(The Desert Fathers and Mothers) were life’s renegades, men in whom the spirit of denial was proof of their commitment to abandoning the worn-out husk of classicism that had for so long held men in its sway…. The long line of thinkers from Pythagorus through Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and Zeno, down to Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, had finally become frayed. No one had yet been able to answer satisfactorily the question of Being. Instead it had been left to an unlettered carpenter from Nazareth to propound a new metaphysic and a new reason for living. It was this man who made his own death into an event rich in symbolic meaning: if a man could die to being, then he could become like unto a God in Being. It was the message for the future. Christ had become a manifestation of a vast, unused sweetness that now bathed the world in the perfume of flowers. His death was the dew that slaked the thirst of the world.
James Cowan, Desert Father, A Journey in the Wilderness with Saint Anthony
