The call of the wilderness

UNESCO Courier, Jan, 1994 by Jean-Claude Carriere

The first monasteries and convents were founded in the Thebaid and in Syria in the fifth century. The word "monk" comes from the Greek word for "alone", but no member of an order lives in seclusion. Indeed, communal living is part of the definition of monastic life.

Monasteries left the wilderness and settled near to and in cities fairly early on, for the desert of stone and sand had proved incapable of healing the desert of the soul. Other weapons and an inner cure are needed. The Church came back to the world, which in the meantime had not been consumed by heavenly flames. The desert experience did, however, leave traces in mystical fervour (the self alone with God) and in the need to get on with others. These traces were born of the calls that were heard, of the silence of heaven, of the impossibility of solitude, of a hard, dry life, of a world not really lost, of the troublesome devil that one always finds within oneself, and, most of all, of the human fabric--tough and tender, ruthless and yielding--that neither wind nor sand can tame.

JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIERE, French author, dramatist and scriptwriter, is director of FEMIS, a cinema and audiovisual school in Paris. He has adapted the great Indian epic The Mahabharata, for the stage and, for the screen, Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac. He has recently published a novel, Simon le Mage (Plon publishers, Paris, 1993).