Alexander, John and Paul the New, Patriarchs of Constantinople
Our Fathers among the Saints Alexander, John and Paul the New, Archbishops of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarchs
Patriarch · Bishop · Confessor · d. Alexander 337/340; John 595; Paul 784
Commemorated 30 August — Joint commemoration of the three patriarchs of Constantinople
August 30 gathers into a single office three archbishops of Constantinople who never met, whose lives lie four and a half centuries apart, and who are joined by the one thing they had in common: each held the throne of the imperial city at a moment when a heresy was pressing on it, and each is remembered for what he did about that. Alexander (†337 or 340) stood in for the aged Metrophanes at the First Ecumenical Council and, as patriarch, prayed through a night that Arius might not be forced upon the Church's communion — a prayer answered the next morning by Arius's sudden and appalling death. John the Faster (†595) governed as an ascetic of legendary abstinence and left the Church its penitential Nomokanon. Paul the New (†784), a Cypriot who had made his peace with the iconoclasts out of fear, repented, abdicated the throne for a monastic cell, and from it urged the convening of the council that would restore the holy icons. A confessor, a canonist and a penitent: the day sets them side by side without flattening the differences.
Alexander, the patriarch of the Nicene age
Alexander was already an old man when the Church emerged from the persecutions. He served as presbyter, and afterwards as auxiliary, under Metrophanes, the first bishop of the new capital (feast June 4); and because Metrophanes was too infirm to travel, it was Alexander — by the Greek account seventy years old — who represented the see of Byzantium at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, where the Son was confessed consubstantial with the Father and Arius was condemned. He is remembered afterwards to have travelled through Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly and the rest of Greece making the council's decisions known. Metrophanes, dying, named him his successor in his will, and Alexander took the throne of Constantinople.
The years that followed were the years in which the Arian party, defeated at Nicaea, recovered its footing at court. The story for which Alexander is chiefly remembered belongs to that recovery. Arius, having persuaded the emperor Constantine that he now believed as the Fathers of Nicaea had taught — laying his hand, the account says, upon his breast, where he had hidden a paper with his own creed written on it, and saying "this is what I believe" — obtained an imperial order that he be received back into communion. Alexander could neither disobey the emperor nor betray the faith. He spent the night in the church in prayer, asking that the Lord Himself should decide the matter; and in the morning, as Arius went in procession toward the great church surrounded by counsellors and soldiers, he turned aside at a public latrine and there died of a sudden and violent haemorrhage of the bowels — a death the Church has always read against Judas (Acts 1:18), and never as a private misfortune. The historians of the fourth and fifth centuries record it; the synaxarion keeps it as the answer to a hierarch's prayer, not as a curse he pronounced.
A second episode is transmitted of him: a public disputation with a pagan philosopher, in which Alexander, weary of a contest of words, commanded the man in the name of Jesus Christ to be silent, and he was struck dumb — recovering his speech only when he signalled his assent to the Christian teaching, whereupon he and a number of his fellow philosophers believed. Alexander governed the capital for some fifteen years and died, according to the Slavic tradition, at the age of ninety-eight. Gregory the Theologian named him with honour in an address to the people of Constantinople.
John the Faster, the canonist
John IV the Faster, patriarch from 582 to 595, has his own principal feast on September 2 and his own entry in this reference; on August 30 he is remembered in this company. A goldsmith of the capital who rose through the diaconate of Hagia Sophia, he was famous in his own lifetime for an abstinence so extreme that his by-name attached to him permanently, and for a charity that emptied the patriarchal treasury. His enduring monument is the penitential Nomokanon that goes under his name: a manual for the hearing of secret confession, which shortened the long public penances of the ancient canons by half and more, and shifted their measure from the gravity of the act to the disposition of the penitent — severe fasting, a fixed number of prostrations, almsgiving, the length of it left to the confessor's judgement. Received among the Greeks and afterwards in Rus as standing "with the other canons of the saints," it was printed by Nikodemos the Hagiorite in the Exomologetarion (1794) and the Pedalion (1800), and in Slavonic ran through the Kievan editions of 1620, 1624 and 1629 and the Moscow Trebnik of 1639, 1651 and 1658. He is also the patriarch whose use of the title oikoumenikos drew the protest of Gregory the Great of Rome.
Paul the New, the penitent
Paul was a Cypriot by birth, brought to Constantinople and raised to the patriarchal throne in 780, in the last months of the iconoclast emperor Leo IV the Khazar. The synaxarion is unusually frank about him: he was virtuous and devout but timid, and, seeing what the Orthodox were suffering for the holy icons, he concealed his own convictions and went along with the iconoclast establishment, signing what he was required to sign. When Leo died and the regency passed to the Empress Irene, Paul wished to restore the veneration of the icons and found that he could not — the iconoclast party in the hierarchy and the guards regiments was still too strong, and his own compromised position gave him no standing to lead.
What the Church honours in him is what he did next. Judging that he was not the man to shepherd the flock through the crisis, he left the patriarchal throne without warning in 784, went secretly to the monastery of Saint Florus, and received the great schema. Summoned there by Irene and the senate and asked why he had abandoned his people, he answered with an open confession of his fault, said that he would rather have been anything than a bishop of a church under heresy, and told them plainly that the icons could be restored only by an ecumenical council. It was on his advice that the layman Tarasius, then imperial secretary, was chosen to succeed him (feast February 25); and it was Tarasius who presided at the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787, which restored the holy images. Paul did not live to see it: he died a schema-monk shortly after his abdication, in 784 by the common reckoning, or as late as 804 in the tradition the OCA follows.
