If the human decides to go into the desert, he elevates his life into the state of metaphysical alertness—awakeness is everything. The metaphor of keeping oneself alert for the lord translates for these extremists of orthodoxy into an unprecedented battle against sleep, which is for the most part reduced to a few hours and in many cases only sitting, even hanging attached to ropes in vertical position. The saints spark themselves up like living eternal lights who illuminate the desert nights with their awakeness; thus, they correspond to the fixed stars, [98] whose light radiates from yonder into the black space of creation. John of Moschus, the poetic eulogist of anchoritism, saw in the people of solitary prayer out there a blooming “spiritual meadow,” and when that meadow laughed, as accords with the rules of rhetoric, its laugh already bore witness to the glamour of the overworld. In contrast, in the literal desert, over centuries people wept more than ever before or after in the history of humanity. Without the gift of tears, hardly one of these athletes could have been capable of elevation into the higher grades of dyadic unity. Tears were at all times held in the highest regard as means and signs of purification by the world-escapists. Together with persistent prayer, that inner monologue of the dyadic monad, tears were incomparably well suited to liquidate the world-blockage and to flush away the separating layers between “God” and soul. If prayers and tears have become identical, nothing is left of the subject but a supplication to be allowed to abandon itself; the supplication makes to its god the unspeakable confession that it wants to be nothing but a part of him; even the anchorite’s desperation belongs to God; in his final weakness the desperate one encounters non-being before the beloved. Then the anchorite wants to not be his own anymore, and above all to have no will of his own and no world of his own. For the sake of becoming unworldly [Entweltlichung], the monks forbid themselves laughter; many spent their whole lives naked, like animals in ecstasy; others abandoned the use of shoes, some even the use of first-person possessive pronouns. John of Cassian said about the undergarments of the Egyptian monks: “The cutoff sleeves [99] should remind them that they are cut off from all deeds and works of this world. The linen garments say to them that they are dead to all life on earth.”¹¹

How far the concern for the destruction of all worldliness reached among the holy solitaries reveals itself above all in the mythlike episodes of anachoretic literature, which, from the fourth century onward, submerges the whole Near East in a climate of desert fanaticism. In the life of the Syrian Symeon the Younger, from the seventh century, it is reported that, after receiving baptism as a two-year-old, the future saint fell into a trance, during which he recited for seven days: “I have a father and I have none; I have a mother and I have none”—a recitation that revealed an early appointee in the full bloom of holy asociality; whoever is able to reject having a father and mother on this earth at this tender age is sheltered from the very beginning against the dangers of getting stuck in naïve world-partiality. Thus, no wonder if this family-critical child prodigy goes into the mountains at age seven, sitting on top of a prayer pillar while losing his baby teeth. Here everything that could lead to the development of an individual worldliness is deactivated in the earliest stage of psychic development; world-flight goes directly into an early precaution against all tendencies toward positive world-inhabitation [Welteinhausung]. One could say that world-flight itself means the whole world to such individuals. 

[…] Without the God-intoxicated men in the desert, the religiously ambivalent masses on the cusp between the heathen and the Christian worlds could hardly have grasped what it means, as a human being, to strive for the correspondence between the spiritual and the absolute One. Although it may seem inappropriate that the anachoretic face à face with God could become a spectacle, even the mere external appearance of the immersed offers to the pilgrims, the patients, the spiritual tourists, a “proof of the spirit and the power.” The preconceptions of the observers meet with the ecstasies of the athletes at the worldless vanishing point which creates space for many kinds of absence from all that is the case.

As the scene of the great secession and as the laboratory of dyadicmonadic transformations, the desert was the cityless city, the worldless world; through the continuous influx of those unfit for worldly service, the seemingly most inhuman of all places became an utopian asylum; in it, the acosmopolitans of all nations united in the most subversive group. In the no-man’s-land that promised nothing and everything, the First Acosmic International was constituted. Cloister communism developed itself in the desert into a consummated fact—and into a specter haunting the excluded secular society. Thenceforth desert is just another word for the worldshadow in which people meet insofar as they neither interpret the world nor change it but rather wish to omit it.

Peter Sloterdijk, Out of This World