The Journey to the Holy Land

At the age of twenty-nine, about the year 406, St. Euthymius left Melitene and came to Jerusalem to venerate the holy places; he then withdrew to the lavra of Pharan, some six miles from the city, where he lived for several years before going out with a like-minded companion, Theoctistus, into the deeper wilderness of the wadi toward the Jordan and the Dead Sea. This file follows that journey — the pilgrimage, the first settling at Pharan, the call of the desert, and the meeting with Theoctistus that began a lifelong bond and the foundation of his own monastic life.

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

The Withdrawal at Twenty-Nine

Cyril of Scythopolis marks a clean break between the Armenian decades and everything that followed. Euthymius, he reports, in the twenty-ninth year of his age, secretly left his native Melitene and journeyed to Jerusalem to venerate the holy and life-giving places of the Lord’s incarnation, passion, and resurrection (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius 6; trans. Price 1991). The act was a renunciation as much as a pilgrimage: a young priest already entrusted with the oversight of the monasteries of his city (see armenia-and-melitene.md) left office, reputation, and homeland behind to seek a stricter and more hidden life. The “secrecy” Cyril notes is a recurring feature of the monastic withdrawals of late antiquity — the flight from honor and from the entanglements of ecclesiastical position that drove so many of the desert fathers, and that would drive Euthymius again and again throughout his life into ever-deeper solitude (see the-ascetic-and-the-solitary.md).

The age is given as twenty-nine, and on Cyril’s chronology — a birth reckoned to 377 (see the discussion of the date in armenia-and-melitene.md) — this places the arrival in Palestine about the year 406. [Disputed: the date of the journey, c. 406, rests on Cyril of Scythopolis’s statement that Euthymius came to Jerusalem in his twenty-ninth year (Life of Euthymius 6; trans. Price 1991) combined with the birth-year 377 inferred from Cyril’s own chronology; since the birth-year is itself a back-reckoning, the journey-date is correspondingly approximate, and modern accounts give it as c. 405–406 (so the chronologies in Binns 1994 and Chitty 1966, which follow Cyril’s framework while treating the absolute years as Cyril’s reckoning rather than independently fixed).] The point is consistent throughout the collection: Cyril’s dates are unusually careful for hagiography and good enough to build on, but the early absolute years are inferences from his framework, and the file presents them as such.

The moment was, in the wider history, well chosen. By the first decade of the fifth century Palestine had become a great destination of pilgrimage and a gathering-ground of monks from across the Christian East. Jerusalem had been re-monumentalized under Constantine and his successors; the holy places drew streams of pilgrims; and the deserts around the holy city — the wilderness of Judea between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea — were filling with ascetics, Egyptian, Syrian, Cappadocian, and Armenian (Chitty 1966; Binns 1994, on the rise of the Judean monasteries). When the Armenian Euthymius arrived to venerate the holy places and then turned to the desert, he was joining a movement already in full flood — and would, in time, become one of its founding fathers.

The Pilgrimage to the Holy Places

Cyril first has Euthymius do what every pilgrim came to do: venerate the holy places. He came to the Holy City, prostrated himself at the sites of the Lord’s saving acts — Golgotha, the Tomb of the Resurrection, and the rest — and gave himself to prayer there (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius 6; trans. Price 1991). For Cyril this is not a tourist’s itinerary but the proper beginning of the monastic life in the Holy Land: the monk roots his whole ascetic struggle in the physical places where the salvation he pursues was accomplished. The desert of Judea, in the Palestinian understanding Cyril expresses, is not an escape from the holy places but their hinterland — the wilderness of repentance set just behind the city of the Resurrection, where the monk could live within sight, almost, of the saving ground (on this geography see the-desert-of-jerusalem.md). The pilgrimage to venerate the places is therefore the hinge of the story: it both completes the journey from Armenia and begins the journey into the desert.

The Lavra of Pharan

Having venerated the holy places, Euthymius did not return home and did not stay in the city. He withdrew, Cyril reports, to a lavra called Pharan (Phara), about six miles from Jerusalem, and there took up his abode in a cell, devoting himself to manual labor, prayer, and the ascetic life under the discipline of an established community (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius 6–7; trans. Price 1991). Pharan was the oldest of the Judean lavras — traditionally founded by Chariton, the pioneer of Palestinian monasticism a generation or more before — and it was the natural first home for a serious monk newly come to the desert near Jerusalem (Binns 1994, on Pharan and the Charitonian foundations; Chitty 1966, on Chariton and the early lavras).

The choice of Pharan is significant for the kind of monasticism Euthymius would later found. A lavra (from the Greek laura, “lane” or “alley”) was not a cenobium where all lived a fully common life under one roof, but a colony of semi-anchorites: monks living in separate cells, scattered along the paths of a wadi, each pursuing solitude through the week, and gathering at a common center — a church and a few shared offices — for the weekend synaxis, the Liturgy, and a common meal (Binns 1994, on the lavriot structure; see the-monastic-pattern.md). At Pharan Euthymius learned this pattern from the inside: years of cell-life, solitary labor and prayer through the week, communal worship at the center. The lavra he would later found in his own desert, and the whole lavriot tradition that ran from him through Sabas to classical Judean monasticism, took its essential form from what he lived at Pharan. He did not invent the lavra; he received it at Pharan and carried it deeper into the wilderness.

