Euthymius the Great

The life of Euthymius is preserved with rare completeness. His biographer, Cyril of Scythopolis — a monk of the Judaean desert who lived in Euthymius's own lavra and in the Great Lavra of Sabbas in the 540s and 550s — composed a Life of Euthymius (the Vita Euthymii) as the first and greatest of his series of desert biographies, drawing on the living memory of aged monks such as Cyriacus the Hermit and John the Silent, who had themselves known the saint or his immediate disciples. What follows rests on that near-contemporary witness.

Origins and early life

Euthymius was born about the year 377 at Melitene, the capital of Armenia Secunda on the upper Euphrates — the city whose great martyr Polyeuctus was its glory. His parents, Paul and Dionysia, were Christians of noble Melitene stock, and for long childless. The tradition Cyril transmits is bound up with the saint's very name: praying at a martyr's shrine near the city for the gift of a child, Dionysia heard a voice bid her "Be of good cheer" (euthymei) — for a son would be given her, and given to God — and when the child was born they named him Euthymius, "good cheer," in memory of the joy of that promise. The name would become a theme of his whole cultus, and the hymnographers play on it endlessly: the man of gladness who made the barren desert rejoice.

His father died while he was still a small child. His mother, fulfilling her vow, brought the boy to Otreius, bishop of Melitene — a hierarch of note, who had sat among the fathers of the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381 — who took him into the clergy, made him reader, had him educated in the Scriptures and the ascetic life, and in time ordained him priest and set him over the monasteries of the city. Even then Euthymius withdrew each year, at the beginning of Lent, into the solitude of a nearby mountain, so that the desire of the wilderness was in him from the first.

The journey to Palestine

At about the age of twenty-nine, unable any longer to bear the honour and the press of business his office brought him, Euthymius left Melitene secretly and came to the Holy Land. He venerated the holy places of Jerusalem, and then withdrew to the Lavra of Pharan — the semi-eremitic colony some six miles east of the city, the earliest of the Judaean lavras, founded a generation before by Chariton the Confessor. There he took a cell apart from the others, learned the craft of the desert — the plaiting of ropes and baskets — and gave himself to silence and prayer. In the neighbouring cell lived another young ascetic, Theoctistus, and between the two grew a friendship and a common purpose that would shape the whole later history of the desert.

The wilderness of Cutila and the coenobium of Theoctistus

After some years at Pharan, Euthymius and Theoctistus, seeking deeper solitude, went out together each year after Theophany into the utter desert toward the Dead Sea, staying until Palm Sunday. On one such retreat, about the year 411, they came upon a great wadi — the ravine the sources call Cutila — and in its cliff a large and high-mouthed cave, which they made their hermitage, living on the wild herbs of the wilderness and unknown to any but God. Shepherds of the Lazarium found them and carried word to Pharan, and disciples began to come, until the cave could not hold them. There the two founded a coenobium — a communal monastery — in the valley below the cave; and because Euthymius loved stillness above all and would not be an abbot, he set Theoctistus over the community as its superior, himself remaining its father and guide from a little apart. This house, the Lower Monastery or coenobium of Theoctistus, became the training-school of the desert: Euthymius made it his rule that no novice, and no young man, might be received directly into the solitary life, but must first be schooled in obedience and the common life under Theoctistus before being admitted to a cell of his own.

The conversion of the Saracens: Aspebetos and Terebon

The event that first made Euthymius famous was the conversion of a whole nation of the desert Arabs. Aspebetos, a Persian nobleman and chief (phylarch) of the Saracen foederati, had fled the persecution of the Christians in Persia and gone over to the Romans, who set him over the allied Arabs of Arabia. His son Terebon lay paralysed down one whole side of his body, and no physician could help him; but the boy was told in a dream to seek out "Euthymius, the servant of God," in the desert of the Lower Monastery. Aspebetos brought his son and a great company of his people to the saint; Euthymius prayed over the boy, signed him with the Cross, and Terebon rose up whole. At the sight of the miracle Aspebetos, his son, and his whole tribe believed in Christ and asked for baptism; Euthymius catechised and baptised them, giving Aspebetos the Christian name Peter. The converts settled in a permanent camp near the monastery — the Parembolai, "the Encampments" — and Euthymius, unwilling to leave them without a shepherd, obtained from the Patriarch of Jerusalem that Peter be ordained their bishop: the first bishop of the tent-dwelling Saracens, "bishop of the Encampments," who would sit as such among the fathers of the Council of Ephesus in 431. It is one of the earliest and most vivid records of the desert monks' mission to the Arab tribes of the frontier.

