Moses the Anchorite
Our Venerable Father Moses the Anchorite
Venerable
Commemorated 28 June — Repose in peace after a life of anchoritic struggle
Moses the Anchorite is one of the ascetics of the Greek synaxarion whose whole surviving memory is a single line: that he struggled in a manner pleasing to God and fell asleep in peace. He is commemorated on June 28. Neither his country, his century, nor the desert in which he lived is transmitted, and the Church honours him as she honours many of the anchorites — by name only, without a story, on the principle that the name written in the book of life is enough.
What the synaxarion says
The Greek notice for June 28 reads in full: Ὁ Ὅσιος Μωϋσῆς ὁ Ἀναχωρητής, ἀφοῦ ἀσκήτεψε θεοφιλῶς, ἐκοιμήθηκε μὲ εἰρήνη — "The venerable Moses the Anchorite, having practised asceticism in a manner pleasing to God, fell asleep in peace." That is the entire record. The epithet ἀναχωρητής, "anchorite," classes him with the solitaries rather than with the coenobites: one who had withdrawn (ἀναχωρεῖν) from the settled life of a monastery into the desert or the mountains, living alone or with a single disciple, and coming in to the church only for the Sunday synaxis. That the notice specifies the manner of his death — in peace, not by the sword — is the synaxarion's usual way of marking that the saint was an ascetic and not a martyr.
Entries of this kind are not defective versions of longer Lives; for the most part no longer Life ever existed. They descend from the Synaxarion of Constantinople, which was compiled to be read at Matins and which preserved, for hundreds of ascetics, exactly what the church of the capital knew of them: a name, a rank, and the fact of a holy death. This repository's policy is to record such saints honestly at the length the record permits, rather than to supply a biography by inference.
Feast and commemoration
June 28 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 11), in the Greek books only; the Slavonic Menaion does not carry him. He has no proper service and is kept at the proskomedia and in the commemoration of the saints of the day.
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, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Moses, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No image of this Moses is known, and none could be securely identified if it were, since the name is borne by so many saints and the anchorite has no attribute of his own. He would be painted in the general type of the desert solitary: an aged man, long-bearded, in the poor tunic and the analavos of the schema — or, in the older Egyptian-style images of the anchorites, in a garment of woven palm — barefoot, a scroll or a hand raised in prayer. A candidate image of "St Moses" must never be stored for this entry without a legible inscription distinguishing him from Moses the Ethiopian, whose images are common and who is always shown dark-skinned; no image has been stored here.
Disputed questions
- No date and no place. The frontmatter therefore omits century, and the entry indexes under unknown.
- Not to be confused with the several better-known monastic Moseses: Moses the Ethiopian (called also the Black), the robber-chief turned abba of Scetis, kept on August 28; Moses the Hungarian of the Kiev Caves (July 26); Moses the Wonderworker of the Kiev Caves (July 28); Moses of Novgorod, the archbishop (January 25); and Moses of Optina (June 16). Nor, of course, with the prophet Moses the God-seer (September 4). The Kiev Caves wonderworker in particular is sometimes mistakenly listed under June 28 in derivative calendars; his day is July 28, and the Moses of this day is the Greek anchorite of the synaxarion.