The Roman Tutor

Before he was the great hermit of Scetis, Arsenius was, according to the tradition, a well-born Roman ordained to the diaconate and summoned to the court of Theodosius the Great to serve as tutor of the emperor’s sons, the future Augusti Arcadius and Honorius. This file sets out what the sources — the Apophthegmata Patrum and the later Life — claim of his origins and his court career, and weighs how much can be securely known against the conventions of the genre that shaped his memory.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of stillness)

The Claim of the Sources

The portrait of Arsenius that the tradition hands down is unusually specific about his worldly station, and the specificity is itself part of his significance. He is remembered not as a peasant or a provincial but as a Roman of rank — a man of the senatorial aristocracy, learned, wealthy, and bred to the highest circles of the Christian Empire — who renounced all of it for the desert. The introductory notice attached to his collection in the Apophthegmata Patrum states plainly that “the blessed Arsenius, while he was still living in the palace, prayed to God in these words, ‘Lord, lead me in the way of salvation’” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 1; trans. Ward 1984). The detail that he was “still living in the palace” (en tois basileiois) anchors the whole of his desert reputation in a prior life at the imperial court, and it is from that contrast — the courtier turned hermit — that much of the force of his sayings derives.

The fuller biographical frame is supplied by the later Life of Arsenius, a Byzantine composition that gathers and elaborates the data of the sayings. According to this tradition, Arsenius was born about 354, of a distinguished and pious Roman family; he was well educated in the learning of the age, fluent in both Greek and Latin, and was ordained deacon of the Church of Rome (Chitty 1966, 67; Regnault, La vie quotidienne des Pères du désert en Égypte au IVe siècle, 1990). It was on account of his learning and his piety, the tradition holds, that he was recommended to the emperor and summoned east to the court.

The Tutorship of Arcadius and Honorius

The central claim of the court tradition is that Arsenius was made paedagogus — tutor and guardian — of the two sons of the emperor Theodosius the Great (r. 379–395): Arcadius, who would become Augustus of the East, and the younger Honorius, who would become Augustus of the West. The synaxarion and the Life present the summons as an act of the emperor himself, who, seeking a man of both Roman learning and Christian seriousness to form his heirs, had Arsenius brought to the palace and entrusted the princes to his charge (Chitty 1966, 67; Bunge and the Life tradition as summarized in Harmless 2004, 421–423).

This places Arsenius at the very center of the Theodosian establishment in the years around 383–394, the period in which Arcadius and Honorius were being raised to imperial dignity (Arcadius was proclaimed Augustus in 383, Honorius in 393). The tradition draws from this station a double moral: that the man who taught the masters of the world chose to become the least of the servants of God, and that the very refinement of his upbringing made his subsequent austerity the more remarkable. The famous later contrast — that “Rome and the whole world knew thy father, but no one in Egypt knows thee,” said of him in the desert — depends for its point on the reality of the court career (cf. Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 36; Ward 1984; and see The Aristocrat in the Desert).

The Limits of the Evidence

The court tutorship is the most biographically concrete claim made about Arsenius, and it is also the one most exposed to the source-critical question. The Apophthegmata, the earliest and most reliable witness, place him “in the palace” and assume a grand worldly past, but they do not name the princes or describe the tutorship in detail; the explicit identification of his charges as Arcadius and Honorius, and the dating of his summons, come chiefly from the later Life and the synaxaria, which are hagiographical compositions of considerably later date than the events they report.

[Disputed: that Arsenius was a Roman of senatorial rank, ordained deacon, who left a position at the imperial court for the desert is the consistent witness of the earliest tradition and is generally accepted by scholars as the historical kernel (Chitty, *The Desert a City*, 1966, 67; Ward, *Sayings*, 1984, 8–9); but the precise claim that he was personally tutor of Arcadius and Honorius rests on the later *Life* and synaxarion rather than the *Apophthegmata*, and is treated by historians as the developed hagiographical form of the tradition rather than as independently documented fact — the secular sources for the education of the Theodosian princes do not name Arsenius (Harmless, *Desert Christians*, 2004, 421–423; Regnault, *La vie quotidienne*, 1990).]

