Cosmas the Hermit of Palestine
Our Venerable Father Cosmas the Eunuch and Hermit, of the Lavra of Pharan in Palestine
Venerable · d. 6th century, at Antioch
Commemorated 3 August — Memory of the hermit of the Pharan wilderness
Cosmas the eunuch was a hermit of the Lavra of Pharan, the oldest of the monastic settlements of the Judaean desert, in the sixth century. He is known almost entirely from the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschus, who had the account of him from Abba Basil, a presbyter — and what that book preserves is the portrait of a reader: a monk of severe fasting who stood through the whole night from Saturday to Sunday at prayer, and who had gone through the Scriptures and the Fathers so thoroughly, and loved Athanasius the Great so particularly, that he told his hearers that if they came upon a saying of Athanasius and had no paper, they should write it on their clothing. He was an uncompromising opponent of the heresies of his day. He died at Antioch and was buried by the patriarch in a monastery there, and a beggar paralysed for twelve years was healed at his tomb.
The Lavra of Pharan
Cosmas lived in the wilderness of Pharan, in the ravine of Wadi Qelt between Jerusalem and Jericho, where Chariton the Confessor had founded in the fourth century the first lavra of Palestine — a settlement of separate cells around a church, in which the monks lived alone through the week and came together on Saturday and Sunday. It was the mother house of the Palestinian desert, the school through which Euthymius the Great and others passed, and by the sixth century a place of long memory and settled discipline.
Cosmas was a eunuch — the sources say so without explanation and the calendars keep the epithet, which in the hagiography of the period is a note of biography, not of scandal, and may equally reflect a childhood mutilation, a court background, or the ascetic literalism some men of that age practised on themselves.
The reader in the desert
The Spiritual Meadow is a book of anecdotes, and the anecdotes it keeps of Cosmas are all of one kind. He fasted with severity. He stood at prayer the whole night through from Saturday into Sunday, the vigil that the lavriote week was built around. And he read: he was, in Moschus's account, exceptionally learned in Holy Scripture and in the Fathers, able to answer a question from the text and to place a doctrine in its authorities.
Among the Fathers he had one master. He revered Athanasius of Alexandria above the rest — the theologian of the Son's consubstantiality, whose whole authority stood against the Arians and, by extension, against every later diminution of Christ — and his counsel to those who came to him has survived because of its extravagance: if you come across a word of Saint Athanasius and have no paper, write it upon your clothing. It is the most quoted sentence of the Palestinian desert about books, and it says two things at once: that the Fathers are to be carried on the body like a garment, and that a monk owns nothing to write on.
That learning had a purpose. The sixth century in Palestine was the century of the Origenist crisis among the monks and of the Severan and monophysite pressure from Syria and Egypt, and Cosmas is remembered as a firm defender of the Orthodox faith against them, the man in the lavra who could show from the Fathers where a proposition led.
Death at Antioch, and the tomb
Cosmas went up to Antioch — the Meadow does not say why — and died there. The patriarch of Antioch had him buried in one of the monasteries of the city. The Meadow attaches to that burial the strangest of the stories told of him: that Cosmas was laid in a grave beside a bishop who had belonged to the Severan party, and appeared afterwards to a brother of the monastery, asking urgently that his body be moved, because he could not bear to lie next to a heretic — a tale which the compiler tells as an admonition about the seriousness of communion and division, and which the reader may take at whatever weight he thinks a sixth-century monastic anecdote will carry.
The miracle at the tomb is told more soberly: a beggar who had been paralysed for twelve years came to the grave, called on the saint, and was healed.
Feast and commemoration
August 3 (church date; New Calendar civil August 3, Old Calendar civil August 16). Cosmas is a synaxarion commemoration on this day: he has no proper office, and the service is that of the fathers of the Dalmatian monastery. He is kept in the Slavic and American calendars, and in the Greek tradition through the desert-father collections rather than the printed Menaion. The day falls within the Dormition fast (August 1–14).
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8
With the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren desert to bring forth, and with sighs from the depths thou didst render thy labours fruitful a hundredfold; thou becamest a beacon shining upon the world by miracles, O Cosmas our father: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Standing all the night of the Resurrection in the ravine of Pharan, thou didst gather the words of the Fathers as another man gathers bread, and didst bid us write them upon our garments when we had no paper; wherefore, O Cosmas, keep us in the faith thou didst guard, and heal them that call upon thee.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Cosmas has no developed iconographic type. Where he is painted he takes the general form of a desert father of the Palestinian lavras: an aged monastic in the dark mantle and the cowl of the schema, the beard long and pointed, the hands raised in prayer or holding an open scroll — which is the fitting attribute for him, since what the tradition remembers is his reading, and a scroll bearing his saying about the words of Athanasius would be the proper inscription for a painter to give him. Being a eunuch, he would in the Byzantine convention be shown beardless or lightly bearded and youthful in the face despite his years, as eunuch saints commonly are; the two conventions pull against each other and no settled solution is attested. No pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this repository.
Disputed questions
- A single source. Everything known of Cosmas comes from the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschus (early seventh century), itself reporting Abba Basil at second hand. There is no passion, no Life, no independent attestation, and no date. The synaxaria that keep him on August 3 depend on the same material. The repository records his century as the sixth on the strength of Moschus's chronology and marks the whole entry as resting on one witness.
- Which Antioch, and which patriarch. The Meadow names neither the year nor the patriarch, and the monastery of his burial is not identified. Attempts to fix the date from the identity of the Severan bishop in the adjoining grave are speculative.
- Not to be confused with the many other Cosmases of the calendar — the unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian of Rome, of Arabia and of Mesopotamia; the hymnographer Cosmas of Maiuma (October 14); or Cosmas of Yakhroma.