The Two Paths of the Desert

The eremitic and the coenobitic ways as complementary rather than rival paths — the desert’s own reflection on which is the greater, and the synthesis by which later monasticism kept both. This file traces the tension and the reconciliation from the Apophthegmata and Cassian through Basil’s coenobitic ideal to the Athonite settlement where hermitage, skete, and coenobium coexist on one mountain.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Egyptian desert monasticism)

Two Ways, One Goal

By the middle of the fourth century Egypt held two great forms of the monastic life side by side: the eremitic and semi-eremitic desert of Antony, Nitria, and Scetis in the north, and the coenobitic koinonia of Pachomius in the Thebaid to the south (see Anchorites, Cenobites, and the Middle Way and The Coenobitic Revolution). They differed sharply in outward shape — the one built on solitude and the individual’s discernment, the other on community, obedience, and a written Rule — and the tradition was aware of the difference as a genuine question: which way is higher, and how do they relate? The desert answered not by choosing but by learning to see the two as complementary, ordered to the one goal of union with God through the purification of the heart.

The Desert’s Own Reflection

The Apophthegmata and Cassian both preserve the desert’s reflection on the two ways, and both refuse a simple ranking. On one hand, the eremitic tradition regarded solitude as the summit — but a summit to be reached only after long formation, so that the coenobium was the necessary school for the hermitage. On the other, the desert warned repeatedly that solitude was perilous, that the common life tested and revealed a monk in ways the cell could not, and that many who fled to solitude took their unhealed passions with them. A famous saying makes the point: a brother who thought himself patient in his cell discovered his anger only when he had to live among others (a common motif; cf. the anonymous series and the systematic collection on patience; The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, trans. Ward, SLG Press, 1975).

St. John Cassian, who knew both forms in Egypt, gives the classic statement of their relation. In the Conferences he presents the coenobium as the training-ground and the anchoritic life as its crown — but a crown few are fit to wear, and only after the passions have been purified in community: to withdraw into solitude before the vices are healed, he warns, is not to conquer them but to hide them, and they will erupt the more violently for having no one to strike against (Cassian, Conferences 19, “On the Aim of the Coenobite and the Hermit”; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57, 1997). Cassian himself, tellingly, came to prefer and to legislate for the coenobitic life as the safer and more broadly livable path, even while honoring the anchoritic as the higher (Cassian, Institutes and Conferences 19; Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk, Oxford, 1998, ch. 2 and 4; and see Cassian and the Desert in the West).

The desert’s mature verdict, then, is an ordering rather than a rivalry: the common life first, to heal the passions and learn obedience and charity; solitude afterward, for those called and proven — with the sober recognition that most are called to remain in community, and that community is not a lesser holiness but a different and, for most, a safer road to the same end (Gould, The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community, Oxford, 1993, on the desert’s high valuation of community; Chitty, The Desert a City, Oxford, 1966).

Basil and the Coenobitic Ideal

The theological case for the common life as itself the higher way — not merely the antechamber to solitude — was made most powerfully outside Egypt, by St. Basil the Great of Caesarea (c. 330–379), who had visited the Egyptian and Syrian ascetics and who framed the coenobitic ideal for the Greek-speaking Church in his Asketikon (the “Longer” and “Shorter Rules”). Basil argued that the solitary life cannot fulfill the commandment of love, for whose feet will the hermit wash, whose burdens will he bear, to whom will he be the member of one body? The common life alone, he held, allows the Christian to live out the double commandment of love of God and neighbor, to be corrected by others, and to exercise the diverse gifts of the Spirit for the good of all (Basil, Longer Rules 3 and 7, on the superiority of the common life; trans. in The Asketikon of St Basil the Great, ed. Anna Silvas, Oxford, 2005). Basil’s synthesis — coenobitic, moderate, integrated into the life of the Church — became the foundation of Eastern monasticism and stands beside Pachomius as the second great charter of the communal life.

The Later Synthesis

The two paths were never in the end separated, and later monasticism institutionalized their complementarity. In the West, St. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–547), drawing directly on Cassian and on the desert tradition, built his Rule on the coenobitic life as the norm — “the strong race of coenobites” — while acknowledging the anchoritic life as a higher calling for the few, to be attempted only after long testing in community (Benedict, Rule, ch. 1, on the kinds of monks; and Rule 73, commending Cassian and “the lives of the Fathers”; Benedict’s dependence on Cassian is treated in Cassian and the Desert in the West). Benedict’s ordering — coenobium as the school, hermitage as the rare crown — is precisely Cassian’s, and through the Rule of St Benedict it became the framework of Western monasticism.

In the East the synthesis took an even more visible form. On Mount Athos, from the tenth century, all three of the desert’s forms have coexisted on a single mountain: the great coenobitic monasteries, the semi-eremitic sketes (the very word an Egyptian inheritance; see The Desert of Scetis), and the solitary hermitages of the most austere ascetics on the wild southern tip — so that a monk may pass, over a lifetime, from coenobium to skete to hermitage as the desert prescribed (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966, epilogue; and see The Desert and All Later Monasticism). The Athonite settlement is the desert’s two paths made permanent: the whole spectrum from community to solitude preserved as a single organism, each form honored, each ordered to the same end.

The Meaning of the Complementarity

That the desert produced both forms, and learned to hold them together, is one of its deepest bequests. It refused to absolutize either the individual or the community — to make holiness either a solitary heroism or a merely corporate discipline. The hermit needs the community that formed him and the sacraments it guards; the community needs the hermit’s witness that its whole life is ordered beyond itself to God alone. The two paths are the same road walked at different distances from other people, and the goal — the purified heart, unceasing prayer, union with God — is one (Cassian, Conferences 1, on the scopos and telos of the monastic life, purity of heart and the Kingdom of God; trans. Ramsey, 1997; and see Hesychia, Nepsis, and Unceasing Prayer). This is why the tradition venerates Antony and Pachomius together, the father of hermits and the father of the common life, as twin founders of one movement.

References

Cassian, John. The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (Conf. 1 on purity of heart as the aim; Conf. 19 on the coenobite and the hermit.)
Basil of Caesarea. The Asketikon of St Basil the Great. Ed. and trans. Anna M. Silvas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. (Longer Rules 3 and 7, on the superiority of the common life.)
Benedict of Nursia. The Rule of St Benedict. (Ch. 1, the kinds of monks; ch. 73, commending Cassian and the Fathers.)
Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (Cassian on the two ways; his preference for the coenobium.)
Gould, Graham. The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (The desert’s valuation of community.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The relation of the forms; the Athonite inheritance.)
The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers: The Anonymous Series. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Oxford: SLG Press, 1975. (Sayings on patience and the testing of solitude.)