Insights into the early Christian Desert Fathers and Mothers
In these days of fast-paced living, instant information and entertainment, what relevance do the words and stories of hermit desert dwellers, who lived almost two thousand years ago, have for us today? Could it be that living as we do in a culture of excessive distraction, comfort, and immediacy, that the wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers is even more relevant to a search for the heart of spiritual truth than in the past?
The “desert” as presented in the book In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers by John Chryssavgis is symbolic of many different levels—including not only the specific Egyptian desert where these hermits lived in the fourth and fifth centuries, but also the empty, desolate places of the soul.
As Barry McDonald writes in his preface to this book:
But the desert may also be understood as an inner geography of desolation and abandonment; it is the place, perhaps even in the midst of others, where we are most alone. It is the valley of our deepest solitude. Father John tells us that anyone who has experienced some aspect of deserted-ness, loneliness, brokenness, breakdown or break-up—whether emotionally, physically or socially—will connect with the profound humanity of the Desert Fathers and Mothers…and the perennial message of these first Christian monks concerns the necessity of emptiness; the Fathers show us, by their examples, how to confront the chaotic impulses of the soul which drive us away from that still point where God is waiting.
Over many centuries Christians have periodically returned to the wisdom, inspiration, and healing conveyed by the sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. This book by Rev. Chryssavgis is welcomed for pointing us once again to their timeless message. The book is additionally notable for its inclusion of some sayings by Abba Zosimas, here published for the first time in English, and for Rev. Chryssavgis’ commentary that distills these ancient sayings into powerful messages for modern readers.
Christian monasticism developed during a period of major transition in the Church. Although Christians had been martyred in the past for their beliefs, it became popular to join the Church after Christianity was declared the formal religion of the Roman Empire. Attendance at services increased, but the sincerity of commitment in the practice of the faith began to wane. It was during this time that St. Antony of Egypt sought out the desert to escape the distractions of the world and deepen the journey to God in the heart of solitude and poverty. The author, Rev. John Chryssavgis, writes:
The Desert Fathers and Mothers proclaimed a different set of values, where change occurs through silence…; where inaction may be the most powerful source of action; and where productivity may be measured by obscurity, even invisibility.…Theirs was a change that was out of sight, unrecorded in history books. Yet, it was a change that proved cataclysmic, recorded silently in human hearts. It was a protest against the complacency of the Christian world.…The desert was what ultimately kept alive the fiery spirit of the martyrs. The words, then, of these desert elders are more than mere sayings; they are a profound statement.
The book explains further that:
Antony’s step into the uninhabitable and inhospitable desert was little noticed outside, or indeed even inside, his village at the time. Nevertheless, when he died at the age of 156, his friend and biographer Athanasius of Alexandria informs us that the “desert had become a city,” meaning that thousands had regularly flocked to Antony to be taught by him and had made the desert their home. Antony of Egypt was to become known as the father and founder of desert monasticism.
Several of the desert personalities are described and quoted in the pages of In the Heart of the Desert. Below are descriptions of just two of these fascinating holy desert dwellers, with the text excerpted from Fr. Chryssavgis’ book:
Abba Macarius of Egypt
Macarius the Great was born around the year 300 in Egypt. His worldly profession was as a camel-driver and trader. He was an ordained priest and one of the founders of monasticism in Scetis.…He died in the year 390. Forty-one sayings have been preserved under Macarius’ name.…Abba Macarius is characterized by a sense of refinement, resignation, and renunciation.…He was known for “receiving all the brothers in equal simplicity,” for working miracles, but especially for his inclusive love.
They said of Abba Macarius the Great, that he became, as it were, a god upon this earth; because, just as God protects the world, so Abba Macarius would cover the faults he saw, as though he did not see them, and those he heard, as though he did not hear them.
