The Healing of the Soul: Part One — The Desert as a School of the Soul

There is a word carved within the history of the Egyptian desert: Ϣⲓϩⲏⲧ (Shiheet). The great basin that would become the heartland of Christian monasticism carried this profound name given to it by the early Coptic monks — Shiheet, known in Greek as Scetis, and today as Wadi El-Natrun. The Arabic translation of this name primarily reflects the physical landscape: a valley rich in natron, the salt that the ancient Egyptians used to preserve the dead. Yet, the older Coptic name reveals something far more striking. Shiheet means “the measure of the heart.”[1]

Shiheet appears often in the Coptic Orthodox Church’s Synaxarium and is even mentioned in the Divine Liturgy, the central liturgical celebration of the Coptic Church, in connection to many saints, including, prominently, the Forty-Nine Martyrs, the elders of Shiheet (444 AD), who were massacred during a Berber raid on the monastic settlements of Scetis. As such, Scetis, or Shiheet, is situated not merely as a geographical location but as a theological landscape shaped by martyrdom, asceticism, and prayer.

Few names capture the purpose of the desert movement more fittingly than Shiheet. Long before modern psychology developed its own language for studying the inner life, the Egyptian desert became one of Christianity’s earliest and most sustained traditions of systematic inward reflection. What the Desert Fathers built across three centuries of monastic silence and extraordinary discipline was one of the most rigorous cultivations of the human interior life the ancient world had ever attempted. What they built was a living school for the soul, sustained not primarily by abstract speculation, but by decades of disciplined prayer, ascetic practice, self-examination, and communal spiritual guidance. They went to the desert to find God. What they discovered along the way, and through that very pursuit, was the human person — thought by thought, temptation by temptation, struggle by struggle, and prayer by prayer. This is the very conviction with which St. Antony opens his third Letter, describing the soul made free through Christ as one that comes to know itself, “in its intellectual substance,” and insisting that self-knowledge leads directly to knowledge of the Creator’s workings: “The rational man who has prepared himself to be set free through the advent of Jesus, knows himself in his intellectual substance. For he who knows himself knows the dispensations of the Creator and all that He does among His creatures.”[2]

The Desert Fathers were not constructing a theory of the mind in the modern scientific sense. Rather, they were engaged in a sustained phenomenology of the spiritual life: carefully observing how thoughts arise, how attention shifts, how desires mature into habits, and how the heart is gradually transformed. Their observations were theological in purpose and experiential in method, emerging from decades of disciplined self-examination within the unique environment of the desert. In this sense, the desert functioned not simply as a place of withdrawal but as a school of the soul, where the conditions of silence, solitude, and prayer made the hidden movements of the heart manifest.

While they lacked the refinement of modern academic research, their words and examples nevertheless remain a clear and deeply relevant teaching about the interior life. If one wishes to take up the journey of Shiheet — that is, the true measuring, or balancing, of the heart — then the centuries of careful insights left by those men and women who abandoned ordinary pursuits to devote their lives to exactly that task deserve to be among his primary sources.

In this series, therefore, the intersection of Coptic desert spirituality and modern understandings of the human mind will be explored. This first entry will introduce the significance of exploring Coptic desert spirituality in relation to the human person and why the wisdom of the desert remains invaluable today. Having this foundation, the specific insights of these teachers will then be explored further in relation to contemporary approaches to the study of psychology, in subsequent entries.

Unlike the Desert Fathers and Mothers[3], whose goal was primarily and ultimately union and relation with God, the study and practice of psychology today is concerned with understanding the human mind and behavior through empirical observation and scientific inquiry. Although their aims are fundamentally different, both traditions approach the same human person from distinct vantage points. Bringing the two into conversation does not diminish either discipline, but rather allows each to illuminate dimensions of the human experience that the other, by its very nature, does not seek to address.

Why did Christians go to the deserts of Egypt?

The third century was a period of profound suffering for Christians in Egypt. The persecutions under Roman Emperors Decius (249-251 AD) and Diocletian (303-311 AD) devastated Christian communities, destroyed many churches and their liturgical and scriptural books, and claimed the lives of countless faithful.[4] Yet, while this red martyrdom of blood — the witness of those who confessed Christ until their death — became part of the identity of the early Egyptian Church, another form of martyrdom had always constituted the Christian tradition: the white martyrdom of ascetical life.[5] In one instance, the Apostle Paul exhorts the Hebrews, writing: “In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood” (Hebrews 12:4). Elsewhere, he advises the Corinthians with the imagery of asceticism — here, the exercise and training of athletes — by saying: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air; but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:24-27).

