Eikon

Peter of Egypt

Our Venerable Father Peter of Egypt, the Ascetic

Venerable · d. 5th century

Commemorated 27 January

Peter of Egypt (fifth century) was one of the ascetics of the Egyptian desert, commemorated among the Fathers on January 27. The tradition remembers him as a disciple of Abba Lot, one of the elders of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, and preserves his memory as an example of the monastic virtues learned at the feet of the old men of the wilderness — humility, silence, and unremitting struggle. No connected Life of him survives; he belongs to the anonymous multitude of the desert whose sanctity the synaxaria record with a single line.

Almost nothing of the outward life of Peter of Egypt is transmitted. He is placed in the fifth century, among the monks of the Egyptian desert — the heirs of Antony, Macarius, and the first generation of anchorites — and the tradition attaches him to Abba Lot, an elder known from the Apophthegmata Patrum (the Sayings of the Desert Fathers) and associated there with Abba Joseph of Panephysis. As Lot's disciple, Peter would have been formed in the discipline of the cell: the manual labour and prayer of the anchorite, the guarding of the tongue, the cutting off of the self-will, and the counsel of the elders that the Apophthegmata gather. A saying transmitted under his name has him recall what he received from the old men — that the monk is not to set himself up as a teacher or lawgiver in his cell but to keep the measure of humility — a fragment that preserves the one thing the desert cared to remember of him: not the events of a life, but the savour of the ascetic wisdom he carried.

He reposed in the desert, at a date not recorded, and is numbered among the venerable Fathers. The honest brevity of his notice is itself characteristic of the tradition that keeps him: the desert produced saints by the thousand whose names alone survive, and Peter of Egypt is honoured as one of them, a witness that holiness in the wilderness needed no chronicle to be real.

Feast and commemoration

January 27 (church date; New Calendar civil January 27; Old Calendar civil February 9). Peter is commemorated among the saints of the day in the Greek Menaion and the synaxaria, on the day led by the translation of the relics of John Chrysostom. He has no proper office; where his memory is kept liturgically he is sung from the common of an ascetic Father.

Iconography

Peter is depicted, where he is imaged, in the manner of the desert Fathers: an aged monk in the tunic, analavos, and mantle of the great schema, with a long white beard, often bearing a scroll of ascetic counsel. No identified pre-modern icon of this particular Peter has been located for storage — the desert Fathers of a single synaxarion line are rarely distinguished in surviving images from their many namesakes — and the entry is listed as wanting an icon.

Sources

  1. Greek Menaion and Synaxaristes for January 27 — the commemoration of the venerable Peter of Egypt among the saints of the day.
  2. Orthodox Church in America and Greek Orthodox Archdiocese daily calendars, January 27 (consulted live) — "Venerable Peter of Egypt, disciple of Abba Lot" (fifth century).
  3. The Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers), for Abba Lot and the milieu of the Egyptian anchorites to which Peter belonged — the tradition's frame for a saint of whom no connected Life survives.