The Desert and All Later Monasticism

How the fourth-century Egyptian desert became the root of all that followed — Basil’s coenobitic ideal, the Sinai of John Climacus, the Studite reform of Constantinople, the Holy Mountain of Athos, and the Russian tradition of the elders. This file traces the desert forward through the monastic tradition it founded, showing the desert ideal persisting at the base of each new flowering.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Egyptian desert monasticism)

The Root

Every later form of Christian monasticism traces itself, directly or at one remove, to the Egyptian desert of the fourth century. Antony gave it the anchoritic pattern, Pachomius the coenobitic, and the semi-eremitic colonies of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis the middle way; the Apophthegmata, the travelogues, and Cassian carried the teaching outward (see Anchorites, Cenobites, and the Middle Way and Cassian and the Desert in the West). What follows is not a break with the desert but its continual re-rooting in new soil — Cappadocia, Sinai, Constantinople, Athos, Russia — each time preserving the desert’s spectrum of forms, its elder–disciple relation, and its prayer of the heart (Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City, Oxford, 1966, the standard narrative of this continuity; Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed., London: Penguin, 1993, on the monastic tradition).

Basil and the Cappadocian Synthesis

The first great re-rooting was in Cappadocia. St. Basil the Great (c. 330–379) had visited the ascetics of Egypt and Syria, and he gave the coenobitic ideal its theological charter in his Asketikon — a moderate, church-integrated common life, ordered by the double commandment of love (see The Two Paths of the Desert). Basil’s rules became the foundation of Eastern monasticism, and to this day Orthodox monastic profession is understood to follow “the rule of St. Basil” (Basil, The Asketikon, ed. Silvas, Oxford, 2005; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, ch. 2). Basil desert-fathered the East as Cassian and Benedict would the West: he took the Egyptian ideal and made it livable and permanent within the ordinary life of the Church.

Sinai and the Ladder

A second great inheritor was the monastic tradition of Sinai. At the foot of the holy mountain, in the monastery that would come to bear St. Catherine’s name, the desert’s teaching on the thoughts, on stillness, and on the prayer of the heart was gathered and systematized by St. John Climacus (c. 579–649) in The Ladder of Divine Ascent — thirty rungs of ascetic ascent, from renunciation through the war with the passions to hesychia, prayer, and love (John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent; and see St. John Climacus). The Ladder, read in Orthodox monasteries every Great Lent, is the desert’s teaching raised into a spiritual classic; through it the Egyptian inheritance — penthos, discernment, the guarding of the heart, the remembrance of Jesus with every breath — passed into the mainstream of Byzantine and later Orthodox spirituality (see Hesychia, Nepsis, and Unceasing Prayer).

The Studite Reform

In the imperial capital the desert took urban and coenobitic form. St. Theodore the Studite (759–826), abbot of the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople, reformed communal monasticism on a Basilian and desert foundation — a disciplined, liturgically rich common life under a written typikon — and his reform became the model for coenobitic monasteries across the Byzantine world (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, ch. 3). The Studite pattern was carried into the Slavic lands: when St. Theodosius of the Kiev Caves (d. 1074) organized the first great monastery of Rus’, he adopted the Studite typikon, so that Russian monasticism began, at one remove, from the desert by way of Constantinople (on the Kiev Caves and the Studite typikon, Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993; see Orthodoxy: Monasticism).

The Holy Mountain

The fullest surviving embodiment of the desert’s legacy is Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula that from the tenth century (St. Athanasius the Athonite founded the Great Lavra in 963) became the heart of Orthodox monasticism. On Athos all three of the desert’s forms persist side by side on a single mountain — the great coenobitic monasteries, the semi-eremitic sketes (the word itself the memory of Egyptian Scetis; see The Desert of Scetis), and the solitary hermitages of the austere southern crags — so that Athos is the desert’s spectrum of vocations made permanent (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966, epilogue; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993). It was on Athos, in the fourteenth century, that the desert’s prayer of the heart flowered into the hesychast renewal defended by St. Gregory Palamas, and from Athos, in the eighteenth, that the Philokalia went out to renew the whole Orthodox world (see Cassian and the Desert in the West). The Holy Mountain is, in a real sense, the Egyptian desert transplanted to a Greek peninsula and kept alive for a thousand years.

The Russian Elders

The last great flowering treated here is the Russian tradition of the startsy, the elders. St. Sergius of Radonezh (c. 1314–1392) renewed Russian monasticism from a hermitage in the northern forests that grew into the great Trinity Lavra, reliving the desert pattern of the solitary whose holiness draws a community. St. Nil Sorsky (c. 1433–1508), who had studied on Athos, planted the skete life of the desert in the Russian north, teaching the guarding of the thoughts and the prayer of the heart in direct dependence on the desert and neptic fathers. And the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revival — St. Paisius Velichkovsky’s translation of the Philokalia into Slavonic, the elders of Optina, St. Seraphim of Sarov — carried the desert’s eldership and prayer into modern Russia, and through Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima into the imagination of the modern world (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, ch. 6; on the elders and the Philokalia revival, see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer and Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction). The Russian starets who receives the pilgrim and gives him a “word” is the direct heir of the Scetan old man to whom the young monk came saying “abba, give me a word.”

The Persisting Ideal

Through all these transformations the desert ideal persists unbroken at the base: the spectrum of forms from community to solitude, honored together and never absolutized (see The Two Paths of the Desert); the elder–disciple relation as the ordinary means of formation; the teaching on the thoughts, on penthos and discernment and humility; and the prayer of the heart, the unceasing invocation of mercy, at the center of all (see Penthos, Discernment, and Humility). Basil, Climacus, Theodore, the Athonites, the Russian elders — each drew fresh water, but the well was dug in fourth-century Egypt. To study the desert fathers is thus to study the source of the whole living tradition of Christian monastic and ascetic life, East and West alike.

See Also

References

  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The continuity from Egypt through Sinai and Palestine to later monasticism; the Athonite epilogue.)
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Basil, the Studites, the Kiev Caves and the Studite typikon, Athos, the Russian elders.)
  • Basil of Caesarea. The Asketikon of St Basil the Great. Ed. and trans. Anna M. Silvas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. (The coenobitic charter of Eastern monasticism.)
  • John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. (The desert’s teaching systematized; treated in the St. John Climacus collection.)
  • The Philokalia. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber, 1979– . (The neptic tradition and its eighteenth-century revival.)