The life of St Zosimas of Palestine
At fifty-three, troubled by a growing thought that he had reached the height of virtue and needed no more instruction, he left that monastery, tradition says at the prompting of a vision, and took up residence instead in a stricter community near the Jordan, whose monks kept the custom of withdrawing alone into the wilderness each Lent. It was during one such Lenten withdrawal that he encountered a woman living alone in the desert who, after much persuasion, told him the story of her own life, a life of dissolution in Alexandria followed by decades of solitary repentance in that same wilderness; he is remembered as the man who first gave her Communion at the Jordan's edge, and who, returning a year later as she had asked, found her already dead and buried her there. The whole of what is known of Zosimas comes down through the life of that woman, Mary of Egypt, set down decades later from the oral memory of the desert's own monks by Sophronius, the future Patriarch of Jerusalem. Zosimas himself reposed at the age of a hundred, sometime in the earlier sixth century.
