When the Edict of Milan ended persecution, a paradox followed: the Church, no longer in danger, grew comfortable. Some Christians felt that comfort as a loss. Beginning with Antony the Great in the late third century, they withdrew to the Egyptian desert to pursue God without distraction — in solitude, fasting, unceasing prayer, and the long inward struggle against temptation.
What began with solitary hermits soon took communal form. Pachomius gathered monks into ordered communities under a common rule; the pattern spread to Syria, Palestine, and beyond. The sayings of these desert elders — terse, hard-won, often startling — were collected and treasured by the wider Church.
Desert monasticism is the headwater of all later Christian monasticism, East and West. The Theologos Desert Fathers library profiles its great figures; here the movement is recorded as what it was — the Church's instinct, in a comfortable age, to seek God in the hard and quiet place.