The life of St Arsenios the Great
Church tradition holds that he was ordained a deacon and came to the attention of the Emperor Theodosius the Great, who was searching for a tutor equal to forming his two young sons, the future emperors Arcadius and Honorius, in wisdom and in godliness alike, and that Arsenios arrived in Constantinople in 383 and spent the next eleven years in that role, holding the boys to the same obedience and discipline he would have asked of his own sons. This court narrative comes down through a later and less reliable strand of his Life, distinct from the sayings and stories that circulated among the desert fathers themselves, and its particulars should be read as received tradition rather than settled history.
Though the court is remembered as having given him every comfort and honor, Arsenios felt a call away from that life growing steadily within him, until he came to understand it as an inward summons to leave the company of men for the sake of his soul. He slipped away in secret to Alexandria and from there to the desert of Scetis, where he placed himself under the guidance of John the Dwarf and took up a life of silence, fasting, manual labor, and unbroken prayer. When his former pupil Arcadius, now emperor, later found where he had hidden himself and asked him to return, Arsenios refused, unwilling even to serve as a channel for the court's charity to the poor nearby, and remained instead in the desert he had chosen. He is remembered as one of the most revered of the Desert Fathers, and Church tradition places his repose in the year 449.
