The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth CenturyThomas Merton The Wisdom of the Desert was one of Thomas Merton's favorites among his own books-surely because he had hoped to spend his last years as a hermit. The personal tone of the translations, the blend of reverence and humor so characteristic of him, show how deeply Merton identified with the legendary authors of these sayings and parables, the fourth-century Christian Fathers who sought solitude and contemplation in the deserts of the Near East. The hermits of Scete who turned their backs on a corrupt society remarkably like our own had much in common with the Zen Masters of China and Japan, and Father Merton made his selection from them with an eye to the kind of impact produced by the Zen mondo. |
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The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century No preview available - 2004 |
Common terms and phrases
Abbot Abraham Abbot Agatho Abbot Ammonas Abbot Anastasius Abbot Anthony Abbot Arsenius ABBOT HYPERICHIUS Abbot John Abbot Joseph Abbot Macarius Abbot Moses ABBOT PASTOR Abbot Poemen Abbot Sisois Abbot Theodore angel Arthur Rimbaud asked Abbot baskets Bernadette Mayer bread brethren brother asked cell cenobites charity Christ Christian Collected Poems command Desert Fathers devil disciple Egypt elder replied Evagrius everything eyes Ezra Pound fire fourth century give hates evil hear heard heart Heinrich von Kleist hermit holy humility insulted John the Dwarf journey judge labour laughed lived Lord monastic monk Muriel Spark never night Nihil obstat Nitria novice ONCE Abbot one's pray prayer quies read of Abbot rest robbers salvation saying Scete Scriptures Selected Poems silence sins society solitary sought soul spiritual stories tell temptation things THOMAS MERTON thoughts told wisdom woman words
Popular passages
Page 20 - Prayer ("Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner") synchronized with one's breathing.
Page 11 - What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.
Page 23 - ... who lived their lives out to a good old age among the rocks and sands only did so because they had come into the desert to be themselves, their ordinary selves, and to forget a world that divided them from themselves. There can be no other valid reason for seeking solitude or for leaving the world. And thus to leave the world, is, in fact, to help save it in saving oneself. This is the final point, and it is an important one. The Coptic hermits who left the world as though escaping from a wreck,...
Page 26 - Therefore, whatever you see your soul to desire according to God, do that thing, and you shall keep your heart safe.
Page 24 - We cannot do exactly what they did. But we must be as thorough and as ruthless in our determination to break all spiritual chains, and cast off the domination of alien compulsions, to find our true selves, to discover and develop our inalienable spiritual liberty and use it to build, on earth, the Kingdom of God.
Page 8 - rest" which these men sought was simply the sanity and poise of a being that no longer has to look at itself because it is carried away by the perfection of freedom that is in it. And carried where? Wherever Love itself, or the Divine Spirit, sees fit to go. Rest, then, was a kind of simple no-whereness and no-mindedness that had lost all preoccupation with a false or limited "self.
Page 3 - In the fourth century AD the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Arabia and Persia were peopled by a race of men who have left behind them a strange reputation. They were the first Christian hermits, who abandoned the cities of the pagan world to live in solitude. Why did they do this? The reasons were many and various, but they can all be summed up in one word as the quest for "salvation.
Page 23 - The simple men who lived their lives out to a good old age among the rocks and sands only did so because they had come into the desert to be themselves, their ordinary selves, and to forget a world that divided them from themselves.
Page 6 - They sought a way to God that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had mapped it out beforehand...
Page 11 - ... able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous. Proof: the great travellers and colonizers of the Renaissance were, for the most part, men who perhaps were capable of the things they did precisely because they were alienated from themselves. In subjugating primitive worlds they only imposed on them, with the force of cannons, their own confusion and their own alienation.