Antoninus of Alexandria
The Holy Martyr Antoninus of Alexandria
Martyr
Commemorated 9 August — Martyrdom by fire at Alexandria
Antoninus — called Anthony in the Slavic and American calendars — was a Christian of Alexandria who preached Christ openly in the city and was arrested for it. He was hung up and his flesh torn with iron hooks, and then, when he would not yield, condemned to the fire; and while he stood in the furnace he went on exhorting the bystanders to care for their souls rather than for their bodies. He gave up his spirit in the flames, and the tradition adds that his body was found untouched, the fire having harmed not a hair of his head. Neither his century nor the emperor under whom he suffered is transmitted.
The confession
The synaxarion gives no origin, no trade, no family and no date. It says that Antoninus was of Alexandria, and that he did not wait to be found out: he preached the truth of the Gospel openly and with fervour in a city where the imperial cult, the old Egyptian religion and a large and quarrelsome pagan intelligentsia all had a stake in silencing him. The magistrates arrested him on that account, and the confession he made before them was the same as the preaching that had brought him there.
Passion
The torments are given in the usual sequence of the Alexandrian passions. He was hung up — on a tree, by one recension of the notice — and his sides were torn with iron hooks, the standard instrument of the Egyptian and Palestinian tribunals. When this failed to move him he was sentenced to be burned, and a furnace was heated for him.
What the tradition remembers of the burning is not his silence but his speech. Standing in the fire, Antoninus turned to those watching and urged them not to be anxious for the body, which suffers a little and is done, but for the soul, whose journey to God is the only matter of consequence — an exhortation preached from within the punishment itself, and the one utterance of his that the notice preserves. So he surrendered his spirit.
Relics
The couplet appointed for him in the Menaion sets the two halves of that scene against each other: though the body of Antoninus be full of ashes, his spirit has obtained a strange splendour. To this the fuller Greek notice adds that the fire did not consume him — his body was drawn from the furnace whole, without so much as a hair of his head singed, in the manner of the Three Children in Babylon whom the hymnography of the martyrs never fails to recall. The Christians of the city took up the relics; where they were laid is not recorded.
Feast and commemoration
August 9 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 22), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition Fast. The day's office in the Menaion belongs to the Apostle Matthias; Antoninus is commemorated by his synaxarion notice and couplet, with the common of a martyr where a local usage adds hymns. He is kept in the Greek Menaion and in the Slavic and American calendars.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Antoninus, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Antoninus is painted as a martyr of no particular age or office: tunic and mantle, the martyr's cross in the right hand, the left open before the breast. His proper attribute is the furnace — a brick or masonry oven with the flames breaking from its mouth, the saint standing upright within it and unburnt, one hand raised in the gesture of speech, which is the notice's own detail of the exhortation preached from the fire. Where the passion is narrated in a cycle, the preceding scene is the suspension and the tearing with hooks. The type deliberately echoes the Three Holy Children in the Babylonian furnace, and in menologion cycles the two images are often painted in the same idiom.
No pre-1900 icon of him has been located for this collection. The Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for a saint known only from a synaxarion line, covers only September to February and offers nothing for August 9.
Disputed questions
- Date and persecution. No century, emperor or governor is transmitted. Alexandria's great persecutions were those of Decius (250–251), Valerian (257–260) and Diocletian and Maximinus Daia (303–313), and the manner of the torture would suit any of them; the entry declines to choose, and no century is recorded, so that the saint indexes among those of unknown date.
- The name. The Greek books give Ἀντωνῖνος (Antoninus), and some recensions Ἀντώνιος (Antonios); the Slavic and OCA calendars have taken the latter and render him Anthony of Alexandria, which invites confusion with the great Anthony the Great of the Egyptian desert (January 17) — a different man altogether, a hermit who died in peace at a great age. The form Antoninus is preferred here as the better attested.
- Not to be confused with the other martyrs named Antoninus in the Byzantine calendars — chief among them the Antoninus who suffers with Andrew, John and Peter (September 23), nor with the emperor Antoninus Pius, under whom other Antonines were martyred and whose name is the source of theirs.