SOLITUDE AND THE DESERT EXPANSE

NARRATIVES OF THE DESERT and its corollary, the wilderness, have long been intrinsic to the Christian belief-system. From the exploits of Old Testament prophets such as Moses and Elijah to the life of solitary privation preferred by John the Baptist in the New Testament, so-called ‘wilderness theology’ unsurprisingly formed a centrepiece within the writings by and about the early Christians – the Church Fathers and Mothers – who had fled to the more remote areas of Palestine and Egypt to avoid persecution under the Romans. The geographies of wilderness and desert were thus overlayed like a palimpsest to form one of the most sustained physical and metaphorical topoi within Christian discourse. This, however, was not entirely a result of the harshness of the desert landscape within which Christianity originated, as several critics have argued, but, as the geographer Irit Rogoff suggests, because location is one of those ‘epistemological categories [which] determine what we know, how we know it and why we know it’. As an epistemological continuity, then, the discourse of the desert has permeated the Christian grand narrative from its origins up until the present, migrating from a literal deployment in the depiction of the caves and remote recesses where the early Christians lived out their frugal and pared-down lives, and metaphorically taking up residence within the anchoritic lives and texts which provide the focus of this present study.