Barsanuphius

Barsanuphius, known in Eastern Christian tradition as Barsanuphius the Great and in many Western sources as Barsanuphius of Gaza or Barsanuphius of Palestine, was a Christian hermit of Egyptian birth who spent his mature years as a recluse in southern Palestine in the sixth century. Contemporary and near-contemporary witnesses do not record the year or place of his birth, nor the names of his parents. What they do attest is that he came from Egypt and that he eventually enclosed himself in a cell belonging to the monastery governed by Abba Seridos (also called Seridus) at Thawatha, a settlement near Gaza. From that cell he is said to have refused almost all face-to-face contact for a great many years, receiving questions and sending answers only through the abbot or, later, through other trusted intermediaries. His way of life belonged to the later Palestinian development of the desert tradition, in which extreme enclosure coexisted with a densely populated monastic landscape and with pastoral care of both monks and laity.

The principal monument of his life is the large corpus of letters exchanged by Barsanuphius and his fellow recluse John, called John the Prophet, with monks of Seridos’s house and with correspondents outside it. Several hundred of these letters survive in Greek. They answer concrete questions about prayer, night vigils, diet, manual work, illness, demonic temptation, the treatment of servants, the reception of visitors, and the attitude a monk should take toward doctrinal controversy. Barsanuphius, often styled the Great Old Man, writes at greater length and with a more commanding spiritual authority than John, the Other Old Man. Among those formed in this circle was Dorotheus of Gaza, whose own instructions later became a classic of Byzantine monasticism. The letters show Barsanuphius insisting on humility, the cutting off of self-will, and fidelity to the evangelical commandments rather than on elaborate metaphysical speculation.

The correspondence can be dated to the reign of the emperor Justinian I and reflects the tensions that ran through Palestinian monasticism in the 530s and 540s, including the Origenist controversy. Barsanuphius discouraged curiosity about the fate of the damned, the nature of the resurrection body, and other disputed points, urging his disciples to keep to the simplicity of the faith as the Church had received it. He remained in communion with the Chalcedonian imperial church. After the death of Abbot Seridos the monastery continued under successors; John died while Barsanuphius was still living, and the Great Old Man then entered a final period of silence. No contemporary obituary fixes the year of his death. Medieval Western martyrologies and modern reference works have often assigned it to about 540, whereas some Eastern synaxaria give 563. Scholarly study of the letters tends to place his last years in the 540s. He held no episcopal or patriarchal office.

Liturgical veneration of Barsanuphius is ancient in the Byzantine East, where he is commemorated with John the Prophet on 6 February. The Roman Martyrology lists him on 11 April as an anchoret at Gaza in Palestine. His relics have been claimed by more than one later shrine, but the original place of burial is not securely documented. The letters, transmitted in Greek and in Oriental versions, were read in Orthodox monasteries through the Middle Ages and have been the object of critical editions and translations in modern times. They remain a primary source for the spirituality of sixth-century Gaza and for the history of spiritual direction in Eastern Christianity.