The Desert of Nitria (Ερημος της Νιτρία)

-From The Meletic Tales.

It was said that beyond the monastery of Nitria, where the Christian anchorites manifested their faith into their devotion, there lived a man who neither fasted nor fought demons, yet dwelt in solitude. He was not of the Church, although he sat before the sun each morning and watched the stars by night. His home was near stones and drift-sand, his speech infrequent, his hands stained with the red earth of the escarpment. Some people said he was a hermit; others, that he had been cast off for heresy.

A monk by the name of Athanasios had heard of him from a visiting anchorite who spoke in cautious tones. The tale was offered not as encouragement, but warning for one's fallibility.

‘He speaks of awareness, but not as we do. He does not fast. He does not wage the warfare of the soul. He does not pray in the name of Christ. He meditates. He has no need for salvation, because man's virtues save man's character’, the anchorite had said.

Athanasios was compelled. He had come to Nitria young, full of zeal, fleeing the comforts of Alexandria, but zeal, he discovered had nightmares. His nights were filled with dreams of flame, his prayers torn between heaven and doubt. He craved purity and fought temptation with stones in his mouth, with hours of prostration, with harsh words turned inwards. And still, his peace was absent. Only effort remained.

So, one morning before the heat could harden the sands, he walked west beyond the last place of the monks, into the emptier desert, seeking the silent man who followed the philosophy of Meleticism.

He found him by a dry acacia tree, seated cross-legged with his back to a wind-smoothed boulder, carving lines into a slab of clay with a reed stylus. A bowl of water sat nearby, undisturbed by the breeze. The man was olive-skinned, his beard shot with grey, and his eyes untroubled.

‘Are you the one they call Aniketos?’

The man looked up, neither startled nor smiling. He gestured to a flat stone nearby.

‘Yes. You may sit, if you wish. I do not often receive visitors’.

‘I am a monk of the monastery’, said Athanasios. ‘I heard of you. I wished to ask—why are you here? You are not of the brothers. Do you seek salvation?’

Aniketos set down his stylus and wiped his hands on his robe.

‘I seek neither heaven nor its gatekeeper. I seek only awareness’.

‘Awareness of what?’

‘Of being. Of this moment. Of the One in all things’.

Athanasios crossed himself.

‘But there is warfare in the soul. A man must resist the passions or be overcome’.

Aniketos regarded him gently.

‘Is it not possible that resistance gives the passion more life than awareness ever could?’

‘We must strive’, Athanasios insisted. ‘Even Saint Anthony fought devils in caves, crying aloud in prayer. To be passive is to be conquered’.

Aniketos shook his head slowly.

‘What if to resist is still to remain bound? I do not resist. I observe. I dwell in the presence of To Ena, the One that does not strike, nor punish, nor war, but simply exists, as a teaching that we should learn and apply to life'.

Athanasios felt a prickle beneath his tunic. He was unused to contradiction, particularly from one who did not venerate the cross.

‘You speak of peace without struggle, but is that not the way of death?’

‘No’, said Aniketos. ‘It is the way of life without panic. The fig ripens not by effort, but by ripeness. The wind does not scream unless it is hindered. I have found that what is natural need not be warred against—only understood’.

Athanasios rose, restless.

‘I came here hoping to find some deeper ascetic, but you are no hermit. You are wise. You do not fast, you do not pray, you do not speak of sin’.

‘I do not,’ said Aniketos calmly. ‘I speak of essence. Of the ousia. The river beneath the desert, not the mirage on its surface’.

‘And you believe that will save you?’

‘I do not believe in salvation as you define it. I believe in returning to the awareness from which we have strayed. Salvation implies a loss. I say: there is no loss, only forgetfulness. And remembering is not a battle—it is a return’.

The words lingered in the hot air. A hawk circled high above them.

‘So you do nothing?’ Athanasios asked, accusatory.

‘I observe. I contemplate. I allow the flow of being to pass through me. I have come to see that silence is not the absence of action—it is the fullness of attention. It teaches without command. It endures without weapon. It allows the storm to pass without trembling’.

