Feast day: June 12
St. Onuphrius
One of the most famous of the Egyptian desert hermits, who by tradition lived alone in the wilderness for some seventy years, clothed only in his own long hair and a girdle of leaves.
Onuphrius — Onuphrius the Great — was one of the most famous of the desert hermits of Christian Egypt, a figure who came to embody the extreme of the solitary life. What is known of him comes through the account of a monk named Paphnutius, who, journeying into the deep desert of the Thebaid, is said to have found him near the end of his life.
According to that account, Onuphrius had once been a monk in a large community, but feeling drawn to perfect solitude had gone out alone into the wilderness, where he lived for some sixty or seventy years entirely apart from human company, seeing no one, clothed only in his own long hair and a girdle of leaves.
He told Paphnutius that an angel had brought him Communion, that a date-palm and a spring had sustained him, and that God had been his only companion through those decades of silence. The two spoke through a day and a night; then Onuphrius died, and Paphnutius buried him, after which the palm withered and the cell crumbled, as if they had existed only for him.
Whatever history lies beneath the legend, Onuphrius became one of the most beloved patrons of hermits and monks in both the Eastern and Western Churches — an enduring image of the soul utterly alone with God.
His extreme solitude made him a favorite subject of medieval art across Europe — the wild-haired hermit fed, it was said, by an angel.
Image: Emmanuel Tzanes (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/10464a.htm
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