Eikon

Barses, Eulogius and Protogenes

The Holy Confessors Barses and Eulogius, Bishops of Edessa, and Protogenes, Bishop of Carrhae

Confessor · Bishop · d. Barses c. 378 in exile; Eulogius and Protogenes at the end of the 4th century

Commemorated 25 August — Memory of the three confessors of Edessa and Carrhae

Three bishops of the Syrian Mesopotamian frontier, kept together on one day because they suffered together in one persecution: the Arian repression under the Emperor Valens in the years after 370. Barses, bishop of Edessa, an aged wonderworker whom the whole East venerated, was driven from his city and sent from exile to exile — the island of Aradus, then Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, then a desert fort on the barbarian frontier — until he died of it. Eulogius, a presbyter of Edessa, and Protogenes, a presbyter of the same church, were among eighty clergy deported for refusing communion with the imperial nominee, and were sent in chains to Antinoöpolis in the Thebaid; there Protogenes opened a school, taught the pagan children their letters and the Psalms with them, and baptised so many that the two exiles converted the town that had been their prison. When Valens died and Theodosius restored the orthodox, Eulogius came back to be bishop of Edessa and Protogenes bishop of Carrhae. Their memory is kept on August 25.

Edessa under Valens

Edessa — Urhai, the modern Şanlıurfa — was the chief Christian city of Osrhoene and one of the oldest Christian cities in the world, holding the tomb of the Apostle Thomas and the memory of Thaddaeus of the Seventy and King Abgar. Under Valens (364–378), the last Arian emperor of the East, it became the scene of the most famous act of civil resistance of the fourth-century Church.

The see was held by Barses — Syriac Barsai — who had been translated to Edessa from Harran (Carrhae) and who was, by every account, the most venerated bishop in Mesopotamia. Theodoret says the fame of his cures had gone through the whole East, and that the couch on which he had lain was preserved after him as a relic and worked healings on the sick who were laid upon it. He would not communicate with the Arians, and Valens deposed him.

The emperor's method with Barses was to break him by movement. He was banished first to the island of Aradus off the Phoenician coast; when it became known that pilgrims were crossing to him there, he was moved to Oxyrhynchus in Egypt; when the same thing happened at Oxyrhynchus, he was sent on to a remote garrison town on the edge of the desert, on the barbarian frontier — the name is transmitted variously, Phelon or Thenon in the Greek and Slavonic lives. There, worn out by the journeys and by age, he died in exile, about the year 378.

The eighty clergy, and the exile of Eulogius and Protogenes

In place of Barses the emperor installed an Arian, whom the lives name Lupus. Almost no one in Edessa would communicate with him. When Valens came to the city in person — this is the scene Theodoret and Socrates both tell — the whole population, warned that the assembly at the martyrium of St Thomas outside the walls was forbidden on pain of death, went out to it anyway; and the prefect Modestus, sent to disperse them with troops, met on the road a woman running with her child in her arms to be in time to die, and could not carry out his orders.

Valens fell back on deportation. Eighty of the clergy of Edessa, presbyters and deacons, were arrested and sent in chains into exile in Thrace for refusing communion with Lupus. Among them were the presbyters Eulogius and Protogenes, who were separated from the rest and banished together to Antinoöpolis — Antinoe — in the Thebaid of Upper Egypt.

The school at Antinoöpolis

The two exiles found Antinoöpolis a largely pagan town, and what they did there is the reason their memory survives. Eulogius, the elder, shut himself up in a small house and gave himself to prayer and fasting, seeing no one; Protogenes, seeing the town's ignorance, hired a room, set up as a schoolmaster of shorthand and writing, and gathered the boys of the place as his pupils. With their letters he taught them the Psalms and the Scriptures, and when any of them fell sick he took the child to Eulogius, who prayed over him and healed him.

The parents followed the children. Protogenes catechised and Eulogius received them, and between them, the account says, they baptised a great number of the pagans of Antinoöpolis. It is one of the very few episodes in the persecution literature in which the punishment simply becomes a mission.

