ON SAINT JOHN THE ASCETIC OF THE MONASTERY AT RUFINIANUM.
CommentaryJohn the Ascetic of the monastery at Rufinianum (S.)
Well known is the city of Chalcedon on the Bosporus, opposite Byzantium or Constantinople, in which the fourth Ecumenical Council was celebrated in the year 451. In its suburb a pseudo-synod had long before been held against Saint John Chrysostom: concerning which Sozomen, in book 8 of his Ecclesiastical History, chapter 17, adds the following: At The Oak is a suburb of Chalcedon, which takes its name from the Consular Rufinus: in which there is both a palace and a spacious church, which Rufinus himself built in honor of the Apostles Peter and Paul, and is called by them the Apostoleum. A monastery adjoining it was founded by the same Rufinus, who had come from Rome, and there he lived until death and was buried, as the manuscript Acts of Saint Hypatius, to be illustrated on the seventeenth of June, relate. But Saint Hypatius later restored it and reestablished in it the discipline that had lapsed, whence it is called the Monastery of Saint Hypatius at Rufinianum in the Life of Saint Auxentius the Archimandrite, which we published on the fourteenth of February, and who, as is related in numbers 36 and 39, was often in that monastery and was renowned for miracles. In that place lived Saint John, whom the Greek Menaea and Maximus Bishop of Cythera celebrate on the sixteenth of March in these words: Saint John, who at Rufianae or Rufinianum, ended his life in peace. The Menaea add this couplet:
We honor, John, your departure, Which should rather be called an arrival to God.
The play is on the words departure and arrival, which can be understood of the transit from this life to the next, or certainly of the journey from the city of Constantinople and his departure from the honors which he could have had there, to the retreat and contemplation of heavenly and divine things in the Monastery of Saint Hypatius at Rufinianum, where we believe he lived among ascetics and contemplatives.