The Lives of the Saints, Volume 1 (of 16)

S. John Chrysostom, in Matt., hom. VIII. The above account of the life of the monks in Egypt is by the eloquent pen of the Count de Montalembert.

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Rabbulus was afterwards consecrated Bishop of Edessa.

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Bollandus gives two lives; one is authentic, the other is not. The first states that he lived at Constantinople, from which he escaped to Gomon, threescore furlongs from the city, by water. The second, mistaking new Rome for old Rome, makes him voyage from Italy to Bithynia.

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S. Eucher, De laude Eremi, p. 342.

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So far Montalembert's Monks of the West, Vol. I., Book III.

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There is not space to give an account of S. Fursey's vision, which seems to have been the original of Dante's Divina Commedia.

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Vita, ex duobus veteribus MSS., Bolland. II. p. 83

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He is said to have been born at Coma, near Heracleia, in Middle Egypt, A. D. 251.

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Seemingly the Greek language and literature.

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a. d. 301. Galerius Valerius Maximinus (his real name was Daza) had been a shepherd-lad in Illyria, like his uncle Galerius Valerius Maximianus; and rose, like him, through the various grades of the army to be co-Emperor of Rome, over Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor; a furious persecutor of the Christians, and a brutal and profligate tyrant. Such were the "kings of the world" from whom those old monks fled.

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The lonely alluvial flats at the mouths of the Nile. "Below the cliffs, beside the sea," as one describes them.

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Now the monastery of Deir Antonios, over the Wady el Arabah, between the Nile and the Red Sea, where Antony's monks endure to this day.

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Meletius, Bishop of Lycopolis, was the author of an obscure schism calling itself the "Church of the Martyrs," which refused to communicate with the rest of the Eastern Church.

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Arius (whose most famous and successful opponent was Athanasius, the writer of this biography) maintained that the Son of God was not co-equal and co-eternal with the Father, but created by Him out of nothing, and before the world. His opinions were condemned in the famous Council of Nicæa, a. d. 325.

69

I.e. those were still heathens.

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Probably that of a. d. 341, when Gregory of Cappadocia, nominated by the Arian Bishops, who had assembled at the Council of Antioch, expelled Athanasius from the see of Alexandria, and great violence was committed by his followers and by Philagrius the Prefect. Athanasius meanwhile fled to Rome.

71

I.e. celebrated there their own Communion.

72

Evidently the primæval custom of embalming the dead, and keeping mummies in the house, still lingered among the Egyptians.

73

Euseb. Hist. Eccl., lib. II. c. 25.

74

Euseb. lib. II. c. 25.

75

Lib. III. c. 3.

76

Euseb. lib. II. c. 14.

77

Ibid. c. 15.

78

That Claudius I. did persecute the Church appears from Acts xviii. 2. Why Alban Butler should give S. Prisca the date 275, after the death of the second Claudius, when all notices of her are unanimous in saying she suffered under Claudius I., I am at a loss to conjecture.

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Lure is in the diocese of Besançon, among the Vosges mountains, between Vesoul and Belfort.

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