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nwhyte's review against another edition
http://nhw.livejournal.com/892620.html[return][return]Helen Waddell has selected her favourite bits from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers compiled by Pelagius in the early fourth century, perhaps a third of it, and then added on various other texts, concluding with the Lives of St Pelagia the Harlot and St Mary the Harlot, which are about as exciting as you would expect.[return][return]a fascinating insight into the lives and mentalities of the first Christian monastics - men and women who felt that they must go and live in the desert to get closer to God. There is an uneasy and sometimes consciously very funny tension running through the writings, between on the one hand being deeply devout and determined, and pulling up the other monks who are not trying hard enough; and on the other hand not showing off one's own piety. But at the same time you can't help but be impressed with the seriousness and dedication with which these people tried to develop their understanding of their creator and themselves by cutting themselves off from the world.[return][return]Waddell has written a respectful yet witty introduction to each of the ten pieces, and a longer one for the book of the whole, bemoaning the fact that the reputation of the early Christian monastics has never recovered from being mocked viciously in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She complains that St Simeon Stylites, who lived on a pillar for thirty years, was not in fact a very important figure in Christian history: "His present reputation, vast as it is, dates largely from the eighteenth century, and balances delicately on a paragraph of Gibbon's prose."
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