Blackwell Reference Online

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[xiii.d] The origin of Christian monasticism is unknown: tradition portrays St Antony the Great as the first monk and St Paul of Thebes as the first hermit, attributing the origin of the two forms of monasticism to Egypt in the 4th century, and this could well be correct. The word ‘monk’ comes from the Greek word monachos, which means ‘solitary’; ‘hermit’ from heremites, a desert-dweller. The early monks and nuns were just that: men and women who fled the worldliness of urban life and the ethos of a church that was now an established institution of the Roman empire; they fled to the desert to repent and seek God by prayer, fasting and hard manual labour. In the desert they practised an ascetic lifestyle of great poverty and extreme simplicity (see Asceticism, christian). The Desert fathers, the notable teachers and saints of the desert, became the reference point for all later Christian monastic spirituality. The earliest monks lived as hermits, or in small, loosely organized colonies around a teacher, or as clusters of solitaries, sometimes worshipping together. The Coptic monk Pachomius gave a new shape to monastic life by establishing a large-scale monastic community organized on almost military lines.Eastern Christian monasticism retains all the forms known from the desert period: some of the Coptic desert monasteries still survive from a very early period. Recluses living a ... log in or subscribe to read full text