Start with The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the alphabetical collection translated by Benedicta Ward and published by Cistercian Publications in 1975 — and do not read it straight through. One saying, or three, at a time; they were spoken, remembered, and traded as single coins. The standard edition to hold is Ward's; the standard temptation is to binge it.
Who Were the Desert Fathers and Mothers?
Christians — mostly fourth-century Egyptians, men and women together — who left towns and villages for the desert west of the Nile Delta: Nitria, Scetis, and the Cells, with others in the Judean desert and, later, Syria. The most famous is Antony of Egypt (c. 251–356), whose life Athanasius wrote shortly after his death and which carried the movement across the Roman world.
They were not all hermits. Many lived in loose clusters of cells and gathered for worship and counsel; visitors came, and kept coming, which is why anything survives. The collections preserve women too — the Ammas Sarah, Theodora, and Syncletica stand inside Ward's alphabetical edition — and every stratum from Roman aristocrats to reformed bandits. The sayings assume a world of manual work, salt bread, and almost nothing else; that austerity is the experiment's substance, not its backdrop. reading coverage.
What Is an Apophthegm?
A very short spoken item: a question put to an elder, the elder's answer, sometimes a small scene with a plot the size of a thumbnail. “Apophthegm” is Greek for a pointed saying; the collections — arranged by abba's name in the Greek alphabet, or by theme in the “systematic” series, or left anonymous — were compiled over the following centuries from memory.
The genre's request is famous: “Abba, give me a word.” Not advice, exactly — a word to keep, the way you keep a stone in a pocket. The best-loved answer in the whole book belongs to Abba Moses: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything” (Benedicta Ward's translation). Note the shape: almost every saying ends the conversation rather than opening it, which is the exact opposite of self-help and the source of the form's odd authority.
How Should You Actually Read the Sayings?
- A page a day, in the morning; five minutes is enough.
- Carry one saying through the day. The old practice was to keep an elder's word for years, not minutes.
- Read some aloud. They were spoken before they were written, and the punctuation is a guess.
- Do not paraphrase them into productivity maxims. The world-denial is the point, or much of it, and it is allowed to repel you a little.
- Pair Ward's alphabetical collection with the Life of Antony, trans. Robert C. Gregg (1980), for the narrative frame the sayings assume.
- Keep a list of the sayings that resist you. That list is the book you actually needed.
Related stories: Where to Start With Simone Weil · Where to Start With Augustine's Confessions.
What Is the Hardest Part of the Desert Sayings?
Their plainness about what they want. These are texts that rank salvation above comfort, treat the body's appetites as a front in a real war, and can be merciless about women, the young, and the world. The comedy and tenderness are real — some sayings are jokes, and the joke is usually on a self-satisfied monk — but romanticizing the desert is as dishonest as flattening it. Read them as documents of a serious experiment, and let the friction inform you.
The other difficulty is mediocrity's absence. Nothing in the collection is ordinary in the way most religious writing is ordinary; even the gentlest sayings assume that a human life is an emergency being answered. Readers who stay tend to find their own lives slightly recategorized — not improved, exactly, but revalued.
What Should You Read After the Sayings?
Thomas Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert (1960), a modern selection whose introduction argues for the sayings' contemporary force; then John Wortley's English version of the systematic collection (Cistercian Publications), arranged by theme, which reads like a handbook compiled by people who knew the handbook might be dangerous. After that, Evagrius Pontus on the thoughts, in Robert E. Sinkewicz's translation of the ascetic corpus (2003), supplies the psychology underneath the anecdotes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Were there women among the Desert Fathers?
Yes — the Ammas. Sarah, Theodora, Syncletica, and others have sayings preserved in the same collections, and Benedicta Ward's edition includes them. “Fathers” is the tradition's shorthand, not the census.
Did the monks write books?
Mostly not. The sayings circulated orally for generations and were written down and organized over the following centuries; the movement's literature is remembered speech, not authored text.
What does “give me a word” mean?
A request for one saving word from an elder — verbum in the Latin tradition. Not advice for a situation, but a word to live against, kept and tested over years.
Do I have to be religious to read them?
No. They reward skeptics who read slowly, partly because they make no effort to persuade. The sayings describe a practice; whether the practice describes you is a question the book leaves entirely open.