The Prophecy of Forty Days

The most celebrated of St. Arsenios’ reported prophecies: that he would live only forty days after reaching Greece, and would not settle in the new land — a foretelling the tradition holds was fulfilled exactly, when he reposed on Corfu forty days after arrival. Reported strictly as St. Paisios and the Farasiot tradition attest it (§3.5), with the contested precision flagged.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Cappadocian)

The Foretelling

Among all the accounts of St. Arsenios’ discernment, the one the tradition holds most dear is his foretelling of his own death. According to the Life St. Paisios compiled from the Farasiot memory, the old priest knew and said before or during the exodus that he would not live long in Greece — that he would reach the new country only to die, and specifically that he would live but forty days after arriving (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti, on his foretelling that he would live forty days after reaching Greece). In the tradition’s telling, he had brought his flock out of Cappadocia to safety as his last task, and understood that once it was accomplished his own course was run; he is remembered as facing this with the calm of a man whose work is finished (see The Uprooting of 1924).

The number forty carries its own weight in the Scriptural and liturgical imagination — the forty days of the Flood, of Moses on Sinai, of Elijah’s journey, of Christ’s fast and of His post-Resurrection appearances; the forty days of the Church’s mourning and memorial for the dead (on the Scriptural resonance see Orthodoxy: Holy Scripture). Whether St. Arsenios named the number with this resonance in mind, or whether the tradition’s memory settled on “forty” partly because of it, is not something the sources allow one to decide; the collection notes the resonance without resolving it.

The Fulfilment

The tradition holds that the prophecy was fulfilled to the letter. St. Arsenios reached Greece in the autumn of 1924, was among the refugees brought to Corfu (Kerkyra), and there reposed on 10 November 1924 — by the reckoning of the tradition, exactly forty days after his arrival (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti, on his repose forty days after arrival, as foretold; see Repose on Corfu, 1924). It is this exact correspondence — the foretold interval and the actual one coinciding — that fixes the prophecy in the tradition as a sign of his sanctity, and that gives his death its characteristic note of completion rather than mere ending.

Per the repository methodology (§3.5), the collection reports this as the tradition attests it, pinned to St. Paisios’ Life, and does not certify it as an adjudicated fact. The honest statement is that St. Arsenios was remembered as having foretold his death within forty days of reaching Greece, and as having died accordingly; that this memory is uniform in the tradition; and that it rests, like the rest of the Life, on the Farasiot oral testimony recorded a half-century later by his godson (see Attestation and Tradition).

[Disputed: the exact interval and the account of the arrival. The received tradition gives “forty days” and the repose on 10 November 1924, and this is what the collection reports. Some notices, however, describe the interval differently — for example speaking of his living only a short time, or “about two weeks,” in the Castle of Corfu, or of a few months between reaching Greece and his death — reflecting variation in how the arrival in Greece and the arrival on Corfu are counted (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti [forty days]; cf. divergent encyclopedic and synaxarial notices). The collection reports the traditional “forty days” as the core of the account while flagging that the precise reckoning of the interval varies across the sources and is not documentarily fixed.]

The Meaning of a Finished Course

The prophecy of forty days is, in the tradition’s reading, the seal on St. Arsenios’ whole life. It presents his death not as a defeat — the old priest failing to survive the ordeal of exile — but as a deliberate completion: he had asked and been granted, as it were, only to bring his people home, and having done so he departed. The tradition draws a straight line from the shepherd who would not abandon his flock to the man who died the moment they were safe, and reads the forty days as the measure of a task exactly fulfilled (Elder Paisios, Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Souroti). This is why the prophecy matters beyond its uncanny precision: it interprets his death, giving it the shape of an offering rather than an accident.

It also completes the portrait of his discernment (see Clairvoyance and the Gift of Prayer). The priest who was remembered as knowing the hidden things of those who came to him is remembered, at the last, as knowing the hidden measure of his own life — and as meeting it without fear. The collection reports this as the tradition’s testimony to him, soberly and without inflation, and passes to the repose itself and the long afterlife of his relics.

See Also

References

  • Elder Paisios the Athonite (Hieromonk Paisios). Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian. Souroti, Thessaloniki: Holy Hesychasterion “Evangelist John the Theologian,” Greek 1st ed. 1975; English translation, Souroti. (His foretelling that he would live forty days after reaching Greece; the fulfilment in his repose on Corfu on 10 November 1924; the reading of his death as a completed task.)