Gerasimus of the Jordan

Gerasimus of the Jordan was a fifth-century Christian monk and abbot, venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. Hagiographical tradition holds that he was a native of Lycia in Asia Minor. He first took up the monastic life in the Thebaid of Egypt, among the desert ascetics, and later went to Palestine in the mid-fifth century, attaching himself to the monastic movement then flourishing in the Judean wilderness and the Jordan valley.

After the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Gerasimus is reported to have inclined at first toward those who rejected the council’s Christological definition. The Palestinian abbot Euthymius the Great is credited, in the account of Cyril of Scythopolis, with persuading him to accept the Chalcedonian settlement, after which Gerasimus remained in communion with the imperial church. Around the middle of the century he established a laura—a cluster of hermit cells grouped around a central church and coenobium—in the wilderness of the Jordan, not far from the river and north of the Dead Sea. The community followed a demanding rule: for five days of the week the monks remained in solitude in their cells, occupied with prayer and handicrafts and living on a sparse diet of bread, dates, and water; on Saturday and Sunday they assembled for the Divine Liturgy and a common meal, sleeping in the monastery rather than in their cells.

The episode most closely attached to his memory is the story of the lion, preserved in the early seventh-century Spiritual Meadow of John Moschus. A lion came to the monastery with a thorn in its paw; Gerasimus extracted the thorn and dressed the wound. The animal remained with the monks and was given the task of guarding the donkey that carried water from the Jordan. When traders stole the donkey, the lion was suspected of having eaten it and was made to do the donkey’s work. Later the lion found the traders with the stolen beast and brought them back to the laura. The lion, called Jordanes in the narrative, stayed with Gerasimus until the abbot’s death and, according to the tale, then lay down on his grave and died of grief. The story later became intertwined in popular imagination with similar legends told of Saint Jerome.

Gerasimus died in 475 at the laura he had founded and was buried there. Palestinian monastic tradition kept his memory, and a monastery dedicated to him, often identified with Deir Hajla (Deir Hijleh) near Jericho, still exists, though the original fifth-century laura lay closer to the Jordan and did not survive intact through later centuries of invasion and abandonment. He is remembered as one of the organizers of Jordan-valley monasticism and as a figure linking the Egyptian desert tradition with the lavriote life of Palestine.