The Desert Fathers and Mothers

The men and women who went out into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine and Syria from the late third century to live for God alone, and made, as St Athanasius wrote, the desert a city. St Antony went furthest and stayed longest, and the Life of him that Athanasius wrote around 360 carried the ideal across the whole Christian world. Around them grew the three ways of life that the Church still keeps: the hermit alone, as Antony; the small group around an elder, as at Scetis under St Macarius; and the community under a rule, as St Pachomius founded it in the Thebaid. There were Mothers as well as Fathers, Syncletica, Sarah and Theodora among them. What they taught was handed down as sayings, short and blunt, gathered in the fifth century into the Apophthegmata; Palladius wrote down what he saw among them, and St John Cassian carried their teaching to the West. Almost every later word of Orthodox spirituality, on the passions, on watchfulness, on humility, starts from theirs.