Amma Syncletica
One of the three women that feature in the Sayings is Amma Syncletica. [She was] born in 380 in Alexandria, of a wealthy and well respected pious family.…She died around the year 460. Twenty-seven of her sayings are preserved.…Amma Syncletica rejects any sharp distinction between those who live in the desert and those who live in the city. The goal is the same for all, even if the way differs for some.…
Amma Syncletica said: “There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town; they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd; and it is possible for those who are a solitaries to live in the crowd of their own thoughts.”
Moderation and balance generally seem to characterize the sayings of this desert amma.…Everyone has the potential for such balance, she believes.…
The author explores the reasons for these early Christian seekers to turn to the desert:
Why did these elders choose the desert in the first place? What was the significance of the desert? What is the power of its suggestion?
“Desert” (eremos) literally means “abandonment”; it is the term from which we derive the word “hermit”.…The desert signified death: nothing grows in the desert. Your very existence is, therefore, threatened. In the desert you will find no one and no thing. In the desert, you can only face up to yourself and to every aspect of your self, to your temptations, and to your reality. You confront your own heart, and your heart’s deepest desires, without any scapegoat, without any hiding place.…After all, you cannot hide in the desert; there is no room for lying or deceit there. Your very self is reflected in the dry desert, and you are obliged to face up to this self.…The desert is a place of spiritual revolution, not of personal retreat. It is a place of inner protest, not outward peace. It is a place of deep encounter, not of superficial escape. It is a place of repentance, not recuperation. Living in the desert does not mean living without people; it means living for God. Antony and the other desert dwellers never forgot this.
The author explains to us that the monastic Fathers and Mothers of the Desert each lived alone in a simple hut or room called “the cell.” He tells us that “the cell” is the “starting point” and the “ending point” of the spiritual progress of the monastics. He writes:
In the cell, you simply stay with yourself; you sit with your emotions; and you shut the door to any intrusion.
And he quotes:
A brother came to Scetis to visit Abba Moses and asked him for a word. The old man said to him: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”
Rev. Dr. Chryssavgis explains that:
The cell symbolizes the work of the soul. Like the desert, it too is not merely a place; it is a profound way of the spirit.…
The stability that is here called for is not physical but spiritual. The whole mystery of the desert is encapsulated in this one concept of the cell.…The cell becomes the place where we encounter God, the place where God is.…If the cell indicates the space and the place where we are able to encounter God, then patience intimates the framework or the time within which such an encounter will occur.
Abba Arsenius said to someone who was tempted by the demons: “Go, eat, drink, do no work; only do not leave your cell.” For he knew that patience in the cell keeps a monk in the right way.
“Evil thoughts and demons disappear through patience,” claimed Abba Poemen. Patience is something you pray for fervently. Once gained, however, it can even heal the sick!
Rev. Chryssavgis tells us in this book that to live in our cell requires patience. In Greek the word is hupomone, which “literally implies just sitting there, simply staying put.” This means not running from ourselves, our passions, our personal demons, nor the urge that will surely come to flee back into the world of distraction and relief. And what is required of us to face ourselves in patience is silence, both outer, and especially, inner:
What one comes to practice in patience is the virtue of silence (hesychia). We come to self-knowledge through stillness and silence, through attentiveness and watchfulness (nepsis). When words are abandoned, a new awareness arrives. Silence awakens us from dullness of awareness, from dimness of vision.…
Silence is also the first duty of love (agape), the first requirement for survival within community.
Abba Poemen said: “Someone may seem to be silent, but if in the heart one is condemning others, then one is babbling ceaselessly. And there may be another who talks from morning till evening, and yet in the heart that person is truly silent. That person says nothing that is not profitable.”
What is also required of us is the courage to face ourselves in humility, i.e., to face our helplessness, our failures and sins, to be “perfected in weakness” (2 Cor: 12:9). This is what the author describes as “the role of tears.” This is the willingness to face our pain, to be broken and to grieve; to admit our dependency on God:
The silence of tears reflects our surrender to God and to new patterns of learning and living. Through weeping, we learn by suffering and undergoing, not just by speculating and understanding.…Tears signify an opening of new life, a softening of the soul, a clarity of the mind. They bring us to rebirth and the world to healing. They signify a true homecoming. Through tears we are able to enter the treasury of the heart.
