The Desert

When this man heard that impious decree, he bade farewell to that vain glory and luxury that drag a man downward, and mingled himself among the chosen ones of the monks, going beyond the borders into desert places.

And when in Egypt too the monasteries began to be established and the multitudes of monks to be gathered together, and the fame of their virtue and their angelic manner of life spread to the ends of the inhabited world and came also to the Indians, it stirred these as well to the like zeal, so that many of them, leaving all things behind, took to the deserts and, in a mortal body, took up the way …

And the man of God went out and withdrew into the desert, grieved that he had not been martyred, yet bearing witness day by day in his conscience and wrestling against the principalities and powers, against the world-rulers of the darkness of this age, against the spiritual forces of wickedness, as the blessed Paul says.

For this reason the pious are driven from their homelands and removed to the deserts.

the people, abandoning the houses of prayer, gather in the deserts, a pitiable sight—women, and children, and old men, and others who are weak, in the most violent rains, and in snow and winds and the frost of winter, and likewise in summer under the blaze of the sun, suffering miserably in the open air.

rather they used to go about the desert transmitting descent from the tongues of those who preserved it, setting it down or committing it to memory.