Daniel of Sketis
Our Venerable Father Daniel, Priest and Elder of Sketis
Venerable · Priest · b. late 5th century, in Egypt — d. 6th century, at Sketis in Egypt
Commemorated 7 June — Repose of the elder and hegumen of Sketis
Daniel of Sketis was the great Egyptian elder of the sixth century, priest and hegumen of Sketis in the Nitrian desert, remembered less for sayings of his own than for a group of narratives — the Life and Tales of Abba Daniel of Sketis — which made him the Church's chief witness to the hidden saint: the holy man or woman whose sanctity is covered by folly, drunkenness, disguise, poverty or the ordinary business of a trade, and whom Daniel is repeatedly given to recognise. He himself is remembered as a penitent: taken captive twice in a barbarian raid on the desert, he killed one of his captors in escaping, and spent the rest of his life seeking a penance that no patriarch would impose, until he took one upon himself and served a leper in his inner cell in secret until he died. The cycle attached to his name gathers Mark the Fool of the Alexandrian hippodrome, Eulogius the Hospitable the stonecutter, Anastasia the Patrician hidden as a eunuch, Thomais of Alexandria the martyr for chastity, the nun who feigned drunkenness, and Andronicus and Athanasia; in one of them the elder himself is the man corrected. His memory is kept on June 7.
Sketis in the sixth century
Sketis — the Greek Σκῆτις, the Coptic Shiêt, the modern Wadi al-Natrun west of the Nile delta — was in Daniel's day already the most famous monastic country in the world: the desert of Macarius the Great, of Arsenius, of John the Dwarf and of Moses the Ethiopian, whose sayings had been gathered into the Apophthegmata Patrum and carried across the Christian east. It was also, by the sixth century, a place that had been repeatedly destroyed. The nomads whom the Greek sources call Mazices and the Coptic sources the Berbers of the western desert sacked the settlement in 407 and again about 434, and came back for a third and worse devastation in the later sixth century; each time the monks scattered and each time some of them returned and rebuilt. Daniel's whole life is set inside that rhythm of catastrophe and return, and it explains a good deal about him — his practicality, his freedom of movement between the desert and Alexandria, and the peculiar tenderness of his judgements about human weakness.
He is said to have entered Sketis as a boy, so that the desert was the only life he knew. In the received texts he is styled presbyter and, at the end, hegumen of Sketis — the head of the whole settlement rather than of a single house — and the tales show him doing what a priest of the desert did: keeping a disciple, travelling with him, carrying the Holy Mysteries to recluses who could not come out, and being consulted by the archbishop of Alexandria.
The captivity and the killing
The one episode transmitted about Daniel's own doings rather than about the saints he discovered is the story of his captivity, and it is the reason the tradition thinks of him as a penitent.
In a raid on the desert he was carried off by barbarians and held in slavery for about two years, until a Christian ransomed him. He was taken a second time; and after some six months, seeing a chance to escape, he struck his guard with a stone and killed him, and got away.
The killing broke him. It was not murder in any court's reckoning — he was a slave making for freedom — but Daniel judged himself by the desert's rule and not by the law, and the blood on his hands became the fact of his life. He confessed it and asked for a penance, and the tale takes him on a long, almost comic circuit of the whole Church in search of one: to Timothy, archbishop of Alexandria, to the bishop of Rome, and to the patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch and Jerusalem. Not one of them would give him a canonical penance; each told him that he had done nothing for which the Church could bind him. Unsatisfied, he went to the civil magistrate and gave himself up as a homicide, and was put in prison — and the governor, when he had heard the case, refused to execute him and let him go.
Only then did Daniel find his own answer. He determined that since no one would appoint him a penance he would keep one himself for as long as he lived: he took a leper into the inner part of his cell and served him — washing, feeding, carrying him — in secret, so that the brethren who came and went knew nothing of it. That, the account says, gave him peace at last.
The story is the key to everything else in his dossier. The elder who is famous for finding holiness where nobody expected it had first learned, in his own case, that guilt and grace are not distributed as the onlooker supposes; and the man who served a leper behind a curtain for a lifetime is exactly the man to be trusted with other people's hidden lives.
The tales: the discovery of the hidden saints
What survives under Daniel's name is not a biography but a dossier of narratives, transmitted in Greek and translated early into Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Latin and Old Slavonic — a spread that shows how widely they were read. Their number and order vary from manuscript to manuscript; the best-attested are these.
Mark the Fool at Alexandria. Going into the city on the affairs of the desert, Daniel found in the great square, or by the hippodrome, a naked madman whom the whole town used for sport; and knew him for a monk. The man was Mark, who had spent some fifteen years playing the fool in Alexandria for the sake of Christ. Daniel brought him out to Sketis and presented him to the archbishop, and Mark died among the fathers with his secret told.
