The philosopher of Alexandria, having described the Essenes of Judea as the pattern of the active virtuous life, wrote a companion treatise on the contemplative life, and in it described a community he knew far better, because it lay a short journey from his own city. On a low hill above a lake, beyond the marshes southwest of Alexandria, where the air was healthy and the breezes came from the sea, lived a company of men and women he calls the Therapeutae: the healers, or the attendants, for the Greek word means both, and he says they were called so because they healed souls and because they served God.
The Life by the Lake
They had given away their property, he says, to children or kin or friends, and fled without looking back, as from a plague, to live in solitary houses scattered around the hill, each with a small sanctuary, a holy room, into which the member went alone to study the Law and the prophets and the psalms, and to pray. They prayed at dawn, asking that their minds be filled with heavenly light, and at evening, asking that the soul be relieved of the burden of the senses. Between the prayers they read scripture by allegory, holding that the literal text was a body whose soul was the hidden meaning, and they composed hymns in many meters.
They ate nothing until sunset, and some only every third day, and some only every sixth. Their food was bread and salt, with hyssop for the more delicate, and spring water. They wore the cheapest clothing. On the seventh day they gathered in a common sanctuary, the men on one side and the women on the other, separated by a wall high enough for modesty and low enough for the women to hear, and the eldest expounded the scriptures while the rest sat in silence.
Every seventh week they held a great feast, which was not a feast: bread, salt, hyssop, water, on a plain table, after a discourse and hymns. And then, through the night, the choirs: the men and the women singing separately, then together, in the antiphons of the song of the sea, dancing as the Israelites danced on the far shore, until dawn, when they stood facing east and prayed as the sun rose and went back to their cells.
Cousins of the Essenes
The philosopher does not call the Therapeutae Essenes, and the fellowship does not either. But he describes them in the same breath, as the contemplative counterpart to the Essenes' active virtue, and the resemblances are strong. The surrender of property. The dawn and evening prayers, facing the sun. The plain food and cheap clothing. The study of scripture by allegory, which he also attributes to the Essenes. The seventh-day assembly in silence. The reverence for the holy number seven. The fellowship considers them cousins: the same stream of Jewish piety, flowing in a different channel, in a different country, with women admitted to the life on terms the desert community never allowed.
The women matter. The philosopher says that most of the women of the community were aged virgins who had kept their chastity not from compulsion but from desire for wisdom, and that they sang and danced with the men on the night of the great feast. Whatever the fellowship's students make of the ancient attitude to marriage, we note that here, on the lake in Egypt, the contemplative life of the stream was open to both, and that the women were not an afterthought.
The Thread to the Jar
Two centuries after the philosopher wrote, Christian men and women began to go out to the deserts of Egypt to live almost exactly as the Therapeutae had lived: in scattered cells, in silence, on bread and salt and water, fasting to sunset, praying at dawn and evening, gathering on the seventh day, reading scripture for its hidden meaning. They are called the desert fathers and mothers, and the Christian monastic tradition descends from them. One of the earliest Christian historians, writing about these monks, quoted the philosopher's treatise on the Therapeutae at length and declared that it described the first Christians of Egypt. He was wrong about the date; the Therapeutae were Jews, and older than the church. But he was not wrong about the resemblance.
And it was monks of this tradition, or men close to them, who most likely buried the jar at Nag Hammadi, near the great monasteries of Upper Egypt, when the bishop ordered the libraries purged of books not approved. They could not burn the Gospel of Thomas. They hid it. The fellowship follows the thread: from the Essenes of Judea to their cousins by the lake, from the lake to the desert cells, from the cells to the jar, and from the jar, sixteen centuries later, to a farmer's hoe and a shelf in the Reading Room. The stream went underground and surfaced in another country. It does that.
What the Healers Teach
The fellowship takes three things from the Therapeutae. First, that the contemplative life is a form of healing, of the soul and through the soul of the body, and that the one who sits in the holy room alone is not idle but at work. Second, that a community of solitaries is possible: people who live apart and gather on the seventh day and sing together through one night in seven weeks, and who are a community for all that. Most of the fellowship's students live like this, scattered, meeting rarely, keeping the hours alone. The lake says it has been done before. Third, that the way is for women and men alike, and always was, whatever the desert's rule said. The fellowship's keepers are two women and two men, and we did not plan it, and we are glad of it.