The life of St John Moschos
He had come to believe that the hard-won holiness of the earlier Desert Fathers was fading quickly among the looser habits of his own generation, and rather than accept that loss he set out to preserve whatever of it he could still find, traveling for years among the monastic communities of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor. His constant companion on these journeys was a close friend named Sophronius, who would go on to become Patriarch of Jerusalem.
Out of that long searching came the book by which John is remembered, the Spiritual Meadow: hundreds of brief accounts, remembered sayings, and small lives gathered from the monks he met himself and the stories told to him of others. Historians still rank it as the second most valuable surviving witness, after the History of the Monks of Palestine, to what monastic life in the Judaean desert actually looked like in that era.
He finished the work at last in Rome, where he died in 619. Its reach outlived him by centuries, carried eventually into Latin, Armenian, Arabic, Georgian, Ethiopian, and Old Slavonic versions alongside the Greek original.
