Asclepius and James of Syria
Our Venerable Fathers Asclepius and James, Hermits of Syria
Venerable · d. 5th century
Commemorated 27 February — Two Syrian solitaries of the region of Cyrrhus, remembered together
Asclepius and James (fifth century) were two ascetics of the Syrian countryside, of the region around Cyrrhus, remembered together on February 27 among the solitaries whose lives were gathered by Theodoret of Cyrrhus in his Religious History. Asclepius first pursued the ascetic life in his own village, drawing many after him into the discipline of prayer and fasting, before withdrawing into stricter solitude; James likewise lived the hermit's life in the same country of Syria. Little more is transmitted of them than the fact and the manner of their struggle, and they are honoured as fathers of the great fifth-century flowering of Syrian monasticism.
Asclepius and James belong to the company of Syrian holy men whom the Church keeps in her February commemorations and whom Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus, knew or recorded in the Philotheos Historia — the same region and the same generation that produced the solitaries Thalassius, Limnaeus and Baradates (kept February 22) and the weeping hermit Thalelaeus (kept the same day).
Of Asclepius the tradition records that he first took up the ascetic life in his own village, not withdrawing at once into the desert but sanctifying the place where he lived; his example and his teaching drew many of his neighbours to follow him in the monastic discipline, so that he became a father of souls in the world before he sought the deeper solitude in which he perfected his own struggle. Of James less is transmitted — that he too was a hermit of the Syrian country, a solitary of prayer and abstinence — and the calendars keep the two together as fellow-labourers of the one region and the one age. Both reposed in peace in the fifth century, and both are honoured for the plain Syrian sanctity that Theodoret loved to record: the endurance of the body, the guarding of the heart, and the winning of others to the same way.
The honest brevity of their notice is itself faithful to the record: they are saints known, like many of the desert and the Syrian hills, by the fact of their holiness rather than by a preserved biography.
Feast and commemoration
Asclepius and James are kept together on February 27 (church date; Old Calendar civil March 12), among the Syrian ascetics of the day, in the Byzantine synaxaria and the calendars that descend from them.
Iconography
They are depicted, where they are shown at all, in the settled type of the Syrian hermits — aged, bearded ascetics in the monastic habit, one or both bearing a scroll or a cross. No public-domain image identified as Asclepius and James of Syria has been found for storage; the entry notes the icon as wanting.