Alexander the Sleepless

From the world to the desert

Alexander was born about the middle of the fourth century in Asia — the tradition names the region of Asia Minor, and one strand the islands — of a family able to send him for his education to Constantinople, the new capital, where he was schooled in letters and entered for a time upon a secular career in the imperial service. But the reading of the Scriptures, and above all the Gospel call to the rich young man — "if thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor" — took hold of him with a completeness that marked his whole after-life: he did not soften the words but obeyed them to the letter. He gave away his possessions, left the world, and went into the Syrian desert, where he placed himself under an abbot (the tradition names Elias) in a monastery near the Euphrates.

After four years in the community he withdrew deeper into the wilderness to live as a solitary, and there, for some seven years, he gave himself to prayer and to the searching of the Scriptures. It was in these years that he seized upon the verse that would govern the rest of his life — "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17) — and asked himself, with his characteristic literalness, whether it could be truly kept; and he conceived the plan of a community that would fulfil it not by intention only but in fact, keeping up the praise of God without a break through every hour of the day and night.

The burning of the temple, and the wandering ascetics

Alexander's zeal was of the fierce, apostolic kind. Coming to a still half-pagan district, he is said to have burned down a temple of the idols, and to have faced the fury of the townsfolk with such fearlessness that many were converted — among them, in one tradition, the local magnate Rabbula, afterwards the famous bishop of Edessa. Gathering disciples, he formed a band of ascetics — the sources speak of a great number, drawn from many nations, Greeks, Romans, and Syrians — who lived without possessions of any kind, "taking no thought for the morrow," subsisting on alms and the providence of God, and moving through Syria and Mesopotamia along the Euphrates as a wandering choir of prayer. Among these followers he organised his great innovation: the monks were divided into companies which relieved one another in turn, so that the chanting of the psalms never ceased, one choir taking up the office as another laid it down, the doxology rising to God unbroken by day or night. From this "unsleeping" praise the community took the name by which history knows it — the Akoimetoi, the Unsleeping Ones — and its founder became Alexander the Sleepless.

His uncompromising ways, and the spectacle of a great company of propertyless wanderers, brought him into repeated conflict with the settled powers. At Antioch, where he came with his monks and where his preaching and his denunciation of wealth stirred both the poor and the authorities, he fell foul of the patriarch and the civil officials, was accused of the Messalian heresy (the charge of quietist enthusiasm regularly levelled at unattached ascetics), and was driven from the city.

Constantinople, and the monastery of the Unsleeping Ones

About the year 425 Alexander brought his community to Constantinople itself, and there established a monastery in which the perpetual office was kept in full — the monks, ranged in choirs and relieving one another around the clock, sang the psalter through without interruption, "a heaven upon earth," as the tradition loved to call it. But the capital proved no more welcoming than Antioch. His severity, his poverty, and the suspicion of Messalianism again roused opposition; he was accused before the ecclesiastical authorities, his monks were scattered and harried, and Alexander himself was persecuted and expelled. He withdrew across the water and settled at last at Gomon, on the Asian shore of the Bosporus, where he reposed about the year 430, worn out with labours and old age.

Persecution did not end his work. His disciples regathered, and the community — settling in time at the Irenaion on the Bosporus and afterwards drawing monks of many tongues — became one of the most celebrated monasteries of the Byzantine world, a byword for liturgical fervour and, in the christological struggles that followed, a stronghold of the Council of Chalcedon. Under its later abbots, above all Marcellus the Akoimetos, it reached its greatest flourishing and supplied the first monks for the famed Monastery of Stoudios at Constantinople, whence the Studite reform of Eastern monasticism would spring. Thus the perpetual doxology Alexander had conceived in the Syrian desert passed, through his sons, into the mainstream of Byzantine monastic life.