Alonius of Scetis

Our Venerable Father Alonius, the Ascetic of Scetis in Egypt

Venerable · d. 5th century

Alonius is one of the Desert Fathers of Egypt, an ascetic of Scetis of the generation that the Sayings of the Fathers preserves, remembered not for events but for four or five sentences of terrible concision. Of his life the synaxarion says only that he was among the ascetics famous for virtue in the desert, that his sayings are found in the Evergetinos, and that he reposed in peace. Those sayings — "If a man does not say in his heart, In this world there is only I and God, he will not find rest"; "If I had not destroyed everything, I could not have rebuilt myself" — put him among the most quoted of the fathers of the Apophthegmata, and he is commemorated on June 4.

What the record contains

Alonius belongs to the class of saints whose whole surviving biography is a handful of recorded words. The Greek synaxarion notice is two sentences long: that he appears to have been one of the ascetics of the desert distinguished for virtue; that his sayings are to be found in the Evergetinos, the great eleventh-century Byzantine anthology of the fathers compiled by Paul of Evergetis; and that he died in peace. No country, no monastery, no teacher and no year are transmitted. The commonly cited placing — Scetis, in the Nitrian desert west of the Nile delta, in the fifth century — comes from the company he keeps in the Apophthegmata Patrum, where he appears in the alphabetical collection under his own name and in conversation with Abba Agathon, and where a certain Abba Ammoes is named as his companion.

He is, in other words, a father known from the desert literature rather than from a Life; and the honest limit of the record is that a monk of Egypt named Alonius said certain things that the tradition judged worth keeping, and reposed in peace.

The sayings

Five sayings are transmitted under his name in the alphabetical Apophthegmata, and they hang together with unusual coherence around a single idea: the radical solitude of the soul before God, and the destruction of the old self as the condition of building a new one.

On solitude of heart. "Unless a man say in his heart, In this world there is only I and God, he will not find rest." This is the saying by which he is chiefly known, and it is not a recommendation of misanthropy: it is the counsel that the soul cannot bargain with, or hide behind, or measure itself against anyone else in the matter of repentance.
On demolition. "If I had not pulled everything down, I should not have been able to build myself up again." The metaphor is a builder's, and the tradition reads it as the precondition of the whole ascetic enterprise: not the improvement of the old man but his demolition.
On silence and self-accusation. Asked how to be at peace with a brother, he answered that a man should reckon himself as having no existence and blame no one but himself — the sentence sometimes handed on as "I have not existed, and I do not exist." Abba Agathon, who had asked how one comes to guard the tongue, was told to take himself out of the reckoning altogether.
On the measure of a day. "If a man wills it, he may come in a single day to the measure of the fear of God" — the desert's characteristic refusal of the excuse of gradualism.

The Evergetinos, and after it the whole Byzantine ascetic tradition, quarried these lines; they pass into Slavonic in the Paterikon and into the standard collections of the fathers. The synaxarion's laconic reference to the Evergetinos is thus not an evasion but an accurate citation: it is where a Byzantine reader would in fact have met Alonius.

Feast and commemoration

June 4 (church date; New Calendar civil June 4, Old Calendar civil June 17), kept with Saint Metrophanes of Constantinople and the sisters of Lazarus. He shares the day with two other Egyptian ascetics of the fixed calendar's June 4 — Zosimas, bishop of Babylon, who ended his days on Sinai — so that the day carries a small Egyptian and Sinaite cluster. Alonius has no proper service; he is commemorated at the simple rank, with the common of a venerable father. The Greek synaxarion sets over his notice the distich on his name:

Alonius gives delight to the Husbandman of souls, who laid upon the threshing-floor of his soul a rick of good works.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)

By the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren desert to bring forth; and by thy sighing from the depths thou didst bear fruit a hundredfold in labours; and thou wast a beacon to the whole world, shining with miracles, O Alonius our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Iconography

Alonius is painted in the type of the Egyptian desert fathers: an elder in the plain brown or russet analavos and cowl of the great schema, gaunt, long-bearded, the face lined by abstinence, holding a scroll — and where a scroll is inscribed it will carry his best-known sentence, that a man must say in his heart I alone and God are in this world. He carries no attribute, no instrument and no book of the Gospels, since he was neither martyr nor hierarch; he belongs to the rows of ascetics painted in monastic refectories and narthexes and to the composite icons of the Fathers of the desert and of the Paterikon.

No pre-1900 icon of him alone has been located for this collection; the desert fathers of the Apophthegmata who never received a proper service are, as a class, poorly served by the surviving panel and menologion tradition, and Alonius is not among the figures the illustrated menologia single out.

Disputed questions

Identity and place. The synaxarion itself hedges — "he appears to have been one of the celebrated ascetics of the desert" — and the assignment to Scetis and to the fifth century is an inference from the Apophthegmata rather than a transmitted fact. Some lists place him in the Nitrian desert generally, others simply "of Egypt."
Name. The Greek Ἀλώνιος is uncommon and is echoed in the commemorative distich by a deliberate pun on ἁλωνία, a threshing-floor: the saint has heaped up on the threshing-floor of his soul a rick of good works, and so gladdens the Husbandman of souls. Latin and Slavonic transmission gives Alonius, Alonios, Alonis; the form "Alonius of Egypt" is the usual English style.
No fixed feast in some calendars. He is a Greek synaxarion commemoration and appears on June 4 in the Great Synaxaristes and in the Greek and English lists that depend on it; he is not in every jurisdictional calendar of the day, and the Antiochian and Russian day-lists do not always name him.