How the Anchorites Began

From this number of the perfect, from this most fruitful root of saints, if I may use the expression, there were produced afterward the flowers and fruits of the anchorites as well. We have heard that the founders of this order were the men we mentioned just now, Saint Paul and Antony. They lived in the depths of the desert, not, as some do, out of faintheartedness and the fault of impatience, but from a desire for loftier heights of perfection and for divine contemplation. It is said, though, that the first of them found his way to the desert out of necessity, while he was escaping the plots of his neighbors during a time of persecution. [a]

So from the system we have spoken of there sprang another kind of perfection, whose followers are rightly called anchorites, that is, those who withdraw. They were not at all satisfied with the victory by which they had trampled underfoot the hidden snares of the devil while still living among men. They were eager to fight the demons in open conflict and in a straightforward battle, and so they were not afraid to go deep into the vast recesses of the desert. In this they imitated John the Baptist, who spent his whole life in the desert, and Elijah and Elisha, and those of whom the apostle speaks in this way: “They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, in want, distressed, afflicted, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.”

Of them, too, the Lord speaks figuratively to Job: “But who has sent out the wild donkey free, and who has loosed his bonds? To him I have given the wilderness for a home, and the barren land for his dwelling. He scorns the crowds of the city and does not hear the shout of the driver. He looks around the mountains of his pasture and searches for every green thing.” In the Psalms also: “Let the redeemed of the Lord now speak, those whom he has redeemed from the hand of the enemy.” And a little after: “They wandered in a wilderness, in a place without water; they did not find the way to a city to live in. They were hungry and thirsty; their soul fainted within them. And they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distress.”

Jeremiah, too, describes them this way: “Blessed is the man who has borne the yoke from his youth. He will sit alone and keep silent, because he has taken it upon himself.” And there, in heart and in deed, they sing these words of the psalmist: “I have become like a pelican in the wilderness. I kept watch and have become like a sparrow alone on the housetop.”