VOX PATRUM 35 (2015) t. 64 Eirini ARTEMI * ATHANASIUS OF ALEXANDRIA AND “THE KINGDOM OF THE DESERT” IN HIS WORKS The concept of monasticism is ancient and can be found in many reli- gions and philosophies. In the centuries immediately before Christ, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism developed alternative styles of life which involved renouncing the world in some ways, in order to seek liberation or puriication or union with God, sometimes as a solitary ascetic, sometimes in community. In the third and fourth century, a signiicant numbers of Christians preferred the desert as the way to come closer to God. So they abandoned their family life and they chose the isolation in the wilderness as the safe path which ends in their deiication 1 . The wilderness in the Bible is a barely perceptible space, an in-between place where ordinary life is suspended, identity shifts, and where the new pos- sibilities emerge. Beginning with the Exodus and then through the Old Testa- ment times, the desert was regarded as a place of spiritual renewal and return to God 2 . From the experiences of the Israelites in exile, one can learn that the Biblical wilderness is a place of danger, temptation, and chaos, but it is also a place for solitude, nourishment, and revelation from God 3 . These themes emerge again in Jesus’ journey into the wilderness after His baptism (cf. Mt 4:1-11; Mk 1:12-13; Lk 4:1-13) and when the Christianity started to develop in the period of Roman Empire. Early Christian monasticism drew its inspira- tion from the examples of the Prophet Elijah and John the Baptist, who both lived alone in the desert and above all from the story of Jesus’ time in solitary struggling with Satan in the desert, before his public ministry 4 . So in the desert of Egypt, the Christian monasticism was born at the end of the third and in the fourth century. In the Egyptian desert, the revolutionary * Dr Eirini Artemi – Theologist & Classical Philologist, MA & Ph.D. of Theology of National and Capodistrian University of Athens, email: eartemi@theol.uoa.gr. 1 Cf. G. Herring, An Introduction to the History of Christianity: From the Early Church to the Enlightenment, New York 2006, 67. 2 Cf. D.W. Kling, The Bible in History. How the Texts Have Shaped the Times: How the Texts have shaped the times, New York 2006, 33. 3 Cf. W. Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism, New York 2004, 3. 4 Cf. Harmless, Desert Christians, p. 11-12.