Hagiographia · Eastern Orthodox · Roman Catholic

Avramije the Recluse

For fifty years he walled himself into a cell to escape the world. The one time he broke out, he rode into a brothel disguised as a soldier, to bring one lost woman home.

Feast day: October 29 (November 11 on the new calendar)
Era: 4th century (died c. 366)
Region: Syriac Christianity; venerated across the Orthodox and Catholic churches
Status: canonical (venerable, prepodobni)
Patronage: hermits and penitents, the fallen and the despairing

Saint Avramije spent about fifty years behind a wall he had built himself, in a cell with one small window through which food was passed. He had fled his own wedding to get there. The single time in that long enclosure that he stepped back into the world, he did it in disguise, as a soldier calling at a brothel, to carry one woman out of it. That night is why anyone remembers him.

The wall

Abraham, Avramije in the Slavic churches, was born to a wealthy family near Edessa in Mesopotamia in the fourth century. His parents arranged a marriage. He went through the ceremony and then, the Life says, told his bride that he meant to give his life to God, left the house, and walled up the door of a small cell, keeping only a window for bread and water. He gave his inheritance away and stayed there. His epithet in Serbian, Zatvornik, means the enclosed one, the shut-in.

His Life comes down to us attached to the name of Ephrem the Syrian, the great fourth-century poet of Syriac Christianity, and it belongs to the same desert world as the more famous hermits of Egypt. Once, the story goes, his bishop sent him out to a stubbornly pagan village; he was beaten and driven off more than once, and kept returning, until the village converted. Then he went back to his wall.

The one night out

The heart of the story is his niece. When Abraham’s brother died, his orphaned daughter Mary was given to the hermit to raise, and he built her a cell beside his own and trained her in prayer. She grew up in the ascetic life. Then, at about twenty, she was seduced by a man the Life calls a false monk, and in her shame she did not repent but fled, travelling to a distant town and, believing herself already lost, taking up work in a brothel.

Abraham did not go after her at once, and when he learned where she was, he did not send word or curse her. He borrowed a horse and a soldier’s clothes, hid his monk’s face under a traveller’s hat, and rode to the inn where she worked. He asked for her by the name the house knew, sat to a supper, and let her serve him. Only then did he lift his head and say who he was. He did not reproach her. He told her that her sin was his to carry, that God was waiting, and begged her to come back. She went with him. She lived the rest of her life in penance in the desert, and the tradition holds she received the gift of healing the sick.

Did You Know?

The tale of Abraham and Mary was popular enough in medieval Europe to be retold, three centuries later, by the German canoness Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, the first known woman playwright in the West, who made it one of her Latin dramas. A Syrian hermit’s rescue of his niece became a stage play written by a tenth-century nun in Saxony.

In the compendium

Avramije belongs in this wing as the compendium’s cleanest case of holiness breaking its own rule. The desert saints are usually defined by what they refuse: the world, the body, the company of the living. Avramije refused all of it for fifty years, and the one act that made him a saint worth remembering is the night he put the world’s costume back on and walked into its lowest room for the sake of one person. His nearest neighbor here is John the Baptist, the other desert ascetic in camel hair, though the Baptist went to the wilderness to call crowds out of the world, while Avramije left the wilderness once, quietly, to fetch a single soul back. His likeness in the western half of the wing is Wiborada of St Gallen, the anchoress who had herself sealed into a cell with one small window and, unlike Avramije, never came out; she died there in 926, when the Magyars broke through the roof.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

Life of Abraham of Kidun and his niece Mary, traditionally attributed to Saint Ephrem the Syrian (4th century)
Orthodox synaxaria and menaia for October 29, the commemoration of the Venerable Abraham the Recluse and Mary his niece
Philips Galle, engraving ‘Abrahamius Confessor, Eremita’ (c. 1600), after the eremite tradition
Donald Attwater, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (Harmondsworth, 1965)

Primary Sources

Life of Abraham of Kidun and his niece Mary, traditionally attributed to Saint Ephrem the Syrian (4th century)
Orthodox synaxaria and menaia for October 29, the commemoration of the Venerable Abraham the Recluse and Mary his niece
Philips Galle, engraving 'Abrahamius Confessor, Eremita' (c. 1600), after the eremite tradition
Donald Attwater, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (Harmondsworth, 1965)

Common Questions

Who was Saint Avramije (Abraham the Recluse)?

A fourth-century Syrian Christian hermit, known in Serbian as Sveti Avramije Zatvornik, ’the enclosed one,’ and in the wider tradition as Abraham of Kidun. He walled himself into a cell near Edessa and lived there roughly fifty years. His feast is October 29, November 11 on the new calendar. He is distinct from the patriarch Abraham of the Old Testament.

What is the story of Abraham the Recluse and his niece?

Abraham raised his orphaned niece Mary in the ascetic life beside his own cell. As a young woman she was seduced by a false monk, fled in shame, and became a prostitute in a distant town. Abraham waited, learned where she was, disguised himself as a soldier, and went to the brothel as a paying customer. At the meal he revealed himself and, instead of condemning her, begged her to come home. She repented and returned to the desert, where the tradition says she was given the gift of healing.

Why did a hermit disguise himself as a soldier?

Because it was the only way to reach her. A monk asking for a prostitute by name would have been turned away or exposed; a soldier calling for a woman and a meal was ordinary. The disguise is the point of the story. The man who had refused the world for fifty years put on its costume for a single night to save one person, then went straight back to his cell.

Is this Abraham the same as the biblical Abraham?

No. The patriarch Abraham of Genesis is a separate figure, called Avram in Serbian. This is Avramije, the fourth-century hermit, whose story survives in a Life attributed to Saint Ephrem the Syrian and belongs to the world of the Egyptian and Syrian desert ascetics.