Limnaeus

Venerable Limnaeus (Limnius) was a Syrian hermit of the fourth and fifth centuries. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who knew him personally, tells of him in chapter twenty-⁠two of the History of the Lovers of God. His commemoration is on the same day as that of Thalassius, 22 February.

As a young man he chose the monastic life and came to Thalassius, who lived on a hill called Tillima, where he became his disciple. He made it his rule to be always silent and lived for a long time without speaking to anyone about anything. He stayed long with Thalassius and learned much from him, and afterwards passed to Maron as a disciple. He came to Maron at the same time as James. After living for a time with Maron, Limnaeus settled on the top of a mountain near a village called Targalla. There he lived in the open air, in fasting and prayer. From the outside world he was separated only by a bare wall, the stones of which were not bound together with clay. In the wall was a small door, always plastered shut with mud and always closed; only when Theodoret came would Limnaeus open it.

Many people gathered from different places when they learned that Theodoret wished to visit Limnaeus, wanting to enter together with the bishop to the ascetic. With all the others who came at other times, Limnaeus spoke through a small opening in the wall and gave them his blessing, through which many gained health. Calling on the name of the Saviour, Limnaeus healed illnesses and cast out demons and, like the apostles, worked other miracles.

Theodoret describes two incidents from the ascetic's life. In the first he was taken ill with colic. He suffered terrible pains, but did not use the help of physicians, did not lie down in bed, and found healing and relief not from medicines or from food. Sitting on a plank laid on the ground, Limnaeus was healed by the power of prayer and of the sign of the cross alone. In the second, Limnaeus was bitten by a viper. By the power of faith, by the sign of the cross, prayer and the invocation of the name of God, he received healing.

Limnaeus gathered around him many blind and poor people and arranged for them, on the eastern and western sides of the mountain, shelters, commanding them to live there glorifying God. He ordered that the food needed by the blind and the poor be brought to them by those who came to him. The people gathered by the ascetic glorified God without ceasing. By the time Theodoret wrote the History of the Lovers of God (444 or 445), Limnaeus had been living in the open air, in fasting and prayer, for thirty-⁠eight years.

Until the eighteenth century, in the Slavonic Prologues, the lives of Thalassius and Limnius were placed in a single chapter, which repeats chapter twenty-⁠two of Theodoret and has, as in Theodoret, two parts, one for each. The same was done in the Acta Sanctorum. Demetrius of Rostov left out the name of Limnius in his Menaion and placed all the events of the lives of Limnius and Thalassius as events of Thalassius, thus composing a single mixed life.