Apollo of the Thebaid

Our Venerable Father Apollo (Apollonius) of the Thebaid, Abbot of Hermopolis

Venerable · b. c. 305 — d. c. 395

Commemorated 31 May — Repose of the abbot of Hermopolis in the Thebaid

Apollo — Apollonius in the fuller form of the name — was one of the great abbots of fourth-century Egypt, the father of a community of some five hundred monks near Hermopolis in the Thebaid. Withdrawing to the desert at fifteen and living forty years in solitude before being called by a divine word to gather disciples and "destroy the wisdom of the wise" among the pagans of the region, he became the most celebrated ascetic of Upper Egypt in the generation after Antony. The History of the Monks in Egypt, whose authors visited his monastery, gives him one of its longest chapters, and records of him the note that made him famous: that his face was always radiant with joy, and that he would not have sorrow in the house of God. He reposed about 395, very old.

Origins and the forty years in the desert

Apollo was born about the beginning of the fourth century, in the Thebaid, the southern reach of Egypt, to parents whom the tradition names Aisi and Amani and describes as devout. At fifteen he left them for the desert, taking with him a kinsman named Abib, and for forty years — the sources give the round figure — he lived there in unbroken solitude, in the extreme austerity of the first Egyptian generation: no cooked food, a garment of one piece, unceasing prayer, and no company but the man who had come out with him.

The tradition relates that his elder brother, already dead, appeared to him in a dream at the outset and turned him decisively to the monastic life — the kind of vocation-story the Egyptian lives commonly report, and the only account given of why so young a man went out. Of the forty years themselves nothing is transmitted but their length, which is as it should be: the point of the eremitical decades in these lives is precisely that nothing happened in them that could be told.

The call to found a community

At the end of the forty years, in the reign of Julian the Apostate (361–363), a voice came to him — the History reports it as a divine word — bidding him leave his solitude, gather disciples, and confront the paganism of the surrounding country, "for by thee I will destroy the wisdom of the wise of Egypt." He came down from the inner desert to the neighbourhood of Hermopolis, the city of the Nile valley that the Copts identified with the resting-place of the Holy Family in the flight into Egypt, and there began to receive those who came to him.

The community that grew around him numbered, when the visitors from Jerusalem saw it at the end of the century, about five hundred monks, with several neighbouring settlements under his direction. The History describes its rule and was clearly impressed by it: the brethren communicated at the ninth hour each day, remained afterwards to hear the Scriptures expounded by the abbot, and only after sunset ate a little food, after which each went out alone into the desert to spend part of the night in prayer and to return before dawn. It was a regime combining the daily eucharistic assembly of a coenobium with the solitary night of the anchorite, and it is one of the fullest pictures we have of a large Egyptian monastery's day.

"Christians ought not to be sad"

The one saying that fixed Apollo in the memory of the Church is not an austerity but a temper. He held that sadness had no place among Christians, who are the heirs of the resurrection and of the kingdom, and that gloom belongs to the pagans and to those who despair; his own face, the visitors report, was always shining with gladness, and his community was marked out among the Egyptian monasteries by its cheerfulness. The History puts the principle in his mouth in the plainest form — that it is not fitting for those who are being saved to wear the face of the perishing — and makes it the note of his teaching to the brethren. Cassian and the Apophthegmata carry the theme forward: it is one of the roots of the Orthodox ascetic doctrine that akēdia and self-pitying sorrow are temptations to be fought, not virtues to be cultivated.

Miracles and the confrontation with paganism

The History of the Monks in Egypt attaches to Apollo an unusually thick cluster of miracles, all of them public and all bearing on the mission for which he had been called out of the desert.

