Traditions

Over the centuries – millennia, even – the lives of the Desert Fathers, as recorded in the so-called Vitae patrum, furnished models and inspiration for believers striving after the perfect Christian life. In Germany their influence would even transcend confessional boundaries. These naked, emaciated figures with long hair and beards lived together in small ascetic communities or, like wild animals, kept themselves hidden in caves or old pagan gravesites. Their lives were recorded in the early fifth century by travellers from both the East and the West. Later generations of monks would expand the collection of short vitae when the need arose.

Writing some two centuries after these first monastic accounts, Gregory of Tours (d. 594) proposed a different model of the ascetic ideal, one more strongly oriented towards the realities of the ‘Western’ Church. One half of his Liber vitae patrum deals with saintly bishops and abbots, the other half with anchorites who renounced the world and had themselves shut up like prisoners in cells, towers, or old buildings. For the bishop of Tours, these inclusi were the real virtuosi of the ascetic life. Many of them had been monks living in community before opting for total isolation. The same author's Historia Francorum also contains several accounts of recluses. One of these figures, a certain Hospitius, was able to succeed where Gregory's other vitae had failed. He became famous. As the exemplar from the Carthusian monastery in Basel shows, Hospitius found entrance into the living corpus of the Vitae patrum. In fact, he was to become the very prototype of the inclusus in the Western Church. He had himself walled up naked and in chains in a tower in the vicinity of Nizza. Under his iron fetters his flesh began to putrefy, and the worms that had tormented him his whole life left his body only after his death. Hospitius restricted his diet to dates and bread, during Lent to roots and herbs. And, at last, he obtained the divine gift of prophecy.

Grimlaïcus and Benedictine monasticism

Although institutional forms of monastic life became more prevalent in the period that followed, nonetheless the Desert Fathers lived on in the books and in the minds of the monks who read and copied them. The Rule of St Benedict prescribes daily reading from Cassian's (d. 430) Conlationes, Institutiones and the Vitae patrum at community mealtimes.