This is not a reason to discard the tradition but to hold it at the right level of confidence. What the earliest sources securely give is a man of the Roman governing class who had lived “in the palace” and who renounced that world utterly; the named tutorship of the two emperors is the form in which the later Church remembered and dramatized that renunciation. Both the kernel and its elaboration are part of the record, and the careful reader keeps them distinct (METHODOLOGY §§3.5, 4).

The Meaning of the Station

Whatever the exact post, the function of the court career in Arsenius’ story is clear and consistent across the sources. It establishes him as a man who had tasted the summit of worldly honor — wealth, learning, proximity to power, the formation of emperors — and who judged it all as nothing beside the salvation of his soul. The desert tradition prized such renunciations precisely because they measured the cost: the higher the station abandoned, the more eloquent the abandonment. Antony had given up a moderate inheritance; Arsenius, in the Church’s memory, gave up the imperial court itself (on Antony’s renunciation, see St. Antony the Great).

The court past also explains a recurring tension in his desert life that the sayings preserve with unusual candor: the refined, fastidious aristocrat who must learn the rough humility of the desert, who is reproached for keeping some habits of his former delicacy, and who answers his reproachers with a sharpness that is itself a kind of teaching (see The Aristocrat in the Desert). The Roman tutor did not cease to be a Roman of culture when he became a monk; he carried that formation into the desert, and the friction between it and the desert’s poverty is one of the most humanly interesting features of his portrait.

The World of the Theodosian Court

To grasp what Arsenius renounced, one must picture the court he is said to have served. The reign of Theodosius the Great (379–395) was the high noon of the Christian Roman Empire in the East: the emperor who had made Nicene Christianity the religion of the state by the Edict of Thessalonica (380), who had presided over the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople (381), who had done public penance before Ambrose of Milan after the massacre at Thessalonica, and who would be the last to rule both halves of the empire (Chitty 1966; the standard histories of the Theodosian age). The court of such an emperor was the center of the Christian world’s political power, a place of immense wealth, learning, and influence, where the affairs of Church and state were intertwined.

It was into this world, the tradition holds, that Arsenius was summoned, and at its very summit — the imperial household, the formation of the heirs — that he was placed. The renunciation of such a station was therefore not the renunciation of a comfortable life merely, but of proximity to the greatest power and the highest honor the Christian world could offer. The desert prized Arsenius’ flight precisely because the court he left was so dazzling: he had every reason the world could give to stay, and he left. This is the force the tradition draws from the court career, and it is why the sources dwell on his rank: the higher the world he abandoned, the more eloquent the abandonment (Ward 1984, 9–10; Chitty 1966, 67).

A Bridge Between Two Worlds

The court career is, finally, what makes Arsenius a bridge-figure. He belongs at once to the world of Theodosius, Ambrose, and the Christianized senatorial aristocracy — the world in which the Empire and the Church were being fused — and to the world of Scetis, where that whole order was renounced for the sake of God alone. In him the two great movements of the fourth century meet and collide: the Christianization of the Roman establishment, which drew the faith into the heart of imperial power, and the monastic exodus, which fled that same power for the desert. Arsenius lived both and chose the second, and his story is therefore a parable of the tension between them — the courtier who judged that the salvation of his soul required him to flee the very world the Church had won.

His flight from the one world to the other is the subject of the companion file (see Flee from Men), and the meaning of that flight is inseparable from the height of the station he left.

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Arsenius 1, the prayer “in the palace”; Arsenius 36, the contrast of Rome and Egypt; introduction, 8–9, on Arsenius’ rank and career.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (67, on Arsenius’ Roman origin, diaconate, and court position.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (421–423, on Arsenius in the Apophthegmata and the limits of the biographical tradition.)
Regnault, Lucien. La vie quotidienne des Pères du désert en Égypte au IVe siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1990. (On the social world of Scetis and the figure of Arsenius.)
Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1965. (Context for the monastic world of Arsenius’ Egypt.)