‘The world has lost Rome, but the monks have lost Scetis’:Destruction, Dispersion, and Recollection of a Desert Community

During the fifth century CE, the monastic settlements of the Egyptian desert, Scetis among them, were attacked and destroyed multiple times. The Apophthegmata Patrum (AP; ‘Sayings of the Fathers’) relate how Abba Arsenius wept when this happened, lamenting: ‘The world has lost Rome, but the monks have lost Scetis.’ Many did not survive the raids. A number of survivors, however, relocated to Palestine, the trauma of their experiences reverberating through the desert sayings they rescued from oblivion. In this contribution, I explore how the surviving monks dealt with the loss of Scetis. How did they respond to the destruction, violence, and loss they had gone through and how is this mirrored in the apophthegmata? It is argued that the sayings are not only a source of monastic wisdom for us to study and contemplate, but that the very act of collecting and ordering the words of the abbas of the past gave meaning and purpose to the monks in their new environment. Preserving their wisdom traditions for posterity and thus creating a body of literature to compensate for losing the place and its inhabitants, was deeply therapeutic: it countered despair and provided a way to psychologically integrate the loss of Scetis. Methodologically, two perspectives will be taken: on the one hand, concrete sayings about the destruction are read through a wide, historical lens, while on the other hand, insights from contemporary literature on grieving and the activity of collecting as a means to cope with trauma are also discussed.