Among those who heeded this scriptural advice and sought to practice it with complete devotion was a young Coptic Egyptian man, born around 251 AD in the village of Qiman al-‘Arus near modern-day Beni Suef, Egypt, named Antony. As he grew and became renowned for his asceticism, St. Antony quickly became regarded as the Father of Christian Monasticism, as countless men and women flocked to the desert to imitate his life through his guidance and teaching. In a remarkably short period of time, the life, teaching, and example of St. Antony deeply shaped generations of monks in both Egypt and beyond, even until today.

St. Athanasius the Apostolic, the twentieth Patriarch of Alexandria and chief defender of Nicene Orthodoxy, knew Antony personally and later recorded his life in the Life of Antony, which he wrote shortly after St. Antony’s death in 356 AD.[6] This work quickly became one of the most influential writings in Christian history, spreading rapidly beyond Egypt and being translated into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Georgian, and Armenian within generations of its composition. Its account of St. Antony’s pursuit of God even affected Augustine of Hippo, who described, in his Confessions, the story of the Egyptian monk as being one of the influences that led to his conversion.[7]

What made the Life of Antony so compelling to its diverse readers was not necessarily its descriptions of angelic encounters and demonic battles, though these appear in abundance throughout the work, but more importantly, its beautiful and gravitating portrait of an ordinary man who devoted his entire life to the pursuit of God and, through that pursuit, underwent a most profound transformation and gained an intimate understanding of God, and through Him, the human heart. St. Antony did not simply withdraw from the world; in the wilderness, he remained deeply concerned with the salvation of the world. The desert became for him the battlefield of interior warfare where he would struggle against the desires of the flesh and the movements of the mind and work towards the soul’s longing for God. St. Athanasius records that it was a dictum of St. Antony’s that “the soul’s energy thrives when the body’s desires are feeblest.”[8] This was not merely some rule of ascetic practice or a rejection of the body itself. Rather, it reflected decades of spiritual experience and watchfulness: an understanding that the state of the body, the discipline of desire, and the attention of the mind all shape the condition of the heart. St. Antony came to see how human desires and thoughts could either be purified and directed toward God or become obstacles that separate the soul from Him.

From the very beginning, St. Antony’s journey into the desert unfolded through stages of deeper commitment and solitude. He first placed himself under the guidance of an experienced elder near his village, from whom he learned the basic principles and foundations of the ascetical life. He then gradually withdrew further into solitude, first to abandoned tombs on the outskirts of the inhabited world, then to an abandoned Roman fort where he remained enclosed for twenty years, and finally into the inner desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, near what is now the Monastery of St. Antony at Mount Colzim.[9] What may seem to be a gradual departure and withdrawal from society was in fact a deeper entry into the struggle of the heart. The silence of the desert enabled St. Antony to confront his thoughts, purify his desires, and seek restoration in undistracted communion with God. St. Athanasius notably records that when St. Antony finally emerged from his twenty-year enclosure, those who saw him were astonished; rather than appearing weakened or broken, he appeared renewed, “as Adam in Paradise, a man restored to his original glory.”[10]

The Geography of the Heart

St. Antony’s life inspired a movement of extraordinary scale and geographical scope. By the time he died, the desert surrounding the Nile valley had become a landscape of organized ascetic settlement. St. Athanasius memorably writes that St. Antony had made “the desert a city.”[11] Three locations in the Egyptian desert became the principal centers of this movement: Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis (Shiheet).

Nitria, situated roughly sixty kilometers south of Alexandria, was the most accessible of the three and served as an entry point for new monastics. John Cassian, the monastic writer who transmitted much of Egyptian ascetic wisdom to the West, describes Nitria as containing at its height around 5,000 monks, with a bakery, physicians, and craftsmen operating alongside the cells of the solitary monks in a semi-organized settlement.[12] From Nitria, monks seeking greater solitude could withdraw another eighteen kilometers into the desert to Kellia, which translates literally to “the Cells.” At the deepest point of withdrawal lay Scetis, a full day’s journey from Nitria into the trackless Libyan wilderness, where the silence was almost absolute and only the most committed and capable of monastics ventured. It was in Scetis that St. Macarius the Great established his community around 330 AD, after perceiving the will of God and receiving the blessing of St. Antony.

