Eulogius the Hospitable

The stonecutter of the Thebaid

Eulogius belonged to the Thebaid, the Upper Egyptian country whose deserts had already filled with monks, and he was not a monk but a working layman: a quarryman and stonecutter (λαξευτής), one of the labourers who cut and dressed the soft limestone of the Nile cliffs. His wage was a keration a day — a coin of the smallest sort, the bare living of a hired man. It was on that wage, and on nothing else, that he built his reputation.

The synaxarion's picture of him is exact and unforgettable. He ate nothing until evening; and when the day's work was over and he might have eaten, he took what he had earned and went out to look for strangers. In the winter he carried a lantern through the market place, hunting for anyone who had come to the town and had neither food nor lodging, and he took them into his own house and fed them and served them, and made their affairs his business. It was a settled discipline, kept for a lifetime, and it is what gave him his name in the calendar: not "the ascetic" and not "the almsgiver," but the receiver of strangers, the man whose house was a xenodocheion.

Among the travellers he lodged were monks of the desert, and by that road he entered history: the great Abba Daniel of Sketis and his disciple, coming into the town without bread or shelter, were received by Eulogius, and Daniel afterwards made a practice of lodging with him whenever he passed that way. This is all the synaxarion notice itself contains — a stonecutter, a lantern, a hundred years, a peaceful death. The rest of the story belongs to Daniel's own Life.

Abba Daniel's prayer and the finding of the treasure

The Life of Abba Daniel of Sketis, a sixth-century Egyptian collection of tales about the great Scetiote elder, tells the story at length, and tells it against Daniel himself.

Daniel, having seen the man's hospitality year after year on a labourer's wage, reasoned as anyone would reason: if God gave Eulogius means, how many more would he receive, and how much greater would his reward be. So the old man fasted three weeks and prayed that Eulogius might be given wealth — and, when the answer was not given, went so far as to make himself surety for Eulogius's soul, pledging his own salvation that the man would use riches well. The pledge was accepted, and the tale turns on it.

Not long afterwards, cutting into the rock as usual, Eulogius struck a place that answered his chisel with a hollow sound. He broke through into a small opening, and behind it a cave full of money — one of the buried hoards of the old Egypt, of which the Nile valley was full. He looked at it, and at his life, and made his decision: he loaded the treasure into a boat and went down the river and across the sea to Constantinople.

The eparch in Constantinople

In the reign of the emperor Justin he presented great sums to the emperor and to the nobles of the court, and was rewarded, as such gifts were rewarded, with rank: the Life makes him procurator of the praetorian prefecture, an office of the highest civil administration. He bought a great estate, which the tale says was known afterwards as "the estate of the Egyptian." And the hospitality stopped. The lantern was put out; the market place saw him no more; the man who had emptied a labourer's wage every evening now had an income and a household and no strangers in it.

Daniel, when he learned what had become of his prayer, was appalled — the more so because he had made himself answerable for it. The Life tells of a vision in which he was required to give account for the soul he had pledged, and of a journey to Constantinople in which the old monk, going to the great man's door to plead with him, was not recognised, was driven off, and was beaten by the servants. Then Daniel prayed the opposite prayer: that what had been given might be taken away, and Eulogius given back to himself.

The fall, and the return to the lantern

The answer came through politics. Under Justinian, Eulogius was found among the supporters of Hypatius, Dexikratios and Pompeius; the conspirators were destroyed, the estate of the Egyptian was confiscated to the treasury, and Eulogius fled the capital in fear of his life. (The Hypatius and Pompeius of the tale answer to the nephews of the late emperor Anastasius, whom Justinian put to death in the aftermath of the Nika revolt of 532; if the identification holds — the Life does not make it explicitly — it dates Eulogius's fall to that year.)

He came home to his own village in the Thebaid with nothing, and took up his chisel again. The tale keeps one perfect detail: he went back to the rock where he had found the hoard and struck it for six hours and found nothing. So he returned to his old labour and his old wage — and to his old life, the fasting until evening, the lantern in the market place, the strangers at his table. Daniel came again and found him as he had first known him; and Eulogius, the story says, blessed God who had visited him and brought him back. He lived on, the synaxarion adds, past his hundredth year, and reposed in peace.

The meaning of the tale

The story is preserved in the desert literature not as biography but as a warning, and its target is not Eulogius but the intercessor. Daniel's prayer was generous, pious, and wrong: he asked for a good man to be given the one thing that could destroy him, and he staked his own soul on his judgement of another man's strength. The tale's teaching is the desert's constant teaching about wealth — that riches are not a neutral instrument enlarged in proportion to the virtue of the man who holds them, but a power that changes him — and its secondary teaching is about the limits of what even a great elder may ask of God on another's behalf. That Eulogius is nonetheless in the calendar, and Daniel too, is the point: the man is a saint for the lantern and the keration, not for the hoard, and the elder is a saint who was allowed to learn something.