The Untimely Tomb: Death in the Spirituality of the Desert

In this paper we will explore the “practice of death” in the spirituality of the desert. The paper is divided into two sections. Section 1 explores the desert as place of the death. The monk has symbolized this death by locating his existence in the desert, because the renunciation of secular life led the monk to regard himself as dead. Section 2 points out depictions of monks as dead or entombed. We will examine here the role played by “daily dying” in the Life of Antony. Antony the Great characterizes his life as a kind of “death”, because he lives as though dying each day. In other words, the monk, though not actually dead, effectively dies each day. This kind of “death” (daily dying) contains the seeds of later ascetic tradition on a “practice of death”.