John the Solitary of Jerusalem
Our Venerable Father John the Solitary, the Hermit of Jerusalem
Venerable · d. 6th century, in Palestine
Commemorated 19 June — Repose in his cave near Jerusalem
John the Solitary was a hermit of the sixth century who lived in a cave in the wilderness near Jerusalem, owning nothing but an icon of the Mother of God and the lamp that burned before it. His memory has come down as a single sustained image rather than a biography: that whenever he went off on pilgrimage — to the holy places of Jerusalem, to the tombs of the martyrs, to Sinai — he left the lamp burning, and returned weeks or months later to find it still alight and still full of oil. He is remembered also for the lion that reared up and stood aside to let him pass on a narrow track, and for the answer he gave a visitor who pitied his poverty: that the cave held riches greater than any on earth.
The cave and the lamp
Nothing is transmitted of John's birth, family or country. He belongs to the great population of solitaries who filled the Judean wilderness in the age of Sabbas and Theodosius, and the Palestinian tradition that preserved him kept only what it thought worth keeping: the manner of his life.
He lived in a cave near Jerusalem, in fasting and prayer. His whole property was an icon of the Theotokos with a lampada burning before it. This poverty is the point of the story that follows. He was much given to pilgrimage — to the holy places of the city, to the graves of the martyrs and the fathers, and as far as Mount Sinai — and journeys of that kind kept him away for weeks and sometimes months at a time. Before setting out he would light the lamp before the icon and leave it burning; and when he returned, however long he had been gone, he found it still burning and the oil not spent. The tradition offers no explanation and needs none: it is the Mother of God keeping house for a man who has no house.
The lion on the path
Of the same kind is the one other incident preserved. Going along a narrow track overgrown on both sides, so that there was no room to pass, John met a lion coming the other way. The beast rose on its hind legs against the bank and held itself there until the elder had gone by. The story belongs to a large family of desert stories in which the animals return to the obedience they owed man before the fall; it is told of John without embellishment and without a moral attached.
On riches
A monk who visited the cave is said to have looked at its bareness and asked how he could live so, with nothing. The elder's reply — that his cave contained spiritual riches greater than any earthly treasure — is the only saying transmitted under his name, and the hagiography treats it as the summary of him.
He reposed in great old age, in the cave where he had lived.
Feast and commemoration
June 19 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 2). He is a synaxarion commemoration of the day, without proper hymns; the service belongs to the Apostle Jude. He is carried by the Greek and Slavonic books and by the OCA's list for the day, and by the Russian calendar as "prep. Ioann otshelnik" — John the hermit, of Palestine.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert to bring forth; with sighs from the depths thou didst make thy labours bear fruit a hundredfold; and thou wast made a beacon for the whole world, shining with miracles, O John our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
John is painted as an aged hermit in the plain tunic and mantle of the Palestinian solitaries, long-bearded and thin, holding a scroll; where a setting is given it is the mouth of a cave, and the two attributes that belong to him are the hanging lampada burning before a small icon of the Theotokos and, in narrative scenes, the lion rearing back on a narrow path to let him pass. He has no independent painted tradition; when he appears at all it is in the crowded June rank of the venerable fathers in the menologia.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection. The Menologion of Basil II, the first resort for a saint known only from a synaxarion notice, covers only September to February and cannot serve a June day.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with John the Silent, the hesychast (December 3), bishop of Colonia who became a monk of the Lavra of St Sabbas and lived in silence in the same Judean wilderness in the same century — the confusion most likely to occur, since the names, the epithets ("the Silent," "the Solitary") and the setting all overlap. They are distinct: John the Silent was a bishop, a well-documented figure of the Life of Sabbas by Cyril of Scythopolis, and reposed at the Lavra about 558; this John is an anonymous cave-dweller of the same country, known only from the synaxarion, without see, monastery or date.
- Not the Syrian writer John the Solitary of Apamea (5th century), an author of Syriac ascetic dialogues who bears the identical epithet (ihidaya) and has no commemoration in the Byzantine calendar.
- Date. The sixth century is the calendars' placement; nothing in the notice fixes it, and the story would sit as easily in the fifth or seventh.