Anthusa of Seleucia
Our Venerable Mother Anthusa of Seleucia, who was baptised by the Hieromartyr Athanasius of Tarsus
Venerable · Virgin · d. c. 298
Commemorated 22 August — Repose after twenty-three years in the wilderness
Anthusa was the daughter of rich pagans at Seleucia, who in the third century heard of the Christian faith, left her father's house on a pretext, sought out Athanasius, bishop of Tarsus, and would not go home again. He baptised her, and at her own insistence tonsured her a nun; her two servants Charisimus and Neophytus were baptised with her. The bishop and the two young men were beheaded soon after, but Anthusa was not taken: she went into the wilderness and lived there in ascetic labour for twenty-three years, dying in peace about the year 298. She is the rarest kind of figure in the third-century calendar — a woman ascetic of the persecuting age, keeping in solitude a monastic life that had not yet been given a name.
A pagan house at Seleucia
The account names her parents: Antoninus and Martyria, called also Maria — wealthy, pagan, and of standing enough that their daughter's disappearance was a scandal. Their city is given simply as Seleukeia in Syria, which the Greek notice most naturally means of Seleucia Pieria, the harbour of Antioch; other readings understand Seleucia on the Calycadnus in Isauria (see Disputed questions). Anthusa was raised to the religion of her house and to the expectation of a good marriage.
What turned her is not preserved beyond the bare fact that she came to believe. She had heard of the Christians, and — as girls in the passions of this period repeatedly do — she acted alone and irreversibly. She persuaded her mother to let her make a journey, saying she wished to visit her old nurse; and instead of the nurse she went to Tarsus, in Cilicia, to find the bishop.
Baptism and tonsure
Athanasius received her, instructed her, and baptised her, and with her the two servants of her household who had travelled with her, Charisimus and Neophytus. She then asked for more than baptism. Rather than return to Seleucia, to her parents' religion and their marriage plans, she asked to be clothed as a monastic; and the bishop tonsured her and sent her away into the desert.
This is a striking act on both sides. Organised women's monasticism did not yet exist in any developed form in the mid-third century — the great women's communities of Egypt, Syria and Cappadocia are a generation and more away — and what Anthusa entered was the older, harder thing: the solitary life of the ascetria, alone in the waste places, without rule, community or superior. The tonsure of a runaway heiress also exposed the bishop who performed it, and the account joins the two events without softening the link: Athanasius was arrested, refused to sacrifice, and was beheaded, and Charisimus and Neophytus were beheaded after him.
Twenty-three years in the wilderness
Anthusa was not pursued into the desert, or was not found there. The whole of her subsequent life is compressed by the synaxarion into a single number: twenty-three years of ascetic struggle, ended by a peaceful repose. No miracle, no vision, no disciple, no monastery and no relic-translation is transmitted; nothing has been invented here to fill the silence. The calendars set her death about the year 298, which — if her baptism belongs to the reign of Valerian — implies a long life, and if to the reign of Aurelian, a shorter and tighter chronology.
It is worth marking what the Church chose to remember. Of the four saints of this day's notice, three were martyred and one was not; and yet the Greek books head the notice with her name — Ὁσία Ἀνθοῦσα — and identify the hieromartyr bishop by reference to her: "and Athanasius the hieromartyr who baptised her." The bloodless witness of a woman who spent twenty-three years alone in the desert was accounted the equal of the sword.
Feast and commemoration
August 22 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 4), within the afterfeast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. The Greek synaxarion heads her notice Ὁσία Ἀνθοῦσα καὶ Ἀθανάσιος ὁ ἱερομάρτυς ὁ βαπτίσας αὐτήν, καὶ οἱ δύο ὑπηρέτες της Χαρίσιμος καὶ Νεόφυτος; the Russian books list Преподобная Анфуса with the date c. 298; the OCA gathers all four under a single heading. The day's principal commemoration everywhere is Agathonicus of Nicomedia, and no proper office is appointed to Anthusa.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable woman)
In thee, O Mother, was the image of God preserved with exactness; for thou didst take up the Cross and follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Therefore doth thy spirit, O venerable Anthusa, rejoice together with the Angels.
Iconography
Anthusa is shown as a nun: the full monastic habit, the dark koukoulion or veil covering the head and shoulders, her hands raised in prayer or holding a small cross, her face lean with fasting. She is generally painted as a mature or elderly woman, since the twenty-three years in the desert are the substance of her memory, though the moment for which she is remembered — the runaway girl at the bishop's feet — belongs to her youth. Where the day's company is grouped, she stands beside the vested hierarch Athanasius, sometimes with a stream between them for the baptism, and the two young martyrs behind. No pre-1900 image of her has been identified for this repository; a search of Wikimedia Commons for her and for Athanasius of Tarsus returned nothing at all.
Disputed questions
- Which Seleucia. Seleukeia in Syria points to Seleucia Pieria, Antioch's port at the mouth of the Orontes, which would set the whole episode within the Antiochian church and make her journey to Tarsus a short one along the Cilician coast road. Seleucia ad Calycadnum in Isauria — the great shrine-city of St Thecla, itself a natural home for a girl drawn to the virgin's life — is the other candidate, and some Slavonic lists say only "Seleucia." The sources do not decide it.
- The date and the reign. The Russian menologion dates her repose c. 298 while dating Athanasius and the two servants to 270–275; the Greek account and the OCA place the baptism under Valerian (253–260). The twenty-three years in the desert do not reconcile all of these. This entry follows the c. 298 repose and indexes her in the third century.
- Not to be confused with Anthusa the Younger (August 27), the martyr drowned in a well, whose very epithet — the Younger, the New — exists to distinguish her from this Anthusa. The two stand five days apart in the same month, and Latin martyrologies which carry both make the relation explicit.
- Several saints named Anthusa. She is not the abbess Anthusa of Mantinea (†759, July 27), the iconodule confessor of Paphlagonia with her ninety nuns; not that abbess's godchild and namesake Anthusa the daughter of Constantine V, the confessor kept on April 12; and not the Anthusa martyred at Rome, baptised by Ambrose of Milan and burned, who is listed on December 8. Nor is she the Anthusa who was the mother of John Chrysostom, a righteous woman remembered in his own writings rather than in the calendar. The name — "the flowering one" — was common, and these five women have been conflated repeatedly in secondary literature.