01 — Foundations
The beginnings of St. Euthymius the Great: his birth at Melitene in Lesser Armenia (377), his formation and ordination under Bishop Otreius, the charge of the city’s monasteries laid on him, and his withdrawal at twenty-nine to the Holy Land and the desert of Jerusalem. These two files cover the Armenian decades and the journey east that turned a Cappadocian-Armenian priest into a father of the Judean desert.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of Palestinian monasticism)
Everything in this section, like the rest of the collection, rests overwhelmingly on a single near-contemporary witness — Cyril of Scythopolis, who wrote the Life of Euthymius about eighty years after the saint’s death, inside the very communities Euthymius had founded, and who names the elders from whom he had his information. Cyril is, by broad scholarly consensus, the most reliable hagiographer of the Christian East; but reliability is not omniscience, and his account of Euthymius’s Armenian youth is the part of the Life furthest from his own informants and closest to the conventions of the genre. These two files therefore set out what Cyril reports, mark where his chronology is an inference rather than a record, and place the young Euthymius in the concrete Armenian and Palestinian world the independent sources let us see.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| armenia-and-melitene.md | Birth at Melitene in Lesser Armenia (377) to Paul and Dionysia; baptism and name; upbringing, education in Scripture and psalmody, and the care of Bishop Otreius; ordination as lector and priest; the charge of the monasteries of the city; the Armenian Christian milieu of the late fourth century. |
| the-journey-to-the-holy-land.md | The withdrawal at twenty-nine (c. 406) to Jerusalem; the pilgrimage to the holy places; the lavra of Pharan near Jerusalem; the call of the deeper desert; the meeting and lifelong bond with Theoctistus and the move into the wadi toward the Jordan. |
See Also
- 02 — The Lavra of Euthymius — what the move into the wilderness became: the founding of the lavra and Euthymius as a father of the desert
- 05 — Sources — the source-critical assessment of Cyril of Scythopolis on which this section depends
- Orthodoxy: Monasticism — the ascetic tradition Euthymius carried from Armenia into Palestine
- Orthodoxy: Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem — the patriarchate of Jerusalem in whose desert the journey ended
References
- Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Euthymius. In Cyril of Scythopolis: The Lives of the Monks of Palestine, translated by R. M. Price, with introduction and notes by John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. Cited by section number, following the critical edition of Eduard Schwartz, Kyrillos von Skythopolis (Texte und Untersuchungen 49.2; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1939).
- Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
- Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.