Doulas the Passion-bearer

Twenty years of contempt

Nothing is transmitted of Doulas's origin, and no date is given; the account belongs to the common stock of Egyptian monastic narrative of the fourth to sixth centuries, and the Byzantine synaxaria carry it without fixing an era. What they preserve is a portrait of one particular kind of ascetic achievement. Doulas was distinguished, the notice says, by meekness, humility and obedience — and by nothing else that the world would count. Some of the brethren despised him for it and made him the object of a settled contempt: mockery, abuse, small humiliations, sustained for twenty years.

The account is careful about the psychology, and this is what gives it its value. At the beginning it was hard for him; he bore the insults with effort and with resentment mastered rather than absent. Only in time did he arrive at the state the fathers call ἀπάθεια — dispassion — in which the insults no longer reached him at all, and he came to pity the men who offered them and to pray for them from the heart. The distance between the two conditions, and the twenty years it took to cross it, is the substance of his Life.

The stolen vessels

At the end of his life came the trial that made him a passion-bearer. A monk of the house stole the church vessels and hid them. When the abbot and the elders opened an investigation, suspicion fell on Doulas, on the ground that he had not appeared at the vigil that night — he had always come before, but he was ill and could not rise; and those who had spent twenty years despising him now came forward as witnesses, swearing that they had seen him do it.

Doulas protested his innocence once. Seeing that he was not believed, he stopped arguing and said, Forgive me, holy fathers, I am a sinner. The abbot ordered him stripped of the monastic habit and dressed again in secular clothes; and it is here that the account records the only complaint he made — not against his accusers, but to God: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, for the sake of Thy holy Name I put on this habit, and now, for my sins, it is taken from me.

He was put in chains. The steward demanded to know where the vessels were hidden, and to every question the answer was the same: Forgive me, I have sinned. He was then handed over to the civil authority and tortured, where he said only, I have neither silver nor the lost vessels. The eparch of the city, uneasy, asked the monks what should be done with a man whom they themselves had delivered to the secular court; they answered, Do with him as the laws prescribe. Sentence was passed: both hands to be cut off.

On the way to the place of execution the governor made a last offer — tell us where the vessels are, and go free — and drew from the martyr of patience the one flash of plain speech in the whole story: Governor, do you want me to confess something I did not do? I will not tell lies about myself, for every lie is of the devil. At that point, with the sentence about to be carried out, the thief broke, went to the abbot, and confessed.

Repose, and the vanished body

Doulas was brought back. The monks came to ask his forgiveness, and he not only bore them no malice but thanked them: they had given him, he said, the chance to wipe out his sins by suffering when he had done nothing, and he prayed the Lord to pardon his accusers. Three days later he was found dead, on his knees, at prayer.

His body was laid in the monastery church and the burial was put off until the abbot and brethren of a neighbouring house could arrive. When everyone had gathered and gone in, the body was not there: only his clothes and his sandals remained. The account draws the moral without softening it — those who had accused him were shown to be unworthy to bury him.