The Ascetic and the Solitary

Beneath the public Euthymius — founder, missionary, defender of Chalcedon — lay a hidden life of stillness that Cyril of Scythopolis presents as the root of all the rest. This file gathers what the Life of Euthymius records of his ascetic practice: the love of hesychia and the school of the cell; the strict fast, the night vigil, the silence, and the manual labor; and above all the great annual withdrawals into the utter desert of Rouba and Ziph, when each year after his January feast he left the lavra for the inner wilderness toward the Dead Sea and remained in solitude through Lent, returning only for Palm Sunday. It closes with his teaching on humility, charity, discretion, and the refusal to despise small things.

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

The Love of Stillness

The single most insistent note in Cyril of Scythopolis’s portrait of Euthymius is his love of hesychia — stillness, quiet, the unbroken interior repose that the desert tradition counted the matrix of prayer. Cyril returns to it again and again: Euthymius “loved stillness” and sought it out, and the whole architecture of his life can be read as a series of withdrawals deeper into solitude as the demands of others pressed upon him (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 11–12; trans. Price 1991). It is the same word and the same ideal that the Egyptian fathers had made central — the anachoresis of Antony, the hesychia of Arsenius who fled men because “I cannot be with God and with men” — and Euthymius is, in Cyril’s telling, a Palestinian heir of that Egyptian root (on the lineage, Father of the Desert; on the prayer of stillness in its later form, Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

This love of stillness is not, in Cyril, a flight from responsibility but its precondition. The paradox runs through the whole Life: the more Euthymius sought to be hidden, the more he was sought out, and the foundations, the conversions, and the conciliar interventions for which he is remembered all proceed, in Cyril’s account, from a man who wanted above all to be left alone with God. When the lavra grew and crowds of visitors disturbed its quiet, his instinct was always to go deeper into the desert rather than to enlarge his presence in the world (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 16, 21; Price 1991). Cyril makes the point structurally: each enlargement of Euthymius’s reputation is followed by a further retreat, so that the saint’s public greatness and his private hiddenness grow together. Binns reads this as Cyril’s deliberate theology of the holy man — authority in the desert is a function of withdrawal, not of self-assertion (Binns 1994, on Cyril’s portrait of sanctity and hesychia).

The Cell

For the desert fathers the cell was a school, and the saying “sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything” (attributed to Abba Moses in the Apophthegmata) names a discipline Euthymius embodied. Cyril presents the cell — the kellion — as the monk’s proper place, the narrow space in which the warfare of the thoughts is fought and the habit of prayer is formed. Euthymius’s whole monastic pedagogy, as Cyril describes it, is built around teaching younger monks to love and to keep the cell, to find in its confinement not a prison but a workshop of the spirit (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 9, 21; Price 1991; on the rule of the cell within the lavra, The Monastic Pattern).

The lavriot pattern in which Euthymius lived gave the cell a particular weight. In a lavra — as distinct from a cenobium where the monks lived a fully common life — the brethren dwelt in separate cells scattered around a central core of church, bakery, and refectory, gathering for the synaxis on Saturday and Sunday and otherwise keeping silence and solitude in their own cells through the week (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 9; Price 1991; Chitty 1966 on the lavriot form). The cell was thus not an occasional retreat but the ordinary theatre of the monk’s life, five days in seven; and Euthymius’s insistence on its keeping, on not wandering from cell to cell or filling the day with talk, is the practical core of his teaching on stillness (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 9, 21; Price 1991).

Fasting, Vigil, Silence, and Labor

The disciplines Cyril attributes to Euthymius are the classic ascetic quartet of the desert: fasting, vigil, silence, and the unceasing prayer that manual labor was meant to support rather than displace. Cyril records that Euthymius fasted strictly — the desert measure of one meal, taken late, and a severe limitation of food, with the great fasts kept far more rigorously still (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 21; Price 1991). He kept the night vigil, standing in prayer and psalmody through long stretches of the night, in the pattern that the desert tradition counted the very marrow of the monastic day (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 21; Price 1991). The exact quantities Cyril gives are, like all such hagiographical measures, formulaic to a degree — the desert vitae tend to describe ascetic feats in stylized terms — and are better read as the tradition’s idiom for “extreme austerity” than as a dietary log [Disputed: Cyril gives Euthymius's fasting and vigil in the conventional superlatives of desert hagiography; Flusin (1983) and Binns (1994) caution that such ascetic measures are a topos of the genre and cannot be pressed for literal precision, even granting Cyril's general reliability].

Manual labor completed the discipline. In the manner of the Egyptian fathers — who plaited rope and wove baskets from palm and reed so that the hands might work while the heart prayed, and so that the monk might eat the bread of his own labor and have something to give to the poor — Euthymius and his monks practiced a quiet handicraft (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 9, 21; Price 1991; on the wider pattern, Chitty 1966). The point of the labor, in the desert understanding Cyril shares, was never the product but the prayer it guarded and the idleness it banished, idleness being counted the mother of every spiritual sickness. Silence governed all of it: the desert ideal of to stoma phrourein, guarding the mouth, so that speech was reserved for necessity and the cell remained a place of quiet (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 9; Price 1991).

