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figure 1
figure 2
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Sinai’s early monks were part of a larger movement. By the
early fourth century, monasticism was sweeping across the eastern
provinces of the Roman Empire. Ascetics were fleeing towns and villages
for the desert in the hope that years of penance and mortification
of the body would yield a glimpse of the glory that Adam enjoyed
in the Garden of Eden (Brown, Christendom, 118). These refugees from
society took inspiration from monastic prototypes—the Prophet Elijah
and Saint John the Baptist (Chitty, 4). On either side of the Sinai
Peninsula, the deserts of Egypt and Palestine were filled with hermits.
The most famous of these desert wanderers was Saint Antony of Egypt,
born about 250 A.D., who, according to his biographer, attracted
so many people to monasticism that “the desert was made a city by monks” (Chitty,
5). Although Antony and others like him lived as anchorites in
solitary cells with no formal rules, vows, or common worship, their
desert was often located just beyond
the boundary of a civilized area, one of the hallmarks of Egyptian
monasticism (Chitty, 5).
Not all ascetics lived as solitaries. A contemporary
of Antony, Pachomius, also took to the desert, building monastic
communities called coenobia,
filled with monks who lived and worshiped together. By the time
of his death in 346 A.D., at least seven monastic communities for
men and two for women had been created under his influence and
command (Rousseau, 624–25). These,
and communities like them, grew to such a size that they became
cities in their own right (Brown, "Holy Man," 110).
To the
east of Sinai, monasticism had a slightly different flavor. Two early
names in Palestinian monasticism, Hilarion (d. ca. 371 A.D.) and
Epiphanius (d. 403 A.D.), traveled to Egypt, bringing back aspects
of Egyptian monasticism (Chitty, 71). Palestinian monks lived in
a lavra,
a row or cluster of solitary cells around a common center, including
a church and a bakehouse, where ascetics would assemble on Saturdays
and Sundays (Chitty, 15). These communities, often far removed from
civilized areas, are similar to those found on the southern Sinai
Peninsula. Important innovations in Palestinian monasticism were
brought about by Euthymius (d. ca. 473 A.D.), who established coenobia,
or communal monasteries, as novice houses from which the young monks
would graduate to the near-anchoretic life of the lavra.
Historical sources suggest that the communities in Sinai followed
a similar pattern (Chitty, 88). |
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