Cyril notes that even at Pharan Euthymius pressed toward greater solitude than the lavra’s ordinary rhythm allowed — a foreshadowing of the lifelong pattern by which, whenever a community gathered around him, he withdrew further into the desert in search of stillness (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 7; Price 1991). He is said to have used the lavra as a base while spending the great fast in deeper retreat; the love of the deep-desert Lenten withdrawal that Cyril makes central to the later portrait (see the-ascetic-and-the-solitary.md) begins here.

The Call of the Judean Desert

After some years at Pharan — Cyril does not give an exact span, but presents it as a substantial apprenticeship — Euthymius felt the pull of the deeper wilderness. The lavra near Jerusalem, settled and somewhat populous, no longer answered the solitude he sought, and he resolved to go out into the true desert, the harsh and uninhabited country that fell away eastward toward the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius 7–8; trans. Price 1991). This is the desert of Judea proper — the broken, waterless badlands between the Judean hill-country and the rift of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, a landscape of gorges and cliffs and seasonal torrents, one of the most forbidding inhabited deserts of the late-antique world (on its geography and its meaning for the monks, see the-desert-of-jerusalem.md).

The movement from the inhabited lavra into the uninhabited desert is, for Cyril, the decisive ascetic step — the pattern Antony had set in Egypt and that the Palestinian fathers repeated: from the village to the edge of the desert, and from the edge into the deep desert, each move a further death to the world and a further reach toward God alone (Chitty 1966, on the Antonian pattern carried into Palestine). Euthymius’s whole subsequent life would be a series of such withdrawals; this first move from Pharan into the wadi was the prototype. It also set the geographical stage for everything that followed — the founding of the cenobium and then the lavra of Euthymius in this same eastern desert, the conversion of the Saracens who ranged across it, and the alliance of the desert with the patriarchate of Jerusalem behind it (see father-of-the-desert.md).

The Meeting with Theoctistus

Euthymius did not go alone, and the companion he found shaped the rest of his life. At Pharan he had met Theoctistus, a monk of like mind and like longing for solitude, and the two were knit together in a bond Cyril describes in the warmest terms — a single soul in two bodies, of one mind in their pursuit of God (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius 8; trans. Price 1991). Together they left Pharan and went out into the wilderness; and there, Cyril reports, they came upon a wild and beautiful gorge — the wadi later associated with their foundation, the ravine of the seasonal torrent that ran eastward through the desert (the gorge of the Wadi Mukellik / the desert toward the Jordan and the Dead Sea) — and found in its cliff a great cave, which they took for their dwelling (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 8; Price 1991).

The friendship of Euthymius and Theoctistus is one of the constants of the Life. The two are presented as co-founders of the first community: when disciples gathered to them in the wadi, it was Theoctistus who took up the governance of the resulting lower cenobium in the gorge while Euthymius sought the stricter solitude of the heights, and the bond between the two houses — the cenobium below and Euthymius’s own foundation above — runs through the whole history of the community (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 8–9; Price 1991; see father-of-the-desert.md and the-monastic-pattern.md). Theoctistus is the man through whom Euthymius first exercised in the desert the gift for monastic organization he had brought from Melitene: Euthymius the solitary and spiritual father, Theoctistus the administrator of the common life — a division of labor that prefigures the lavra-and-cenobium structure of the mature Palestinian monasticism (Binns 1994, on the complementarity of lavra and cenobium in the Judean foundations).

With the move into the wadi and the founding of the cenobium under Theoctistus, the “foundations” proper are laid: an Armenian priest, formed at Melitene and seasoned at Pharan, has become a desert father with a companion, a cave, and the beginnings of a community in the wilderness of Jerusalem. Everything the rest of the collection treats — the lavra, the monastic pattern, the Saracen mission, the defense of Chalcedon, the disciples and the long legacy — grows from this point. The journey from Lesser Armenia to the gorge in the Judean desert is the journey from a vocation received to a vocation begun.

See Also

References

  • Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Euthymius 6–9. 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. (The departure from Melitene in the twenty-ninth year; the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the veneration of the holy places; the withdrawal to the lavra of Pharan about six miles from Jerusalem; the move into the deeper desert toward the Jordan and the Dead Sea; the bond with Theoctistus, the cave in the wadi, and the beginnings of the cenobium.) Cited by the section numbering of 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. (Pharan and the Charitonian foundations; the lavriot structure; the rise of the Judean monasteries; the complementarity of lavra and cenobium; chronological notes to Price’s translation.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Chariton and the early lavras; the Antonian pattern of successive withdrawals carried into Palestine; the gathering of eastern monks in the Judean desert; the chronology of Euthymius’s career.)
  • Flusin, Bernard. Miracle et histoire dans l’œuvre de Cyrille de Scythopolis. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983. (Cyril’s reliability, method, and chronological framework.)
  • Perrone, Lorenzo. La chiesa di Palestina e le controversie cristologiche. Brescia: Paideia, 1980. (The Palestinian monastic foundations in relation to the church of Jerusalem.)