Anubius the Confessor
Our Venerable Father Anubius the Confessor, Anchorite of Egypt
Venerable · Confessor · d. 4th century
Commemorated 5 June — Repose in the Egyptian desert
Anubius — Anoub, in the Egyptian form of his name — was a confessor of the fourth-century persecutions who, having endured tortures for Christ and survived, went out into the Egyptian desert and spent the rest of his long life as an anchorite, gathering a small skete of six brethren, one of them his own brother. He is remembered in the desert literature for a single astonishing claim, made without boasting when he was asked for a word: that from the day he confessed the name of Christ before the persecutors, no lie had ever come out of his mouth, and no earthly thing had ever again drawn his desire. He is commemorated on June 5.
Confessor under the persecutions
Anubius belonged to the generation of Egyptian Christians who were tried in the persecutions of the early fourth century — the terror under Diocletian and its continuation in Egypt under Maximinus Daza, which fell on the Nile valley harder than on any other province of the empire. He was arrested, required to sacrifice, and tortured; he confessed Christ, and — as happened to many when a persecution lapsed or a governor's term ended — he was not put to death, and so came away with the title the Church honours next after the martyr's: confessor, ὁμολογητής, one who bore the witness and lived.
Anchorite in the desert
Having survived, Anubius did not return to ordinary life. He withdrew into the desert, and there — the notice says — founded a small skete in which he lived with six monks, among them his brother. This is the classic Egyptian half-solitary arrangement, neither the great coenobium of Pachomius nor pure anchoretism: a handful of cells around an elder, the brethren keeping their own silence through the week and meeting for the synaxis. He was reckoned among the great old men of Egypt and lived to a great age, dying at last in peace.
"No lie has come out of my mouth"
The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto — the eyewitness account of a party of pilgrims who toured the Egyptian ascetics about the year 394 — preserves a scene which the tradition has always attached to this saint. Three monks travelling in the inner desert came upon a very old anchorite, Anuph, and pressed him to tell them, for their profit, what God had wrought in him. He answered, when he could not honourably refuse: that from the time he had confessed the name of the Saviour before the judges, and had been tortured, no falsehood had passed his lips; that he had never desired an earthly thing after a heavenly one; that God's grace had never once failed him when he asked; that he had been fed in the desert by the hand of angels; that nothing he had sought of God had been withheld; and that he had been shown the armies of heaven, the choirs of the righteous, the ranks of the martyrs and the companies of the monks. Three days after this conversation, the account says, he reposed, and the visitors saw the angels receiving him.
Whether or not the desert writer's Anuph is the Anubius of the calendar — the identification is old and probable, and the confession under torture is the hinge of both accounts — the story states exactly what the Church honours in him: the absolute truthfulness of a man who had once been made to choose between his life and a single word, and who never afterwards spent a word carelessly.
Feast and commemoration
June 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 18). Anubius is one of the ascetic commemorations of a day whose principal saint is Dorotheus of Tyre, and he stands with Abba Dorotheus of Gaza and Theodore of the Jordan in what amounts to a small synaxis of desert fathers on June 5. No proper service is appointed; he is named in the synaxarion notice at the sixth ode, and the common of a venerable father is used where his memory is kept liturgically. The Coptic tradition keeps its own memory of Abba Anoub on other days; the June 5 commemoration is the Byzantine one.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father and confessor)
In thee, O Father, the image was preserved unfailing; for having confessed Christ before the tribunals, thou didst take up the cross and follow Him into the desert, and by deed thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Anubius, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Anubius is written as an Egyptian anchorite: very old, emaciated, with a long white beard reaching to the breast, in the plain tunic and analavos of the desert fathers, sometimes with the great schema over the shoulders, holding an unrolled scroll. Two attributes are proper to him where a painter troubles to distinguish him. As a confessor he may be shown with the marks of his tortures, or holding a small cross in token of the confession; and from the Historia Monachorum comes the scene of the angel bringing him bread in the desert, which is his only narrative subject. Where he is identified with Abba Anoub of the Sayings, painted cycles of the desert fathers occasionally show the broken idol at Terenuthis at his feet.
No pre-1900 icon of Anubius has been located for this collection. As a June commemoration he is outside the range of the Menologion of Basil II, which covers only September to February.
Disputed questions
- Identity with Abba Anoub of the Apophthegmata. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers contain a small group of sayings under Abba Anoub, the brother of Abba Poemen, who lived with his brethren in a ruined pagan temple at Terenuthis and there taught them their most famous lesson: every morning he threw stones at the face of a stone idol, and every evening he asked its forgiveness, and when Poemen asked why, he said that he had done it for seven days so that his brothers might learn to be moved neither by insult nor by praise, as the statue was moved by neither. That Anoub too was one of a small brotherhood including his own brother, which agrees with the calendar notice; the identification is likely but not certain, and the two bodies of material are recorded here side by side rather than fused.
- Form of the name. Anubius (Greek Ἀνούβιος) is the calendar form; Anoub, Anub and Anuph are the Coptic/Egyptian forms found in the desert literature. All derive from the name of the Egyptian god Anubis, and were ordinary personal names in Christian Egypt.
- Date. The fourth century, on the persecution and on the Historia Monachorum; no year of repose is transmitted.