Julian of Mesopotamia

What is known of Julian rests on an unusually good source for a fourth-century hermit: the second chapter of the Religious History of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, written within living memory of his disciples, with which the Byzantine synaxaria and the Slavic menologies agree. He withdrew as a young man into the region of Osrhoene in Mesopotamia — the borderland the Russian tradition's epithet remembers when it calls him "the Persian" — and made his dwelling in a cave in the desert country by the Euphrates; the Greek synaxarion knows him simply as "Julian on the Euphrates," and the Syriac tradition as Julian Saba, "the old man," the elder. His rule was of the utmost severity: he ate once a week, a bread of millet, with salt, and drank spring water, and he gave the days to unbroken psalmody and prayer. Severity did not make him solitary for long. Disciples came — Theodoret counts as many as a hundred in his lifetime — and he formed them in the desert in companies of prayer, sending them out two by two to sing the psalms while he prayed in the cave, so that the wilderness of the Euphrates became, in the historian's picture, a school of hermits a generation before the great Palestinian lavras.

Two journeys frame the tradition. The first was to Mount Sinai, on foot through the desert with a company of disciples: there, at the rock where Moses stood when he received the tables of the Law, Julian built a church — the tradition transmitted from Theodoret through the Slavic menologies credits the altar on the holy summit to his labours — and returned to his cave. The second belongs to the great crisis of the age. During the Persian campaign of the emperor Julian the Apostate (363), while the persecutor's threats hung over the Church of the East, the hermit was at prayer when he received a revelation of the tyrant's destruction, and announced to his disciples, at the hour of it, that the boar that had ravaged the Lord's vineyard was fallen; word soon came that the emperor had died in Persia that same hour. The synaxaria made the prophecy his chief memorial, and the OCA's notice keeps it to this day.

Once more the old man left the Euphrates, and the occasion gives him his place in the history of the Church of Antioch. In the reign of Valens, when the Arians held the churches of Antioch and orthodoxy there hung on the confessing communities of the future patriarch Flavian's circle, the Arian party put about the claim that the famous hermit of Mesopotamia — by then the most venerated ascetic of the East — was of their communion. The defenders of the Nicene faith sent to the desert and begged him to come and give them the lie in person; and Julian, who had fled the world for half a century, walked to Antioch, stood among the confessors, worked healings among the people, publicly professed the faith of Nicaea and shattered the Arian boast, and went back to his cave. He died there soon after, about 377 — the transmitted dates range from the 360s to about 380 — an old man, leaving his disciples as the seed of Mesopotamian monasticism.

His memory was cherished nowhere more than in the Syriac world: a cycle of some two dozen hymns on Julian Saba is transmitted under the name of Ephrem the Syrian, singing the elder of the Euphrates beside the fathers of Egypt; whatever the attribution's precise worth, it shows how early and how high his veneration stood among the Syrians. Through Theodoret he passed into the Greek synaxaria, and through them to the whole Church.