Chairemon of Egypt
Our Venerable Father Chairemon, Ascetic of the Desert of Scetis
Venerable · d. c. 400, in the desert of Scetis
Commemorated 16 August — Repose in the desert, at his handiwork
Chairemon was an anchorite of Scetis, the great desert south-west of the Nile delta, at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries. What the record preserves of him is a handful of measurements and a death: his cave stood forty stadia from the church and twelve stadia from water, so that every liturgy and every drink was bought with a walk; he lived past a hundred years; and he died sitting at his handiwork, the plaited rope still in his fingers. Palladius set him among the fathers of the Lausiac History, the alphabetical Paterikon keeps his name, and Theodore the Studite numbered him in the roll of holy ascetics sung on the Saturday of Cheesefare, by which the whole Church still remembers him each year on the threshold of Lent.
The desert of Scetis
Scetis — the Wadi al-Natrun, some sixty miles south-west of Alexandria — was in the fourth century the most austere of the three great monastic settlements of Lower Egypt, beyond Nitria and the Cells, a salt depression reachable only by those who knew the way. Its anchorites lived singly in caves and cells at wide intervals, coming together at the church for the Saturday and Sunday synaxis and returning at once to solitude. The distance of a cell from the church and from water was a plain measure of a man's severity, and it is by that measure that Chairemon is remembered: forty stadia — some seven or eight kilometres — from the church, and twelve stadia from the water. He walked those distances into extreme old age.
The manner of his repose
The detail that fixed him in the memory of the desert is the manner of his death. He was found dead seated at his work, upright, with his handiwork in his hands. The anchorites of Egypt supported themselves by plaiting palm-leaf into ropes and baskets, and the work was itself a discipline — a hedge against idleness and a rhythm for the Jesus Prayer. To be taken at it, without illness, decline or interruption, was understood as a seal on a life of unbroken labour, and the Greek epigram of the synaxarion turns exactly on his name, which means "rejoicing":
At the ending of thy life, rejoice, blessed Chairemon; for thou hast seen the beginning of the wage of thy labours.
The sources say he was more than a hundred years old. They give him no famous sayings, no disciples, no monastery and no miracles.
The witness of the sources
Chairemon owes his survival in the calendar to three things. Palladius of Helenopolis named him among the ascetics of Egypt in the Lausiac History (c. 419–420), the earliest and best of the eyewitness collections. The alphabetical Paterikon — the Sayings of the Desert Fathers — keeps his name in its list. And Theodore the Studite, composing the canon for the Saturday of Cheesefare, the commemoration of all the holy ascetic men and women which stands at the gate of Great Lent, wrote Chairemon into the sixth ode among the fathers there invoked. That last is the reason his name is still heard annually by Orthodox congregations who have never encountered the August notice.
Feast and commemoration
August 16 (church date; New Calendar civil August 16, Old Calendar civil August 29), within the afterfeast of the Dormition. His notice stands in the Greek synaxarion of the day between the martyr Diomedes and the Thirty-three Martyrs of Palestine, and the day is dominated liturgically by the Translation of the Image Not-Made-by-Hands; no proper service of Chairemon is appointed, and he is commemorated at the synaxarion reading. He is also commemorated with all the venerable fathers on the Saturday of Cheesefare, where Theodore the Studite names him in the canon.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
In thee, O father, was the divine image kept without stain: for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passes away, and to care for the soul, which is immortal. Wherefore thy spirit, O venerable Chairemon, rejoices with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
There is no distinctive iconography of Chairemon, and no image of him has been located. Where he is painted at all he takes the type of the Egyptian anchorite: an extremely old man, gaunt, white-bearded to the waist, in the plain brown or grey tunic and koukoulion of the desert, holding a scroll or with the hands raised in prayer. The one attribute proper to him, were an iconographer to reach for it, would be the plaited rope-work in his hands, the handiwork at which he died — the same attribute given to Paul of Thebes and to the rope-plaiting fathers of Scetis generally. He would most naturally appear not alone but in the ranks of the venerable fathers on an icon of the Saturday of Cheesefare, where his name is sung.
Disputed questions
- The century. The Slavonic and Russian calendars assign him to the fourth century; the OCA hedges, "either at the end of the fourth century or the beginning years of the fifth." Palladius, writing about 419–420 of a man already dead, permits both. This entry indexes him under the fourth century and records the alternative.
- Not to be confused with the several other bearers of the name in the Egyptian record — notably Chaeremon, bishop of Nilopolis, an aged confessor who fled with his wife into the Arabian mountains in the Decian persecution and was never seen again, whose story Dionysius of Alexandria tells in a letter preserved by Eusebius, and the Chaeremon whose conferences are reported by John Cassian among the fathers of Scetis. None of these is certainly identical with the ascetic of this day, and the synaxarion keeps them apart.