The Life
Onuphrius lived in the Egyptian inner desert in the fourth century. We know about him because of one chance encounter. A monk named Paphnutius, from a community in the Thebaid, decided to walk into the deepest desert to find out whether anyone was laboring for the Lord more than he was. He took some bread and water and started walking. After many days, weak from hunger and thirst, he saw something approaching: a wild figure covered head to foot in long white hair, wearing a loincloth of leaves. Paphnutius was terrified and ran. The figure called him by name. They sat down. The figure said: I am Onuphrius. I have lived here sixty years. I have not seen another human being in all that time. Onuphrius told him his story. He had been raised in a monastery near Hermopolis. As a boy he had heard stories of the great desert hermits, and he had decided to imitate them. He left the monastery secretly one night. An angel guided him into the inner desert and to an old hermit’s cave; he served the old hermit for some time, then was led to his own cave further in. There a date palm grew up beside his cell, with twelve branches each bearing fruit a different month of the year. A spring of water came out of the rock. An angel brought him Communion every Saturday and Sunday. He had been there sixty years. He told Paphnutius that the Lord had sent him to bury him. They prayed together through the night. At dawn, Onuphrius died. Paphnutius covered the body with a piece of his own tunic, placed it in a crevice in the rock, and prayed. As he watched, the cave collapsed; the palm tree withered; the spring dried up. He understood: nobody else was meant to live there. He returned to Egypt and told the story.
Onuphrius was raised in the Eratus monastery, near the city of Hermopolis in Upper Egypt. It was a respectable cenobitic community: brothers living together in obedience to an abbot, sharing meals, praying the offices, doing manual labor. The young Onuphrius was a good monk. He kept the rule. He served the brothers. He grew in the basic disciplines of the Christian life. But the elders of the community sometimes told stories of the desert hermits who lived even further in: men who had left the monastery to seek the Lord in complete solitude, men who fasted more severely than any cenobite could fast, men who prayed without ceasing because there was nothing else to do, men whom the angels visited because they had cut themselves off from any human help. Onuphrius found that he could not stop thinking about these stories. He understood, gradually, that they were describing his own vocation. He prayed about it for a long time. One night, having made his decision, he slipped out of the monastery without telling anyone, walked east into the desert, and never came back. He was guided by an angel into the inner desert, served an older anchorite for a time, and was eventually established in his own cave. The cenobitic monastery had been the school. The desert was the actual vocation.
When the angel led Onuphrius to his own cave, the inner desert had nothing in it. There was no food. There was no water. There was no shelter from the sun in the day or the cold at night. Onuphrius had nothing he could grow, nothing he could store, nowhere he could go to find supplies. By all human reckoning he should have starved within a month. But the Lord had something else in mind. A date palm grew up beside his cave. It was not an ordinary palm tree. It had twelve branches, and each branch bore fruit in a different month of the year. So in January one branch was heavy with dates, and in February another, and so on through December, each in turn, none ever empty. Onuphrius had food year round, bountiful and reliable, never spoiled, never lacking. A spring of pure water came out of the rock near his cave. He drank from it. It never dried up. The shade of the palm sheltered him from the noonday heat in summer. As for clothing, he had none, but the Lord caused his hair to grow long enough that it covered his entire body, providing both warmth in the cold and modesty among the angels and animals. He spent sixty years in this place, fed by the palm, watered by the spring, clothed by his own hair. He never went hungry. He never went thirsty. He never went cold. The Lord, having received the gift of his complete withdrawal, gave him completely back the ordinary necessities of life.
Of all the providential gifts that the Lord gave Onuphrius, the most important by far was not the palm or the spring. It was the Eucharist. Onuphrius had been baptized as a child, had been formed in the cenobitic monastery, had received Communion regularly there. He could not bear the thought of going without it for the rest of his life. But the inner desert was utterly empty. There was no priest. There was no liturgy. There was no church. There was nobody to bring him the consecrated bread and wine. The Lord, who had received his complete withdrawal, gave him a complete answer. Every Saturday morning an angel came to the cave bringing the Holy Mysteries. Every Sunday morning the angel came again. Onuphrius received Communion twice a week, every week, for sixty years, by the hand of an angel. When Paphnutius asked him about it, he simply confirmed it: yes, the angel brings me Communion every Saturday and every Sunday, exactly as I would receive it in any monastery. Paphnutius was not surprised by this; he had heard similar things from other hermits. After his visit to Onuphrius he visited a small community of four young anchorites and saw the angel deliver Communion there with his own eyes. The patristic tradition has consistently held that the Lord does not abandon his children to sacramental isolation. Where the institutional Church cannot reach, He sends his angels.
