ON ST. JOHN PALAEOLAURITES,
IN THE DESERT NEAR JERUSALEM.
CommentaryJohn Palaeolaurites, in the desert near Jerusalem (St.)
G. H.
The memory of Saint Chariton Confessor is celebrated among the Greeks on September 28 and 30, whom they hand down to have been held as Master of solitary life in the desert of the holy city: inasmuch as under Constantine the Great Emperor he began a Laura, called by posterity Old from its antiquity. Among the illustrious men of this Laura, Sacred cultus on April 19 who flourished there in great sanctity, was Saint John, surnamed Palaeolaurites from the place of his exercise: whom the Greeks celebrate in the Typicon of Saint Sabas on this April 19: followed by others in their Horologia, and in these inserted Menologies, Genebrard in the Calendar of the Greeks, and Molanus in additions to Usuard. Of him this eulogy is had in the Menology collected by Cardinal Sirlet: On the same day April 19 the Falling-asleep of Saint John Palaeolaurites, who kindled with desire of serving God, leaving the delights of this life, having taken up the cross of Christ, went to the venerable places, and proceeding to the Laura of Blessed Chariton, there the contest of monastic life taken up well and laudably pursued, and rested in peace. Somewhat more fully these things are explained in the Menaea of the Greeks, and April 20, but on April 20, in these words: On the same day of our holy Father John Palaeolaurites. This man from his cradle wounded with love of God, clung to God, and leaving the pleasures of the world and glory and splendor of life, leaving fatherland and household, and having taken up the cross of Christ, came to a foreign and unknown province; imitating Christ, who born on a foreign soil, and in pilgrimage completed his life. And when he had visited the sacred places, he remained in the Laura of Blessed Chariton, and exercised every kind of virtue gloriously, and at last from pilgrim lodgings, migrated to the heavenly, blessed, and eternal tabernacles. The same things are read in Maximus Bishop of Cythera "in the lives of the saints," who in his small Menology reported together with others on April 19. A distich is prefixed in the Menaea to this, so that by the name of Minds the Angels are to be understood.
"Some new gain the minds have found in John Palaeolaurites and rejoice."
In the old Laura finding a new gain,
The angelic throng exults with new joy.
[2] A similar eulogy is read in the Menology of Basil Porphyrogenitus the Emperor, but perhaps ineptly afterward attached by someone to the eulogy of another John, whom to have been a disciple of Saint Gregory the Decapolite and to have died at Constantinople about the year 850, wholly different from Saint John disciple of Saint Gregory the Decapolite we said on the preceding day April 18 from the Life of Saint Joseph the Hymnographer; who lived with the same until death in the said royal city, and translated the sacred bodies of Saints Gregory and John to the church of Saint John Chrysostom, then to another, where he himself afterward lived. We illustrated the Life of Saint Joseph on April 3. But the eulogy in the said Menology is of this kind: reference April 18, John went to a foreign and unknown region, as Christ had been born and conversed among strangers. Then enduring many labors, he left the sacred places, entering the Laura of Blessed Chariton; and exercised himself there in many offices of virtue and piety: and thus having rightly lived in peace, he emigrated to him whom he had always sincerely loved, the God of peace. These same things, but wrongly joined also to the Acts of another John, are had in the New Anthology of Antonio Arcudius on April 18, and in the manuscript Parisian Synaxarium of the Clermont College on this April 19. and again April 19. On which day also Ferrari in the General Catalogue celebrates Saint John monk in Palestine, but in the Notes he confuses everything; asserting that in the old Laura, under the discipline of Saint Gregory the Decapolite, he professed monastic life: whereas the disciple of Saint Gregory completed his life at Thessalonica and Constantinople and neighboring places. As Palaeolaurita John on this day the tables of the Muscovite Kalendar, to be seen at Amsterdam, depict in monastic habit, and in the Ruthenian Kalendar in Possevino is had the name of S. P. John Eutychius, the cause of which surname we do not grasp.
[3] The time in which he lived, and met death in the old Laura, is nowhere expressed. This could have happened still in the fourth century, after that Laura was constructed, or certainly in the following centuries of Christ rather than the ninth, time of his life, in which Saint Gregory the Decapolite and his disciple Saint John lived: for at that time the monasteries of Palestine were almost desolate and destroyed by the Saracens, and so were far from those peaceful times which are indicated above in the eulogy. Thus of twenty monks killed by the Saracens in the Laura of Saint Sabas in the year 797 we treated on March 20, and here and there have said and shall say more about the desolation of the Palestinian monasteries as occasion arises.