Berimus

Berimus is known only as a correspondent of the ascetic writer Nilus of Ancyra (d. c. 430), to whom seven short letters of spiritual direction in the Nilus collection are addressed. The address lines are not wholly consistent: one letter styles him "Berimus the Protos" (a leading citizen or chief civic magistrate) while the others address "Berimus the Monk," so he was most likely a man of standing in or around Ancyra who had taken up the monastic life. The letters treat him as a soul under direction: Nilus counsels him against despair over his sense of being "unclean" and without confidence before God, warns him about spiritual pride and the demons that enter through the bodily senses, urges the fear of the Lord as the path to repentance, and repeatedly tells him not to condemn or judge others. Beyond these letters he is otherwise unattested, and no dates, office details, or biography can be confirmed; he belongs to the early-5th-century Ancyran milieu only by virtue of being one of Nilus's correspondents.