The nun who feigned drunkenness. Visiting a women's monastery near Hermopolis, Daniel asked to see all the sisters, and was shown all but one — a wretch who lay about the kitchen, was thought to be drunk and epileptic, and was despised and beaten by the whole community. Daniel knelt and kissed her head and told the sisters that she was their mother and his own, and that God accepted her prayers where He did not accept theirs. Her cover broken, she left the house by night and was never found.
Eulogius the stonecutter. The longest and hardest of the tales, and the only one told against Daniel himself: it is set out under Eulogius the Hospitable, whose feast is April 27. Daniel, lodging year after year with a stonecutter of the Thebaid who lived on a keration a day and spent it all on strangers, reasoned that God should give the man money so that he might do more good, fasted three weeks for it, and at last made himself surety for Eulogius's soul to obtain the answer. Eulogius struck a hollow place in the rock, found a cave of buried treasure, carried it to Constantinople, bought rank and an estate under the emperor Justin — and stopped receiving strangers altogether. Daniel, called to account for the soul he had pledged, went to the great man's door, was not recognised, and was beaten away by the servants; then he prayed that the money might be taken back. It was: Eulogius fell with the conspirators of the Nika year, the estate was confiscated, and he came home to the chisel, the fasting until evening and the lantern in the market place. The tale's target is not Eulogius but Daniel — the intercessor who asked God for a good man to be given the one thing that would ruin him, and who staked his own salvation on his estimate of another man's strength. The desert kept the story precisely because a great elder was wrong in it.
Anastasia the Patrician. A lady of the court of Justinian who fled Constantinople and the jealousy of the empress Theodora, and whom Daniel enclosed in a cave near Sketis where she lived twenty-eight years as "Anastasius the eunuch," visited only by Daniel and his disciple with bread and water; her sex was discovered by the disciple only when Daniel sent him to prepare the body for burial. Her feast is March 10 — see Anastasia the Patrician.
Thomais of Alexandria. The young married woman of Alexandria killed by her father-in-law for refusing him. Her body was brought to the monastic settlement of Octodecaton, and it was Daniel who ordered that she be buried among the fathers in the monks' own cemetery, calling her "our sister" who had died for the commandment of God — and who afterwards sent a brother tormented by lust to pray at her grave, and so began her patronage against the warfare of the flesh. Her feast is April 14 — see Thomais of Alexandria.
Andronicus and Athanasia. The Antiochene goldsmith and his wife who, having lost both their children in a day, separated to the monastic life, and lived twelve years side by side in the desert without the husband knowing that the "brother Athanasius" beside him was his wife; their story too is transmitted in the Daniel cycle, and their feast is October 9 — see Andronicus and Athanasia of Antioch.
Other pieces travel with these in one manuscript or another: the tale of the thief who became a monk, the blind beggar who had once been rich and gave thanks, and short sayings in which Daniel judges a brother's fall gently, or refuses to judge at all.
The shape of the teaching
Taken together the dossier makes a single argument, and it is not the argument of the ordinary desert saying. The Apophthegmata teach the beginner how to keep a cell; Daniel's tales teach the advanced how little he knows about anyone else. In every one of them the holiness is in the wrong place: in a naked lunatic, in a drunk woman beaten by nuns, in a labourer's evening lantern, in a eunuch who is a patrician lady, in a murdered wife whom the monks did not want in their graveyard, in a "brother" who is somebody's wife. And in one of them the wrongness is in the elder: Daniel prays a disastrous prayer and has to live with the result. That is the reason his name outlived his sayings. The Egyptian tradition called him "a new Abraham, and the host of Christ" — Abraham because he entertained strangers and found God in them, and because he had learned to expect it.
Repose and veneration
Daniel died at Sketis, in old age, in the course of the sixth century; no year is transmitted. He is remembered in the Greek manuscript tradition, in the Coptic Church of Egypt whose own literature preserves the tales in Sahidic, and in the Slavonic books and the calendars derived from them, which keep his memory on June 7. He has no proper office and no relics whose history is recorded; his monument is the dossier and the six or seven saints of the calendar whose lives it alone transmits.
Feast and commemoration
June 7 (church date; New Calendar civil June 7; Old Calendar civil June 20). The memory is a synaxarion commemoration without a proper sung office: where Daniel is kept, the common of a venerable father serves. On the same day the calendars set the martyr Theodotus of Ancyra, the Roman popes Marcellinus and Marcellus with their companions, and the women martyrs of Palestine and Egypt — a crowded day in which Daniel's notice is easily passed over.
