THE WISDOM OF THE DESERT Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century TRANSLATED BY

THOMAS MERTON A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK Nihil obstat Austin B. Vaughan, S. T. D. Censor
Deputatus Imprimatur Francis Cardinal Spellman Archbishop of New York Ex Parte Ordinis Nihil
obstat Frater M. Thomas Aquinas Porter, O. C. S. O. Frater M. Gabriel O’Connell, O. C. S. O. Imprimi
potest Frater M. Gabriel Sortais, O. C. S. O. Abbas Generalis The Nihil obstat and Imprimatur are
official declarations that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is
contained therein that those who have granted the Nihil obstat and Imprimatur agree with the
contents, opinions or statements expressed. TABLE OF CONTENTS AUTHOR’S NOTE THE WISDOM OF
THE DESERT SOME SAYINGS OF THE DESERT FATHERS AUTHOR’S NOTE This collection of sayings from
the Verba Seniorum is by no means intended as a piece of research scholarship. It is, on the contrary,
a free and informal redaction of stories chosen here and there in the various original Latin versions,
without order and without any identification of the particular sources. The book is designed entirely
for the reader’s interest and edification. In other words I have felt that as a monk of the twentieth
century I ought to be quite free in availing myself of the privilege enjoyed by the monks of earlier
days, and so I have made a little collection of my own, with no special system, order or purpose,
merely in order to have the stories and to enjoy them with my friends. This is the way such books
originally came into existence. When the first version of this work was completed, I gave it to my
friend Victor Hammer who printed an extraordinarily beautiful limited edition on his hand press in
Lexington, Kentucky. After that, it was decided to expand the collection a little, and rewrite the
introduction, so that New Directions could bring out a larger edition. So here it is. But I hope the
book still preserves its original spontaneous, informal and personal aspect. Far from detracting from
their wisdom, this informality will guarantee the stories the authenticity they have always had and
keep them fresh and alive in all their concreteness and immediacy. May those who need and enjoy
such apothegms be encouraged, by the taste of clear water, to follow the brook to its source. THE
WISDOM OF THE DESERT * SOME SAYINGS OF THE DESERT FATHERS THE WISDOM OF THE DESERT IN
the fourth century A. D. the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Arabia and Persia were peopled by a race of
men who have left behind them a strange reputation. They were the first Christian hermits, who
abandoned the cities of the pagan world to live in solitude. Why did they do this? The reasons were
many and various, but they can all be summed up in one word as the quest for “salvation.” And what
was salvation? Certainly it was not something they sought in mere exterior conformity to the
customs and dictates of any social group. In those days men had become keenly conscious of the
strictly individual character of “salvation.” Society – which meant pagan society, limited by the
horizons and prospects of life “in this world” – was regarded by them as a shipwreck from which
each single individual man had to swim for his life. We need not stop here to discuss the fairness of
this view: what matters is to remember that it was a fact. These were men who believed that to let
oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was
purely and simply a disaster. The fact that the Emperor was now Christian and that the “world” was
coming to know the Cross as a sign of temporal power only strengthened them in their resolve. It
should seem to us much stranger than it does, this paradoxical flight from the world that attained its
greatest dimensions (I almost said frenzy) when the “world” became officially Christian. These men
seem to have thought, as a few rare modern thinkers like Berdyaev have thought, that there is really
no such thing as a “Christian state.” They seem to have doubted that Christianity and politics could
ever be mixed to such an extent as to produce a fully Christian society. In other words, for them the
only Christian society was spiritual and extra-mundane: the Mystical Body of Christ. These were
surely extreme views, and it is almost scandalous to recall them in a time like ours when Christianity
is accused on all sides of preaching negativism and withdrawal – of having no effective way of
meeting the problems of the age. But let us not be too superficial. The Desert Fathers did, in fact,
meet the “problems of their time” in the sense that they were among the few who were ahead of
their time, and opened the way for the development of a new man and a new society. They
represent what modern social philosophers (Jaspers, Mumford) call the emergence of the “axial
man,” the forerunner of the modern personalist man. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with
their pragmatic individualism degraded and corrupted the psychological heritage of axial man with
its debt to the Desert Fathers and other contemplatives, and prepared the way for the great
regression to the herd mentality that is taking place now. The flight of these men to the desert was
neither purely negative nor purely individualistic. They were not rebels against society. True, they
were in a certain sense “anarchists,” and it will do no harm to think of them in that light. They were
men who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state,
and who believed that there was a way of getting along without slavish dependence on accepted,
conventional values. But they did not intend to place themselves above society. They did not reject
society with proud contempt, as if they were superior to other men. On the contrary, one of the
reasons why they fled from the world of men was that in the world men were divided into those who
were successful, and imposed their will on others, and those who had to give in and be imposed
upon. The Desert Fathers declined to be ruled by men, but had no desire to rule over others
themselves. Nor did they fly from human fellowship – the very fact that they uttered these “words”
of advice to one another is proof that they were eminently social. The society they sought was one
where all men were truly equal, where the only authority under God was the charismatic authority
of wisdom, experience and love. Of course, they acknowledged the benevolent, hierarchical
authority of their bishops: but the bishops were far away and said little about what went on in the
desert until the great Origenist conflict at the end of the fourth century. What the Fathers sought
most of all was their own true self, in Christ. And in order to do this, they had to reject completely
the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion in “the world.” They sought a way to God
that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had mapped it out beforehand.
