The Desert in the Modern World

The enduring appeal of the desert fathers: the twentieth-century rediscovery of the Sayings, their reception by modern readers within and beyond the Church, the living continuity of Egyptian and Athonite monasticism, and a closing, sober assessment of what the desert fathers were and what they still give.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Egyptian desert monasticism)

A Rediscovered Literature

The Apophthegmata Patrum — for centuries the reading of monks — has, over the last century, found a wide readership far beyond the monastery. The rediscovery had two engines: sound scholarship and popular translation. On the scholarly side, the critical work of Jean-Claude Guy on the Greek collections, Derwas Chitty’s The Desert a City (1966), and Benedicta Ward’s authoritative English translations of the alphabetical and anonymous collections (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 1975/1984; The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, 1975) made the desert accessible and reliable; the later studies of Douglas Burton-Christie, Graham Gould, and William Harmless set it on a firm critical footing (Harmless, Desert Christians, Oxford, 2004, surveys the whole modern scholarship). On the popular side, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s slim The Wisdom of the Desert (New York: New Directions, 1960) — his own selection and translation of sayings — introduced the desert to a broad mid-century audience and framed it as a resource for modern spiritual seekers (Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, 1960, introduction). Others followed: Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart (1981) drew on the desert’s teaching on solitude, silence, and prayer for contemporary ministers, and Rowan Williams’ Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert (Oxford: Lion, 2003) read the Sayings for their bearing on community, self-knowledge, and life with the neighbor.

The Living Continuity

The desert is not only a literature but a living tradition, and its modern appeal is bound up with the fact that the life the Sayings record has never wholly ceased. In Egypt itself, the monasteries of the Wadi al-Natrun — the ancient Scetis — remain inhabited, and the twentieth century saw a remarkable Coptic monastic revival, associated above all with Fr. Matthew the Poor (Matta al-Maskeen) and his community at the Monastery of St. Macarius, and with the wider renewal under the Coptic Church, drawing educated men back to the desert cells (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 8, on the surviving and revived monasteries; see The Desert of Scetis). On Mount Athos and in the monasteries of Greece, Romania, Russia, and the Orthodox diaspora, the desert’s forms — coenobium, skete, hermitage — and its prayer of the heart continue to be lived, and the twentieth-century Athonite elders (St. Silouan, St. Paisios, St. Porphyrios, St. Sophrony of Essex) are recognizably the desert’s heirs (see The Desert and All Later Monasticism). The reader of the Apophthegmata can still visit places where the words attach to living communities.

Why the Desert Speaks Now

The desert’s appeal to modern readers, within and beyond the Church, rests on several qualities. Its brevity and concreteness — the terse “word” answering a real question — suits an age impatient with system. Its psychology of the thoughts — the close observation of how a temptation arises, grows, and is refused — reads with startling freshness to a culture preoccupied with the inner life (Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, Oxford, 1993). Its insistence on silence and stillness speaks to the noise and distraction of modern existence; its teaching on not judging and on self-accusation cuts against a culture of outrage and blame. And the desert’s realism about the self — its refusal of illusion, its demand that a man look first at his own heart — has struck many modern readers, religious and secular alike, as a rare and needed honesty (Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, 2003; Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, 1981).

There is, in this modern reception, a real danger of romanticizing — of turning the harsh, demanding, God-obsessed ascetics of fourth-century Egypt into gentle sages of mindfulness, detached from the faith and the Church that were their whole reason for being. The desert fathers went to the wilderness not for self-improvement but to save their souls, to do battle with real demons, to weep for their sins and seek the vision of God; their asceticism was severe, their world-view uncompromisingly supernatural, and their sayings make sense only within the Gospel they were trying to obey (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004; and see The Flight to the Desert). To read them well is to receive the whole of what they were, not a decaffeinated remainder.

A Sober Assessment

What, in the end, were the desert fathers, and what do they still give? Three honest judgments close this compendium.

First, they are known to us through a layered and largely later record — an oral tradition redacted in Greek around 500, two travelogues with their own agendas, a Latin corpus written in Gaul — and the compendium has kept that gap in view throughout (see The Sayings and Their Collections). We cannot, in most cases, recover the exact words of a fourth-century abba or fix his dates; what we can recover is the shape and ethos of a movement and the persona of its great figures, and that is a great deal. The honest reader neither treats the Sayings as court transcripts nor dismisses them as fiction, but takes them for what they are: the faithful memory of a spiritual tradition, received and transmitted by the Church (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Second, the desert’s historical achievement is immense and secure. Within a single century a scatter of Egyptian hermits and communities created the forms, the teaching, and the literature from which all later Christian monasticism, East and West, would grow (see The Desert and All Later Monasticism). Whatever the source-critical qualifications, the movement itself is one of the great facts of Christian history, and its influence is beyond dispute.

Third, and deepest, the desert still gives what it always gave: a word. The whole form of its literature — the disciple’s “abba, give me a word,” the elder’s brief answer carried home to be lived — is an invitation still open. The desert fathers do not offer a system to be mastered but a word to be received and done: sit in your cell; guard your thoughts; weep for your sins; do not judge your brother; pray without ceasing; count yourself the least; seek God alone. Fifteen hundred years after the salt desert of Scetis was first settled, that word still finds those who ask for it — which is, finally, the truest measure of what the desert fathers were (see Reading the Sayings).

References

Merton, Thomas. The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century. New York: New Directions, 1960. (The mid-century popular rediscovery.)
Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Way of the Heart. New York: Seabury Press, 1981. (The desert’s solitude, silence, and prayer for modern readers.)
Williams, Rowan. Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert. Oxford: Lion, 2003. (The Sayings on community and self-knowledge.)
Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Cistercian Publications, 1984; and The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers: The Anonymous Series. SLG Press, 1975. (The authoritative modern English translations.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The modern scholarship; the surviving and revived monasteries; the caution against romanticizing.)
Burton-Christie, Douglas. The Word in the Desert. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. (The desert’s enduring spiritual method.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The standard history behind the rediscovery.)