The Desert Great-Great Grandfathers

One stumbles across the most remarkable things on the internet. Today I learned that September 17 is the feast day of an Orthodox Saint named Joachim, a Chalcedonian Patriarch of Alexandria, (formerly a monk of the famous monastery of St Catherine on Mt Sinai,) who is said to have been elected in 1486 at the age of about 38, and died on this day in 1567 at the age of 119, after serving for 80 years. And while this is the record for the longest tenure in the Orthodox See of Alexandria by a huge margin (and possibly in any bishopric in history, but see comments below), nine others have reigned for more than 30 years.

His Holiness Shenouda III, Pope of Alexandria from 1971 to 2012. At 40 years and 4 months, his reign is the 4th or 5th longest among the Coptic Popes. (The uncertainty depends on the poorly documented tenure of John XIII, who reigned from 1484-1524, also 40 years.) This photograph was taken during the consecration of the Coptic church of Ss Mary and George on Staten Island, New York, on Aug. 12, 2007. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Mark Sleman of Hope Pictures LLC, CC BY 3.0)

Among the Patriarchs of Alexandria who lived before the post-Chalcedonian schism, two passed the 30-year mark: St Demetrius I, known as ‘the Vinedresser’, whose reign began in 189 and lasted for somewhere between 35 and 43 years, and St Athanasius the Great, at 45 years (328-73). Theodosius I, the last Patriarch to be acknowledged as such by both the Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians, reigned for 31 years, 535-66. Since then, ten Coptic Popes have ruled for more than 30 years; the record holder among them, Cyril V, sat on the throne of St Mark from 1874-1927, a span 52 years and 9 months. By contrast, among the Popes of Rome, there have been exactly two whose reign was longer than 30 years: St Peter himself (32 years, according to one version of the traditional reckoning), and Bl. Pius IX (1846-78), at 31 years and 7 months. The current Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, is the only one to have passed the 30-year mark; he will celebrate his 35th anniversary on October 22. (This is, incidentally, the feast day of St John Paul II, who was crowned on that day in 1978, 6 days after his election.)

In St Joachim’s time, both the Orthodox Church in Egypt and the much larger Coptic Church had been reduced to a pitiable state by relentless persecution on the part of the Muslim Arabs who ruled the country. And in fact, one of the most notable things about his reign is the fact that during it, Egypt was conquered by the Turks in 1517. The persecution of Egyptian Christians was then mostly ended by a decree of the Ottoman Sultan which gave them a much greater degree of liberty and protection than they had had under the Mamluk Sultanate.

But these persecutions especially affected the kinds of institutions that would have preserved some verifiable record of Joachim’s age, such as parishes and monasteries. As a result, the tradition about his age and the length of his reign has not been proved or disproved, and mostly likely cannot be. No one will be surprised at this. Sed contra, there doesn’t seem to be much doubt or dispute about the dates of either his predecessor or successor, and the 15th century is very late to be losing a whole patriarch or two. 

In any case, my very random discovery of this story got me thinking about some things. All these remarkably long-reigning patriarchs were monks, since of course, bishops are only elected from among the monastic clergy in the East. And this reminded me of a story told to me by a relative about visiting a Trappist monastery. One of the monks was a friend of a friend, and she had heard that he was quite elderly; seeing him approach them from a distance, she was very surprised that his walk seemed to be that of a very much younger man.

The Isenheim Altarpiece, by Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1470-1528), ca. 1515. Left panel, the Visit of St Anthony to St Paul; right panel, the Temptation of St Anthony, based on chapters 8 and 9 of St Athanasius’Life of St Anthony, which give vivid descriptions of the demonic attacks which St Anthony suffered, and have inspired many rather wild artistic depictions. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Then I remembered that hagiographical skeptics have sometimes alleged that the life of a particular Saint is unreliable because it claims that he lived to an extreme old age. For example, St Jerome reports that St Paul the First Hermit, one of the first great Egyptian ascetics, died at 113. (St Anthony, whom he met at the very end of his life, reached a mere 105.) But again, even if we grant that the reported lifespan of Joachim of Alexandria is an exaggeration, we see how the tremendous austerity of the monastic discipline practiced by the Copts definitely seems to make very long livers of them. So perhaps it really does behoove scholars to be less skeptical on that front.

And this in turn reminded me that one of the “proofs” adduced against the historicity of the Gospels is the significant discrepancies between the genealogies of Our Lord given by St Matthew in his first chapter, and St Luke in his third. But the Church Fathers argued that this could be explained (at least in part) by the differences in the lengths of men’s lives, and this is exactly what we see in the lists of the Roman and Coptic Popes. Clement XIV of Rome (famous as the suppressor of the Jesuits) was elected on May 19, 1769, one day after the death of the Coptic Pope Mark VII. Since then, there have been 19 Roman Popes, but only 12 Coptic ones.