Athanasius the Wonderworker
Our Venerable Father Athanasius the Wonderworker, priest of the monastery of Traianos
Venerable · Priest · Wonderworker
Commemorated 3 June — Repose in peace in old age
Athanasius the Wonderworker is a monastic saint of the Greek synaxaria, commemorated on June 3 and known from a single short synaxarion notice: a man who gave himself from boyhood to the preaching and the practice of the Gospel, received from God the gift of healing bodies and souls so that people came to him and fetched him to their houses, entered a monastery on the river Sangarios whose abbot had been a senator in the world, was asked by that abbot to recover a community grown slack, and did it by preaching, by his own blameless example, by brotherly entreaty and by praying all night; afterwards he went to the monastery of Traianos, where he was ordained priest and lived by copying books, selling them and giving the money to the poor, and where he reposed in peace at a great age. Nothing further is transmitted — not his country, not his century.
The gift of healing
The notice begins with a boyhood already given away: Athanasius devoted himself "from a young age" wholly to the service of the Gospel, and the synaxarion is careful to say that he served it both by preaching and by doing it. To this life God added the charism of healing, and the notice records it in an unusually concrete form — that people ran to him, and that they also invited him into their homes, seeking his prayers. It is the working life of a wonderworker in a populated country rather than in a desert: the sick brought to a door, and the man of prayer fetched out to the sick.
The synaxarion sets his healing of bodies and of souls side by side, and it is the second that the rest of the notice illustrates.
The monastery on the Sangarios
He entered the monastic life at a house beside the river Sangarios — the great river of Bithynia that runs north into the Black Sea, in a region thick with monasteries in the middle Byzantine centuries. Its abbot had been a senator before his tonsure, a detail the notice keeps because it explains what follows: a monastery founded or governed out of the aristocracy, and troubled by worldly passions brought in from the world.
The abbot asked Athanasius to set the brotherhood right, and the notice enumerates the four means by which he did it — his fervent word, his blameless example, his entreaty as a brother rather than as a superior, and his all-night supplication to God — and says that the reform succeeded. It is a small portrait of the reformer who holds no office: a monk correcting monks by persuasion and by prayer, at the request of the man who could have commanded them and could not move them.
The monastery of Traianos, and his repose
Afterwards he removed to the monastery of Traianos, and there he was ordained priest. His labour was the copying of books — the ordinary and honourable trade of the Byzantine monastic scribe — and the notice specifies what he did with the proceeds: he sold what he copied and gave to the poor, so that the work of his hands supported not himself but others.
He reposed in peace in advanced old age. No martyrdom, no exile, no confession before a tribunal: the synaxarion has kept him for the reform of one slack monastery, the healing of the people who came to his door, and the books he wrote out for the poor.
Feast and commemoration
June 3 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 16), on which the Greek synaxaria name him second, after the martyrs Lucillian, Paula and the four children. He has no proper office: the Menaion appoints the common of a venerable father where he is kept, and in most usage he is simply named in the synaxarion notice of the day and not otherwise commemorated. The Slavonic calendar does not carry him, and neither the Antiochian nor the Russian calendar of June 3 names him; his commemoration is a Greek one.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By a flood of tears thou didst make the desert fruitful, and by thy sighing from the depths thou didst bear fruit a hundredfold in labours; thou becamest a beacon, shining upon the world by miracles, O Athanasius our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
There is no established type. Where he is painted at all — chiefly in the June leaf of a painted menologion, or in the wall-calendar of a monastery katholikon — he takes the ordinary form of the venerable priest-monk: an old man with a long white beard in the black rason and koukoulion or with the head bare, holding a scroll or blessing, and, because he was a hieromonk, sometimes shown with the epitrachelion. A book, for the volumes he copied and sold, would be the natural attribute, but no image assigning it to him has been located.
No pre-1900 image identified as this Athanasius has been found. The difficulty is not that such images are scarce but that they are hard to attribute: the name is one of the commonest in the calendar, and an inscription reading only Ο ΑΓΙΟΣ ΑΘΑΝΑΣΙΟΣ is worthless for identification. No image is therefore stored, rather than risk attaching to this entry a portrait of Athanasius the Great or of Athanasius of Athos.
Disputed questions
- "Of Cilicia"? English and English-derived lists of June 3 style him Athanasius the Wonder-worker of Cilicia, and the epithet has been widely copied. The Greek synaxarion notice knows nothing of Cilicia: it places him at a monastery on the Sangarios, that is in Bithynia, and afterwards at the monastery of Traianos, and gives him no country of origin at all. The two cannot both be primary, and the Greek notice is the older witness. This entry keeps the Wonderworker as his name, records of Cilicia among the alternate names because that is how he is looked up in English, and does not assert a Cilician origin. Whether the epithet rests on a manuscript reading now lost, or on a confusion with one of the several Cilician saints named Athanasius, cannot be determined from the available record.
- No date is transmitted. Neither the century nor the reign is given. The setting — a Bithynian monastery under an abbot of senatorial rank, a house named for a Traianos, a monk living by book-copying — is characteristic of the eighth to eleventh centuries, but this is inference from the furniture of the story and not evidence. The entry therefore carries no century, and is indexed among the saints of undetermined date.
- Not to be confused with the many other saints of the name: not Athanasius of Alexandria the Great (January 18, May 2), nor Athanasius I of Constantinople (October 28), nor Athanasius the Confessor of Paulopetrion (February 22), nor Athanasius of Corinth, nor Athanasius of Modon, nor Athanasius Patelarios of Lubny (May 2), nor Athanasius the Resurrected of the Kiev Caves (December 2), nor Athanasius of Murom. He is also not Athanasius of Athos (July 5), the founder of the Great Lavra, with whom the bare epithet the Wonderworker occasionally causes him to be confounded in catalogues.