St. Macarius was born around 300 AD in the village of Shanshur in Lower Egypt to faithful parents, who instilled in him the virtues of the Christian way of life. He entered the monastic life as a young man, receiving the guidance of an elder, much like the experience of St. Antony, and eventually had the opportunity to become a direct disciple of St. Antony.[13] The two men met when St. Macarius made the arduous journey to St. Antony’s cell in the mountain. St. Athanasius records that when St. Antony first saw St. Macarius approaching, he welcomed him with great praise, saying to him: “Macarius, my child, you are blessed, just as your name means ‘blessed.’”[14] Recognizing St. Macarius’ maturity in the ascetical life, St. Antony placed the Great Schema upon him, the highest and most austere rank of monasticism, and entrusted him with greater responsibility before sending him back to Scetis. What St. Macarius built there would, over the next several decades, become one of the most influential spiritual schools in early Christian monasticism.

St. Macarius served as spiritual father to over 4,000 monks drawn from Egypt, Greece, Ethiopia, Armenia, Nubia, Palestine, Gaul, and Rome. His community was international before the concept existed. The desert drew a remarkably diverse community from every corner of civilization and every walk of life: philosophers, peasants, princes, and even former bandits.[15] The monasteries he founded in Wadi El-Natrun stand to this day, continuously inhabited by Coptic monks for over sixteen centuries, and the Monastery of St. Macarius the Great remains one of the great living centers of Coptic monastic life.

Among the great sayings and teachings of Abba Macarius, often repeated for its remarkable depth beyond its apparent simplicity, is his guidance to his disciples at the dismissal of the liturgy: “Flee, brothers!” One of the elders, puzzled, asked him: “Where can we flee to that is more remote than this desert?” St. Macarius placed his finger to his lips, then went into his cell, shut the door, and stayed there.[16] The flight he was prescribing was primarily of an inward character.

What is the human person according to the Desert Fathers?

Before one can approach the discoveries of the Desert Fathers about the interior condition, one must first understand how they viewed the human person more generally. The Coptic Orthodox Church, rooted in its Alexandrian theological heritage, understands the human person as a unity of body, soul, and spirit, which carries Trinitarian semblance as it appears in St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians: “May the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[17] These are not independent components of the person but inseparable dimensions of a single human being, each ordered toward communion with God. St. Athanasius, in his treatise, On the Incarnation, emphasizes that the human person was created in the Image and Likeness of God (eikōn kai homoisōsi), and that this Image was located not in the physical body but in the rational soul and its spiritual capacities (i.e., the capacity to know God, to participate in His life, and to grow into communion with Him).[18] St. Cyril of Alexandria, the great fifth-century patriarch, follows his predecessor closely, locating man’s true likeness to God not in his earthly form but in the rational and spiritual nature breathed into him: “Having sculpted man out of the soil, he made him into a rational creature, and, in order that he might replicate the rationality of his own nature, he immediately implanted within him an immortal, life-giving Spirit.”[19]

The dignity of the human person, within the Coptic theological framework, is inseparable from the Divine Image after which he is made and to which he is called for relation and communion — the Creator Himself. This marks one of the most important differences between the Desert Fathers and modern psychology. Modern psychology often begins by asking how the mind works: how thoughts, emotions, memory, and behavior arise and interact. The Desert Fathers began with a different question altogether: what is the human person? Only after answering that question — understanding humanity’s origin, purpose, and calling in relation to God — did they then ask how the inner life functions.

Within this theological framework, the Desert Fathers worked with a more precise vocabulary drawn from the Scriptures and from centuries of interior observation. Their writings were not attempts to construct an abstract theory of the human person, but efforts to understand how every dimension of human existence (e.g., body, soul, mind, desire, memory, and will) could be restored to its proper harmony in God.

Unlike many modern approaches that examine cognition, emotion, and behavior as distinct domains of inquiry, the Desert Fathers approached the human person holistically. A thought could not be separated from desire, nor could desire be separated from the heart, nor the heart from one’s relationship with God. Every individual faculty of a person was understood in perfect relation with all the others. Their anthropology was therefore fundamentally integrative rather than compartmentalized.

Important Terminology

As this series ventures deeper into the interaction of the patristic tradition with modern psychology, three terms become important to define at the outset.