They sought a God whom they alone could find, not one who was “given” in a set, stereotyped form
by somebody else. Not that they rejected any of the dogmatic formulas of the Christian faith: they
accepted and clung to them in their simplest and most elementary shape. But they were slow (at
least in the beginning, in the time of their primitive wisdom) to get involved in theological
controversy. Their flight to the arid horizons of the desert meant also a refusal to be content with
arguments, concepts and technical verbiage. We deal here exclusively with hermits. There were also
cenobites in the desert – cenobites by the hundred and by the thousand, living the “common life” in
enormous monasteries like the one founded by St. Pachomius at Tabenna. Among these there was
social order, almost military discipline. Nevertheless the spirit was still very much a spirit of
personalism and freedom, because even the cenobite knew that his Rule was only an exterior
framework, a kind of scaffolding with which he was to help himself build the spiritual structure of his
own life with God. But the hermits were in every way more free. There was nothing to which they
had to “conform” except the secret, hidden, inscrutable will of God which might differ very notably
from one cell to another! It is very significant that one of the first of these Verba (Number 3) is one in
which the authority of St. Anthony is adduced for what is the basic principle of desert life: that God is
the authority and that apart from His manifest will there are few or no principles: “Therefore,
whatever you see your soul to desire according to God, do that thing, and you shall keep your heart
safe.” Obviously such a path could only be travelled by one who was very alert and very sensitive to
the landmarks of a trackless wilderness. The hermit had to be a man mature in faith, humble and
detached from himself to a degree that is altogether terrible. The spiritual cataclysms that
sometimes overtook some of the presumptuous visionaries of the desert are there to show the
dangers of the lonely life – like bones whitening in the sand. The Desert Father could not afford to be
an illuminist. He could not dare risk attachment to his own ego, or the dangerous ecstasy of self-will.
He could not retain the slightest identification with his superficial, transient, self-constructed self. He
had to lose himself in the inner, hidden reality of a self that was transcendent, mysterious,
halfknown, and lost in Christ. He had to die to the values of transient existence as Christ had died to
them on the Cross, and rise from the dead with Him in the light of an entirely new wisdom. Hence
the life of sacrifice, which started out from a clean break, separating the monk from the world. A life
continued in “compunction” which taught him to lament the madness of attachment to unreal
values. A life of solitude and labour, poverty and fasting, charity and prayer which enabled the old
superficial self to be purged away and permitted the gradual emergence of the true, secret self in
which the Believer and Christ were “one Spirit.” Finally, the proximate end of all this striving was
“purity of heart” – a clear unobstructed vision of the true state of affairs, an intuitive grasp of one’s
own inner reality as anchored, or rather lost, in God through Christ. The fruit of this was quies: “rest”.