The author tells us that when we enter our heart we discover the “essence of the desert message,” namely, “that we are not in control of ourselves, we are wounded.” He explains that the essence of facing oneself is to face our “passions.” Some may view the passions as our sins, our transgressions against God, but the author reframes this understanding by explaining that:
Passions are our inner wounds, those deep marks in the space of our heart that require healing. In the mind of the desert elders, this means that those passions need to be attended to and tended. If we are going to be a healing presence in the world, then we need to comprehend our passions.
There are many kinds of passions, but Rev. Chryssavgis tells us that there are two basic ways of understanding the passions: One is to view the passions as sins or vices to be subdued and eradicated; the other is to view the passions as God-given natural forces that have become misdirected and need to be mastered and redirected for God’s purposes. Each view calls for a different approach, but each approach requires courage, humility and acceptance.
The Desert Fathers and Mothers recognized that it takes a long time to become a human being. It takes an infinitely patient waiting to put together all the variegated parts of the human heart. Moreover, in the unnoticeable changes toward ever-growing perfection, it is the things that we love that reveal to us who we are. It is the things to which we are most attached that show us where our priorities lie. It is our very imperfections—what they like to call passions, and what we invariably call our wounds—that lead us to the way of perfection.
The desert elders believed that we cannot truly know our heart and transform our passions without a spiritual guide or counselor. The spiritual director is someone who keeps us honest, someone to whom we become accountable and someone to whom we owe obedience as an “avenue toward grace.”
The spiritual elder—or the abba, the amma—is the one who has journeyed along the way of the desert. The spiritual director is the one who has survived the desert and, therefore, can speak both with confidence and with compassion, with authority and with charity alike. The spiritual elder can provide guidelines against the pitfalls and pointers to places of refreshment. The way, of course, always remains personal; each of us follows a way that we carve out for ourselves. Yet the journey is social; we travel together with a sense of community.…In this journey, the spiritual guide should be as dry as the desert. The elder should be characterized by discernment.…The abba or amma should never block the way; they should never steal the limelight. They should never stand out, but always stand beside us. In fact, they should be characterized by few words, by the same golden virtues of the desert: namely, silence and fasting. The spiritual director is not a tourist-guide, but a fellow traveler on the same path.
We are used to hearing and reading about the principle of detachment in regards to the realm of the material world and possessions. But the author reveals to us that the lesson of detachment as taught by the desert elders is one that seeks to transform our inner existence and lives as well as our outer practices. Here are some insights from Rev. Chryssavgis’ text:
Detachment is not the inability to focus on things, material or other; it is the spiritual capacity to focus on all things, material and other, without attachment. It is primarily something spiritual; it is an attitude of life. And in this respect, detachment is ongoing, requiring continual refinement.
There are stages in the way of detachment, just as there are steps in the ladder of spiritual life. Perhaps we should look at detachment not so much as the first stage, but as a series of stages of refinement. There are, in fact, a number of successive detachments that one undergoes in the desert. Detachment resembles the shedding of a number of coats of skin, until our senses are sharpened, or until “our inner vision becomes keen.” When we learn what to let go of, we also learn what it is that is worth holding on to.…
The detachment that is recommended here is a form of letting go. We are to let go of our actions, of our statements, and finally of our very existence. The aim of letting go of our actions is the learning of the prayer, which is the starting-point and ending-point of all action.…
Finally, detachment signifies letting go of our very being. It is a sign of humility, which in the desert is treasured “above all virtues”.…
Humility looks to shift the focus of oneself as the center of the world and to place oneself in the service of others.