The Great Lenten Withdrawals

The most distinctive and best-attested feature of Euthymius’s personal asceticism, in Cyril’s account, is the custom of his great annual withdrawal into the utter desert for Lent. Cyril reports that each year Euthymius would depart from the lavra into the deep wilderness shortly after his January commemoration, on or about 14 January — the day after the feast that kept the memory of his leaving the world — and would remain in the inner desert in total solitude through the whole of the Lenten fast, returning to the lavra only for the gathering of Palm Sunday at the threshold of Holy Week (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 21, and the episodes set in the inner desert; Price 1991). The pattern is fixed and recurring: a clean departure from the community at the opening of the year, the long solitude of the Forty Days spent where no crowd could reach him, and a return for the great services that begin the Passion.

The desert into which he went was the harshest country of the region — the wilderness of Rouba and Ziph, the deep desert that falls away eastward and southward toward the Dead Sea, a land of waterless heat and absolute emptiness (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 6, 11, and the inner-desert episodes; Price 1991; on the geography, Chitty 1966 and The Desert of Jerusalem). It was in these Lenten withdrawals that Cyril sets some of the most charged scenes of the Life — Euthymius’s encounters in the wilderness, his solitary prayer, and several of the wonders (treated in The Miracles). The withdrawal was, in other words, both the high season of his own prayer and, in Cyril’s narrative theology, the place where the power that issues in miracle was renewed.

It is worth marking what the withdrawals say about Euthymius’s understanding of the monastic vocation. He did not regard the founding of the lavra and the care of its monks as the summit of his life; he regarded them as work to be done in their season and then left, year by year, for the deeper thing — the bare solitude of God in the empty desert. The community was real and necessary, but the inner desert was the heart. This rhythm — the alternation of the common life and the solitary, of the lavra and the inner wilderness — is the literal enactment of the lavriot ideal itself, in which the solitary cell and the common synaxis are held in tension; Euthymius simply lived that tension at its widest stretch, between the lavra and the Forty Days alone in Rouba (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 21; Price 1991; Binns 1994).

The precise dating of the departure carries a small uncertainty. Cyril fixes the custom to the days around the January feast, and the saint’s own death and principal commemoration fall on 20 January 473; the “14 January” departure is bound up with the cluster of January observances Cyril associates with Euthymius’s leaving of the world [Disputed: Cyril attaches the annual withdrawal to the period after Euthymius's January commemoration; the exact calendar day of departure (commonly given as 14 January, the octave/day after the feast of his renunciation) is a harmonization of Cyril's notices rather than a single explicit date in the *Life*, and the surrounding chronology of the inner-desert episodes is not precisely datable].

Humility and Not Despising Small Things

Cyril’s Euthymius is, for all his austerity, a teacher of the interior virtues before the bodily ones, and the virtue he sets above all others is humility. The Life records his counsel that the monk must above everything else hold himself low, accounting himself the least and the servant of all, and that the bodily disciplines are worthless — even dangerous — without the humility that keeps them from breeding pride (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 9, 21; Price 1991). This is the standard and essential teaching of the desert — the Apophthegmata are unanimous that humility, not feats of fasting, is the monk’s true work — and Euthymius transmits it as the first lesson.

Joined to humility in Cyril’s record is a particular counsel: not to despise small things. The saying preserved in the Life — that one must not think any small commandment or small matter beneath notice, for the great is built of the small and contempt for little things is the road to the loss of great ones — is characteristic of Euthymius’s spiritual realism (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 9; Price 1991). It is of a piece with the desert’s whole anthropology of the thoughts: that the spiritual life is won or lost in the small, daily, unremarkable acts of obedience and attention, not in the grand gesture. Cyril presents this as a settled theme of Euthymius’s instruction to his monks.

Around these two stand the cluster of virtues Cyril most often puts in Euthymius’s mouth: obedience, without which the cell becomes self-will; charity and hospitality, the duty to receive the stranger and the guest as Christ Himself, which Cyril shows Euthymius practicing as well as preaching, even when the lavra’s stores were thin (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 17, 21; Price 1991; and the food miracles in The Miracles); and discretion or discernment (diakrisis), the queen of the virtues in the desert tradition, the measured judgment that keeps asceticism from excess and zeal from folly. The teaching to receive guests as Christ is the practical face of the charity that, in Cyril’s narrative, the multiplication-of-food wonders are given to vindicate: Euthymius opens the gate and the bread does not fail.

The portrait that results is balanced and recognizably of the desert: severe in the body, severer still in the watch over the thoughts, but governed throughout by humility, charity, and discernment, so that the asceticism serves love and does not consume it. It is this interior discipline — far more than any single feat — that Cyril offers as the true greatness of Euthymius, and as the soil from which the wonders he reports are said to grow.

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Euthymius. In R. M. Price, trans., Cyril of Scythopolis: The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (Cited by the section numbering of Eduard Schwartz, Kyrillos von Skythopolis, TU 49.2; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1939. The love of stillness and the successive withdrawals at §§11–12, 16, 21; the cell and the lavriot pattern at §9; fasting, vigil, silence, and labor at §§9, 21; the annual Lenten withdrawal into the inner desert and return for Palm Sunday at §21 with the inner-desert episodes at §§6, 11; the desert of Rouba and Ziph toward the Dead Sea at §§6, 11; humility and “not despising small things,” obedience, charity/hospitality, and discretion at §§9, 17, 21; death on 20 January 473.)
Flusin, Bernard. Miracle et histoire dans l’œuvre de Cyrille de Scythopolis. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983. (On the topical character of Cyril’s ascetic descriptions and the genre conventions governing the measures of fast and vigil.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Cyril’s theology of the holy man; hesychia and authority; the lavriot rhythm of cell and synaxis.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The lavriot form; the Judean desert geography; the Egyptian background of the Palestinian discipline.)