Athanasios sat again, unwilling, yet unable to leave. ‘Do you believe in anything beyond yourself?’

‘I believe in the One—To Ena—not as god of thunder or judge of souls, but as the unity within and beyond all things. It is recognised, as one recognises calm when it returns after the noise’.

The monk closed his eyes briefly.

‘In my monastery I shout inside. Even when I kneel, I am not still. I pray, but I do not hear. I fast, but I remain full of want. I shout to God, but the heavens do not answer’.

Aniketos said nothing for a while.

Then, gently: ‘What if you ceased shouting? What if you stopped asking and simply listened? The One is not deaf. It is quiet’.

Athanasios bowed his head. ‘But I am afraid’.

‘Fear comes from the noise of the self. When the noise quietens, fear dissolves’.

They sat in silence then. The sun reached its apex and began its long descent. The desert, which had seemed so empty to Athanasios, now hummed with quiet life: the rustle of beetles, the faint call of a bird, the breath of sand against stone.

He stayed through the evening. They shared dates and a small dish of lentils. Aniketos did not ask questions. He made no declarations, yet, Athanasios felt a kind of ease he had not known even amongst the chanting of brothers.

That night, under stars as sharp as spearheads, Athanasios said: ‘You were once a student of the ancient philosophers of Greece, they say’.

‘Once. Then I saw that the mind’s labour, even though beautiful, is not always wise. So I left the polis and came here, to let thought dissolve into presence’.

‘And you never desired to teach?’

‘I teach nothing, but those people who come may listen to the silence and become aware. Sometimes, that is enough’.

Athanasios looked towards the far-off colony, now a dim line of light where oil lamps flickered behind stone walls.

‘I shall return tomorrow’, he said, almost apologetically.

Aniketos inclined his head. ‘As you wish. Or not. The desert will remain, and so shall I’.

In the days that followed, Athanasios returned each morning, always arriving just after sunrise when the light crept low across the dunes like water seeping into thirsted ground. He brought bread and dates once, a small scroll another time, hoping to offer something for the company he was not sure he had earned.

Aniketos accepted the food but left the scroll unread.

‘Why bring me words?’ he asked intriguely. ‘Have you not brought your presence?’

‘I thought you might miss the world. Its thoughts. Its beauty’.

‘I have not left the world’, said Aniketos. ‘I am in it more fully now than when I lived amongst the marble porticoes and olive-slicked debates’.

They sat in the quietude between the wind and the sand. Athanasios laid the scroll down, unread between them.

‘You must have read much once. Who were your teachers?’

Aniketos stirred the dust with a stick. ‘Philostratos. Then later an Alexandrian named Hermippos, but I remember less of their lessons than I do the silence that followed them. The finest truths come not at the height of rhetoric, but in the stillness when speech departs and awareness arrives'.

Athanasios thought on this. His own mind was often a theatre of argument—Scripture and ascetic teachings interwoven with fears, hopes and whispered accusations. It rarely stilled.

‘What truth did silence reveal to you?’

Aniketos drew a circle in the dirt. ‘That we are not separate from To Ena, the One, only unaware. That the soul’s turmoil is not cured by punishment or pleading—but by remembering. Not remembering facts or doctrines, but remembering the quiet state that was before we were taught fear’.

Athanasios looked at the circle. ‘Is that not what some call heresy? That we are already whole?’

‘Only to those people who profit by our brokenness,’ said Aniketos softly. ‘But tell me, Athanasios—if a fig tree is pruned to the root and told it must grow again to be accepted, will it not grow twisted? If it is left in light, and watered, and left in peace, will it not bear fruit in its season?’

The monk did not answer, but he returned again the next day. And the day after that.

The weeks passed. Each visit changed little in form. There was no teaching, no binding rule. Sometimes they sat in stillness for hours in meditation. Sometimes Aniketos shared fragments of his meandering thoughts—about the flow of wind across dune ridges, or the way ants carried their dead with such solemnity. Sometimes Athanasios spoke, reluctant at first, then with growing confidence, not to challenge but to reflect aloud.