Rev. Chryssavgis writes that “theoretically, anyone could enter the desert. People from all classes, hermits of every kind of temperament,…background, education, status, and virtue.…” He tells us that many of the Desert Fathers were well-educated men but that secular education was insufficient when living the ascetic life of the desert:
It is not that secular education was unacceptable to the desert elders. Indeed, many of them were lettered: Arsenius, Basil, Evagrius,and Cassian. It is simply that secular education always remains insufficient without an ascetic depth; it is unfulfilled without the spiritual content. The only degree that counted in the desert was the degree to which one was humbled, even effaced, in order to reveal the presence and grace of God.
Rev. Chryssavgis points out that the desert communities also tended to overlook gender distinction, at least in theory. While many of the stories and sayings of the Desert Mothers have been lost, there are still numerous stories and legends of “heroic women” which have been preserved:
Generally, women in the early Christian centuries did not own themselves; they did not possess or control their lives or even their bodies. They were at the disposal of other people, normally other men, who owned them.…
In the desert, however, women were able to throw off these constraints and restrictions. In the desert, the ammas were able to live with a single focus, namely the heavenly kingdom, and not adhere to any earthly circumstance. And, like others both known and unknown to us in history, these women were also able to remind the men (who might otherwise have been tempted to forget!) that their goal in the desert was not to fulfill particular social roles.
The author asks us a question that one can hear often today when we consider the life of even modern monks, nuns or hermits: “Is it selfish…to withdraw into the desert when there appears to be so much suffering in the world? Are the Desert Fathers and Mothers anti-social figures of fourth-century Egypt?” He explains to us that these holy people served and gave to each other, and to those who came to visit them. As they progressed spiritually, their love for their neighbors also progressed. And Rev. Chryssavgis challenges us with another spiritual position, namely that “We must never use love and service as excuses to avoid the inner work of transformation. All of us—especially those in the caring professions—should take time out for ourselves in retreat.” He continues:
Yet, there is another perspective from which to consider this question about selfishness. It may be that we are in fact called to be more selfish in the spiritual life. This may sound strange, but perhaps we ought to set aside a time and a place where we do nothing else at all but address the passions of the soul and meditate on God. It may be that we should take time out for ourselves and for God in the same way as we do—quite naturally, and without ever considering that this is in any way selfish—to eat and rest and be entertained. The truth is that we are no good to others or to ourselves if we avoid or miss this stage of the desert. The Desert Fathers and Mothers emphasize the need for an integrated self. Remember the words of Abba Alonius: we must, he claimed, be totally alone with God and with ourselves in order to rebuild and reshape ourselves.
Anyone who visits a desert for the first time is often struck with its special kind of stark beauty. The Desert Dwellers also came to love the special beauty of the surrounding desert environment, so that as they lived out their lives there, they became one with the environment and its creatures. They viewed their world as a creation of God, a place to be admired but not adored. “Worship was due to God alone as author and creator of the world,” writes Chryssavgis. In the same way the Desert Fathers and Mothers developed a special relationship with the animals of the desert:
Abba Antony also said: “Obedience with abstinence gives people authority even over wild beasts.” Antony knew the truth of this statement. He had persuaded the animals in his region to live at peace with him and no longer to disturb him. In fact, the notion of being like Adam, before he fell from the graceful condition he enjoyed in paradise, is the ideal to which the desert elders aspired.
Further development of a special relationship with God’s creation was evidenced by the signs and miracles the desert elders were reported to have exhibited:
Another time, when Abba Bessarion had occasion to do so, he said a prayer and crossed the river Chrysoroas on foot, and then continued on his way. Filled with wonder, I asked his pardon and said: “How did your feet feel when you were walking in the water?” He replied: “I felt the water just to my heels, but the rest was dry.”
On another day, while we were going to see an old man, the sun was setting. So Abba Bessarion said this prayer: “I pray you, Lord, that the sun may stand still until we reach your servant,” and this is exactly what happened.…
For the Desert Fathers and Mothers, creation is a miracle. The world, too, is a miracle. In fact, it is not the desert dwellers that make miracles happen; they themselves comprise miracles of God. As vessels of another grace, they remind us of the miracle of human existence.