Because so much of the fixed calendar's Egyptian material depends on his dossier, his own day functions in practice as the commemoration of the whole cycle: a reader who wants the saints Daniel found must go to April 14, April 27, October 9, March 10 and the days of the holy fools.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By the flowing of thy tears thou didst make the waterless desert bear fruit, and by thy groanings out of the depths thou didst make thy labours yield a hundredfold; and thou wast shown to be a lamp for the whole world, shining with wonders, O Daniel our father: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou didst seek a penance and wast given none, and so didst appoint thyself the leper and the hidden cell; wherefore God entrusted to thee His hidden ones, and thou didst uncover the fool, the mocked woman and the lantern of the poor man, O father Daniel, new Abraham and host of Christ.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Daniel has no fixed iconographic type of his own and is very seldom painted alone. Where he appears he is an aged Egyptian abba — long white beard, the plain dark monastic tunic, analavos and koukoulion of the desert fathers, holding a scroll or in the gesture of teaching — indistinguishable, without an inscription, from the crowd of desert elders in the ranks of venerable fathers along the walls of a refectory or in the margins of a menologion. Because his fame is narrative, the images that do exist are almost all scenes from the tales, and in them he is the recognising bystander rather than the subject: he stands beside the naked Mark the Fool in the Alexandrian square; he receives the Mysteries into the cave of "Anastasius the eunuch," or lays out her body with his disciple's help; he sits at the table of the stonecutter with the lantern on it. Those cycles belong to the saints he discovered, and it is under their names, not his, that a painter would find him.
The two attributes proper to Daniel himself, if a painter chose to give him any, are the ones the dossier insists on: the stone of the killing, which he could not put down, and the leper in the inner cell whom he served for a lifetime and told no one about.
No pre-1900 image of Daniel of Sketis, alone or securely identified by inscription within a group, has been located for this collection; a Wikimedia Commons media search under both the English and the Greek forms of his name returns nothing at all. The Menologion of Basil II, the ordinary first resort for a minor fixed-calendar saint, cannot help here: it covers only September to February.
Disputed questions
- Which Abba Daniel? The alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum carry a small group of sayings under the name of Abba Daniel, most of them about Arsenius the Great, whose disciple and near-biographer that Daniel was; he belongs to the late fourth and early fifth century and is sometimes called Daniel of Pharan. Modern scholarship (notably the critical work of Britt Dahlman) distinguishes him from the sixth-century Daniel of Sketis to whom the narrative dossier is attached. The tradition — and several standard reference works, including the present English Wikipedia article — merge the two, giving Daniel of Sketis the disciple's dates and Arsenius's deathbed. This entry keeps them apart, notes that the sayings under "Daniel" in the alphabetical collection most probably belong to the earlier man, and records the identification as a real and unresolved question rather than a settled error.
- Was there a Daniel at all? Because the dossier is a collection built around a recurring narrator-figure, it has been asked whether "Abba Daniel" is a literary frame rather than a person. The better view is that a genuine sixth-century priest and hegumen of Sketis of that name existed and that stories accumulated to him as they accumulated to Macarius and to Paphnutius; but the particulars of every tale, including his own captivity, are transmitted as edifying narrative and not as documentary record, and are reported here on that footing.
- Chronology. The tales strain against one another. The Mark the Fool story involves an archbishop Timothy of Alexandria — most naturally Timothy III/IV (517–535); the Eulogius story runs from the reign of Justin (518–527) into that of Justinian and the fall of the conspirators of the Nika year (532); the Anastasia story has her reposing about 567–576 after twenty-eight years enclosed. A single elder can just contain all of that if he was born in the late fifth century and lived very long, which is what the tradition implies; but the fit is tight enough that some of the material has probably been drawn to his name from elsewhere.
- Whose fault was the affair of Eulogius? The Life tells the episode against Daniel, and this collection states it so in both entries: the fault is the elder's presumption in asking, and in pledging his own soul on his reading of another man's strength, not Eulogius's in accepting what God appeared to give. Eulogius's own synaxarion notice is silent about the treasure altogether and honours him for the hospitality alone.
- Not to be confused with Daniel the Stylite (December 11, the Syrian pillar-ascetic at Constantinople), Daniel the Prophet (December 17), or Daniel of Moscow (March 4, the prince); nor with the several later Egyptian and Palestinian monks of the name who appear in the Apophthegmata without epithet.
- The Greek day-lists. June 7 for Daniel is well attested in the Slavonic and OCA-derived calendars. It is worth recording that the current Greek online synaxaria — for example saint.gr, consulted live for this day — do not carry him on June 7, and that the Russian Old-Calendar day-pages for civil June 20 likewise omit him while carrying the day's other saints. The commemoration is genuine but is not uniformly kept, and the divergence is recorded rather than resolved.