Castor the Venerable

Our Venerable Father Castor, who reposed in peace

Venerable

Commemorated 12 August — Commemoration of the venerable Castor, who reposed in peace

Castor is a venerable monastic commemorated in the Greek synaxaria on August 12, of whom the books preserve one clause: ὁ Ὅσιος Κάστωρ ἐν εἰρήνῃ τελειοῦται — "the venerable Castor is perfected in peace." No country, no century, no monastery and no act is transmitted, and the notice carries the standing formula for a monastic who died a natural death rather than a martyr's. He is entered here because the commemoration is genuine and consistently printed for the day, and because an honest record of such a saint is worth more than a constructed one.

One line

The Greek synaxarion for August 12, after the martyrs and the ascetic Palamon, gives Castor a single clause and a commemorative distich. The clause tells us his name and that he reposed in peace — the formula by which the synaxaria distinguish the venerable, the ascetics who "were perfected in peace," from the martyrs who "were perfected by the sword" or "by fire." The distich, composed for the calendar rather than drawn from any life, plays on the name and adds nothing.

That is the whole of the record. There is no vita, no place of burial, no monastery claiming him, no relics, and no witness earlier than the synaxarial tradition itself. The name Kastōr — from the Dioscurus, and common enough as a personal name in the Greek East through late antiquity — is the only material for inference, and it will support none.

Why the entry survives

Commemorations of this kind are not accidents of transmission; they are the residue of local memory. The Synaxarion of Constantinople was compiled as a working directory of the city's liturgical year, and a bare name entered against a day generally means that somewhere a community kept that name — a monastery, a shrine, a founder's memorial — at a time when the compiler could still see the practice but no longer read a life. When the community lapsed, the name remained in the book. The Church has continued to keep it, on the principle that a saint's worth does not depend on the survival of his biography.

Feast and commemoration

August 12 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 25), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and the Dormition Fast. He is commemorated at the synaxarion reading at Orthros, without proper hymns; the day's office belongs to Anicetus and Photius.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)

In thee, O father, was preserved unfailing that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passes away, and to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore thy spirit, O venerable Castor, rejoices with the angels.

Iconography

Nothing being transmitted of his life, Castor can only be painted by the type: a monastic father in the analavos and mantle, the koukoulion on the head or laid back on the shoulders, holding an unrolled scroll or with the right hand raised in blessing, the beard long and the face wasted with ascesis — old if the painter follows the ordinary reading of "venerable father," of middle years if he does not. He has no attribute, because he has no story. Such saints appear in practice only in the month-icons and menologion registers, where a whole day's commemoration is reduced to a row of small standing figures and the name is the identification.

No image of him has been located for this collection, nor is one to be expected. The Menologion of Basil II, which would ordinarily supply exactly this kind of figure, covers only September to February and cannot serve an August day.

Disputed questions

Not Castor the Martyr of September 18. Castor the Martyr, commemorated on September 18 and associated by the OCA with the Egyptian martyrs Sophia and Irene, is a different commemoration and a different class of saint: he is entered as a martyr, this Castor as a venerable who died in peace. Both are bare entries, which is exactly why the confusion is easy and why the distinction has to be stated. Two days, two categories, two entries in the synaxarion; no manuscript merges them.
Not Castor of Karden. English lists for August 12 print the bare name "Saint Kastor," which has led some compilers to identify him with Castor of Karden on the Moselle (c. 400), the hermit-priest and disciple of Maximinus of Trier whose relics were translated to Koblenz in 836. That identification will not stand: the Western Castor's feast is February 13, no Western source connects him with August 12, and above all the Greek synaxarion's Castor has no country, no story and no cult attached to him, whereas the Karden saint has all three. The coincidence is of name alone.
No date. No century is transmitted; the entry carries no century field and is indexed under unknown.
Jurisdiction. The commemoration is Greek. It is absent from the Slavonic Menaion and from the OCA's August 12 list.