After “A Time to Die” and “The Great Happiness”, Nicolas Diat continues his pilgrimage on the path of silence and eternity where each monastery is a sanctuary. In his new work, “Humilitas. The birth of men alone”, this time he takes the reader into the Egyptian desert to the origins of monasticism.
This book is not just a historical account; it is an invitation to a personal, almost mystical journey. If he takes us into the burning sands, it is to discover another world, purified, where the superfluous no longer has its place, where the Coptic monks continue to question our era led by immediacy and silence disturbed by incessant notifications.
“Can the choices of the monks be understood by postmodern and ultra-connected man? Who is right? Who is unreasonable? Who knows God? » Faced with our own lives, saturated with connections and demands, the radicalism of these monks disturbs as much as it fascinates. Yet they reveal a timeless quest: to give deep meaning to existence.
“Here the devil cannot hide”
The daily life of the first monks was both simple and demanding: pray, meditate, fast. “Time abolished becomes a wonderful feeling”, but no one can escape the inner journey that awaits them. Not even the author when he notices that his smartphone is “no longer in working order”, before making up his mind: “The desert was doing its work”, he writes, to the point of making the absolute introspection. We understand better to what extent the vast expanses of sand are for the monks much more than a decoration: they become a mirror of the soul where the “power of the desert” rhymes with the “feeling of humility”.
“Here, the devil cannot hide,” confides a contemporary Coptic monk to Nicolas Diat. The Evil One can certainly no longer cheat, but confrontation becomes inevitable. The deserts of Egypt then reveal themselves to the monks as places of combat where cold nights, hunger, temptations, solitude push these men to the edge of the abyss. In this ordeal, the example of their venerable predecessors, the Desert Fathers, and their theology shaped in the first centuries, proves indispensable: “Without this guide, the novice is in danger; he will even be lost. Without an intimate relationship with the fathers, he will no longer have a spiritual taste,” says Father Timon, enlightened by twenty-five years of life as a monk in Deir El-Suryani, a monastery in Egypt founded in the 8th century.
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“Every minute spent in prayer comes from eternity”
This is the reason why Saint Anthony, a pioneer of monasticism in the 3rd century, occupies a central place in “Humilitas”. Coming from a wealthy Egyptian farming family, he is the first to want to escape all worldliness by leaving his village to respond to a radical call that takes him into the desert. As if that were not enough, he wanders from tomb to cave, in an abandoned fort, wherever he will remain untraceable. But Saint Anthony knows that “where you are, God is with you”. From then on, everything becomes possible again, including drawing the resources necessary to defeat the devil and his traps.
The monk, reveals “Humilitas”, just like the man in search of meaning, is then able to touch the infinite, because “every minute spent in prayer comes from eternity”. God can thus strip our concerns “of their mortal form” and clothe them with a divine character. A lesson learned from a hermit, “who spent most of his time in the solitude of the desert”, notes Nicolas Diat, like us, stunned.
“Humility”, by Nicolas Diat, ed. Fayard, 180 pages, 17.90 euros.
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France
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