Dorotheus of Gaza

Origins and education

Dorotheus was born about the year 505, probably at Antioch — the sources are not explicit, and Gaza itself and Aescalon have also been proposed — into a family able to give him a full rhetorical and philosophical education. His own writings betray the training on every page: he quotes the classical commonplaces, argues by homely analogy and syllogism, and shows a working knowledge of medicine, which he uses both literally, in the infirmary, and as the governing metaphor of the spiritual life. He tells us himself, with characteristic humour at his own expense, how in his student days he came to love books so much that he forgot to eat and slept with the volumes at his side, and how that same appetite, converted, later carried him through the reading of the Scriptures and the Fathers.

The coenobium of Abba Seridos at Thavatha

Some time in the 520s or 530s Dorotheus renounced the world and entered the coenobium of Abba Seridos at Thavatha, a village a few miles south of Gaza. Two famous recluses lived enclosed beside that monastery — the Great Old Man Barsanuphius, who spoke to no one and answered by written notes, and John the Prophet, his fellow-elder. Dorotheus attached himself to them with a devotion he never afterwards concealed: a substantial part of the surviving Correspondence of Barsanuphius and John consists of the elders' answers to Dorotheus's own questions, and we can follow through them the anxieties of his early monastic years — his scruples, his poor health, his fear of his own irritability, his longing to be given a rule strict enough to satisfy him and the elders' refusal to give it.

In the monastery he was appointed successively guest-master — receiving travellers and pilgrims at the gate, a post which he says taught him more about his own soul than any solitude could have done — and infirmarian, in charge of the sick. He was himself often ill, subject to fevers and to a weakness of the head that made continuous vigil impossible, and the elders' letters are full of gentle, practical accommodation: he is to eat, to sleep, to take wine when he needs it, and not to measure himself against the athletes.

Dositheus, and the teaching of obedience

To Dorotheus at the infirmary was given a raw, pampered, and wholly untaught youth, Dositheus, converted by a vision at the holy places. Dorotheus trained him not by austerities — he imposed almost none — but by an absolute and instantaneous cutting off of his own will in the smallest matters: what he ate, what he kept, what he wanted. In some five years Dositheus died of consumption, and Barsanuphius declared his measure equal to that of the great old ascetics. Dorotheus wrote the young man's Life, which the manuscripts prefix to the Instructions, and it remains the classic Orthodox case-study of obedience as a short road.

His own monastery, and the Instructions

After the death of John the Prophet and the withdrawal of Barsanuphius into total silence — and, it seems, after the death of Abba Seridos and some disturbance in the community — Dorotheus left Thavatha and founded or took charge of a monastery of his own, in the region between Gaza and Maiouma. There he was abba and teacher, and there he delivered the διδασκαλίαι — the Instructions or Discourses, some seventeen in number, with a group of letters and a collection of short sayings — which are the reason his name is known wherever Orthodox ascetic literature is read.

The teaching is memorable chiefly for its refusal of extremes. Its foundation is humility, of which Dorotheus distinguishes two kinds and about which he says that it needs no other virtue to make it complete, while every other virtue without it is nothing. Its method is the patient cutting off of self-will in ordinary things, on the ground that a man who cannot yield about a vegetable will not yield about his salvation. Its most quoted image is the wheel: God is the centre, the lines drawn from the circumference to the centre are the lives of men, and the nearer men draw to God the nearer they come to one another, while the nearer they draw to one another the nearer they come to God — a figure which has passed into common Christian use far beyond monasticism. He insists that we do not know what is in another's heart and must therefore never judge; that anger is to be dealt with at the flicker, before it is a flame, since it is easier to pull up a shoot than a tree; that the passions are to be treated as an illness and not as a crime; and that the whole of the ascetic life is ordered to love of neighbour, which is its proof.

Repose

Dorotheus reposed in peace, probably about the year 565; some place his death as late as the 580s. He was not a martyr and worked no recorded wonders, and the tradition venerates him for his teaching and for the sanctity that produced it.

Later influence

The Instructions passed almost at once into the general possession of the Church. Theodore the Studite prescribed Dorotheus for reading in his monasteries; Symeon the New Theologian was formed on him; he was translated early into Georgian, Arabic, Syriac and Slavonic, and in the Slavonic world he became one of the standard novitiate books, quoted constantly by the Russian elders — Seraphim of Sarov, Paisius Velichkovsky's school, and the fathers of Optina — and drawn on by the compilers of ascetic anthologies. Among Greek monastics on Athos he is read as a first book, before the more advanced Fathers, precisely because he is so unfrightening.