The Paradise of the Holy Fathers, Vol. 1: Lives of the Desert Fathers

xn

Jntrobuctfon

3ntrotwctton j. ipallafcius, bte Xtfe anfc travels

THE principal facts of the life of Palladius we owe to the famous biographer of the monks himself, and nearly all of them are to be found in the History of the Acts of the Holy Fathers, which he dedicated to his patron Lausus, and en titled Paradise. He was born, probably in Galatia (see Vol. I, p. 170), about A.D. 364, but of his family, and of his boyhood and early manhood nothing is known. He appears to have em braced the ascetic life, to a greater or lesser degree, when he was about twenty years of age.

Soon after Palladius became a monk, he went and lived with the "blessed priest Innocent" on the Mount of Olives for a period of three years (386-388). Innocent had formerly been a court official "in the kingdom of the Emperor Constantine," and he had a son, but he "withdrew himself from marriage" (Vol. I, p. 184) and became a monk. Palladius describes Inno cent as a man of most merciful disposition, and he tells us that he used to steal things from the brethren in order to give them to the poor and needy; all the same he considered him to be a man "lacking in sense." Innocent possessed a small martyrium in which he kept a blessed [relic] of St. John the Bap tist, and by means of this he cast out from a young woman a devil which vexed her exceedingly, and caused such writhing and contortions of her body that "when she spat the spittle " fell on her side," instead of away from her.

When Palladius was about twenty-three or twenty-four years of age he visited Alexandria for the first time; this event took place, as he himself tells us (Vol. I, p. 89), in the second Con sulate of the Emperor Theodosius the Great, i.e., in 388. Here he met Isidore, the secretary of the hospital which was sup ported by the Church of Alexandria, who had lived as a monk in Nitria, and was at that time about seventy years of age. Isidore was a wealthy man, and gave large alms to the poor and needy (Vol. I, p. 90), but he fared hardly. He never wore a linen shirt, or put a covering on his head; he never ate meat, never partook of a full meal, seated comfortably at a table, and never washed, yet his body was strong, sound and healthy. With him Palladius lived for a short time, but finding that he re quired "not the Word only but also the labour of the body, "and severe physical exercises, even like the young unbroken…