Desert Fathers

“In the fourth century AD, the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Arabia and Persia were peopled by a race of men who had 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? 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. 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 every person needed to swim for their life. These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenants and values of what they knew as society... was purely and simply a disaster.” – Thomas Merton “The Wisdom of the Desert”
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