The great lavra

The fame of the miracle drove Euthymius, who dreaded honour as others dread disgrace, back into hiding. He fled with a single disciple into the deep desert of Rouba, wandered by the Dead Sea, on the crag of Marda (Masada) where he built a church, and at Ziph near Hebron, where again he healed and converted and could not be hidden. At length he returned to his own wilderness, and about the year 420 settled on a low hill on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, north of the coenobium. Disciples gathered once more, and there Euthymius founded the monastery for which the Church chiefly remembers him — a lavra on the pattern of Pharan: a colony of solitaries, each in his own cell through the working week, plaiting rope and keeping silence, and gathering only on Saturday and Sunday at the central church for the common Liturgy and a common meal. Its church was consecrated by Juvenal, Patriarch of Jerusalem, in the year 428. The Lavra of Euthymius grew into one of the mother-houses of Palestinian monasticism, and its founder is honoured as the great forerunner of the lavriote life that Sabbas would perfect in the same desert a generation later.

Euthymius governed his lavra with the discipline of the perfect: unbroken silence, manual labour, obedience, the memory of death, and — for all his own severity — an unfailing hospitality and charity to the stranger and the poor. When his monks murmured that the little food in the storehouse could not feed the crowd of pilgrims who had come, the saint bade them serve all the same, and the loaves and oil multiplied and were not spent until all were filled and much remained — one of many wonders Cyril records: rain called down in drought, the barren made fruitful, demons cast out, the future foretold. He would say that the monk must above all things guard humility and the love of the brethren, and that discernment is the mother of the virtues.

Teacher of the desert

From the Lavra of Euthymius came a whole generation of the desert's fathers. The greatest was Sabbas the Sanctified, who came to Euthymius as a youth of eighteen; the old man, discerning his future greatness, called him a "child-elder," but — keeping his own rule — judged him too young for the solitary life and sent him to be trained in the coenobium under Theoctistus, foretelling that he would become a father of monks. Others formed in Euthymius's discipline, or won by him from error, include Cyriacus the Hermit, John the Silent (John the Hesychast, the bishop who became a monk of the desert), and Gerasimus of the Jordan, whom Euthymius recalled from the Eutychian error to the orthodox faith. His closest companion was his disciple Domitian, who served him for many years and would not be parted from him even in death. Two of his monks, Martyrius and Elias, would themselves become Patriarchs of Jerusalem — a succession Euthymius is said to have foretold. Through these disciples his spirit passed into the whole later tradition of the Holy Land.

The defence of Chalcedon and the Empress Eudocia

Euthymius lived through the gravest doctrinal crisis of the fifth-century East. The Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon (451) confessed Christ acknowledged in two natures, divine and human, in one person — against the teaching of Eutyches that after the union there was but one nature. In Palestine the definition was met by a violent Monophysite reaction: a monk named Theodosius seized the throne of Jerusalem, drove out the lawful Patriarch Juvenal, and carried a great part of the desert's monks into schism. Euthymius alone of the great fathers refused to be moved; he withdrew into the desert of Rouba rather than commune with the usurper, and his steadfastness held a remnant of the monks to the Council.

The turning of the tide is bound up with the Empress Eudocia — widow of Theodosius II, who after her fall from favour had settled in Jerusalem and, in her uncertainty, had been drawn into the anti-Chalcedonian party. Grieved and wavering, she sent to Simeon the Stylite for counsel, and Simeon directed her to "the man of God Euthymius," whose judgement she should follow. At the saint's word — conveyed when she sought him out in the desert, or through his disciples — Eudocia embraced the Council of Chalcedon and returned to communion with the Patriarch; and her conversion drew after it a great multitude of monks and laypeople, so that the empress's submission to the old hermit's counsel became the hinge on which the Holy Land turned back to orthodoxy. For this the Church honours Euthymius, with Theodosius and Sabbas after him, as one of the pillars who held Palestine to the faith of Chalcedon.

Repose

Euthymius governed his lavra to a very great age. On the eve of the feast of Antony the Great (January 17) he told the brethren, who had gathered as was their custom, that he would not be with them for next year's feast, for God was calling him within the week. He gave them his last counsels — to keep love and humility above all, never to close the monastery's doors to the stranger — set his affairs in order, and appointed for the lavra its future (asking that after his death it be made a coenobium, as in time it was). He reposed on January 20, in the year 473, having lived ninety-seven years, of which some sixty-eight had been spent in the desert. Anastasius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, came with a vast concourse of monks and people to his burial, which was delayed until evening by the press of the crowd. His faithful Domitian, refusing to leave the tomb of his master, reposed seven days later and was buried beside him. Miracles multiplied at his grave, and the Lavra of Euthymius kept his relics as its treasure for centuries.