Paul the Simple

Paul the Simple (Paulus Simplex; in Greek, Paulos ho Haplos) was a fourth-century Egyptian hermit counted among the Desert Fathers and remembered as a disciple of Anthony the Great. He is not to be confused with Paul of Thebes, the so-called first hermit, a separate figure of the same era. The chief ancient narrative of his life is chapter 22 of the Lausiac History of Palladius of Galatia, composed in the early fifth century from stories Palladius had gathered in Egypt; further anecdotes appear in the alphabetical and systematic collections of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum). He is styled “the Simple” as a title of honor, denoting holy innocence, lack of worldly craft, and single-hearted obedience rather than deficiency of mind. He belonged to the first generations of organized Egyptian monasticism, when Anthony’s eremitical example was drawing peasants as well as educated men into the wilderness of the Nile valley and the Eastern Desert. He held no episcopal or patriarchal office and belonged to no later named religious order; he lived as a hermit in Anthony’s circle.

Palladius presents Paul as a rustic farmer of humble origin, illiterate and trained only in field labor. In later adulthood—Palladius says he was about sixty—he came home from work and found his wife in adultery. He did not take vengeance. He left the house, declaring that he would not remain, and went into the desert seeking Anthony. When he found the hermit he asked to be made a monk. Anthony, judging him too old and too unformed for the austerities of the solitary life, refused him and told him to return home. Paul would not go. He remained outside Anthony’s cell for days without food. Anthony at last admitted him, but only after subjecting him to a series of apparently pointless tests of obedience: weaving palm-leaf baskets and then unweaving them, drawing water and pouring it away, and similar tasks meant to break self-will. Paul performed them without argument or visible resentment. The same tradition holds that he advanced with unusual speed. Anthony is reported to have said that if a man were willing, he could in a short time reach the measure of Paul the Simple—an acknowledgment that the unlettered novice had acquired a purity of heart that years of ascetic practice had not automatically conferred.

Later desert lore attributed to Paul gifts of discernment, authority over demons, and healing of the possessed. In one widely repeated episode he is said to have stood at the liturgy and perceived that a certain monk was inwardly darkened by a demon; after the man confessed and did penance, Paul saw the demon depart. Other stories have Anthony sending him to deliver the possessed, the point of the tale being that Paul’s unadorned obedience accomplished what more celebrated ascetics had not. These narratives belong to the hagiographical genre of the Egyptian desert. They cannot be treated as datable historical reportage, but they fixed his reputation in Egypt, Palestine, and the later monastic literature of East and West as the type of the simple monk whose lack of sophistication was itself a spiritual attainment. He spent the rest of his life as a hermit in Egypt, associated with Anthony’s disciples. Ancient texts do not give a precise year of death; later martyrologies and modern notices often place it approximately in the earlier fourth century (commonly cited as about 339), which remains traditional rather than documented.

Veneration of Paul the Simple is liturgical and ancient, not the result of a medieval papal canonization or beatification process. He is entered on 7 March in the Roman Martyrology and in the calendars of the Eastern Orthodox Churches; Coptic tradition likewise numbers him among the saints of the Egyptian desert. He lived and died well before the Council of Chalcedon, and so is claimed by the undivided memory of the Church of Alexandria as well as by later Catholic and Orthodox usage. He is not widely invoked as patron of particular places, trades, illnesses, or social groups; his cult has remained that of an exemplar rather than a specialist intercessor. What the sources preserve is a consistent moral portrait: a married Egyptian peasant who, after discovering his wife’s adultery, abandoned household life without violence, submitted to a famous hermit, and became, in the judgment of that hermit and of later monastic compilers, a model of obedience and evangelical simplicity.