Baradates

Baradates (also written Baradatus) was a Christian hermit of fifth-century Syria, known almost entirely from the contemporary portrait drawn by Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, in chapter 27 of the Historia Religiosa (Religious History), composed while the hermit was still alive, and from a later imperial consultation connected with the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon. He belonged to the dense world of Syrian anchorites in the countryside of Cyrrhestica, the region around Cyrrhus in the Roman East. No reliable source records his parentage, the town of his birth, or an exact year of birth; the historical record begins with his adult eremitical life. Theodoret presents him as a local figure of the diocese rather than as a wanderer from elsewhere, which is the basis for placing both his origin and his death in Syria.

Theodoret describes an asceticism of unusual physical constraint. Baradates first lived in a small hut and then had himself enclosed in a wooden crate or cage so narrow that he could neither stand upright nor stretch out at full length, remaining crouched, and so open that sun, rain, and cold reached him without shelter. He wore a rough garment of skins or haircloth. Theodoret, acting as bishop, later judged this confinement a danger to life rather than a necessary work of piety and persuaded the hermit to accept a slightly less cramped dwelling. Baradates complied but did not abandon fasting, vigil, and poverty. Despite the severity of his enclosure he received visitors, and Theodoret praises both his composure and a clarity in speaking of Christian doctrine that the bishop found striking in a solitary of little formal schooling.

In the Christological disputes of the mid-fifth century Baradates was counted on the side of the doctrine defined at Chalcedon in 451. After the murder of Proterius of Alexandria and the installation of Timothy II Aelurus, the emperor Leo I circulated an inquiry, in the period around 457–458, not only to metropolitans but also to the most renowned Syrian monks, among them Symeon the Stylite, James the Solitary, and Baradates, asking their judgment on the council and on the Alexandrian schism. Baradates’ reply upheld the Chalcedonian definition and the Tome of Pope Leo I and rejected the anti-Chalcedonian claim. That correspondence is the last firmly dated notice of him. Later martyrological and encyclopedic tradition, including the Catholic Encyclopedia, states that he died about 460; the year is conventional rather than documented by a contemporary obituary, and no burial place is recorded.

He was entered in the Roman Martyrology on 22 February as a hermit of Syria remembered for holiness. There was no papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type; veneration rests on local reputation and on the martyrology. No source assigns him a spouse, children, a named religious order (he was an independent anchorite, not a member of a later congregation), a patriarchal or papal office, or a list of patronages. His importance for history is twofold: Theodoret’s chapter is a primary witness to the extreme forms of Syrian enclosure, and the hermit’s brief role as an imperial consultor shows how lay monastic reputations were drawn into the reception of Chalcedon in the East.