The first is psyche, the “soul.” In the patristic tradition, psyche refers broadly to the animating principle of the person, encompassing the full range of human faculties: intellect, will, emotion, memory, and desire. John of Damascus, writing in the eighth century, defines it precisely in these terms: “The soul, accordingly, is a living essence, simple, incorporeal, invisible in its proper nature to bodily eyes, immortal, reasoning and intelligent, formless, making use of an organized body, and being the source of its powers of life, and growth, and sensation, and generation…”[20] Therefore, the soul is not understood as a separate substance imprisoned within the body, but as the animating principle of the whole person. The human person ultimately exists as a unity, where the spiritual and physical dimensions are deeply connected.

The second, and perhaps most significant term, is nous, translated variously as “intellect,” “mind,” or “spirit,” though inadequately captured by any of these English terms. The compilers of the Philokalia, the great collection of patristic ascetic texts spanning the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, defined the nous as “the highest faculty in man, through which — provided it is purified — he knows God or the inner essences of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception.”[21] The nous is not the discursive, analytical mind that reasons, compares, and draws conclusions. Rather, it is the faculty of directing spiritual intuition, which the patristic tradition frequently describes as the “eye of the soul.”[22] Because the nous is the faculty by which the person perceives God, much of the ascetical life is directed not toward acquiring new knowledge, but toward purifying perception itself. In its healthy state, it perceives and turns toward God. In its disordered state, clouded by passions and desires, it perceives only the noise of its own distraction and loses this clarity.

The third term is kardia, the “heart.” In the patristic and biblical tradition, the heart is not merely the seat of emotion. The heart is the center of a person, the place where nous and psyche meet, and the deepest point of the self where thought, desire, will, and spiritual life converge. This is the very point Nikiphoros the Monk draws out in his Philokalic treatise On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart, turning to St. Antony the Great as his proof: when St. Antony perceived in prayer, from his mountain, that two traveling monks were dying of thirst far away, Nikiphoros explains that this was revealed to St. Antony alone because he kept his heart watchful — “Do you see how through watchfulness of heart St. Antony was able to perceive God and to acquire the power of clairvoyance? For it is in the heart that God manifests Himself to the intellect, first — according to St John Klimakos — as fire that purifies the lover and then as light that illumines the intellect and renders it godlike.”[23] When the Desert Fathers speak of “guarding the heart,” rooted in the scriptural command to “keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life” (Prov. 4:23)[24], they therefore mean something deeper and more comprehensive than emotional management. They mean attending to the source from which all thought, desire, and action flow, as the Lord Jesus Christ Himself said: “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34).[25]

More than mere theological terminology, this vocabulary provides the conceptual framework through which the Desert Fathers interpreted every movement of the interior life. Thoughts, emotions, desires, temptations, virtues, and even suffering were not isolated experiences, but expressions of the condition of the whole person. Without this groundwork, many of the Fathers’ observations about the spiritual life become difficult to understand. With it, their later discussions of watchfulness, temptation, and healing emerge as parts of a coherent vision of what it means to be “human” altogether.

Why the Fathers Studied Thoughts

With this theological framework in view, one can begin to understand why the Desert Fathers developed such an intense, systematic focus on thoughts.

The word they used to describe these interior movements was logismoi (λογισμοί). This term refers to the interior movements of the mind that arise before becoming explicit desires, decisions, or actions. The Desert Fathers observed, with remarkable precision, that the interior life does not simply happen to a person, but unfolds according to patterns and within the hidden places of the heart. For this reason, they did not treat thoughts as isolated mental events, but understood them as the beginning of a process that gradually shapes the whole person:

A thought arrives.

It lingers.

It is either dismissed or entertained.

If entertained, it provokes an emotional response.

If the response is indulged, it leads to action.

If the action is repeated, it forms a habit.

If the habit is deepened, it shapes character.

And character, for good or ill, is what a person becomes.

Although separated from modern psychology by more than fifteen centuries, this sequence bears striking similarities to contemporary accounts of how repeated patterns of thought influence emotion, behavior, and habit.[26] It was an experiential observation, tested in the “laboratory” of the monastic cell, where silence and solitude removed many of the distractions that ordinarily conceal the movements of the heart. St. Antony is said to have known the condition of visiting monks’ souls before they spoke a word, having learned to read the movements of the inner life with extraordinary precision through years of vigilant self-observation.[27]

The Fathers’ concern, therefore, was not simply the content of thoughts, but also the direction of attention. A passing thought held little significance unless it was received, entertained, and allowed to shape the heart. The ascetical life was consequently less about suppressing thought than about learning where to direct one’s attention.

