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The Egypt of Mena, bishop of Nikiou, was a country under relatively tolerant Muslim administration, with a long history of conquest and reconquest, and a deep antipathy to the Byzantine Empire and Melkite ('imperial') ecclesiastics. Staunchly monophysite, deeply devoted to the patriarchs of Alexandria, and determinedly opposed to the Council of Chalcedon (451) and all that it represented, the Christians of Egypt continued their witness and the...

I have plucked the finest flowers of the unmown meadow and worked them into a row which I now offer to you', wrote John Moschos as he began his tales of the holy men of seventh-century Palestine and Egypt. This translation offers readers contemporary insights into the spirituality of the desert.

The Syrian monks of the fourth and fifth centuries led lives at the opposite extreme from the culture of graeco-roman cities. Unwashed, unkempt, often homeless, usually poorly educated, making a positive virtue out of physical deprivation, they shocked and appalled cultivated pagans. Even Christian townsmen had to overcome hellenic prejudices before they could see in these uncouth figures the spiritual paragons of the age. Yet the Christian la...

Eyewitness accounts of the lives and teachings of the fourth-century Desert Fathers from the Historia monachorum in Aegypto.

A shrewd observer, a master psychologist, an accomplished raconteur, Dorotheos is also a learned man with a prodigious capacity for assimiliating in an organized harmony the wisdom of his precedessors in the life of the Spirit. Yet he is far more interested in humbly serving his brethren than in discoursing about the recondite aspects of the hescyhast experience. His genial candor makes him the ideal spiritual master to introduce modern reader...

The living link through whom the ascetic principles of hellenistic philosophers passed into monasticism, Evagrius molded Christian asceticism through his own works and through his influcence on John Cassian, Climacus, and Saint Benedict.

The narrow stretch of desert between the Jordan Valley and the hill country of Judea drew great biblical prophets-Elijah and John the Baptist-and unforgettable christian ascetics. Our best source of information on this movement from AD 400-600 comes from Cyril's pen.

Written in the fifth century, during one of the most formative periods of christian monasticism in Egypt and Palestine, the Ascetic Discourses show a strong influence of the Scriptures, both Old and New, and of earlier monastic writers. They are marked by a faithfulness to tradition, yet equally by a note of originality distinctive to the Gaza region. Abba Isaiah has set forth a practical guide for monks, ever aware of the challenges that inte...

All around the Roman world--in the Greek East and the Latin West, in Asia Minor, North Africa, Egypt, the Holy Land, Italy, and Gaul--widows, virgins, and sometimes matrons lived ascetic, celibate and devout lives either in community or in their own households. They created a powerful tradition which exerts an influence down to the present time. We see these women chiefly through the eyes of men who paid them the intended compliment of calling...

Beauty consuming itself like incense burnt before God in solitude: these stories of penitent women from the fourth- century egyptian desert fascinated Christians in antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages.

The desert stood in stark opposition to the oikoumene, the inhabited world of the fourth century. Not because the world was a bad place, but because the desert - understood geographically, religiously, spiritually, and mystically - was the harsh, uncomprising place where the Christian could be perfected by God. Far from the Christian metropolis of Alexandria, removed from the well-known and much-visited monastic settlements of the Thebaid, and...

The saintly austerities of Mary of Egypt so impressed early monks that they recorded her life to edify their brethren. Many versions circulated and the tale traveled from Palestine to Europe, from Greek to Latin to French to Spanish, from prose to poetry, from hagiography to literature, and from the monastery into the world outside. Here we see Mary through the eyes of three medieval poets: Flodoard, a canon of Reims ( 966), Hildebert of Lavar...

Those seeking to deepen their spiritual lives by visiting monasteries rarely have enough time to absorb as much as they would like. In this book an experienced spiritual master provides an intensive directed retreat which relies heavily on the rich Cistercian spiritual tradition. Readers may read and digest at their own pace, savoring the author's contagious enthusiasm for the monastic way and the medieval monks who formed this distinctive con...

In the flood of christian ascetics who left the world to seek God alone, Simeon chose a novel withdrawal. He mounted a pillar and remained there the rest of his life. To him came supplicants with all kinds of problems: personal anguish, sickness and pain, infertility, sin, and social transgression. Public issues were mediated at his shrine and slaves manumitted. Three views of the Stylite in three lives.

Basil the Great (330-379) is one of the most important figures in Christian history and a theologian and spiritual teacher of ecumenical significance. At a time when the sources of their riche spiritual heritage are being re-appropriated by Christians of many traditions, it is strange that little attention has so far been given to Basilian spirituality. A Life Pleasing to God tells the story of Basil's own spiritual development in the theologi...

The lives, rules, and other writings of Saint Pachomius and his disciples.

The pearlers we meet in this book were early monks of Syria, Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Persia (Iran), They saw themselves as pearl-divers and pearl-merchants searching, through asceticism and prayer, for the precious pearls of mystical experience. Their quest led them into the wilderness, to a state of silent solitude in remote caves and hermitages. Working from Syriac manuscripts in the British Museum and the Vatican Library, and from the Greek...

During his twenty years as abbot of the Yorkshire monastery of Rievaulx, Aelred preached many sermons: to his own monks, in other monasteries, and at significant gatherings outside the cloister. His disciple and biographer, Walter Daniel, mentions hundreds of sermons. In this volume, the first of several, we have twenty-eight of his sermons. They have been translated from the critical edition of a manuscript copied for the Abbey of Clairvaux i...

Monks and priests - male celibates - have for centuries described, expressed, and celebrated their love for God in the language of sex, most prolifically and characteristically in a thousand-year tradition of theological commentaries on the scriptural Song of Songs. As their allegory for the intimate love between God and man, they chose the most intense human model available - erotic love. After analyzing the tradition, its logic, and its imag...

These eighty-six sermons are among the most famous and most beautiful examples of medieval scriptural exegesis. In them the modern reader can catch a glimpse of the genius an entire generation found irresistible.