The People You Run into in the Desert

There's no telling whom you'll run into while on a stroll through the Egyptian deserts of the mid-fourth century. A recently translated book about the monk Palladius tells us that he was not lolling about his cell but instead lead a very peripatetic life: John Wortley, ed. and trans., Palladius of Aspuna: the Lausiac History (Cistercian, 2015), 176pp.

About this book the publisher tell us:

Born in Galatia in the 360s, Palladius enrolled as a monk on the Mount of Olives in his early twenties. As a monk, he traveled to Alexandria, the desert of Nitria, the Cells, Palestine, Rome, and the Thebaid. During his travels he encountered Rufinus of Aquileia, Melania the Elder, the hermit Dorotheos, Macarius of Alexandria, Evagrius of Pontus, Jerome of Bethlehem, and John Chrysostom. He wrote this elegant account of his visits to various monastic sites in Egypt toward the end of the fourth century AD for the imperial chamberlain Lausus. It is both the most sophisticated and the most informative of the few documents illustrating the earliest chapter in the history of Christian monasticism. Palladius’s work is the only one of the major monastic writings not written for fellow monks to inspire them with models for their emulation but rather for a man very much of the world, with the explicit intention of exerting not only religious but also political influence.