Venerable Barsanuphius and John the Prophet

Barsanuphius and John lived in the first half of the sixth century at a monastery near Gaza, in Palestine, run by an abbot named Seridos. They are almost always named together, because their surviving work is a single collection and because they lived the same way.

Barsanuphius was an Egyptian by birth. He came to Palestine as a young man and by about 525 had shut himself in a cell beside the monastery. He is called the Great Old Man. He never came out. John, called the Other Old Man and given the title Prophet for his gift of counsel, arrived some years later and took a cell nearby, on the same terms. Both were enclosed for decades. Barsanuphius is thought to have died about 540 and John shortly after; the dating is approximate.

They saw practically nobody. Everything went through Abbot Seridos, who carried questions in and answers out in writing. That arrangement is the reason we have them.

About eight hundred and fifty of their letters survive, preserved in Greek. They are answers, and the questions are quoted or summarised with them, so the collection reads as a continuous correspondence between two hidden men and the whole range of people who wrote to them: monks in the community, hermits, the abbot himself, bishops, and lay people in the towns, married men, farmers, a soldier, people with lawsuits, people who were ill, people who were bereaved, people who could not stop thinking about something.

The counsel is astonishingly practical and almost never grand. Should I fast more? No, you are proud and tired; eat. Should I leave my job? What is your motive? A brother has wronged me and I cannot let it go, pray for him by name until you can. I am afraid of dying. I want to see visions. I am in debt. I cannot pray. Again and again the old men refuse to give a rule and instead ask a question back, or tell the correspondent to bear his own weakness patiently, or say plainly that the thing he is asking about is not his business.

Barsanuphius often writes with striking warmth and takes the burden on himself, 'I bear half of it with you', and just as often refuses to be flattered. Both insist on the same core: cut off your own will, do not judge your brother, do not measure yourself against anyone, keep asking for mercy.

Dorotheus of Gaza, whose Discourses became one of the most widely read spiritual books in the Eastern church, was formed in that monastery and under those two men, and much of what he later taught is theirs.

The Eastern Orthodox church honours them both. Their correspondence has been translated into modern languages only recently, and it has been called the fullest surviving record of ancient Christian spiritual direction in actual practice.

Sources: Barsanuphius and John, Letters (English translation by John Chryssavgis, Fathers of the Church, volumes 113–114); Dorotheus of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings (Cistercian Studies 33); Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, book 4 (for the contemporary notice of Barsanuphius).