the wilderness
place · 3 works · 7 mentions · 9 anchored passages
the desert · the mountains · wilderness
in the texts
Adversus Marcionem
Region into which Christ withdraws, identified as belonging to the Creator's prior salvation history.
He goes forth into the wilderness.
For whether he speaks, through humility, of someone modest, or of himself, because he was held lesser than John — all, namely, running together into the wilderness to John rather than to Christ ("What did you go out into the wilderness to see?
He feeds the people in the wilderness, namely after the former manner.
Letters
The desert/mountain setting of the solitary ascetic life, richly linked to biblical precedents.
For I pass my life in this wilderness, O evil thought, in which the Lord himself dwelt.
" For I have learned that God-loving Abraham obeyed the voice of God and removed into the wilderness;
but fond of the wilderness, abiding ever upon yourself without distraction, accounting prayer and psalmody your work.
Adversus Judaeos
The desert region where Israel wandered and was fed with manna after the Exodus.
For Israel, which had been known to God, and which had been exalted by him in Egypt, and was carried across the Red Sea, and which was fed in the wilderness with manna for forty years — brought to the likeness of eternity, neither defiled with human sufferings nor fed on the foods of this world, but fed on manna, the bread of angels, and bound to God by enough of his benefits — forgot the Lord and …
From this we understand that God's law existed even before Moses, and not in Horeb only or in Sinai and in the wilderness for the first time, but more ancient still — first in paradise, then to the patriarchs, and so also reshaped for the Jews at fixed times — so that we should no longer attend to the law of Moses as if to the principal law, but as to one that follows after, which at a fixed time …