John the Dwarf

John the Dwarf, known in Greek as Ioannes Kolobos and in Coptic tradition as Abba Ioannes the Short, was one of the most frequently cited of the Egyptian Desert Fathers. Later hagiographical tradition places his birth around 339 in the town of Basta in Lower Egypt, to poor Christian parents. At about the age of eighteen he left home with an elder brother and entered the desert of Scetis (Wadi El Natrun) in the Nitrian region of Egypt. There he became a disciple of Abba Pambo, a leading elder of the first generation of Scetiote monks. After Pambo's death he continued under Abba Ammoes. The monastic settlements of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis in the later fourth century formed the setting of nearly the whole of his adult life until the raids that devastated Scetis near the end of the century.

The Apophthegmata Patrum preserve a substantial body of sayings and anecdotes attached to Abba John, which together portray a monk of small physical stature but of marked spiritual authority. The best-known story concerns obedience: his elder planted a dry stick in the sand and ordered him to water it until it bore fruit. John fetched water from a distant source every day for three years; the stick then put forth leaves and fruit, which the elder offered to the brethren as the fruit of obedience. Other sayings show him struggling with a naturally irascible temper, learning to master anger, practicing unceasing prayer and recitation of the Psalter, and warning against vainglory and against remaining in the world of the imagination. He is depicted as combining extreme humility with a capacity for sharp spiritual diagnosis. Tradition also associates him with the instruction of Arsenius the Great after Arsenius's arrival in Scetis.

John's years in Scetis ended when Berber tribes, often identified as the Mazices, raided and devastated the Nitrian monastic settlements around 395. Like many of the surviving elders he fled eastward and settled as a hermit on Mount Colzim (Jabal al-Qolzum) in the Eastern Desert, in the neighborhood of the cave and monastery of Saint Anthony the Great near the Red Sea. There, according to the received chronology, he died about 405. He left no writings of his own. His memory was transmitted through the alphabetical and systematic collections of the Sayings of the Fathers, through related monastic literature such as the Lausiac History of Palladius, and through the Coptic Synaxarium.

Veneration of John the Dwarf is ancient and is shared by the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox (especially Coptic), and Roman Catholic Churches. He is commemorated on 9 November in the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar, on 17 October in the Roman Martyrology, and on 20 Paopi in the Coptic synaxarium. No later process of formal canonization is recorded; his cult grew from the living tradition of the Egyptian desert and from the liturgical books of the churches of Egypt and the Christian East. The corpus of sayings attributed to him has remained a standard source for Eastern Christian teaching on obedience, humility, and the warfare against the passions.