Dorotheus of Gaza

Dorotheus addresses the ordinary friction of monastic life: the thought we keep defending, the brother we judge, the object we resent losing, the correction we cannot bear. His teaching moves between Scripture, sayings of the elders, and stories from his own community.

These addresses are variously called instructions, discourses, or homilies. The two concluding pieces interpret the hymns for Pascha and the martyrs. Six short letters bring the teaching into particular situations of illness, temptation, and discouragement.

This collection also preserves the publisher’s introduction and its life of Dorotheus, followed by the anonymous Life of Dositheus. Those biographical pieces are about Dorotheus and his disciple; they are not presented as works written by Dorotheus.

The English comes from OrthoChristian’s published series. Its editors describe a translation dictated by an unnamed American monk from a pre-revolutionary Russian translation, then edited for online publication. It is therefore an English rendering through Russian, rather than a translation made directly from the Greek.

The wording is retained, including its older idiom, scriptural references, and occasional awkwardness. The publisher’s introduction names other English editions, including Eric P. Wheeler’s Discourses and Sayings and Constantine Scouteris’s Practical Teaching on the Christian Life. Their texts have not been substituted for this edition.

The contents follow the online series: Instructions I–XIX, the Paschal exposition, the exposition on the martyrs, and the letters. The publisher calls both concluding expositions “21.” Here they are identified by subject; their original source headings are retained in the attribution on each page. The addresses /20 and /21 indicate reading order, not a resolution of that discrepancy.

All twenty-four acquired articles are reproduced, including four source notes. Instruction VII retains the publisher’s editorial marker “Missing text ends here”; its surrounding passage is present in the downloaded article, and we have not silently repaired or removed that marker. This is the complete acquired English series, not a claim to contain every surviving item associated with Dorotheus. The separate correspondence of Barsanuphius and John, including their answers to Dorotheus, is outside this collection.

The inherited life places Dorotheus later than modern scholarship generally does. Its wording remains as published; this work page uses the sixth-century setting discussed in the historical study of Dorotheus and Gazan monasticism.