Christodoulos of Patmos

Origins and early monastic life

Christodoulos was born about the year 1020 in the region of Nicaea in Bithynia, in north-western Asia Minor, and received in baptism the name John — the name of the Theologian whose island he would one day make his own. Drawn to the monastic life from his youth, he left the world and took the habit, and the sources place his early ascetic formation on Mount Olympus in Bithynia, one of the celebrated monastic mountains of the Byzantine world. From there, in the manner of the seekers of his age, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where he entered the ancient Lavra of Saint Sabbas in the Judaean desert and drank at the deep well of Palestinian monasticism — the tradition of Sabbas whose typikon and spirit he would later carry into his own foundation. The disorders of Syria and Palestine under the advancing Turks, however, did not allow him to remain, and he returned to Asia Minor.

Superior of Mount Latros

His return brought him to Mount Latros (Latmos), the monastic mountain rising above the Carian coast near ancient Miletus, honeycombed with lavras and cells and crowned by the famous Lavra of Saint Paul the Younger. There Christodoulos so shone in the ascetic struggle that the monks chose him as their superior (protos, or hegumen), and from this office he carried through the rest of his life the surname "the Latrine" — Christodoulos of Latros. But the same wave that had unsettled the Holy Land now broke over Asia Minor: after the disaster of Manzikert (1071) the Seljuk Turks overran Anatolia, and the monastic mountains, undefended, emptied before them. Christodoulos was forced to abandon Latros, and with a company of monks he withdrew to the islands of the eastern Aegean — to Kos, where he laboured to establish monastic life, and to Leros and the neighbouring isles — always a step ahead of the raiders, seeking a refuge secure enough to house a settled community.

The grant of Patmos

That refuge he found, at last, in the small and deserted island of Patmos — the rocky Dodecanese island, all but uninhabited in his day, on which the Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian had been exiled under Domitian and had received the Revelation. To obtain it Christodoulos went to the source of all such grants, the emperor himself. In 1088 the emperor Alexios I Komnenos — the founder of the Komnenian dynasty, then in the early and precarious years of his reign — received the monk favourably, and by an imperial chrysobull (golden bull) made over to him and to his monks the whole island of Patmos in perpetuity, in exchange for the monastic lands Christodoulos held on Kos. The grant was generous and deliberate: the island was ceded free of taxation and of all interference by imperial and provincial officials, with the right to bring settlers and workers and to hold the neighbouring islets, so that the community might be self-sustaining and, so far as possible, independent. The emperor's mother, the pious Anna Dalassene, is remembered in the tradition as a patron of the undertaking. In this act of Alexios and Christodoulos the great Monastery of Saint John the Theologian was born.

The monastery of Saint John the Theologian

On the island's high central hill, on the site of a ruined ancient sanctuary and an early Christian basilica dedicated to the Theologian, Christodoulos began to build. From the outset the monastery rose as a fortress as much as a house of prayer — girt with high walls and towers against the pirates and Turkish raiders who still swept the Aegean — and this fortified katholikon and its refectory, the oldest surviving parts, remain to this day the core of the great grey pile that crowns Patmos. Within the walls Christodoulos gathered a cenobitic community and gave it, in May 1091, its Rule — the Hypotyposis (Ὑποτύπωσις), a monastic typikon drawing on the Sabbaïte and Studite traditions he had known, prescribing the common life, the daily cycle of prayer, the fasts, and the governance of the house. To this he would add, at the end of his life, his Testament (Διαθήκη) and a Codicil, documents that together fixed the monastery's constitution and its cherished independence — self-governing, answerable to no bishop or lord but only to the emperor's protection and to God. These three texts of Christodoulos survive and are among the most valuable documents of Byzantine monasticism; they have governed the Monastery of Saint John from his day to our own, and Patmos has kept, almost alone among such foundations, an unbroken monastic life of more than nine centuries.

Flight to Euboea and repose

Christodoulos did not die on the island he had won. About the year 1092, a renewed Turkish raid on the Aegean — the fleet of the emir Tzachas (Chaka) of Smyrna was ravaging the islands in these years — fell upon Patmos, and the aged abbot was compelled once more to flee, leading his monks to the safety of the great island of Euboea (Evia) off the coast of Greece. There, knowing his end near, he set his house in order: in March 1093 he composed his Testament and Codicil, commending the monastery to his disciples and to the emperor's protection and binding them to his Rule. He reposed in peace on Euboea on March 16, 1093, an old man full of labours, having in a single lifetime carried the monastic tradition from Bithynia and Palestine to the very island of the Apocalypse and planted there a house that would outlast the empire that endowed it.

Relics and later cultus

The monks did not leave their founder in exile. His relics were carried back to Patmos and enshrined in the monastery he had built, where they remain to this day — held to be incorrupt — in a chapel dedicated to him beside the katholikon, in a silver reliquary that is the goal of the pilgrims who come to the island. From his relics the tradition records a stream of healings and wonders, and it is for these that he bears throughout the Greek world the title "the Wonderworker of Patmos" (ὁ θαυματουργός); the OCA account and the Greek tradition alike remember him also as a physician of soul and body, whose prayers cured the sick. Patmos keeps his memory not only on the day of his repose but with a local feast of the return of his relics to the island, and venerates him as its founder, its protector, and — with the Theologian himself — its patron. His monastery, raised to the rank of a stauropegial and later patriarchal house, became one of the intellectual centres of the enslaved Greek nation under the Turks, its library among the richest in the Orthodox world; and all of it descends from the chrysobull of Alexios and the labour of the monk of Latros.