Restoration: Edessa and Carrhae

Valens was killed at Adrianople in 378, and under Theodosius the Great (379–395) the exiled orthodox were recalled and the churches restored. The people of Edessa, whose bishop Barses had died in exile, received back their clergy; Eulogius was raised from the presbyterate to the episcopate of Edessa, and Protogenes, who had wished to remain with him, was consecrated bishop of Carrhae — the ancient Harran, a stubbornly pagan city notorious for the survival of its old star-worship into the Christian centuries, and precisely the sort of place his years at Antinoöpolis had trained him for.

Both governed their churches until their deaths, at the end of the fourth century, and are numbered among the confessors: they did not die by the sword, but they were deprived, chained and deported for the confession of the faith of Nicaea, and the Church honours the confession as it honours martyrdom.

Feast and commemoration

The three are commemorated together on August 25 (church date; New Calendar civil August 25, Old Calendar civil September 7). They are a secondary commemoration of a day whose propers belong to the return of the relics of Bartholomew and to the repose of Titus, and they have no proper hymnography; the common of a hierarch is sung with their names. The Russian and American calendars name all three; the Greek synaxaria carry them in the day's notice. Barses is also remembered in the Syriac tradition of Edessa in his own right.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 4

A rule of faith and an image of meekness, a teacher of abstinence, hath the truth of things shown you to be unto your flocks; therefore have ye gained by humility the things on high, and by poverty the things that are rich. O Fathers and Hierarchs Barses, Eulogius and Protogenes, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Iconography

No transmitted iconographic type is known for any of the three, and no pre-modern image inscribed with their names has been located. Were they painted, they would appear as hierarchs in the ordinary Byzantine manner — the phelonion and omophorion, the Gospel book, the blessing hand — and as confessors rather than martyrs they would carry no instrument of passion and no red robe of blood, but might hold a scroll. Barses, the eldest and the one with a wonderworking cultus, would be shown as an old man with a long white beard; the one attribute the sources would justify is the couch preserved at Edessa on which the sick were laid, which no known image depicts. The Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for minor saints, covers only September to February and cannot supply an August commemoration. No image was stored for this entry.

Disputed questions

  • Barses of Edessa or Barses of Carrhae? The sources make Barses bishop of Harran (Carrhae) first and of Edessa afterwards; some Syriac notices know him only under one see or the other, and modern reference works are inconsistent. The double episcopate is the likeliest reading and explains the confusion.

  • The place of his last exile. Theodoret's text and the Greek and Slavonic lives give the final place of banishment differently — a fortress in the desert whose name appears as Phelon, Philon or Thenon. It is not identifiable.

  • Why are the three kept together? They were not exiled at the same moment nor to the same place, and Barses was dead before the other two returned. What joins them in the synaxarion is the single persecution and the two neighbouring sees, and the Byzantine notice treats them as one commemoration; this entry follows the books.

Sources

  1. Theodoret of Cyrus, Ecclesiastical History IV.14–18 — the deposition and successive exiles of Barses (Aradus, Oxyrhynchus, the desert fort) and the preservation of his couch as a relic; the deportation of the eighty clergy of Edessa; the exile of Eulogius and Protogenes to Antinoöpolis, the school of Protogenes and the healings of Eulogius, and their consecration to Edessa and Carrhae under Theodosius.
  2. Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History IV.18, and Sozomen, VI.18 — Valens at Edessa, the prohibition of the assembly at the martyrium of St Thomas, the prefect Modestus, and the woman running with her child.
  3. Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, August 25 (consulted live) — the three confessors under Valens, the Arian bishop Lupus, the sequence of Barses's exiles to Aradus, Oxyrhynchus and Thenon, the eighty clergy sent to Thrace, and the elevation of Eulogius and Protogenes to Edessa and Carrhae.
  4. Greek Menaion, August 25 (glt.goarch.org, consulted live) — the day's propers, which belong to Bartholomew and Titus; the three confessors are carried in the synaxarion notice without a proper office.
  5. Cross-references within this corpus: Thaddaeus of the Seventy (August 21), the apostle of Edessa; Titus the Apostle and Bartholomew the Apostle, who hold the day.