The arrested procession. Meeting a pagan festal procession carrying an idol through the fields to secure the harvest, he prayed, and the whole company was fixed motionless in the sun — unable to advance or to set down what they carried — until, at evening, they acknowledged the God of the Christians and were released; and, the account says, they burned the idol and were baptised.
The averted battle. Two villages of the district came out armed against each other over a boundary; Apollo went between the lines and reconciled them, preventing the bloodshed, and the reconciliation held.
Food in famine. During a famine in the Thebaid he distributed to the starving from his monastery's few baskets of bread, which were not exhausted while the need lasted — the multiplication of loaves being the standard Egyptian miracle of a father in charge of a large household.
The robber converted. A brigand of the region, coming to plunder or to test him, was so overcome that he abandoned his life and became a monk.
The prison and the angel. Under Julian, when a Christian soldier had been condemned, Apollo went to comfort him in his confinement and was himself shut up for it; an angel opened the prison, and the account adds the detail the Egyptians relished — that the old man refused to leave until the magistrate came himself and released him publicly, so that the deliverance should not be taken for an escape.

Repose

Apollo governed his community into extreme old age and reposed about 395, shortly before or about the time the party whose report became the History of the Monks in Egypt travelled through the Thebaid. His memory was carried both by the Greek tradition, which keeps him in the synaxaria, and by the Coptic Church, which commemorates him on October 22 (25 Paope). No translation of his relics is recorded.

Feast and commemoration

May 31 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 13), the last day of the church month of May. The commemoration is kept in the Slavonic and Russian calendars, and through them in the Orthodox Church in America's synaxarion; the Greek books of the day give the martyrs Hermias, Eusebius and Charalampus and the Apostle Hermas, and do not carry Apollo. The Coptic Church keeps him on October 22. No proper service is appointed, and the office is sung from the common of a venerable father.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)

By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and by thy sighing from the depths thou didst bear fruit a hundredfold in labours; thou becamest a beacon, shining upon the world by thy miracles, O Apollo our father: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Apollo belongs to the great Egyptian type: an aged monk, gaunt from long fasting, with a long white beard, in the analavos and the deep monastic mantle, holding a scroll or blessing — the same figure the painters give to Antony, Macarius and Pachomius, from whom he is distinguished only by inscription. Where the character of the man is allowed to affect the image, it is in the face: the tradition of the abbot who would not permit sadness has occasionally produced a noticeably serene rather than severe countenance, though this is a matter of a painter's reading and not of a fixed convention. The episodes available to a narrative cycle are the frozen idol-procession, the reconciliation of the two villages, and the angel at the prison door.

No pre-1900 icon of him has been identified for this collection. Searches of the Wikimedia Commons holdings under his Greek, English and Russian names return nothing: the name collides in every index with the pagan god Apollo, and the Egyptian fathers other than the greatest were rarely painted alone. He is present by right, though unlabelled to the eye, in the crowded assemblies of "All the Venerable Fathers of Egypt."

Disputed questions

Apollo or Apollonius; and which Apollo. The name appears as Ἀπολλὼ, Ἀπολλώς and Ἀπολλώνιος, and fourth-century Egypt produced several monks of the name, whom the sources and the later calendars confuse. This entry is the abbot of Hermopolis in the Thebaid of Historia Monachorum ch. 8 (numbered 9 in some editions and in the Latin of Rufinus). He is to be distinguished from the Apollo commemorated with Alexander and Isaacius, from the martyr Apollonius of Egypt, and from Apollos of the Seventy, bishop of Caesarea, the Apollos of the Acts and of First Corinthians — an entirely different person of the apostolic age.
The date of the feast. May 31 is the day of the Slavonic and Russian calendars, followed here; the Coptic date is October 22, and Western martyrologies have placed the Egyptian Apollo on other days. The Greek synaxaristes for May 31 does not carry him, which is why the notice reaches modern English readers chiefly through the Russian tradition.
The forty years and the age at withdrawal. "Fifteen" and "forty years" are the transmitted figures and are round; they place the call to found the community in Julian's reign, with which the sources' own chronology agrees, but they should not be used to compute a birth year more precisely than "about the beginning of the fourth century."
Julian's persecution. The imprisonment episode is set under Julian, whose measures against Christians were largely administrative rather than sanguinary; the condemnation of a Christian soldier fits that reign's known pattern of pressure on the army, and no wider persecution should be inferred from the notice.