Benjamin of Nitria
Our Venerable Father Benjamin the Wonderworker, of Nitria in Egypt
Venerable · Wonderworker · d. c. 392, in the Nitrian desert of Egypt
Commemorated 29 December — Repose; ascetic and healer of the Nitrian desert
Benjamin (†c. 392) was an ascetic of the Nitrian desert in Egypt, one of the desert fathers whose memory is preserved chiefly through the Lausiac History of Palladius. After many years of monastic labour he received from God the gift of healing: by the laying-on of hands or by a little blessed oil he cured those who came to him of every sickness. In his last months he was himself afflicted with a grievous dropsy that swelled his body to an enormous size, yet he continued to heal others and bore his own suffering with such serenity that his brethren marvelled — asking only that they pray his inner man take no hurt. He reposed about the year 392 and is commemorated on December 29, within the afterfeast of the Nativity, together with the ascetic Athenodorus.
Benjamin is remembered among the fathers of Nitria, the great monastic settlement south of Alexandria that, with the neighbouring Kellia and Scetis, was in the fourth century one of the chief nurseries of Egyptian asceticism. Our knowledge of him comes above all from Palladius of Helenopolis, who in his Lausiac History recorded the desert fathers he had known or heard of at first hand. Benjamin, Palladius relates, had lived the ascetic life for some eighty years and had been granted by God a gift of healing so abundant that whoever came to him sick — or received from him blessed oil, or the touch of his hand — went away cured, whatever the disease.
The point of his memory, and the reason the tradition treasured it, lies in the manner of his end. In his last eight months Benjamin was struck with a severe dropsy (hydrops), the fluid so distending his body that he grew, in the image Palladius gives, monstrously swollen — his limbs so enlarged that a man's two hands could not encircle one of his fingers, and he could no longer pass through an ordinary doorway. Through all this the old man continued to heal others even as his own flesh corrupted, and he received his affliction not with complaint but with thanksgiving, saying to those who grieved for him — in the words the tradition remembers — that they should pray rather that his inner man suffer no harm, for as to the body, "it did me no good when it was sound, and does me no hurt now that it decays." The saint whose touch made others whole, left visibly broken in his own body yet untroubled in soul, became a living parable of the desert's whole teaching: that the treasure is within, and the outer man may perish while the inner is renewed. He reposed about the year 392.
Feast and commemoration
Benjamin is kept on December 29 (church date; New Calendar civil December 29, Old Calendar civil January 11), within the afterfeast of the Nativity, led by the commemoration of the Holy Innocents. The Greek Menaion joins to him on this day the ascetic Athenodorus — a desert father reckoned a disciple of Pachomius the Great — the two venerable Egyptians being commemorated together (Athenodorus is not separately authored here; see the day's calendar file). Benjamin's memory is a universal one of the fixed synaxarion.
Iconography
Benjamin is depicted as an aged desert ascetic — emaciated of face yet, by the tradition of his affliction, sometimes shown swollen of body — in the monastic habit, in the manner of the Egyptian fathers. No storable identity-verified image has been secured for this entry.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with Benjamin the Deacon of Persia (†c. 424, kept October 13), the martyr of the Persian persecution under Yazdegerd I and Bahram V — a wholly different saint of a different land, office, and manner of death. This Benjamin is a venerable ascetic of the Egyptian desert, a healer who died in peace.