This is why watchfulness, nepsis, became central to the ascetic tradition. The monastic fathers were not attempting to eliminate every thought that entered the mind, nor did they believe that each carried the same weight. They instead sought to develop the discernment necessary to recognize what draws the person closer to God and what pulls the heart away from Him. Isaiah the Solitary, one of the earliest figures of the Philokalia, instructs the monk with characteristic directness that echoes Christ’s own teachings about the abundance of the heart in Matthew 12:34: “Stand guard, then, over your heart and keep a watch on your senses; and if the remembrance of God dwells peaceably within you, you will catch the thieves when they try to deprive you of it.”[28] The image of thieves is powerful in reflecting the subtle nature of inner struggles: the danger is not simply that destructive thoughts exist, but that, in the undiscerning person, they gradually become welcomed guests, entering quietly and deepening their hold when they are left unexamined.

The Philokalia, which literally translates to “love of the beautiful” in Greek, was compiled precisely to transmit this tradition of interior watchfulness. Its editors, Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth, gathered texts spanning twelve centuries of ascetic wisdom, “collected with a view to purification, illumination, and perfection,” with the explicit goal of helping the reader “awaken and develop attention and consciousness, to attain that state of watchfulness which is the hallmark of sanctity.”[29]

The Desert Fathers did not develop this interior science as an end in itself. They studied thoughts because they understood that the human person is transformed from the inside out. In other words, what one repeatedly attends to shapes what he desires, what he desires shapes what he practices, and what he repeatedly practices shapes the kind of person he ultimately becomes. For a tradition that understood the goal of human life as union with God, the interior life thus became the primary arena of both struggle and grace.

The Ancient Desert and the Modern Mind

At this point, one may wonder what relevance a fourth-century monastic community has for the modern person. The relevance, however, is much greater than one might anticipate. The Desert Fathers approached the same human reality from a different starting point. Before they were concerned with such questions as how the mind works or how suffering can be relieved, which comprise the common starting points for modern psychology, the Desert Fathers first contemplated and sought to discern the purpose for which the human person was created and what may prevent that person from becoming what God intended for them.

The modern sciences of psychology and psychiatry have, in the last century, developed sophisticated tools for understanding the human interior, such as cognitive models of thought, neurobiological accounts of emotion, and behavioral frameworks for habit formation. These are real achievements which must be seriously considered and engaged with. At the same time, they do not address certain questions which are outside of their primary scope. While these disciplines might describe mechanisms, they struggle with meanings. By design, they primarily seek to explain how human beings think, feel, and behave, while largely excluding from their scope of concern questions of ultimate meaning, purpose, and destiny. 

The Desert Fathers began from the opposite end. Their lives were grounded in a clear sense of purpose and teleology. In other words, they began from the place of unwavering belief regarding what the human person was made for and where his journey ought to ultimately lead. Many of the practices they cultivated, such as watchfulness, discernment, self-examination, and the careful observation of thoughts, remain striking because they arose from centuries of sustained reflection on the human person through the lens of their spiritual and doctrinal convictions. Although these practices were developed within a theological framework, they reveal enduring insights into the patterns through which thoughts, desires, and habits shape human life. 

This does not mean the wisdom of the Desert Fathers should replace modern medicine or psychology. Human suffering exists on multiple levels, and physical, psychological, social, and spiritual realities cannot be isolated from each other. No single discipline is sufficient to account for every dimension of one’s suffering. A person struggling with depression, addiction, trauma, or mental illness may require clinical care, medical treatment, and professional support. Yet the desert tradition raises questions that remain deeply relevant. Beyond symptom relief, what does healing mean? What kind of person is one becoming? How do one’s repeated thoughts, desires, and choices shape their lived experience?

As this series continues to unfold, the disciplines of theology and psychology will not be collapsed into one another. To do so would diminish both. Rather, it will place two rich traditions of reflection, practice, and study — one grounded in divine revelation, the practice of faith, and the ascetical experience, and the other in scientific investigation, academic rigor, and clinical observation — in conversation with each other. Where they converge, the convergence is illuminating. Where they differ, those differences are equally instructive and noteworthy.