Paphnutius had not known he was being sent for any particular reason. He had simply felt called to walk into the inner desert to learn from anyone he might find there. He had no idea that on the day he found Onuphrius, the saint was about to die. Onuphrius told him directly: the Lord has sent you here so that you might bury my body. Today I shall finish my earthly course and depart to my Christ, to live in eternal rest. They spent the day in spiritual conversation. As the sun set, a loaf of white bread and a vessel of water appeared between them. They ate. They prayed through the night. At dawn, Paphnutius noticed that the saint’s face had begun to shine with a strange light. Onuphrius said his final words: Into Thy hands, my God, I commend my spirit. He died. Paphnutius wept. The hagiographical tradition records that he saw the saint’s soul ascend in the form of a dove. He tried to dig a grave but the rock was too hard; he tore a piece off his own tunic, wrapped the body in it, and placed it in a cleft of the rock. Two lions, the tradition says, came out of the desert and helped him cover the body with stones. Then he prayed that he might be allowed to remain in that place to live as Onuphrius had lived. Suddenly the cave fell in. The palm tree withered. The spring dried up. The Lord made it clear: the place was not to be inhabited again. Paphnutius understood. He returned to Egypt. He told everyone what he had seen. Without his account, the world would have known nothing about this man.
When Paphnutius asked Onuphrius about his life, the hermit told him about the palm tree and the spring and the angelic Communion. Then he said something that the tradition has remembered with particular care: but my real food and drink, my real sustenance, is the sweet word of God. The palm and the spring kept his body alive, yes; but they were not the source of his life. The source of his life was the continuous interior conversation with the Lord that filled his sixty years in the desert. He prayed without ceasing. He read the Scriptures in his memory. He listened for the voice of the Lord. He fed on the divine words. The bodily food was incidental. The real meal was the Word, who became flesh and dwelt among us, and who continues to dwell in those who give themselves completely to Him. This is the foundational teaching of the entire patristic eremitic tradition: that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God; that the soul has its own food which is more substantial than any bread; that the genuine eremite has discovered this food and learned to feed on it; and that everyone who goes hungry for it can begin to receive it, in any vocation, by the simple practice of attending to the divine word in Scripture and prayer.
Saint Onuphrius is one of the most famous saints in the Eastern Christian tradition. He has churches named after him from Egypt to Russia. His icon is everywhere. Pilgrims visit shrines of him in Cyprus and Greece and Italy and Poland. Yet for sixty years he was completely unknown. He had no disciples, no community, no fame, no public ministry. He existed in an inner desert that no one visited. If Paphnutius had not happened to walk into that desert on the very last day of his life, no human being would ever have known he existed. He would have been, from the perspective of the visible Christian community, a man who never lived. And yet he was, in the actual reality before the Lord, one of the most luminous saints of his entire generation. This is the patristic doctrine of hidden saints. There are saints we do not know about. There are saints whose names appear in no calendar, whose lives are recorded in no hagiography, whose feasts are celebrated by no church. They lived their lives in obscurity. They prayed in silence. They struggled in solitude. They were known to the Lord and the angels and the demons they fought, and to no one else. Onuphrius would have been such a saint had Paphnutius not arrived. Many others, the tradition holds, are still such saints, hidden across the world today. The visible communion of saints of the Orthodox Church is a portion only of the total communion of those whom the Lord has glorified.
After Paphnutius returned to his community in the Thebaid, he reported everything he had seen. The brothers wrote down his account in detail and placed it in the church for anyone to read. From there the story of Saint Onuphrius spread. It traveled into Greek hagiographical collections in the Byzantine Empire. It traveled into Coptic and Arabic versions in the Egyptian and Levantine churches. It traveled west into Latin translations and was read by Western monks and laypeople for the next thousand years. By the medieval period, Onuphrius was venerated across the entire Christian world. He had churches named after him in Russia (where he is celebrated as a particular patron of weavers) and in Poland (where the great monastery of Jableczna in eastern Poland was dedicated to him from the fifteenth century). He had churches in Italy (Sant’Onofrio in Rome, on the Janiculan Hill) and in southern France. He was a co-patron of the city of Palermo in Sicily from 1650. His feast on June 12 was kept across the entire ancient Church, East and West. He never had a single disciple in his lifetime. After his death he became, through the providential transmission of Paphnutius, one of the most beloved teachers of Christian solitude that the world has ever known.