Dorotheos of Gaza

Dorotheos was born about 505, probably at Antioch, into a wealthy family, and given the best education available. He says himself that he came to love books so much that he lost track of what he was eating and had to hire a servant to remind him. Somewhere around 525 he entered the monastery of Abba Seridos near Gaza, in the strip of Palestine that had become one of the great centers of the monastic life. Two recluses lived there in sealed cells: Barsanuphius, called the Great Old Man, and John, called the Other Old Man. Neither received visitors. They answered questions in writing, through Seridos, and hundreds of those letters survive. Dorotheos was their disciple, and a good part of the correspondence is his — a young monk asking, in embarrassing detail, why he is irritated, why he is proud, why obedience is so hard. He was put in charge of the guest house and then the monastery infirmary, and later founded a monastery of his own near Gaza, where he taught. His Discourses and Sayings — seventeen instructions given to his monks — became one of the most widely read spiritual books in Christian history. They are gentle, conversational, and unsparing. He talks about humility, about not trusting your own judgment, about cutting off your own will in small things so that it does not rule you in large ones, about how quarrels begin over nothing and grow because nobody will speak first. His best-known image is a circle. God is the center. Human beings live on the circumference, and the lines from each of them run in to God. "The closer they are to God, the closer they become to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God." Distance from God and distance from your neighbor are the same distance measured twice. The Discourses were read aloud at meals in monasteries East and West for centuries, translated into Latin, Slavonic, Arabic and Georgian. Ignatius of Loyola recommended them. They remain standard reading in Orthodox monasteries and are as plain a book on getting along with difficult people as the ancient church produced. He died sometime after 565. Sources: Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings, translated by Eric P. Wheeler; Barsanuphius and John, Letters, translated by John Chryssavgis; Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City (1966).