Anastasius the Monk and Anastasius the Apocrisiarius
The Holy Confessors Anastasius the Monk and Anastasius the Apocrisiarius, Disciples of Maximus the Confessor
Venerable · Confessor · d. Anastasius the Monk 662; Anastasius the Apocrisiarius 666 — both in exile in Lazica
Commemorated 21 January — Commemorated with their teacher Maximus the Confessor
Anastasius the Monk (†662) and Anastasius the Apocrisiarius (†666) were the two disciples of Maximus the Confessor who shared his struggle against Monotheletism, his trials at Constantinople, and his sufferings. Anastasius the Monk was Maximus's longtime cell-attendant and companion; Anastasius the Apocrisiarius was a Roman, the apocrisiarius (legate) of the Church of Rome. With their master, both refused communion with the one-will heresy; both had their tongues cut out and their right hands cut off, and both were exiled to the barbarous land of Lazica in the Caucasus, where they died confessors — the Monk soon after Maximus in 662, the Apocrisiarius, longest-lived of the three, in the fortress of exile in 666. They are commemorated together with Maximus on January 21.
The two Anastasii are known from the same body of documents that preserve the trial and passion of Maximus — the Relatio Motionis, the Disputatio Bizyae, and above all the Hypomnesticon and the surviving letters of the circle, which record the last years and deaths of the confessors in exile.
Anastasius the Monk had been Maximus's disciple and attendant for many years, the sharer of his flight, his writings, and his confession. Arrested and tried with his master, he stood firm through every interrogation and every inducement to subscribe the imperial Typos, which commanded silence on the two wills. When at last the tribunal resolved to silence the confessors by mutilation, his tongue was cut out and his right hand cut off, as were Maximus's own, and he was sent into exile in Lazica on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. Worn out by his sufferings and the journey, he reposed there in 662, in the same year as Maximus.
Anastasius the Apocrisiarius was a Roman and a cleric, who had served as the apocrisiarius — the resident legate, or nuncio — of the Roman Church at Constantinople, and had attached himself to Maximus as a disciple and fellow labourer in the defence of Orthodoxy. He too was condemned, mutilated in the same cruel manner, and banished to Lazica, to the fortress of Thusume (Skotoros) in the land of the Lazi. He outlived both his master and his fellow disciple, dying in exile on 11 October 666; a letter he wrote from his banishment, and the Hypomnesticon that records the last things of the confessors, are among the sources for the whole history. The two Anastasii are thus, with Maximus, a single company of confessors — the master and his two disciples, all three maimed for the same truth and all three dead in the same distant exile — and the Church keeps their memory together.
Feast and commemoration
January 21 (church date; Old Calendar civil February 3), the principal feast of their teacher Maximus the Confessor, on which they are commemorated with him. Some calendars distinguish the two Anastasii; the OCA and the Greek synaxaria name Anastasius the disciple with Maximus on this day. They have no separate proper office, being sung with Maximus.
Iconography
The two are depicted as monastic confessors — bearded monks in the mantiya, sometimes shown at either side of Maximus, and, like him, associated with the scene of the mutilation of the tongue and hand. No verified pre-modern icon of the pair distinct from Maximus has been identified for storage.