We also saw another father in the desert...

…not far from the city, called Theon, a holy man who had lived as an anchorite in a small cell and had practiced silence for thirty years. He had performed many miracles and was held to be clairvoyant by the people of those parts. A crowd of sick people went out to see him every day, and laying his hand on them through the window, he would send them away cured. One could see him with the face of an angel giving joy to his visitors by his gaze and abounding with much grace.

Not long before, some robber had come at night from some distance away to attack him. They thought that they would find a considerable sum of gold hoarded by him, and intended to kill him. But he prayed, and they remained at the door, rooted to the spot, until daybreak. When the crowd came to him in the morning and proposed to burn these men alive, he was forced to speak a single sentence to them: “Let them go unharmed; if you do not, my gift of healing will leave me.” They obeyed, for they did not dare to contradict him. The robbers at once entered the neighboring monasteries, and with the help of the monks changed their way of life and repented of their crimes.

By grace the man had a competent knowledge of three languages, being able to read Greek, Latin and Coptic, as many told us, and as we discovered from the father himself. For knowing that we were strangers, he wrote on a slate, giving thanks to God for our visit.

He ate vegetables but only those that did not need to be cooked. They say that he used to go out of his cell at night and keep company with wild animals, giving them to drink from the water which he had. Certainly one could see the tracks of antelope and wild asses and gazelle and other animals near his hermitage. These creatures delighted him always.

Historia Monachorum in Aegypto 6