He confessed one afternoon, as the sun dipped low: ‘I have prayed for visions. I have fasted until I trembled. I have seen strange forms in the night and believed them devils, but always the next morning, they were gone. And I was only myself again—emptied, but not filled’.

‘Because you seek to be filled by force that accompanies rituals. That which is true does not fill through force, but through clarity. You do not need visions. You need to see what is already there, unadorned’, said Aniketos.

Athanasios folded his hands. ‘I was taught that struggle is holy. That battle brings purification of the soul’.

Aniketos tilted his head slightly. ‘Is the river purified by fighting its current?’

‘No, but it flows’.

‘Exactly. It flows because it does not resist its own nature’.

They fell quiet again. The hawk had returned, circling overhead.

‘You are not a man of no belief,’ Athanasios said, almost to himself.

‘I am a man who believes that stillness is not empty, but full of what cannot be spoken. It is only understood with awareness'.

He hesitated, then added: ‘Long ago, I thought enlightenment was a peak to be reached. Now I see it is more like returning to sea-level. Not to rise, but to sink into what is real’.

On the fourteenth visit, a sandstorm blew in from the west. Athanasios found the small place covered in dunes. He thought Aniketos gone, perhaps swept away by fate or flame. Then, emerging from behind the rock face, the old man appeared, face wrapped in cloth, carrying a shallow vessel of water and a small bird, limp but not dead.

‘I found it caught in the thorn bush’, he said. ‘Too young to know better’.

They sheltered inside the narrow cave that formed the deeper part of Aniketos home. For the first time, Athanasios saw where the man slept: on a bed of woven palm fronds, with only a clay jar, two reeds and a smooth oval stone to mark the space.

‘I thought you were gone’, Athanasios said.

‘Only hidden. As are most things in a storm’, said Aniketos.

The bird stirred faintly in his hands. Aniketos fed it a drop of water from his fingertip. ‘It will live if it chooses’, he said.

Athanasios watched the care with which he handled it. He thought of the brothers back at the monastery, their austerity, their stern rules, their renunciations. He had never seen one of them tend a bird with such care.

That night, the wind howled around them. Aniketos lit no lamp. There was only the sound of the storm, the sheltering stones and their breath.

‘You speak of awareness’, Athanasios said into the darkness. ‘But what of pain? What of grief?’

Aniketos replied after a long pause.

‘They too are real, but they are not enemies. They are conditions, like the wind and heat. They pass. They do not define you unless you let them. To resist them is to defy the rage. To observe them allows them to endure them’.

‘Is that not coldness?’

‘No. It is clarity. Compassion must come from a place that does not cling to the suffering itself, but recognises it, walks beside it, yet does not become it’.

The monk sat with these words. The bird slept between them.

The days turned to months. Sometimes Aniketos would not speak much at all. Athanasios learnt to sit in that silence without needing to fill it. He never chanted in prayer like the Christians.

In time, he began to find that even in his own place, the thoughts did not scream so loudly. His fasts became gentler, not as punishment, but as quiet rituals of simplicity. His prayers no longer cried out for transformation—they simply existed, like the stones in the sand, honest and unembellished.

He began to carve words not into papyrus, but into the memory of wind. He learnt the seasons of the dunes. He no longer feared the devils in the night—because he no longer fed them with his panic.

One morning, as the sun was rising, he said to Aniketos: ‘You have taught me without teaching’.

Aniketos shook his head. ‘No. You have remembered what you already knew. That is not my doing’.

‘But without you, I might never have stopped the noise in me’.

‘The desert would have silenced you eventually. I only made it less frightening’, Aniketos said, smiling.

Late one season, word came that a bishop was passing near Nitria. He sought to consolidate the anchorites, to draw them under a unified rule. There was talk of correcting doctrine, of purging false teachings. Athanasios heard the rustle of warning in those plans.

‘They may come for you,’ he told Aniketos.

The old man nodded.

‘Then I shall go deeper into the desert. Or I shall be still. What difference does it make?’

