Auxentius of Bithynia

From the imperial guard to the monastic life

Auxentius was a Syrian by birth, born toward the end of the fourth century, who came young to Constantinople and entered imperial service. He was enrolled in the Scholarians — the palace guard — under the emperor Theodosius II (408–450), and won a name at court not for arms but for holiness: the tradition remembers him as a man of prayer and continence amid the luxury of the palace, learned in the Scriptures, and bound in friendship to the devout and to the monks and clergy of the city. This double life — courtier and ascetic — he could not long sustain, and in time he laid down his place in the guard, received the monastic tonsure, and (the tradition holds) was ordained. Drawn to solitude, he crossed the strait into Bithynia.

The mountain near Chalcedon

Some little distance inland from Chalcedon, on the Asian shore opposite the capital, Auxentius climbed a mountain — Mount Oxeia, as the sources call it — and made his cell in a narrow place among the rocks, walling himself into a hermitage open to the weather, where he gave himself to unbroken prayer, fasting, and vigil. He had sought to be hidden; he was not permitted to be. Shepherds and countryfolk discovered the recluse on the height, and word spread, and soon a stream of the sick, the troubled, and the merely curious was climbing the mountain to his cell. He would speak to them through the small window of his enclosure, teaching, correcting, and praying over them, and — the Life insists — sending many away healed of diseases and freed from unclean spirits. He taught the crowds to sing the psalms and the Church's hymns in alternating choirs, so that his mountain rang with worship. Against his desire, the hermit had become a father to multitudes.

The Council of Chalcedon

Auxentius lived through the great Christological crisis that the Fourth Ecumenical Council was called to settle, and the tradition places him at its very centre for a moment. In the ferment before and around the Council of Chalcedon (451), the fame — and, some said, the theological leanings — of the mountain hermit drew the notice of the authorities, and he was summoned down to give an account of his faith. Before the assembled fathers, or before the emperor's commissioners, Auxentius confessed the Orthodox doctrine of the one Christ in two natures, and any suspicion against him was dispelled; he is numbered among the witnesses of Chalcedon and returned to his mountain vindicated. The episode fixes his life firmly in the middle of the fifth century and binds his memory to the Council that the Church keeps as the fourth of the seven.

Father of monks and nuns

From his mountain Auxentius came to govern, at a distance, a widening spiritual family. A community of nuns grew up under his direction at the foot of the height — the sisters whom the tradition calls the Trichinarai ("those clothed in hair") — for whom he appointed a rule of prayer and to whom he gave counsel; and monks gathered to imitate his life, so that the wild mountain became a lavra. Foremost among his disciples was Vendemianus of Bithynia, a young man of Mysia who attached himself to the saint and, after Auxentius's death, shut himself in a rock-cell on the same mountain and continued the ascetic life there for forty-two years (kept in the calendar on February 1). Through such disciples Auxentius's manner of life was carried on, and the mountain itself — Mount Auxentius — remained a holy place and a monastic centre of Bithynia for centuries, one of the cradles of the monasticism that would later flower on the neighbouring Mount Olympus.

Repose

Full of years and of labours, Auxentius reposed on his mountain about the year 470. His grave on the height became a place of pilgrimage, and his memory a fixed star of the Bithynian tradition. The mountain that had been his hermitage kept his name, and the monasteries that grew upon and around it looked back to the Scholarian who had exchanged the emperor's guard for the service of the King of all.