Saint Arsenius the Great

Arsenius was born in Rome around 354, into the noble senatorial family of the Surculi. He was a pupil of Jerome, knew the teaching of Augustine, and because of his learning — above all his Greek — Pope Damasus, who had made him a deacon, recommended him to the emperor Theodosius as tutor to his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius. In 383 he went to Constantinople and stayed there eleven years, as a senator and the emperor’s chief counselor. Things didn’t go very well with his pupils: the story goes that Theodosius, walking in during a lesson, found his son seated and the teacher standing, and as punishment stripped the boy of his imperial insignia. Another time Arcadius, after being punished by Arsenius, hatched a plot against him, which Arsenius himself foiled. Then he left everything and disappeared. He went to Egypt, to the desert of Scetis, and became a monk. He was forty years old, and he was giving up the highest post an educated Roman could hope to reach. Of his silence, the Desert Fathers handed down his most quoted saying: “Many times I have regretted speaking, never keeping silent.” And another, the one he used to explain why he had left: “I have often spoken with men and regretted it; with God, never.” He died at Troe, in Egypt, in 450, after nearly sixty years in the desert. If your name is Arsenio, today is your name day.