Chariton the Confessor

Origins and confession under Aurelian

Chariton was born in the third century at Iconium in Lycaonia (the city of the Apostle Paul's preaching and of the protomartyr among women, Thecla), of a distinguished Christian family. The Life makes him a devoted client of Thecla, his fellow citizen, whose boldness before the persecutors he took as his own pattern. When persecution reached Iconium in the reign of Aurelian (270–275) — the sources connect it with the edict Aurelian was preparing at the end of his reign — Chariton, by then a man of standing in the city, was among the first seized. Before the governor he refused to sacrifice, denounced the idols, and confessed the one God and Christ the Saviour; he was racked, torn, and burned, and was left in prison expecting death. The emperor's own death intervened: the persecution lapsed, the prisoners were released, and Chariton came out of prison a living martyr — a confessor, bearing in his body the marks of torture but denied, as the hagiographer has him lament, the crown of martyrdom itself. The Life adds a second arrest and release under a later persecution before he left his homeland for good.

The robbers' cave

Free, and now regarding his life as no longer his own, Chariton gave away his property and set out on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On the road through the desert hills north-east of the city he fell into the hands of a band of robbers, who bound him and threw him into their cave in the gorge of Pharan (Wadi Fara, at the springs of Ein Fara) until they should return and deal with him. Chariton prayed, not for deliverance, but that God's will be done. While he lay bound, the Life relates, a viper drank from the robbers' wine jar and spat its venom into it; the band returned, drank, and died to a man. The captive found himself heir of the cave and of the robbers' accumulated gold, which he distributed to the poor and to the churches, keeping the cave itself: he consecrated the den of thieves into a house of prayer and settled there as a hermit, about the years of Constantine's peace of the Church.

The three lavras

Disciples gathered, as they always gather in these deserts, and against his love of solitude Chariton organised them. Around the cave-church of Pharan he laid out the first lavra of the Judean desert: a loose colony of solitary cells strung along the gorge, each monk praying and working alone through the week, all assembling on the Lord's Day (and later also Saturday) for the common Eucharist. His rule for Pharan — remembered as strict and simple — prescribed the round of psalmody, night vigil, manual labour (rope- and basket-work bought the monks' bread), a single daily meal of bread, salt and water toward evening, hospitality to strangers, and almsgiving from the work of the monks' own hands. It is the earliest monastic rule of Palestine, and the lavriote pattern it fixed — hermit cells around a common church, the balance of solitude and synaxis — is precisely the form that Euthymius the Great inherited in the next century and Sabas the Sanctified brought to its height in the Great Lavra: the whole Judean tradition, down to Mar Saba today, builds on Chariton's foundation. Tradition further ascribes to him the arrangement of the office of the monastic tonsure, the rite by which the Church clothes a monk.

Fleeing the crowds his fame drew, Chariton withdrew from Pharan — leaving the community under a chosen steward — first to the cliffs above Jericho, where beside the spring of Douka on the Mount of the Temptation he founded his second lavra, Douka (its Byzantine successor is the present monastery of the Temptation); and when pilgrims found him there too, he moved on south to the ravine below Tekoa, where about 345 he founded his third and most enduring community, Souka — called in later centuries simply the Old Lavra (Palaia Lavra), as Sabas's was the Great — in the wadi that still bears his name, Wadi Khureitun. To the end he kept the oversight of all three communities.

Repose

In extreme old age Chariton withdrew to a cave in the cliff above Souka — the "hanging cave" of the later pilgrims, reachable only by ladder (two centuries later the last dwelling of Cyriacus the Hermit) — and there, having gathered the monks of his three lavras, given them his last instruction, and appointed his successors, he reposed in peace on September 28, in or about the year 350. At his own wish he was carried back to his first home in the desert and buried at Pharan, in the church built in the robbers' cave of his deliverance.

Veneration and later cultus

Chariton's cultus is as old as Palestinian monasticism itself: the monks of the desert kept his memory as their common patriarch, and the Old Lavra of Souka was known by the sixth century simply as the lavra "of Chariton." His Life was written in the sixth century by a monk of that house, who says he drew on the community's living tradition; through the Constantinopolitan synaxaria his feast on September 28 passed to the whole Byzantine world. In the later Byzantine rite he stands among the great monastic fathers: the Typikon honours his day, and — a singular distinction — the canon of his feast is interwoven in the Menaion with the memory of the hymnographers, since the September 28 canon is an acrostic work of Joseph the Hymnographer. The monastery of Souka/Old Lavra survived into the Middle Ages; its ruins and the hermit caves of Wadi Khureitun remain, and the modern Russian convent at Ein Fara continues monastic life at Pharan on the site of his first foundation.