Poemen of Palestine
Our Venerable Father Poemen the Anchorite, of the Rouba desert in Palestine
Venerable · d. end of the 6th century, in the Rouba desert
Commemorated 27 August — Death in the Rouba desert, torn by wild beasts
Poemen of Palestine is a solitary of the Rouba, the wilderness east of Jerusalem, known from a single chapter of the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos. He had been a shepherd in the world — his name means shepherd — and his dogs had once torn a man to pieces while he stood by and did not intervene; it was revealed to him that he would die in the same way. He lived out his years in a cave, so free of the flesh that a lion came in and lay beside him in winter to keep him warm; and about three years after he told the story, at the end of the sixth century, he was killed by wild beasts as he had foreseen.
The witness of the Spiritual Meadow
Everything transmitted about this Poemen stands in chapter 167 of the Pratum Spirituale, the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos — the collection of monastic anecdotes gathered in the last decades of the sixth century and the first of the seventh, and dedicated to Moschos' companion Sophronius, afterwards patriarch of Jerusalem. The Slavic notices, which are the source of the entry in the Russian and OCA calendars, attribute the book to "the holy fathers Sophronius and John" and cite the chapter number directly.
The Rouba (τὰ Ῥουβᾶ) was the barren country between the Judaean hills and the Dead Sea, one of the harshest of the Palestinian anchorite districts and the resort of monks who wanted no laura and no rule but the open wilderness. Its solitaries lived in caves, ate what could be gathered, and were visited only occasionally by monks from the settled communities. Poemen lived there in a cave.
The lion and the foreknowledge
A monk named Agathonicus came out to him for a word, and stayed the night in a neighbouring cave. It was winter. In the morning Agathonicus said that he had been badly troubled by the cold. Poemen answered that he himself had slept uncovered and had felt nothing, because a lion had come and lain down beside him and warmed him — and then added the thing he had evidently been carrying for years:
But I know that I shall be eaten by wild beasts. For when I lived in the world I was a shepherd, and my dogs set upon a man and tore him to pieces, and I could have saved him and did not. And it was shown to me that I should die in the same way.
The juxtaposition is the point of the chapter, and John Moschos plainly recorded it for that reason: the same beasts that serve the saint in his innocence are the instrument of a debt he still owes. Three years later, at the close of the sixth century, Poemen was torn to pieces by wild animals in the Rouba, as he had said.
Feast and commemoration
August 27 (church date; New Calendar civil August 27, Old Calendar civil September 9), on which he stands in the synaxaria immediately after his great namesake. He has no proper office and no local shrine; the Rouba anchorites left no monastery and no relics. His commemoration is essentially a note in the calendar preserving one chapter of the Spiritual Meadow, and the entry is kept short here for that reason: the record is thin, and it would be dishonest to pad it.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and by thy sighing from the depths thou didst bring thy labours to a hundredfold harvest; thou wast made a beacon for the whole world, shining with miracles, O Poemen our father: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Poemen of Palestine is not a subject of his own; where the August 27 rank of a menaion icon distinguishes him from Poemen the Great at all, he is a second monastic figure of the venerable type — bearded, in the dark habit, holding a scroll or with hands raised — placed behind the greater saint. The two elements of his story that would make a scene, the lion lying beside the sleeping monk and the death among the beasts, belong to the general repertoire of desert imagery (Gerasimus of the Jordan and his lion, Mamas and his lion) and are not attached to his name in any surviving painting located for this collection.
No pre-1900 image identifiable as this saint has been found, and none is likely to exist: he has no independent cult, and the name in any inscription would be read as the Egyptian abba's.
Disputed questions
- Identity. He is not the great Egyptian abba: see below. Nor is he certainly the "Abba Poemen" of the Palestinian sayings-material more generally, since the name was common. The attribution rests solely on the Moschos chapter, which names the place (Rouba), the visitor (Agathonicus), and the manner of death.
- Not to be confused with Poemen the Great (†c. 450), the Egyptian father of the Apophthegmata, who is commemorated on the same day, August 27. The coincidence of name and date makes this the standard confusion, and calendars that print both entries on one page frequently blur them. They are separated by a century and a half, by two countries, and by the manner of their repose — Poemen the Great died in extreme old age in Egypt, this Poemen violently, in Palestine.
- Not to be confused with the Kievan monks Pimen, Pimen being the Slavonic form of the same name: Pimen the Much-Ailing (feast August 7) and Pimen the Faster (feast May 8, and kept with the Hieromartyr Kuksha on this same August 27).