned the right to greater solitude. Its authority in the tradition rests on this — that Scetis was where the desert’s spiritual method was most fully worked out and most faithfully transmitted (Gould, The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community, Oxford, 1993, on formation and the abba–disciple bond at Scetis).

The Destructions of Scetis

Scetis’ remoteness could not protect it from the desert’s dangers. From the early fifth century the colony suffered a series of devastating raids by the nomadic Libyan peoples (called by the sources the Mazices or Mazicae) who ranged the western desert — raids that killed monks, scattered survivors, and repeatedly emptied the settlement (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966, ch. 3 and 5; Regnault, The Day-to-Day Life, 1999). The tradition and the scholarship reckon a sequence of major sacks:

c. 407/408 — the first great devastation, in which, tradition holds, Abba Moses the Black and a company of brothers were killed, having refused to flee (on Moses’ death, Moses material and the tradition of the seven martyred brothers; see St. Moses the Black); the monks were scattered, some to the sources of the Nile, some to Palestine.
c. 434 and c. 444 — further sacks over the following decades, which the Apophthegmata itself remembers as forcing the old men to abandon Scetis (Arsenius among them withdrew; see St. Arsenius the Great).
c. 570 — a later and again devastating raid, after which the colony was walled and its churches fortified.

[Disputed: the exact years of the destructions of Scetis are given differently in the scholarship and cannot be fixed with certainty. Chitty (*The Desert a City*, 1966) reconstructs a first devastation around 407/408, followed by others around 434 and 444, and a later one about 570; Regnault (*The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers*, 1999) gives similar approximate dates. The sources are the *Apophthegmata*'s own references to the "desolation of Scetis," Cassian's testimony, and later chronicles; no dated document fixes the first raid. The association of Abba Moses' martyrdom with the 407/408 raid is traditional, pinned to the *Sayings* and later Coptic tradition rather than to a contemporary record (per METHODOLOGY §3.5). Ranges, not fixed years, are the honest form.]

These devastations had a double consequence for the tradition. They shattered the fourth-century colony and dispersed its monks across Egypt, Palestine, and beyond — a diaspora that carried the desert’s spirituality outward but broke the living continuity of Scetis. And they created, precisely, the danger and the occasion for writing down what had been oral: with the great old men dead or scattered and the settlement repeatedly emptied, the impulse to gather and fix the sayings in writing — the impulse behind the Apophthegmata as we have it — belongs to this age of loss (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966; and see The Sayings and Their Collections). The book of the desert is in part a monument raised over a scattered community.

Scetis After the Fathers

Unlike Nitria and Kellia, which faded, Scetis survived. Rebuilt and fortified after each devastation, it continued as a monastic center through the Coptic and Islamic centuries, and four ancient monasteries still stand and function in the Wadi al-Natrun today — including Deir Anba Maqar, the Monastery of St. Macarius, on the site of the founder’s own colony (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966, epilogue; on the surviving monasteries, Harmless, Desert Christians, Oxford, 2004, ch. 8). Scetis is thus not only the heartland of the Apophthegmata but the one great center of the Lower Egyptian desert where the life the Sayings record has never wholly ceased — a continuity that gives the modern reader of the desert fathers a living place to which the words still attach.

References

Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (Macarius the Egyptian, ch. 17.)
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo / London: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The life and economy of Scetis; the desolation of Scetis in the Arsenius and Macarius material.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Scetis, its four churches, and its destructions, ch. 2–3, 5; the surviving monasteries.)
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 daily life and economy of Scetis; the dates of the raids.)
Burton-Christie, Douglas. The Word in the Desert. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (The rhythm and economy of the Scetan cell.)
Gould, Graham. The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (Formation and the abba–disciple bond.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Scetis and the surviving Wadi al-Natrun monasteries, ch. 8.)