The Desert Fathers offer a vision of the human person grounded in meaning, purpose, and communion with God. Contemporary psychology offers increasingly sophisticated methods for understanding the mechanisms through which human beings think, feel, and behave. These traditions are not competitors. They ask different questions, employ different methods, and pursue different ends. Precisely because of those differences, however, each has something to illuminate in the other. The clinician does not render the Fathers obsolete. Contrarily, in and through the Coptic Orthodox tradition, within which the Desert Fathers are prominently found, one has access to a wealth of material that remains instructive, illuminating, and deeply relevant, though overlooked in today’s world — a heritage of profound reflection on the human heart.

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[1] Wadi El Natrun, Wikipedia. The Coptic name for Scetis, Ϣⲓϩⲏⲧ (Šihēt), carries the meaning “measure of the heart” in Coptic etymology. The Arabic name Wadi El-Natrun, meaning “Valley of Natron,” reflects the geological significance of the region to ancient Egyptian embalming practice.

[2] Antony the Great, Letter III, in The Letters of Saint Antony the Great, trans. Derwas J. Chitty (Oxford: SLG Press, 1975).

[3] Throughout this series, the term “Desert Fathers” will be used as the conventional shorthand for this movement. Though grammatically masculine, the term is used here in its traditional, generic sense, encompassing the Desert Mothers (Ammas) as well, whose sayings and ascetic witness are preserved alongside those of their male counterparts in the tradition.

[4] The Diocletianic Persecution (303–311 AD) was particularly severe in Egypt. The Coptic Orthodox Church numbers its calendar from 284 AD, the year of Diocletian’s accession, calling it the “Year of the Martyrs” (Anno Martyrum). See Aziz S. Atiya, A History of Eastern Christianity (London: Methuen, 1968), 25–29.

[5] For the Egyptian monastic understanding of asceticism as a continuation of martyrdom, see Athanasius, The Life of Antony, trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), §§46–47. The terminology of “red martyrdom” and “white martyrdom” developed later in Christian tradition; see Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 23, where Ware describes “white martyrdom” as “a man’s abandoning everything he loves for God’s sake” and “red martyrdom” as “the endurance of a Cross or death for Christ’s sake,” quoting J. Ryan, Irish Monasticism (London, 1931), 197.

[6] Athanasius composed the Life of Antony around 356–360 AD, during one of his periods of exile from Alexandria. See Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Early Church Fathers (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1, 24.

[7] Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), Book VIII.6.

[8] Athanasius of Alexandria, The Life of Antony, trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), Section 45.

[9] The Monastery of St. Antony at Mount Colzim, in the Eastern Desert near the Red Sea, is the oldest Christian monastery in the world still in continuous operation.

[10] Athanasius, Life of Antony, Section 14.

[11] Ibid. “From then on there were monasteries in the mountains and the desert was made a city by monks, who left their own people and registered themselves for the citizenship in the heavens.”

[12] John Cassian, The Conferences of the Desert Fathers, trans. Edgar C. S. Gibson (Aeterna Press, 2015), Conference 18. See also Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 8–10.

[13] Macarius the Great (c. 300–391 AD). See Tim Vivian, Saint Macarius the Spiritbearer: Coptic Texts Relating to Saint Macarius the Great; for his birthplace in Shanshur, Menufiya, see the Coptic Orthodox Synaxarium entry for 27 Baramhat (April 5).

[14] See Tim Vivian, Saint Macarius the Spiritbearer: Coptic Texts Relating to Saint Macarius the Great, 162-172 (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011).

[15] Monastery of St. Macarius the Great, Wadi Natrun, stmacariusmonastery.org, historical overview.

[16] Apophthegmata Patrum, Macarius the Great, 16, trans. Benedicta Ward, SLG, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975).

[17] 1 Thessalonians 5:23 (RSVCE).

[18] Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation (De Incarnatione), trans. John Behr (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), Section 3.

[19] Cyril of Alexandria, Glaphyra on the Pentateuch, Volume 1: Genesis, trans. Nicholas P. Lunn, intro. Gregory K. Hillis, Fathers of the Church 137 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 56.

[20] John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book II, Chapter 12, trans. S. D. F. Salmond, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 9, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1899).

[21] The Philokalia, vol. 1, ed. and trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 362.

