What the celibate traditions say about loneliness
Antony of Egypt was orphaned in his late teens, heard a Gospel verse read aloud in church, gave away his land, made provision for his sister, and walked into the Egyptian desert at about twenty. Athanasius, writing soon after his death in 356 CE, calls what followed askesis — training. The traditions in this library that produced lifelong celibates are unusually specific about being alone, and they do not agree with each other. Some say go into a room and stay in it. Others say never leave a person alone at all.
Anthony of Egypt withdrew alone into the desert at twenty, giving away his inheritance to live a life of total simplicity and prayer
Antony's withdrawal began with an ordinary church reading, not a vision — Athanasius says he heard the Gospel verse and took it as addressed to him personally. The word Athanasius uses for what came next is askesis, the root of "ascetic": in this tradition, being alone is something you go and do, not something that happens to you.
Matthew 19:21, as read at the liturgy Antony attended, recounted in The Life of Antony
The desert fathers taught that solitude and continence were a wrestling match, not a passive state, requiring constant vigilance
The Sayings are candid that the desert did not end the struggle — several describe monks tormented by memory and fantasy for years after arriving, because solitude removed the distractions that had been masking an unquiet mind. The elders' consistent counsel was that location wins nothing.
Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers)
A monk's cell, Abba Moses said, teaches him everything he needs to know, if only he has the patience to stay in it
Abba Moses, a former bandit leader, taught that the cell teaches a monk everything provided he can stay in it. Staying meant not visiting other monks, not seeking distraction, and not blaming the surroundings — the desert fathers held that the same unrest simply follows a person wherever they go.
Apophthegmata Patrum
Evagrius Ponticus catalogued the wandering thoughts of the solitary monk, teaching that naming a distraction is the first step to mastering it
Evagrius listed eight afflictive thoughts and wanted monks to observe precisely which one was operating, when it entered, and what fed it. His account of sexual thought locates it in memory, imagination and idle attention rather than the body alone — which is also where loneliness does its work.
Praktikos
The desert monks measured their days by manual work, psalm-singing, and silence, leaving little room for the mind to drift toward longing
The desert day ran on manual labour, psalms at fixed hours, and silence; the baskets and rope were sold to support the community. Cassian presents the schedule as deliberate design rather than an accident of poverty, on the assumption that longing rarely erupts by itself but grows in unstructured time.
Apophthegmata Patrum
A Zen monastery's schedule leaves almost no private hour at all, on the understanding that shared, disciplined time itself becomes the teacher
Zen gives the opposite prescription. A sesshin sequences sitting, walking, formal meals and work so tightly that a monk has almost no hour alone with his own thoughts, and the sources treat that absence of private time as the training itself, not as deprivation.
Shobogenzo
A Quanzhen monastery keeps separate quarters for men and women, yet both study the very same scriptures and sit the very same long hours of meditation
Quanzhen broke with the earlier Taoist pattern of family lineage and hereditary priesthood and built a monastic institution instead: centres such as Beijing's White Cloud Temple ordained both men and women as celibate monastics, separated their living quarters, and gave them one curriculum — the Taoist classics, the school's own internal-alchemy texts, the same long sitting — on the claim that neidan's aims and technique are not gender-specific. The result is a precise and unusual arrangement: constant company, no intimacy, identical practice.
The Shakers built their whole communal economy, their furniture, their farms, their worship, around the discipline of celibate brotherhood and sisterhood
Shaker communities organised celibate "families" of unrelated brothers and sisters around shared farms, workshops and the plain furniture they are still known for. Because reproduction was theologically excluded, nothing could be inherited and nothing was private — the whole economy had to be built so that no one had a spouse and no one was without a household.
Shaker community tradition
The nun Sumangalamata wrote that she was free, gloriously free from her three crooked things: the mortar, the pestle, and her crooked husband
Sumangalamata names three crooked things she is free of: the mortar, the pestle, and her husband, placed in the same list as the tools of grinding labour. The verse is not wistful, and it is a corrective to the whole essay — the loneliest arrangement in this record is sometimes a marriage.
Therigatha
Every tradition that has kept celibate orders for centuries frames the choice the same way: not as loss, but as one true love replacing many smaller, scattered ones
Read side by side, these traditions give genuinely different reasons and arrive at the same phrase: not subtraction, but redirection. The entry admits what that convergence may really be — movements that described the choice as pure loss left thin records, usually because they failed to last across generations.
The desert answer and the Zen answer cannot both be right, and neither tradition pretends otherwise. One says the unrest follows you anywhere and must be sat with; the other says unstructured time is where it breeds and should be abolished. What they share is a refusal to treat being alone as a condition to be waited out. They treat it as material.