Not rest of the body, nor even fixation of the exalted spirit upon some point or summit of light. The
Desert Fathers were not, for the most part, ecstatics. Those who were have left some strange and
misleading stories behind them to confuse the true issue. The “rest” which these men sought was
simply the sanity and poise of a being that no longer has to look at itself because it is carried away by
the perfection of freedom that is in it. And carried where? Wherever Love itself, or the Divine Spirit,
sees fit to go. Rest, then, was a kind of simple nowhereness and no-mindedness that had lost all
preoccupation with a false or limited “self.” At peace in the possession of a sublime “Nothing” the
spirit laid hold, in secret, upon the “All” – without trying to know what it possessed. Now the Fathers
were not even sufficiently concerned with the nature of this rest to speak of it in these terms, except
very rarely, as did St. Anthony, when he remarked that “the prayer of the monk is not perfect until he
no longer realizes himself or the fact that he is praying.” And this was said casually, in passing. For the
rest, the Fathers steered clear of everything lofty, everything esoteric, everything theoretical or
difficult to understand. That is to say, they refused to talk about such things. And for that matter they
were not very willing to talk about anything else, even about the truths of Christian faith, which
accounts for the laconic quality of these sayings. In many respects, therefore, these Desert Fathers
had much in common with Indian Yogis and with Zen Buddhist monks of China and Japan. If we were
to seek their like in twentieth-century America, we would have to look in strange, out of the way
places. Such beings are tragically rare. They obviously do not flourish on the sidewalk at Forty-Second
Street and Broadway. We might perhaps find someone like this among the Pueblo Indians or the
Navahos: but there the case would be entirely different. You would have simplicity, primitive wisdom:
but rooted in a primitive society. With the Desert Fathers, you have the characteristic of a clean
break with a conventional, accepted social context in order to swim for one’s life into an apparently
irrational void. Though I might be expected to claim that men like this could be found in some of our
monasteries of contemplatives, I will not be so bold. With us it is often rather a case of men leaving
the society of the “world” in order to fit themselves into another kind of society, that of the religious
family which they enter. They exchange the values, concepts and rites of the one for those of the
other. And since we now have centuries of monasticism behind us, this puts the whole thing in a
different light. The social “norms” of a monastic family are also apt to be conventional, and to live by
them does not involve a leap into the void – only a radical change of customs and standards. The
words and examples of the Desert Fathers have been so much a part of monastic tradition that time
has turned them into stereotypes for us, and we are no longer able to notice their fabulous
originality. We have buried them, so to speak, in our own routines, and thus securely insulated
ourselves against any form of spiritual shock from their lack of conventionality. Yet it has been my
hope that in selecting and editing these “words” I may have presented them in a new light and made
their freshness once again obvious. The Desert Fathers were pioneers, with nothing to go on but the
example of some of the prophets, like St. John the Baptist, Elias, Eliseus, and the Apostles, who also
served them as models. For the rest, the life they embraced was “angelic” and they walked the
untrodden paths of invisible spirits. Their cells were the furnace of Babylon in which, in the midst of
flames, they found themselves with Christ. They neither courted the approval of their
contemporaries nor sought to provoke their disapproval, because the opinions of others had ceased,
for them, to be matters of importance. They had no set doctrine about freedom, but they had in fact
become free by paying the price of freedom. In any case these Fathers distilled for themselves a very
practical and unassuming wisdom that is at once primitive and timeless, and which enables us to
reopen the sources that have been polluted or blocked up altogether by the accumulated mental and
spiritual refuse of our technological barbarism. Our time is in desperate need of this kind of
simplicity. It needs to recapture something of the experience reflected in these lines. The word to
emphasize is experience. The few short phrases collected in this volume have little or no value
merely as information. It would be futile to skip through these pages and lightly take note of the fact
that the Fathers said this and this. What good will it do us to know merely that such things were once
said? The important thing is that they were lived. That they flow from an experience of the deeper
levels of life. That they represent a discovery of man, at the term of an inner and spiritual journey
that is far more crucial and infinitely more important than any journey to the moon. What can we
gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?
This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless
but disastrous. Proof: the great travellers and colonizers of the Renaissance were, for the most part,
men who perhaps were capable of the things they did precisely because they were alienated from
themselves. In subjugating primitive worlds they only imposed on them, with the force of cannons,
their own confusion and their own alienation. Superb exceptions like Fray Bartolome de las Casas, St.
Francis Xavier, or Father Matthew Ricci, only prove the rule. These sayings of the Desert Fathers are
drawn from a classical collection, the Verba Seniorum, in Migne’s Latin Patrology (Volume 73). The
Verba are distinguished from the other Desert Fathers’ literature by their total lack of literary artifice,
their complete and honest simplicity. The Lives of the Fathers are much more grandiloquent,
dramatic, stylized.