Paul of Thebes

Paul of Thebes, also known as Paul the First Hermit or Paul the Anchorite, is venerated in Christian tradition as the earliest Christian hermit. The principal source for his life is the Vita Pauli primi eremitae, composed in Latin by Saint Jerome around 374 or 375, reportedly on the basis of Egyptian monastic tradition. According to Jerome, Paul was born in the Thebaid of Egypt to a prosperous Christian household in the early third century. Orphaned while still young, he was well educated in both Greek and Egyptian letters. During the persecutions associated with the emperors Decius and Valerian in the mid-third century, a relative by marriage sought to seize Paul's inheritance by threatening to denounce him as a Christian. At about the age of sixteen Paul fled into the desert, where he discovered a remote cave beside a spring and a palm tree. He made that place his dwelling for the remainder of his life, clothing himself in garments woven from palm leaves and living on fruit of the palm and, later, on bread said to have been brought daily by a raven.

Jerome presents Paul's long solitude as the prototype of the eremitical life, deliberately placing it earlier than the withdrawal of Anthony the Great, whose biography by Athanasius of Alexandria had already become famous. For decades Paul remained unknown to other monks. Toward the close of his life, according to the vita, Anthony, then himself advanced in years, received a revelation that a hermit holier than he still lived in the inner desert. After a journey marked by encounters with a centaur and a satyr—details that give the narrative a strongly literary character—Anthony found Paul. The two men greeted one another by name, conversed on the state of the world and the Church, and shared the loaf which the raven that day brought whole instead of in the usual half. Paul, aware that death was near, asked Anthony to fetch the cloak that Athanasius had given Anthony, so that Paul's body might be wrapped in it for burial.

Anthony departed and returned to find Paul dead, kneeling as if in prayer. Jerome relates that two lions approached and, with their paws, excavated a grave in which Anthony laid the body. Anthony took away the palm-leaf tunic, which he thereafter wore on the solemnities of Easter and Pentecost. Traditional chronology, following Jerome's statement that Paul died at the age of one hundred and thirteen, places the death around the year 341. The historical existence of Paul as an individual distinct from later legendary elaboration has been debated; Athanasius does not mention him, and some modern scholars have regarded Jerome's account as a partly fictional counterpart to the Life of Anthony. Nevertheless, the figure of Paul as proto-hermit was accepted in both Eastern and Western monastic literature, and his story was widely copied, translated, and illustrated.

Devotion to Paul took institutional form in Egypt at the site identified as his cave in the Eastern Desert, near the Red Sea and not far from the monastery of Saint Anthony. The Monastery of Saint Paul the Anchorite (Deir Anba Bula) became a major Coptic Orthodox house and is still inhabited. In the Latin West his feast was assigned to 15 January; he is likewise commemorated on that date in the Byzantine calendar, and in the Coptic Church on 2 Amshir. In the thirteenth century the Order of Saint Paul the First Hermit, known as the Pauline Fathers, was founded in Hungary under his patronage. Relics associated with the saint have been claimed at the Egyptian monastery and, in later medieval tradition, in various European churches. He is commemorated as a model of radical withdrawal, poverty, and perseverance in prayer, and he is often depicted in art with a palm tree, a raven, and two lions, or wearing a garment of palm leaves.