The Desert Fathers Author:Helen Waddell "The place called Scete is set in a vast desert, a day and a night from the monasteries on Nitria. Water is hard to find ... There abide men perfect in holiness ..." — This, written towards the end of the fourth century, is a contemporary account of the Desert Fathers, whose fragmentary lives and scattered sayings are the kernel of asce... more »tic tradition in the West. The original Latin is of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries and this selection is a minute fragment of the whole.« less