Elder Arsenios the Companion

Arsenios the Cave-dweller (Spelaiotis), St. Joseph’s lifelong fellow-struggler: the older monk who placed himself in obedience under the younger Joseph, shared nearly four decades of the harshest desert asceticism at his side, served the brotherhood in its material needs, and outlived his elder by four years, dying in 1963.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite

The Fellow-Struggler

Almost every account of St. Joseph the Hesychast is at the same time an account of two men, for Joseph is inseparable in the tradition from Arsenios, called the Cave-dweller (Greek Spelaiotis), his companion for nearly the whole of his monastic life (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, Vatopaidi, 1999, on Arsenios as Joseph’s lifelong synergos). The Greek word the sources use — synergos, “fellow-worker” or co-struggler — captures the relationship exactly: not master and disciple in the ordinary sense, nor equals simply, but two men bound together in a single ascetic labor, of whom one led and the other followed, for close to forty years.

The pairing is unusual and is one of the distinctive marks of Joseph’s story. Where the hesychast tradition typically frames the ascetic life as an elder with his disciples, Joseph’s earliest and closest bond was with a companion of his own generation who became, in effect, his first and most faithful disciple while remaining his constant partner in hardship (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013, on the two men’s shared life).

The Older Man Who Obeyed the Younger

The most striking feature of the relationship, and the one the tradition dwells on, is its inversion of the natural order of seniority. Arsenios was the older man in years, yet he recognized in the younger Frangiskos–Joseph the greater gift for the inner life and the stronger spiritual will, and he freely submitted himself to Joseph’s spiritual leadership, giving him the obedience that Joseph in turn required of all who joined him (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on Arsenios’s submission to the younger Joseph). The sources present this as a model of the humility that the hesychast tradition prizes above natural precedence: Arsenios’s willingness to be led by a younger man is read as itself a spiritual attainment, and as the ground on which the whole common life was built (ibid.; on the theology of obedience, see Spiritual Fatherhood and Obedience).

The two men complemented one another. The tradition portrays Joseph as the more intense and interior — the one who pressed furthest into prayer and bore the sharpest spiritual warfare — and Arsenios as the steadier and more outwardly capable, who took on much of the physical burden of the brotherhood’s survival: the carrying of water and supplies up the cliffs, the manual labor, the practical service of the community, so that Joseph could give himself to prayer and to the guidance of the disciples (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on Arsenios’s practical service; Ephraim of Arizona, My Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 2013). This division of labor did not make Arsenios a mere servant; he was himself a genuine ascetic and man of prayer, remembered in the tradition as a holy elder in his own right, but one who found his particular sanctity in faithful companionship and self-effacing service (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999).

Nearly Forty Years in the Desert

Arsenios shared with Joseph the whole itinerary of the brotherhood through the Athonite desert — Little St. Anne’s, the caves and cells of Katounakia, and at last New Skete — and the whole severity of its life: the extreme poverty, the fasting, the night-long vigils, the illnesses borne without medicine (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the two men’s shared hardships across the decades; see The Cave Life at Little St. Anne’s and Katounakia). Where the sources describe the trials of the desert, they describe them as trials the two men underwent together; where they describe the graces, Arsenios is present as witness and sharer.

Because Arsenios’s life is known almost entirely through the same biography that transmits Joseph’s, and because that biography is a work of veneration written by a disciple, the particulars of Arsenios’s own experience are attested at the same devotional remove as the rest of the tradition, and are reported here on that footing (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999; on the character of the sources, see The Sources for His Life). What is clear is his structural place in the story: he is the constant human presence beside Joseph from the early search (see The Search for a Living Elder) to the end.

After Joseph

St. Joseph reposed on 15/28 August 1959, on the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on the date of Joseph’s repose; see Glorification 2020). Arsenios outlived his companion, dying in 1963, four years later, having spent those final years among the disciples who had been formed in the common life (Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder Joseph the Hesychast, 1999, on Arsenios’s death after Joseph). In the memory of the brotherhood the two men are held together — the elder of prayer and the fellow-struggler who made his life of prayer possible — and Arsenios is venerated within the tradition as a holy companion of the saint, though it is Joseph alone who was formally glorified by the Church in 2020 (on the glorification, see Glorification 2020).

Arsenios’s importance is thus twofold. Practically, he made Joseph’s contemplative life materially possible, absorbing the burdens that would otherwise have broken the silence. Spiritually, he embodies in his own person the central lesson of Joseph’s teaching — that obedience and humble self-forgetfulness, even of an older man to a younger, are the soil in which prayer grows — and so stands not merely beside the tradition but within it, as one of its first and clearest examples.

See Also

References

  • Joseph of Vatopaidi, Elder. Elder Joseph the Hesychast: Struggles, Experiences, Teachings. Mount Athos: The Great and Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1999. (Arsenios as Joseph’s lifelong synergos; his submission to the younger Joseph; his practical service; the shared desert life; his death in 1963.)
  • Ephraim of Philotheou (of Arizona), Elder. My Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 2013. (The daily companionship of Joseph and Arsenios as remembered by a disciple.)