Feast day: January 15
St. Paul the First Hermit
Fleeing persecution as a young man, he went into the Egyptian desert and stayed for ninety years, becoming the first known Christian hermit.
Most of what is known of Paul comes from a vivid biography written by St. Jerome a century after his death. According to it, Paul was born in the Egyptian Thebaid about the year 229 to well-off Christian parents. During the persecution of the Emperor Decius, when he was a young man of about twenty-two, he fled into the desert to escape both the danger and a treacherous relative who coveted his inheritance.
What began as flight became a vocation. Paul found a cave beside a spring and a date-palm, which gave him water, food, and clothing, and there — Jerome says — he remained for the rest of his very long life, given over to prayer in solitude. A raven, the story goes, brought him half a loaf of bread each day.
The most famous episode is his meeting with St. Anthony of Egypt. Anthony, by then revered as the father of hermits, was tempted to think himself the first to dwell in the desert; warned in a vision that another had gone before him, he sought Paul out and found him near death after some ninety years of solitude. As the two spoke, the raven brought a whole loaf instead of half. When Anthony returned to bury him, tradition holds that two lions dug the grave.
Whether or not every detail is historical, the Church has always honoured Paul as the first Christian hermit, the forerunner of all monastic life. He is said to have died about 342, at the age of some one hundred and thirteen years.
By tradition a raven brought him half a loaf of bread each day for decades; when St. Anthony visited, the raven brought a whole loaf.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/11590b.htm
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