The joint commemoration
Nothing but the throne unites the three, and the synaxarion says so: they "lived at different times, but each of them came up against the work of heretics who sought to distort the teaching of the Church." The joint feast is old — it stands at August 30 in the Constantinopolitan synaxarion and passes from there into every Byzantine calendar, Greek and Slavonic alike — and its logic is the logic of the day's proper apolytikion, which addresses each of the three by the one thing he is remembered for: Alexander the champion of the Trinity, John the nursling of grace, Paul the summit of the priesthood. A service to Saint Alexander was printed at Venice in 1771.
Feast and commemoration
August 30 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 12). In 2026 the day is the apodosis of the Beheading of the Forerunner (August 29), whose office it takes up again alongside the patriarchs. The commemoration is universal: it stands in the Greek Menaion, in the Slavonic books, and on the Antiochian, Greek, Russian and OCA calendars. In the Russian usage the day is heavily overlaid with local commemorations — Alexander of Svir, the translation of the relics of Alexander Nevsky, the uncovering of the relics of Daniel of Moscow — so that the three patriarchs, who head the day everywhere, are in practice most audible in Greek parishes. John the Faster keeps his own principal feast on September 2, three days later, and the Greek books there give him a full proper office.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 3 (to "Τὴν ὡραιότητα")
Shown forth as initiates of the heavenly mysteries, ye appeared to the world as revealers of things divine, shepherding the Church of Christ in the way that is pleasing unto God: O sacred Alexander, champion of the Trinity; O glorious John, nursling of grace; and O Paul, height and summit of the priesthood. Wherefore with one voice we sing your praise.
Kontakion — Tone 4
Three shepherds of the Church of the Queen of Cities we honour today: the one who broke the pride of Arius by his prayer, the one who measured out repentance with mercy, and the one who laid down the throne that the icon of Christ might be lifted up. O all-blessed Alexander, John and Paul, entreat the Word made flesh on behalf of us all.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The three are painted together, standing frontally in a row or grouped in a single panel, in the full vesture of hierarchs — polystavrion or phelonion, crossed omophorion, the Gospel held in the left hand and the right raised in blessing — and are distinguished by their beards and by the inscriptions above their haloes. Alexander is shown very old, long-bearded and white; John the Faster gaunt and dark-bearded, the ascetic of the group; Paul the New in the schema over the hierarchical vesture, or bare-headed as a monk, since he is remembered as one who ended outside the hierarchy. Where a scene is added it is Alexander's: the patriarch at prayer in the church by night while the heretic dies in the street outside. No pre-1900 image of the three together has been located for this repository; the composite icon in circulation on the day is a modern work.
Disputed questions
- Which John? The Slavic tradition, the Russian calendars and the OCA identify the John of this day flatly as John IV the Faster (†595), and the Greek liturgical rubrics for August 30 likewise print "Ἰωάννου (†595)". But the Great Synaxaristes tradition represented on the Greek side raises a serious alternative: that the John commemorated here is rather John VIII Xiphilinos (patriarch 1064–1075), the Trapezuntine jurist and scholar who left high civil office for a monastery in Bithynia, was ordained priest and a week later, on 1 January 1064, bishop, preached daily in the churches of the capital, restored the images of Hagia Sophia and distributed bread and grain to the poor, dying in 1075. The two readings are not reconcilable, and this reference records the disagreement rather than resolving it: the weight of the calendars is with the Faster, but the Greek hagiographical tradition's doubt is not frivolous, since Xiphilinos has no other secure day.
- When did Alexander die? The Greek synaxaristes gives 337; the Slavic tradition and the OCA give 340, at the age of ninety-eight. The Nicene-age chronology of the see of Constantinople is not firm enough to decide it.
- Alexander's other date. Some manuscripts assign his commemoration to June 2, not August 30 — a variant the OCA notes explicitly.
- When did Paul die? The usual date is 784, immediately after his abdication; the OCA gives 804, which would make his retirement twenty years long and is hard to reconcile with the accounts of his death-bed confession to Irene.
- The "venerable Phylax." A Jerusalem typikon manuscript (Cod. Hieros. 1096, f. 123, printed by Dmitrievsky, Typika II p. 55) reads the day's rubric as "the memory of the venerable patriarchs Alexander, John and Paul the New, and of the venerable Phylax." No synaxarion knows any such saint, and the Greek synaxaristes lists him only to record that he is unknown. He is most probably a scribal ghost — phylax, "guardian," standing in the source for something else — and no life should be constructed for him.
- Not to be confused. This Alexander is not Alexander of Alexandria (†326/328, feast May 29), the other great anti-Arian hierarch of the same generation, who deposed Arius in his own city and is the one commonly meant by "the patriarch who condemned Arius"; nor is he Alexander the Sleepless or Alexander of Comana. This Paul is not Paul the Confessor (†c. 350, feast November 6), Paul I of Constantinople, who was strangled in exile by the Arians — the confusion is easy, since both are patriarchs of Constantinople named Paul who suffered under a heresy, and it is precisely to distinguish them that this one is always styled "the New."