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Biography

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Saint Auxentius of Bithynia was a Christian hermit of the fifth century, venerated in both the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The principal source for his career is a Greek Life written by a disciple, later excerpted in Byzantine synaxaria and reflected in the Roman Martyrology; there is no independent secular dossier. According to this tradition he was a native of Syria, and some accounts add that he was of Persian ancestry. In early adulthood he served as a soldier in the imperial guard at Constantinople under the emperor Theodosius II. While still in the army he was already noted for fasting, almsgiving, and an austere manner of life. At a date that cannot be fixed with precision he left military service in order to embrace the eremitical life.

He eventually settled on Mount Oxia, also called Skopa, a height in Bithynia a short distance from Chalcedon on the Asian shore of the Bosporus. The mountain thereafter took his name and was known as Mount Auxentius. There he occupied a cell, practiced prolonged prayer, vigils, and bodily austerities, and gradually attracted disciples who formed a loosely organized monastic colony around him. Pilgrims sought him for spiritual counsel and for healing. The hagiographical sources ascribe to him numerous miracles; these cannot be independently verified, but they explain the early growth of his cult. He was regarded as a firm opponent of the teaching of Eutyches and as a defender of the doctrine of two natures in the one person of Christ, the teaching defined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

When that council assembled, Auxentius’s reputation for orthodoxy led the imperial authorities to summon him from his mountain. The Life reports that he was unwilling to abandon his solitude, that he made a confession of Chalcedonian faith before those sent to examine him or before representatives of the council, and that he then returned to his hermitage. He is also said to have been consulted by members of the court in the reigns of the emperors Marcian and Leo I. In the years after the council he continued to instruct monks and lay visitors and to warn against residual Monophysite and other heterodox opinions in Bithynia. The precise chronology of these later years is not recoverable from sources independent of the saint’s Life.

Auxentius died on his mountain. The date traditionally assigned to his death is 14 February 473, which is also his feast day in the Roman Martyrology and in the Byzantine calendar. He was buried at the site of his hermitage. In subsequent Byzantine centuries Mount Auxentius remained an important monastic centre, with several monasteries standing on its slopes into the later Middle Ages. Because the only connected narrative of his career is hagiographical, many details of his birth, his military service, and the wonders attributed to him remain uncertain. What can be affirmed with reasonable confidence is that a Syrian-born ascetic of this name lived as a hermit near Chalcedon in the mid-fifth century, was associated with the Chalcedonian cause, and was honoured as a saint from an early date. He was never bishop of Rome or patriarch of any autocephalous see, and he belonged to no later named religious order.

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