Horus of the Thebaid
Our Venerable Father Horus, Ascetic of the Thebaid in Egypt
Venerable · d. c. 390, in Egypt
Commemorated 7 August — Repose in peace at the age of ninety
Horus — Abba Or of the Egyptian sources — was one of the great fathers of the fourth-century desert: a solitary who spent his early years in complete withdrawal with fasting, prayer and the reading of the divine word; who was told by an angel, when he had grown old in that solitude, that God had appointed him for the salvation of many; and who thereafter received all who came, gathered brotherhoods about him, and founded several monasteries which together held as many as a thousand monks. He was unlettered from childhood and yet was given the grace of reading and expounding the Scriptures. He hid his own labours entirely, teaching by stories of temptation which he attributed to other desert-dwellers "personally known to him"; he never entered the refectory, and never ate on the day he received the Mysteries. He reposed in peace at ninety, about the year 390, with his mind unclouded to the last breath.
The years of solitude
Horus withdrew into the Egyptian desert in his youth and lived for many years in complete solitude, in the strictest hermit's manner: fasting, unceasing prayer, and the meditation of Scripture. The sources make nothing of his origins, which is itself characteristic — the Egyptian fathers are remembered from the point at which they leave the world.
The angel and the change of life
When he was advanced in years, an angel appeared to him and announced that God had destined him for the salvation of many who would come seeking his guidance. From that day he ceased to refuse visitors, and began to receive everyone who came to him for counsel and for help. This is the hinge of his life as the tradition tells it: not a career of teaching entered upon by choice, but an obedience imposed on a man who had chosen the opposite.
The gift of the Scriptures
The most remarkable thing reported of him is that he had never been taught to read or write, having received no schooling as a child, and that the Lord nonetheless granted him the grace of reading the holy Scriptures — reciting and interpreting them, as the accounts put it, to the profit of those who came. In the Egyptian collections this is told not as a marvel for its own sake but as the credential of his teaching.
Father of a thousand monks
Brotherhoods formed around him, and out of them Horus founded several monasteries in which, the record says, the labour of the body and the labour of the spirit were pursued together with equal zeal, and over which he presided as spiritual father. The tally transmitted is about a thousand monastics in all — which puts him among the greatest of the Egyptian abbots, in the company of Pachomius' and Ammon's foundations.
The manner of the man
Several details of his own practice are preserved. He never entered the refectory for food with the brethren, and he did not eat at all on the day he partook of the Holy Mysteries. He taught the brethren often by narrating the temptations that beset a monk living alone, and did so always in such a way that his hearers would believe he was speaking of solitaries of his acquaintance — because he was determined that his own struggles should stay hidden. Everything his disciples thought or did was revealed to him, so that no one dared lie to him. He knew, the sources say, when to be silent and when to speak, which they treat as the rarer of the two graces.
Repose
He survived into deep old age and reposed in peace at ninety years, about the year 390, keeping the clarity of his mind to his last breath.
Feast and commemoration
August 7 (church date; New Calendar civil August 7, Old Calendar civil August 20), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition fast (August 1–14). He is kept universally as one of the venerable fathers of Egypt, with no proper office; the common of a venerable monastic is sung. He is also commemorated collectively with the desert fathers on the Saturday of Cheesefare week.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Horus, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Horus is painted in the manner of the Egyptian desert fathers: an old man, white-bearded and gaunt, in the plain monastic tunic with the analavos, the koukoulion drawn back or worn, holding a scroll — often inscribed with a saying on silence or on the hiding of one's own labours — with the bare hills of the desert behind him and, sometimes, the cluster of cells of his monasteries. The scene proper to him is the appearance of the angel announcing that he is to receive the many. Because his name is short and easily corrupted (Ὢρ, Or, Hor), inscriptions are the only safe identification, and no pre-1900 image reliably inscribed for this Horus has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Thebaid or Nitria? The Slavonic and Russian tradition, followed by the OCA, places him in the Thebaid, the upper-Egyptian desert; the Greek synaxaristic tradition places him on the mountain of Nitria, in lower Egypt west of the Delta. Both localisations are old. The Greek Historia Monachorum in Aegypto treats Abba Or as a father of the Thebaid, which is probably the primary tradition, the Nitrian ascription arising from the general association of the great abbas with that most famous of the monastic mountains. This entry keeps the Thebaid in the name and records the Nitrian variant here.
- Which Or? The Egyptian collections know more than one father named Or, and the Apophthegmata preserve sayings under that name which cannot all be assigned with certainty to the abbot of the thousand monks. No attempt is made here to sort them.
- The date. "About 390" is the conventional dating, derived from the position of Or in the Historia Monachorum, whose author visited Egypt in 394–395 and reports him as recently departed; it is not an attested year.