Attalus the Wonderworker
Our Venerable Father Attalus the Wonderworker
Venerable · Wonderworker
Commemorated 6 June — Commemoration of the wonderworking ascetic
Attalus is a wonderworking ascetic commemorated by the Greek synaxaria on June 6, known only from the synaxarion notice for that day. It describes a monk consumed with the desire to know God's law exactly and to keep it exactly: he ate once in two days, grudged himself sleep as a kind of death, and yet was of so gentle a heart that the birds came to him unafraid each morning and joined their voices to his in the praise of the Creator. God gave him the working of miracles, and he healed sicknesses of body and of soul. Forewarned of his end, he asked the brethren to embrace him while he yet lived, and so departed in the light. Neither his country nor his century is transmitted.
The record
Attalus belongs to that considerable company of saints whose entire surviving biography is a synaxarion notice — a paragraph in the Greek service-books for his day, without a Life, without a date, and without a named monastery. Nothing is gained by pretending otherwise, and the notice itself is short enough to be given in substance.
The ascetic
The notice makes his governing passion a passion for exactness: he wished above all to learn the law of God precisely and to keep it precisely, and measured his life against it rather than against the practice of other men. Two disciplines are singled out. He ate once in two days, taking food as a necessity and not as a consolation. And he denied himself sleep, reckoning it, in the manner of the desert fathers, as a rehearsal of death and a theft from prayer — a commonplace of the ascetic literature which the notice applies to him as his particular labour.
Against this severity the notice sets a striking counterweight: his tenderness. He was harsh with himself alone, and the sign of it given is the one detail of his life that no compiler would have invented — that each morning the birds came near him without fear, and that he and they together sent up the morning glorification to God their Maker. It is the same note that the Lives strike for the great solitaries, whose gentleness the animals recognised before men did.
Wonders and repose
For this life God granted him the gift of miracles, and he healed by prayer both bodily illnesses and passions of the soul — the second, in the desert tradition, being the greater of the two cures. Knowing that his death was upon him, he called the brethren, asked them to embrace him while he still lived rather than mourn him after, and reposed in an illumination of spirit.
Feast and commemoration
June 6 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 19). Attalus is kept in the Greek synaxaria of the day, third or fourth in the list after Hilarion the New of Dalmatia and Bessarion the Wonderworker, and is regularly printed in the same clause as Photius the Monk ("Attalus the wonderworker, and Photius"). He has no sung office of his own: the day's canon is that of the venerable fathers, and his commemoration is made in the reading of the synaxarion at Matins. He does not appear in the Slavonic calendars for the day.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable wonderworker)
By the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren desert to bear fruit, and by thy sighings from the depths thou didst bring thy labours to hundredfold increase; and thou wast made a beacon to the world, shining with miracles, O Attalus our father: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
No individual iconography of Attalus has developed, and no pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this collection. Where he is painted at all it is in the June leaf of a painted menologion, among the ranks of the venerable fathers of the day, in the standard formula for an ascetic: an aged monk in the mantle and analavos, bare head, long beard, one hand blessing and the other holding a scroll. An iconographer working from the notice would properly give him the birds — the one attribute the tradition supplies him with, and the one that would distinguish him from every other monk on the leaf.
Disputed questions
- His name. The Greek notices observe that Attalos is very likely not a given name at all but a form of the monastic style of address — the Coptic and Greek ἀββᾶ / abba, "father," "revered one" — hardened into a proper name in transmission. If so, "Abba Attalus" would be one of several desert fathers whose epithet became their name in the calendars.
- Date and place. Neither is transmitted. The character of the notice — the two-day fast, the sleeplessness, the birds, the death in the presence of the brethren — is that of Egyptian or Palestinian monasticism of the fourth to sixth centuries, but this is inference from genre and not evidence, and no century is asserted here. He is therefore indexed among the saints whose era the sources do not fix.
- Not the Western Attalus. He is distinct from Attalus of Pergamum, the second-century martyr of Lyons named in the letter of the churches of Vienne and Lyons, and from Attala (Attalus) of Bobbio (†627), the Burgundian abbot who succeeded St Columbanus — neither of whom is the wonderworking ascetic of June 6.