Saint Christopher of Palestine

Christopher of Palestine was a sixth-century monk of Roman origin who pursued the ascetic life in the Judaean desert and on Mount Sinai. He is remembered chiefly through The Spiritual Meadow, the early-seventh-century collection of monastic accounts compiled by John Moschus, in which his story is preserved on the authority of his fellow monk Abba Theodulus. He is commemorated on August 30.

By the synaxarion's account, Christopher came from Rome and entered monastic life at the Monastery of Saint Theodosius near Jerusalem, one of the principal cenobitic communities of the Palestinian desert. There he undertook a notably severe rule of prayer: at a cave where earlier Desert Fathers had prayed, he made one hundred prostrations at each of the eighteen steps leading down into the cave and passed the greater part of the night in prayer, continuing this discipline for eleven years until the bell for morning office.

He afterward withdrew to Mount Sinai, where, according to the tradition, he labored for fifty years in ascetic struggle. He is said at last to have heard a voice directing him to return to the monastery where he had first struggled, so that he might find rest there with his fathers. The surviving accounts do not record the year of his death.