Ten Thousand Fathers of Nitria
The Holy Myriad — the Ten Thousand Venerable Fathers of the Desert of Nitria and of the Caves of Scete
Venerable Martyr · d. c. 400, in the Nitrian desert of Egypt
Commemorated 10 July — Commemoration of the monks driven out and destroyed in the Nitrian desert
Under the name of the Myriad — the ten thousand — the Church keeps on July 10 the memory of the monks of the Egyptian desert of Nitria and of the caves of Scete who were driven from their cells, hunted and destroyed about the year 400 by Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria. The synaxarion gives the reason with unusual bluntness: the patriarch charged them with Origenism, but the real offence was that they had sheltered the priest Isidore, whom he had turned against, and had refused to be used in his quarrels. It is the rarest kind of commemoration in the calendar — a company of ascetics honoured as martyrs for what a bishop of the Church did to them — and the Church has never softened it.
The desert before the storm
Nitria, with the Kellia ("the Cells") to its south and Scete in the desert beyond, was in the last quarter of the fourth century the most thickly inhabited monastic country in the world: thousands of monks in cells scattered over the sand within call of one another, gathering on Saturdays and Sundays at the churches, living by the plaiting of rope and the weaving of baskets, and visited from every corner of the empire. It was the school of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The learned among them — the men formed on Evagrius of Pontus, who had died at the Cells in 399 — read Origen for his ascetic and exegetical teaching, while a large simpler party rejected all such reading and held to a crudely literal notion of God's likeness to man. The tension between the two was old and mostly bearable.
Theophilus, Isidore, and the Tall Brothers
Theophilus of Alexandria (patriarch 385–412) had at first taken the learned side, and had used the leading Nitrian monks. Four brothers of great height and greater reputation — Dioscorus, whom he made bishop of Hermopolis, Ammonius, Eusebius and Euthymius, known to history as the Tall Brothers — were drawn into his service, and he had them ordained and set over the affairs of the Church in Alexandria. They found the work of the patriarchate uncongenial and went back to the desert, and the friendship soured.
To this was joined the affair of Isidore, an aged priest of Alexandria and steward of its hospice, long honoured and once Theophilus's own candidate for the see of Constantinople. Theophilus fell out with him over money and over a charge that Isidore refused to sustain; Isidore was deposed and fled to Nitria, and the monks — the Tall Brothers foremost — took him in.
The raid on the desert
Theophilus then reversed himself on the doctrinal question with a completeness that astonished contemporaries: he condemned Origen, and about 399–400 issued the anathema, put himself at the head of the anti-Origenist party among the simple monks, and came out into the desert with soldiers and with a mob of monks and townsmen at his back. The cells of Nitria and the Kellia were broken open and burned, books were destroyed, and the monks were driven out into the desert by night. The number of those expelled is given in the ancient accounts as three hundred, or four hundred, or in the synaxaria as the myriad — ten thousand — which is the figure the calendar has kept and which stands for the whole population of the desert rather than for a count of corpses. Many died: of exposure and thirst in the flight, of wounds, and by violence at the hands of those who came with the patriarch. The survivors scattered, some to Palestine, some to Constantinople.
After
Some fifty of the fugitives, with the Tall Brothers, reached Constantinople and appealed to John Chrysostom, who received them charitably, gave them a lodging and communion in prayer but not the Eucharist while their case was undecided, and wrote to Theophilus on their behalf. Theophilus turned the appeal into a weapon: he came to the capital, and at the Synod of the Oak in 403 it was Chrysostom, not the patriarch of Alexandria, who was condemned and deposed. Ammonius the Tall died at Constantinople during the proceedings, and Theophilus is reported to have wept over him. The destruction of the Nitrian settlements was never repaired to what it had been.
Feast and commemoration
July 10 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 23). The commemoration is carried by the Greek and Slavonic synaxaria and by the OCA. It is one of the very few days on which the calendar records a wrong done by a hierarch of the Church, and it does so without qualification — a fact worth noticing beside the fact that Theophilus himself is not among the saints, while John Chrysostom, whom he brought down, is one of the three Hierarchs.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
The Myriad are painted as an assembly of desert monks: rank on rank of tonsured heads with long white and grey beards, in the pale coarse habit, the analavos and the hood of the Egyptian ascetics, with hands raised in prayer or holding scrolls. Where a scene is given rather than an assembly, it is the flight — cells burning behind, the fathers going out over the sand with what they can carry — and the composition borrows from the icons of the burning of monasteries and the martyrdoms of Sinai and Raithu. No pre-1900 image of this company alone has been identified for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The number. Ten thousand — the myriad — is a liturgical and synaxarial figure for the whole body of the Nitrian and Scetic monks, not a count of the slain. The narrative sources speak of hundreds expelled and of an unstated number dead. The corpus keeps the traditional title and states the difficulty plainly.
- Scete or Nitria? The OCA lists them as fathers "of the deserts and caves of Scete"; the events belong properly to Nitria and the Kellia, with Scete affected in the general dispersal and, a few years later, sacked by the barbarians in a separate catastrophe. The two names are used loosely as one region in the calendars.
- Martyrs? They are not martyrs in the strict sense, having died in a quarrel within the Church and not for confessing Christ before pagans; the calendar nevertheless keeps them with the martyrs, and the synaxarion notice names Theophilus as their killer. This entry classes them as venerable-martyrs and does not attempt to soften the notice.
- The date. The events fall in 399–400; the century of repose is given here as the fifth on the reckoning of the year 400, and some calendars date the commemoration to c. 398.