[22] See, e.g., Diadochos of Photiki, On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination 71, in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), where he writes, “The eye of the soul cannot be led astray...”; and Symeon the New Theologian, One Hundred and Fifty-Three Practical and Theological Texts 22–23, in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 4, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), who refers to the “mind, or eye of the soul” and the “soul’s eye.”

[23] Nikiphoros the Monk, On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart, in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 4, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 194–197. Nikiphoros draws his account from Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of Antony, ch. 59.

[24] Proverbs 4:23 (OSB).

[25] Matthew 12:34 (OSB).

[26] This parallel should not be understood as an equivalence between patristic ascetic theology and modern psychological theory, but as a similarity in their observations of the relationship between cognition, emotion, and behavior. See, for example, Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders (New York: International Universities Press, 1976), 5: “the way people construe themselves and their experiences determines their feelings and behavior.” Similarly, Albert Ellis opens his account of Rational Emotive Therapy by invoking the Stoic maxim of Epictetus, “Men are not disturbed by things, but by the views which they take of them,” a principle he takes as foundational to his own approach; see Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1962), 54. For contemporary habit research, see Wendy Wood and David T. Neal, “A New Look at Habits and the Habit-Goal Interface,” Psychological Review 114, no. 4 (2007): 843–863, which describes habits as “learned dispositions to repeat past responses” (843). More recently, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Judson Brewer has described the same trigger-behavior-reward mechanism underlying the formation of addictive patterns and habits; see The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love—Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

[27] Athanasius, Life of Antony, Section 38.

[28] Isaiah the Solitary, “On Guarding the Intellect: Twenty-Seven Texts,” in The Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), Text 22.

[29] The Philokalia, vol. 1, Introduction, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 13–14.

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Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Antony the Great. The Letters of Saint Antony the Great. Translated by Derwas J. Chitty. Oxford: SLG Press, 1975.

• Apophthegmata Patrum. Translated by Benedicta Ward, SLG. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975.

• Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation (De Incarnatione). Translated by John Behr. Yonkers: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2011.

• Athanasius of Alexandria, and Robert C. Gregg. The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.

• Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

• Cassian, John. The Conferences of the Desert Fathers. Translated by Edgar C. S. Gibson. Aeterna Press, 2015. Kindle.

• Cyril of Alexandria, St. Glaphyra on the Pentateuch, Volume 1: Genesis. Translated by Nicholas P. Lunn. Introduction by Gregory K. Hillis. Fathers of the Church 137. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018.

• Diadochos of Photiki, St. “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination.” In The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1. Translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.

• Isaiah the Solitary. “On Guarding the Intellect: Twenty-Seven Texts.” In The Philokalia, vol. 1. Translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.

• John of Damascus, St. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Translated by S. D. F. Salmond. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 9, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1899.

• Nikiphoros the Monk. “On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart.” In The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 4. Translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

• The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.

• The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Vol. 4. Edited and translated by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

• Symeon the New Theologian, St. “One Hundred and Fifty-Three Practical and Theological Texts.” In The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 4. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

Secondary Sources

• Anatolios, Khaled. Athanasius: The Early Church Fathers. New York: Routledge, 2004.

• Atiya, Aziz S. A History of Eastern Christianity. London: Methuen, 1968.

• Beck, Aaron T. Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. New York: International Universities Press, 1976.

• Brewer, Judson. The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love—Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

• Ellis, Albert. Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1962.

• Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

• Vivian, Tim. Saint Macarius the Spiritbearer: Coptic Texts Relating to Saint Macarius the Great.

• Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church. London: Penguin Books, 1993.

• Wood, Wendy, and David T. Neal. “A New Look at Habits and the Habit-Goal Interface.” Psychological Review 114, no. 4 (2007): 843–863.

Websites Used

• “Wadi El Natrun.” Wikipedia.

• Monastery of St. Macarius the Great, Wadi Natrun. stmacariusmonastery.org

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Bavly Halaka is a Coptic Orthodox Christian and a second-year medical student at Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine, where he is pursuing a career in addiction psychiatry. He holds an interest in the intersection of Coptic patristic theology and the modern sciences of the mind.

This series explores how the Egyptian Desert Fathers understood the human person and what their insights continue to offer to contemporary disciplines of mental and behavioral health.

Cover Art: Icon of the Forty-Nine Martyrs, the Elders of Shiheet at the Monastery of Saint Macarius in Wadi El-Natrun, Egypt — Photographed by Berthold Werner.

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