Venerable Mârûn the Hermit of Kyrrhos

Saint Mârûn of Syria
القديس مار مارون

The feast day of Saint Mârûn [L. Maron, Gk. Μάρων, Ar. Mârûn مارون‎], the venerable fourth-century hermit of the region of Kyrrhos (now Nabî Hûrî نبي حوري) in Syria, falls on the fourteenth of February in the Holy Orthodox Church. He reposed in the Year of the Lord 410. I say here with regret that I passed over the occasion of his feast-day nearly in silence this year, and that unjustly. He was not so misprised by Blessed Theodoret, the Bishop of Kyrrhos who writes of him in his Religious History. Here I undertake to relate what Theodoret has to say about the holy Mârûn:

After him I shall recall Maron, for he too adorned the godly choir of the saints. Embracing the open-air life, he repaired to a hill-top formerly honoured by the impious. Consecrating to God the precinct of demons on it, he lived there, pitching a small tent which he seldom used. He practised not only the usual labours, but devised others as well, heaping up the wealth of philosophy.

The Umpire measured out grace according to his labours: so the munificent one gave in abundance the gift of healing, with the result that his fame circulated everywhere, attracted everyone from every side and taught by experience the truth of the report. One could see fevers quenched by the dew of his blessing, shivering quieted, demons put to flight, and varied diseases of every kind cured by a single remedy; the progeny of physicians apply to each disease the appropriate remedy, but the prayer of the saint is a common antidote for every distress.

He cured not only infirmities of the body, but applied suitable treatment to souls as well, healing this man’s greed and that man’s anger, to this man supplying teaching in self-control and to that providing lessons in justice, correcting this man’s intemperance and shaking up another man’s sloth. Applying this mode of cultivation, he produced many plants of philosophy, and it was he who planted for God the garden that now flourishes in the region of Cyrrhus. A product of his planting was the great James, to whom one could reasonably apply the prophetic utterance, ‘the righteous man will flower as the palm tree, and be multiplied like the cedar of Lebanon’, and also all the others whom, with God’s help, I shall recall individually.

Attending in this way to the divine cultivation and treating bodies and souls alike, he himself underwent a short illness, so that we might learn the weakness of nature and the manliness of resolution, and departed from life. A bitter war over his body arose between his neighbours. One of the adjacent villages that was well-populated came out in mass, drove off the others and seized this thrice-desired treasure; building a great shrine, they reap benefit therefrom even to this day, honouring this victor with a public festival. We ourselves reap his blessing even at a distance; for sufficient for us instead of his tomb is his memory.

I confess that one reason I was reluctant to post this hagiography on the day of his commemoration – which was indeed a wrong and unworthy oversight on my part – was precisely this crass behaviour of his followers, which is no adequate reflection at all on his own spiritual practice which was open to all. Why on earth would one wish to honour a peaceful and long-suffering saint and hermit, who taught patience and virtue to all the various people both Christian and pagan who came to him, by fighting a literal war over his body against other Christians? But, alas, this is what his first followers did, and at that for their own glory rather than his or Christ’s.

Here I must take a leaf out of Blessed Theodoret’s book and learn to honour the saint for his own sake, and not measure him by the standards that his followers prised him by. Theodoret said that his memory was worth the honour, not merely his tomb, and this is indeed the right attitude to take. Even so, what happened after the death of Saint Mârûn is testament to the fact that these places are indeed holy even if they are misused by those who hold them so. Holy and righteous hermit Mârûn, teacher of virtue and worker of many wonders, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

Kalota, Aleppo Governorate, Syria
the village where Saint Mârûn reposed