蜜芽传媒

The Pope鈥檚 recent visit to Egypt was an important act of solidarity after the terrible church bombings of Palm Sunday. But it was also a reminder of the huge historical debt that Christianity owes to the Egyptians. For it was into the Egyptian desert that a number of early Christians were driven by Roman persecution, and it was there that they discovered the spiritual benefits of extreme silence and solitude.

You probably wouldn鈥檛 describe many of them as being terribly well adjusted. They were often strange people who rejected the ways of the world - money, career, family life. But their genius was that they didn鈥檛 give two hoots what other people thought for them. "What [they] sought most of all was their own true self, in Christ鈥� wrote Thomas Merton 鈥淎nd in order to do this, they had to reject the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion.鈥�
And they weren鈥檛 running away. Far from it. Out in the rocks and the caves, these Christian solitaries were discovering the courage needed to be alone. 鈥淪it in your cell and your cell will teach you everything,鈥� said Abba Moses.

They understood that those who run away from their problems will find their problems running ahead of them, ready to meet them once again when all the running has stopped. In the desert these men and women would make a stand against all the temptations of the world, all the false short cuts, all our self-pretence and fantasy. Day after day, month after month, they prayed, snoozed, and pottered about in silence, with nowhere to hide from themselves.
There is a simple story about a bad tempered monk who left his monastery for the inner desert. Sitting in his cell, he kept blaming the water jug for falling over. And one day he just lost it and kicked the jug in anger. Sitting on his own amidst the remains of his jug, he came to see that he鈥檇 been defeated by himself and himself alone. In directing his anger at others, he was covering something up. So he returned to his monastery knowing that the problem was with him not others.

The wisdom of the desert is what you might call difficult knowledge, the knowledge of how we often get in the way of ourselves and, through fear or vanity, obstruct the sources of our own satisfaction. Long before Freud, the monks and nuns of the Egyptian desert were practicing an early form of self-analysis, using silence as a kind of poultice to draw out all falsehood of the spirit.

Later, this monastic tradition would spread into mainland Europe and be hugely influential in shaping our western intellectual culture. As we see Christianity disappearing from the places of its birth, it鈥檚 important to remember our debt of intellectual gratitude to the lonely caves of the Egyptian desert.

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