In the carliest, least structured stage of monasticism the lines of “control between the church and the desert monks of Egypt seen to have been highly tenuous, after which their gradual imposition can be traced. Initially, retirement from the world entailed also retirement from the body of the church, since the earliest mont were solitaries. There is evidence too of a strong charismatic tendency among these ascetics which on occasion to served by-pass an important aspect of the authority nexus in the primitive church which was located in the dispensing of sacraments. So of the Egyptian hermits claimed to have received a miraculous distribution of the eucharistic sacraments, and this was representative of a more general devaluing of the church’s sacrame control which was the logical corollary of, if not the general practice of, the desert solitaries.
The Religious Order, 22
this solitary life 