Hellius of Egypt
Our Venerable Father Hellius, the monk of the Egyptian desert
Venerable · d. 4th century, in Egypt
Commemorated 14 July — Repose in the Egyptian desert
Hellius was a monk of fourth-century Egypt, given to a monastery as a child and brought up there in chastity and abstinence, who went out when he was grown into the deep desert and became one of the great clairvoyant fathers. The stories the tradition attaches to him are all of one kind: the obedience of the creation to a man who has recovered his own obedience to God. A wild ass came at his call and carried his load; a crocodile took him across a river on its back; he read the thoughts of the monks who came to him; and a young disciple whom he brought into the desert, and whose night-terrors he stilled with the sign of the Cross, went on to be fed, as his teacher was, by an angel. He died in great age, and the Church keeps him on July 14.
The child given to the monastery
Hellius was placed in a monastery as a small boy and grew up inside the monastic discipline rather than coming to it as a convert — a formation the Egyptian sources treat as a rare grace, since the passions were never allowed to take root. He was raised, the notice says, in piety, temperance and chastity; and when he came of age he did what the more ardent of the Egyptian monks did, and went out from the community into the inner desert to live as a solitary.
The desert, and the obedience of creatures
There he came, by long labour, to the state that the desert literature calls diorasis — clairvoyance: he knew, of the monks who came to speak with him, both what they were thinking and what disposition they had brought with them, and could therefore tell them what they actually needed to hear. The tradition places beside that gift a handful of scenes which the Historia Monachorum and the Egyptian collections tell of him and which have kept his name:
Once, carrying a heavy burden to a monastery, he grew tired on the road; he prayed, and called a wild ass out of the desert, which came, took the load, carried it to the place, and was dismissed back into the wilderness. Another time, needing to cross a river and finding no boat, he summoned a crocodile from the water and passed over standing on its back. The point of such stories, in the Egyptian understanding, is never the marvel itself: it is that great faith, simplicity of soul and deep humility restore to a man something of the dominion over the creatures that Adam had and lost, and that the beasts know a saint when they meet one.
The young disciple
A young monk of a monastery Hellius used to visit begged to be taken with him into the far desert. The elder warned him of what solitude costs — the labour, the exposure, the temptations that come to every hermit — but the young man persisted, and Hellius took him. On the very first night the novice was terrified by frightful apparitions and ran to the old man's cell. Hellius comforted him, calmed him, and sent him back, tracing the sign of the Cross over the cave and telling him that he would not be troubled by those visions again. The young man believed him and stayed; and he afterwards came to such a measure that he, like his teacher, received his food from an angel.
Hellius reached a great age and reposed in peace.
Feast and commemoration
July 14 (church date; New Calendar civil July 14, Old Calendar civil July 27). The commemoration is carried in the Slavic calendars and by the OCA — "прп. Еллия монаха (IV)" — and belongs to the general Egyptian material that the Byzantine synaxaria drew from the Historia Monachorum and the Lausiac History; the printed Greek Menaion for July 14 does not name him, its synaxarion of the day running Aquila, Justus, Onesimus and Joseph of Thessalonica. There is no proper office; the day's service is that of the Apostle Aquila.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By the streams of thy tears thou didst till the barren desert, and by thy sighing from the depths thou didst bear fruit an hundredfold in labours; and thou wast made a beacon to the whole world, shining with miracles, O Hellius our father: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Hellius belongs to the iconographic family of the Egyptian desert fathers: an old man, white-bearded and gaunt, in the coarse tunic and the analavos, sometimes barefoot, holding a scroll. Where he is distinguished from his fellows at all it is by the crocodile beneath his feet or carrying him across the water — an unmistakable and very rare attribute, which the painters of the Egyptian and Sinaite cycles occasionally use — or by the wild ass bearing his burden. No pre-1900 icon of him alone has been identified for this collection, and a search of Wikimedia Commons under the Greek, Slavonic and English forms of his name returned nothing.
Disputed questions
- Hellius and the Hellë of the Historia Monachorum. The details of the synaxarion notice — the wild ass that carried the load, the crossing of the river on a crocodile, the angelic food, the disciple delivered from night-visions — are those told of the monk Hellë in the Historia Monachorum in Aegypto (c. 400) and in Rufinus's Latin version of it, and the identification is generally made. It rests on the coincidence of the stories rather than on any statement in the calendars, and is recorded here as such.
- The form of the name. The Greek books give Ἕλλιος, the Slavonic Еллий, the OCA "Hellius," older English lists "Ellius" or "Elias." The last is a copyist's assimilation to the prophet's name and should not be followed: he is not Elias/Elijah, and not the fourth-century Elias the hermit of Egypt kept on January 8.