Feature: The Desert Fathers of Egypt

Heritage Key

The Desert Fathers of ancient Egypt were some of the world's first hermits. Despite the modern ideal of the hermit, these didn't live in total isolation. However, they did live a sparse, hard life in the country's early Christian monasteries. If women chose to enter their sphere, they would do so dressed as men. Who were these scholastic men of the desert, and how did their form of worship influence Christianity for millenia to come?

In the fourth century AD, Egypt was a province of the Roman Empire (in modern terms, an occupied territory) vital to Roman security, since the Nile valley supplied most of the grain for the "bread and circuses" that kept Rome's proletariat quiet. But that didn't get Egypt any preferential treatment. It was rigorously controlled, ruthlessly taxed; many small farmers, too poor to pay, abandoned their land, and Egypt's economy slowly deteriorated.

By then Rome itself was an empty shell, threatened from within by corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, from without by Teutonic tribes hungry for land. The one self-confident force was the Christian Church. Less than a century before, its followers had fled, apostasised or suffered agonising deaths in the final persecutions. Now Christianity was the official religion, its Church a rich, powerful, strictly hierarchical institution. Where, in all this pomp and circumstance, were Christ's teachings?

To a small but significant number, inside Egypt and beyond, Church and Empire were now mirror images, and within their stifling embrace it seemed virtually impossible to live a truly Christian life. The solution – inspired by the lone pioneer who became St Anthony – was to retreat to the fringes of the desert and live either as hermits or in a monastery (the world's first Christian monastery was founded by the Egyptian Pachom, just north of Thebes).