Rev. Chryssavgis tells us that the Desert Fathers and Mothers offer three main points of advice about encountering God in the life of the desert:
First, the desert elders state categorically that God is not to be sought after or discovered at the end of a certain long, arduous and methodical struggle (agon, which also implies a sense of agony or anguish). Abba Sisoes said: “Seek God, but do not seek where God dwells.” We are to look for God not at the end, but in the very middle of the struggle.…If God is right there, in the middle of our struggle, then our aim is to stay there. We are to remain in the cell, to stay on the road, not to forego the journey or forget the darkness.…
Second, the desert elders are also convinced that God is not only in the middle of our struggle, but that God is always there. God is never absent, never far away. God loves us irrespective of where we are on that journey. God loves us irrespective of who we are and what we are doing.…
Third, and finally, there is another lesson about encountering God that may be gleaned from the teaching of these elders in the desert of early Egypt. In the struggle—in the very place where we meet God, and where we are loved by God—we too discover how to love others. It is in the struggle itself that we discern ways of embracing the weaknesses of others, and learn how to be compassionate, like God.
It is in continual prayer that we empty ourselves that we might be filled with and by God. “Prayer accompanies everything that one does.”
The end of this book contains a significant contribution to the body of writings on the desert elders: the first English translation of the Text of the Reflections of Abba Zosimas. It was translated from Monk Avgoustinos’ Abba Zosimas: Most Beneficial Chapters (Jerusalem, 1913).
Abba Zosimas was a monk who is best known in the Eastern Orthodox Church. He is the one who discovered and revealed to the world the remarkable story of St. Mary of Egypt, having been led to her in the desert by divine guidance. But for those of us who are not desert scholars, this text offers us an opportunity to understand more of the holy Abba himself. Chryssavgis writes that
Zosimas flourished between 475 and 525, from the period just after the fourth Ecumenical Council (in 451) until around the time of the great Gaza elders, Barsanuphius, John and Dorotheus. He is mentioned several times by Dorotheus of Gaza, who knew him personally and visited him as his younger contemporary and compatriot. Dorotheus may in fact be the compiler of the Reflections of Abba Zosimas.
Here are several excerpts from In the Heart of the Desert on the sayings of the holy figure of Abba Zosimas:
When he began (to speak), the blessed Abba Zosimas spoke in the following manner. First, he would perform the sign of the cross over his mouth. He would say that, when the divine Word became human, He granted abundant grace to those who believed and who still believe in Him. For, it is possible to believe even now, indeed even to begin from this day, if we so desire. After all, our desire depends on our free will, with the cooperation also of grace. Thus, it is possible for whoever so desires, to regard the whole world as being nothing.*
* *[Abba Zosimas] used to say: “Whatever may happen to a humble person, that person turns toward prayer and considers everyone as a benefactor. However, we have deviated from the way of truth and the directions of the saints. Instead, we seek to forge our own way, according to our wicked desires. Nevertheless, what can be easier than to listen to that holy and practical teacher, Abba Ammonas, who says: ‘Pay close attention to yourself. Then, if someone should afflict you in any matter whatsoever, you will be silent. You will not say anything at all until your heart is softened through unceasing prayer. Afterward, you are able to console your brother.’”*
* *He used to say: “Every virtue requires labor, and time, and our desire, and above all God’s cooperation. For, if God does not cooperate with our free will, then our struggle is in vain. It is like the farmer, who cultivates and sows his land, but God does not rain on his seed. Nevertheless, God’s cooperation also requires our prayer and supplication. It is through these that we attract God’s assistance for our support. If we neglect prayer, how will God ever recognize our work? Alternatively, how can He do so if we pray in a lukewarm fashion, or in some lazy manner, or if we are quickly discouraged? As I always say: ‘Then, we do not deserve to receive anything at all. For, God pays attention to our desire and grants His gifts in accordance to this.’”
