During the fourth century, certain ascetics started to react against the worldly values of society and the splendour of the clerical hierarchs and founded monasteries in the desert in order to return to the values of the earliest Christians. The hermits – from the Greek word for ‘wilderness’ – believed it was not enough to know the right formula for Christ’s nature, it was also necessary to live righteously, so they existed in hair-shirted, celibate simplicity in the deserts of Egypt and Syria.