‘But they may call you a heretic. They may try to slander you’.

Aniketos leaned forth, placing a hand on Athanasios’s shoulder.

‘Let them name me what they wish. I am not what they call me. Nor am I the opposite. I simply am, who I am'.

The words struck Athanasios with more force than thunder ever had.

‘If they force you to declare yourself?’

‘Then I shall speak only what is true: that I have harmed no one, that I have worshipped no idol, that I have lived simply and seen To Ena, the One in every shadow. If that is heresy, then may the desert be my judge’.

Athanasios wanted to speak, to argue, to defend—but he knew better now.

Instead, he said: ‘If you go, I shall remember. I shall speak your silence to those people who listen’.

Aniketos gave no reply. Only a quiet nod, as if to say: that is enough.

In the final weeks, the monastery became quieter still. The bird had flown away long ago. The wind now carried the scent of far-off rains. Aniketos carved less. He sat more often in the sunlight, eyes closed, body relaxed.

One morning, Athanasios arrived to find the place where Aniketos dwelt was empty. No sign of struggle. No trace of departure. Only a small circle of stones where Aniketos used to sit, and a line drawn in the sand.

He waited all day, but Aniketos did not return. He waited again the next.

And then, he left the circle untouched, and walked back to Nitria under the stars.

The wind stirred again, and a line of dust danced past them. The desert was no stage for thunder, but for the slow breath of time. He found Aniketos there.

‘Is this peace you speak of not a form of complacency?’ Athanasios asked, his voice steady, but still edged with concern. ‘If we do not resist sin, do we not become its accomplices?’

Aniketos inclined his head slightly, his gaze still on the patterns he had traced in the sand. ‘You see peace as sleep, but I see it as clarity. Resistance breeds its own shadow. When one wages war within, one must always raise an army. Sin is a guilt that can never be eradicated, because it is meant to punish than teach'.

‘Then should we embrace our passions?’

‘Neither be excessive nor cast them out. Observe them. As one watches a caravan pass across the horizon without needing to follow it’.

Athanasios sat back, drawing his cloak around him. The sun was lower now. He had walked into the desert to understand the nature of spiritual combat, and yet this man offered no struggle, no sword for the soul, only stillness applied by awareness.

‘Christ calls us to be watchful. To fight. To endure the cross’.

‘Perhaps. Because those people to whom he spoke were caught in battle already. And a man drowning must be taught to swim before he can float’, said Aniketos.

'Do you never fight for anything?' Athanasios

'I fight for that which is beyond man's ego, which is the strive of the self and soul'.

Silence grew again, but this time it was not strained. The monk listened to the scrape of sand against rock, the hum of wind as it passed over the low ridge. He noticed how the older man did not preach, nor persuade, nor judge. He answered simply, and let the space between the words carry its own weight.

‘I envy you,’ Athanasios said at last. ‘Not because you have no faith, but because your belief demands nothing. No pain. No offering. Only awareness achieved through self-acceptance'.

‘It seeks everything, but it demands nothing in return’, said Aniketos.

A bird circled overhead. In the east, the hills near Nitria were gilded with sunset. The shadows of their bodies stretched long across the desert floor, slowly blurring into the earth.

Athanasios did not speak again for some time. His zeal had not abandoned him—but it had been quieted, as if a louder voice had been gently silenced by a single breath.

In the months that followed, Athanasios returned many times.

He continued his prayers, but now in quietude. He fasted, but without wrath. The demons, when they came, found no enemy in him—only a man who listened to the wind and watched the shifting sands.

He did not abandon the monastery. He lived amongst the brothers, but he returned often to the dry acacia tree, to the stone where Aniketos carved.

Years later, when he was old and grey, and Aniketos long returned to dust, Athanasios would sometimes say to younger monks: ‘There is a warfare that looks like peace, and a silence that speaks louder than angels. I learnt that in Nitria, from a man who never fought to please his ego'.

When they asked his name, he would reply, with a half-smile expressed: ‘His name was Aniketos, which meant unconquerable'.

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