The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Dorotheos of Gaza
died 565Patristic
A rich man's son who loved books so much he forgot to eat, then wrote the gentlest instructions in the whole monastic tradition.
Summary
- Lived died 565.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
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).
What was happening while he lived1 moments · AD 313–600
- c. 529Benedict settles at Monte CassinoOn a hilltop between Rome and Naples he founded the monastery where he wrote his Rule, a short, humane handbook of prayer, work, study, and stability. It became the pattern for Western monasticism.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Dorotheos of Gaza at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Wrote gentle talks on humility that monasteries have read aloud at meals ever since.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.