Desert fathers specialist Benedicta Ward notes that monks were forced to order their dress, sleep, sexuality, and eating because of "the nature of life in the desert," (that is, the severity of the conditions), and because they longed to be "free to feed on the word of God without distraction by appetite." To get a feel for early asceticism, especially fasting, and how it affected the daily lives of monks, we've included a portion of Ward's introduction to The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, translated by Normal Russell, (Cistercian, Kalamazoo, 1980, p. 23-25). (The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto is a late fourth-century journal of seven Palestinian monks who traveled to Egypt to learn from the monks living there).

Some of the monks ate very little, like John of Lycopolis who ate only a little fruit each day and Pityrion who had a light diet of a little corn-meal soup each day. At Bawit it was customary to keep the canonical fasts of Wednesday and Friday, ...

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