Mausimas the Syrian

Mausimas is one of the ascetics whose memory Theodoret of Cyrrhus (bishop 423–457) gathered, from living witnesses and his own knowledge, into the History of the Monks of Syria (the Philotheos Historia). He lived in a village of the territory of Cyrrhus, in the Syrian countryside north-east of Antioch, and was a priest of the simple, Syriac-speaking peasant Christianity of the region — untaught in Greek letters but rich in the wisdom of the Gospel. His whole ascetic labour was turned outward, into mercy: he practised a voluntary poverty and an unwearied hospitality, so that his house stood open to every traveller and his goods were the common store of the poor around him.

To this charity the tradition attaches its characteristic miracle. So freely did Mausimas give from his little store of grain and oil that the vessels holding them should long since have been emptied; yet, like the meal and oil of the widow of Zarephath whom the prophet Elijah blessed (1 Kings 17), they were found never to fail, replenished by the same providence that made his generosity possible. Theodoret records too his fearlessness before the powerful: when a great and grasping landowner of the district oppressed the poor, Mausimas rebuked him plainly and, the account says, his warning was borne out by a judgment that overtook the oppressor — the ascetic's word vindicated against the might of wealth. He reposed in peace in the later fourth century, and his memory passed from Theodoret's book into the synaxaria of the Church.