Wisdom of the Desert

"We cannot do exactly what [the desert hermits] did. But we must be as thorough and as ruthless in our determination to break all spiritual chains, to find our true selves, to discover and develop our inalienable spiritual liberty and use it to build, on earth, the Kingdom of God. This is not the place in which to speculate what our great and mysterious vocation might involve. That is still unknown. Let is suffice for me to say that we need to learn from these men of the fourth century how to ignore prejudice, defy compulsion and strike out fearlessly into the unknown."
--Thomas Merton, Wisdom of the Desert

Merton, the great twentieth-century contemplative, was writing about his spiritual forefathers, the first Christian monastics. These were the "Desert Fathers," men who abandoned society in order to receive a more direct, sincere, authentic experience of reality. By the fourth century CE, Christianity had become the state religion. Some thoughtful people saw that the union of Christendom and the state had not achieved the Kingdom of God. In fact, such a union had the capacity to pervert and undermine the life of prayer, compassion and justice that followers of Christ were seeking to realize. So a rare few, simple men (there were surely women, too, but their names are lost to us and do not appear in the collections of their sayings), left to live alone in the desert and seek God face to face.

These were the forebears of the great monastic orders, but they lived before the rise of rich and powerful monasteries and of the carefully articulated rules of monastic life. Their only rules were survival and love. Eventually, spiritual seekers came to the Desert Fathers and sought out their teachings and words of wisdom. Thomas Merton, who in 1960 when this volume first appeared, was himself an aspiring hermit-monk, translated his favorite sayings of the Desert Fathers from the original Latin texts, and offered a brief introduction.

Merton saw in these simple men icons for our own times. And while Merton acknowledged that most of us will not become hermits (though we surely need more time in silence and solitude), the point is not to emulate the Desert Fathers' outward life. Rather, the point is to seek the same inward experience that they sought, to get beyond the conventional forms of social Christianity and to find "their own true self, in Christ."