Saints
“Abba Or”
Desert Father of the Thebaid · Father of a thousand monks
One of the great fathers of the Egyptian desert, described by Palladius and by the Historia Monachorum as an old man with a snow-white beard who governed about a thousand monks in the Thebaid and whose face, they say, was that of an angel. He had spent his first years alone in the deep desert eating herbs, and could not read until, the account says, he was given the Scriptures by heart.
His life
Palladius, who traveled Egypt around the year 388 and wrote the Lausiac History from what he saw, gives him a chapter, and the anonymous Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, written by monks who made the same journey a few years later, gives him another. Both describe an extremely old man, very tall, with a completely white beard, presiding over a settlement of monks in the Thebaid.
The account says he lived his early years alone in the further desert, eating wild herbs and roots, and that he could not read, and that after long prayer he was able to recite the Scriptures from memory when they were needed. Whatever a modern reader does with that, the men who wrote it down had gone to Egypt precisely to check what they had heard, and they wrote what the community told them.
He came in from the deep desert and founded monasteries in the cultivated land at the desert's edge, and something close to a thousand monks were under him by the end. The travelers describe the brothers coming out to meet visitors singing, and the old man weeping when he received them.
He reposed around 390. His memory is kept on the seventh of August. His words survive only in the two travel accounts and in a handful of sayings, and this app links him to the Lausiac History rather than to a corpus of his own, because he left none.
Holy St. Or of the Thebaid, pray to God for us.