Mar Awgin

Venerable Mar Awgin (Awgen, Eugenios, died 363) was an Egyptian monk who, according to Syriac tradition, brought monasticism to Syriac Christianity, a wonderworker. He is commemorated (Old Style) on 20 April; in the Syriac Jacobite Church on 3 March, 20 to 21 April, 2 and 15 November, and in the East Syriac tradition on one of the Fridays of the season of the renewal of the church. His existence is not certain: the sources are late and contain anachronisms. His Church, through our sources, is the Syriac; we have no report of a Byzantine Orthodox canonization.

What is known

The earliest sources that mention him are from the seventh century, some three hundred years after his death. The view that he brought monasticism to the Syriac tradition is rejected by scholars today, who regard it as a local development; his story, with or without a basis, was embellished to link Syriac monasticism with the illustrious Egyptian tradition of the Desert Fathers. His Life was first published in 1892 by the Chaldean priest Paul Bedjan, from two manuscripts of the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. Jérôme Labourt questioned the data of the Life, since Awgin is mentioned neither by the church historians Sozomen and Theodoret, nor in the acts of the synods of the Church of the East of the fifth to seventh centuries, nor in the monastic rules of the sixth century; the theologian Babai the Great, of the seventh century, calls Saint Abraham of Kashkar (died about 588) "father of the monks". According to Labourt, Awgin may have been the founder or eponym of a Jacobite monastery in Tur Abdin. In the twentieth century the text was analysed by A. P. Dyakonov, and Hieromonk Pimen (Belolikov), of the Urmia mission, translated the Life into Russian.

The Life, by tradition

Mar Awgin was born in the city of Clysma in Egypt (the area of present-⁠day Suez) and was a pearl fisher; his earnings he gave to churches and the poor and he had the gift of working miracles. After twenty-⁠five years of work he entered the monastery of Saint Pachomius in Upper Egypt, where he was a baker; from there he withdrew to Nitria. Then, with about seventy disciples, he came to Mesopotamia, to Nisibis, on the Roman-⁠Iranian border, where he founded a monastery on Mount Izla, above the city. The place was well chosen: Nisibis was on the eastern edge of the Roman Empire, which had just embraced Christianity, while the rest of Mesopotamia was under Sasanian rule, which tried to revive Zoroastrianism and at times persecuted Christians. The community on Mount Izla grew rapidly, at the end of his life it numbered about three hundred and fifty monks, and from it other monasteries were founded throughout Mesopotamia, Persia, Armenia, Georgia, even India and China. With the favour of the Persian shah Shapur II he received permission to build monasteries in Khuzestan. He brought about the election of Jacob as bishop of Nisibis, and his work strengthened Christianity in Mesopotamia and monasticism in Iran. In the sixth century a crisis came: to please the Zoroastrian rulers, the Assyrian Church decided that all monks and nuns should marry, but the reforms were soon reversed by Abraham the Great of Kashkar, who founded a new monastery on Mount Izla, and by Babai the Great.