St Alexis, the Man of God

Alexis begins with an important distinction. Early in the fifth century, at Edessa in Syria, there seems to have been a holy poor man who lived by begging at the church doors, shared what he received with other beggars, and was remembered after death simply as “the Man of God”. A very early writer gives him no name and places him in the days of Bishop Rabbula, who died in 436. Before his death this poor ascetic is said to have told an attendant that he was the only son of noble Roman parents, but when the bishop ordered his body sought after burial, only his ragged clothes could be found. From that modest historical core a much fuller legend grew as the devotion spread westward. In Greek and later in Latin, the saint became Alexis, a Roman nobleman who married at his parents’ insistence, fled on his wedding day with his bride’s consent, lived in poverty at Edessa until a miraculous image revealed his holiness, and then returned secretly to Rome to dwell unrecognized under his own father’s staircase for another seventeen years.

Only after death, by a written account found on him, was his hidden identity revealed. This life retells that received Western legend, but it does not let the reader mistake it for certain history. It openly points out how legends gather dramatic and edifying features as they travel: the flight on the wedding day, the speaking image, the prolonged hidden life in his father’s house. The value of this life lies in two directions at once. It keeps alive the old Christian admiration for humility, self-abasement, and hidden holiness, while also reminding the reader that devotion and source honesty need not be enemies. The secure core is the memory of a holy beggar at Edessa; the rest shows how the Christian imagination clothed that memory in one of the most famous legends of renunciation in the Church.