The desert fathers go out
Anthony of Egypt and the monastic movement
After Constantine, the martyrs stop coming. The arena is closed. The lions are retired. The church that spent three centuries bleeding for its faith suddenly finds itself in basilicas, on the imperial payroll, invited to dinner by an emperor who calls the bishops his brothers.
And a generation of Christians goes to the desert.
The movement begins before Constantine — Anthony went to his cave decades before the Edict of Milan — but it explodes after. When dying for Christ is no longer available as a form of total self-offering, some Christians find another form: total renunciation. The desert becomes, in the language of the tradition, a white martyrdom to replace the red.
They go to Scetis and Nitria and the Thebaid. They go to the caves along the Nile and the cliffs of Cappadocia. They go alone, or in loose communities, or in the organized monasteries that Pachomius begins to build. They fast and pray and work and sleep very little and talk even less.
The world follows them there. People come from Alexandria and Rome and Constantinople to ask a single question: how do I live? The abbas and ammas — the fathers and mothers of the desert — give answers in the compressed, precise language of people who have stopped wasting words.
The movement will shape the entire medieval church. Benedictine monasticism, Celtic Christianity, the mendicant orders, the contemplative traditions of the Reformation era — all of them trace their roots to the men and women who went to the Egyptian desert in the fourth century and found that the silence had something to say.
“Stay in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.”
— Abba Moses of Scetis, Apophthegmata Patrum, 4th century
“and after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.”
The desert fathers went looking for something the basilicas could not give them. They were not rejecting the church. Most of them remained deeply connected to their bishops and their communities. They were testing whether the faith they professed was actually the organizing principle of their interior lives — or whether it was simply the ambient religion of their culture.
The desert strips everything. When there is nothing to do but pray and work and eat and sleep, you find out very quickly what is actually at the center.
You do not have to go to Egypt to ask the question. The question is: when everything that props up your faith is removed — the community, the music, the liturgy, the routine — is there anything left?
What do you find at the center when everything else falls away?