Coprius of Palestine
Our Venerable Father Coprius of Palestine
Venerable · b. c. 440 — d. c. 530
Commemorated 24 September — Repose in peace at the monastery of St. Theodosius
Coprius of Palestine (†c. 530) was a monk of the great cenobium of St. Theodosius near Bethlehem whose whole life, from its first hour, belonged to the monastery: the tradition relates that he was found as a newborn infant, abandoned on a dung-heap when his mother fled a raid of desert nomads, and that the monks who took him up named him from the place of his finding — Kopris, from the Greek kopria, "dung-heap." Raised on goat's milk within the community, tonsured there in due course, he attained humility, virtue and the gift of working wonders, and reposed in peace at about ninety years of age.
The notice of Coprius is brief in all the synaxaria, and the fuller account is transmitted chiefly in the Slavic synaxarion tradition. During a raid by the nomad Arabs (Saracens) who periodically swept the Judaean wilderness, a woman in flight abandoned — or lost — her newborn son on a dung-heap, where monks of the monastery of St. Theodosius the Cenobiarch, between Bethlehem and the Great Lavra, found him. They carried the infant home, fed him on goat's milk, and gave him the name his origin suggested, which he bore all his life without shame: the Greek verses appointed to him on September 24 turn the humiliating name into praise — "Kopris was no dung, but a fruitful vine, offering fair blossom to the Lord."
He grew up wholly within the cenobium, in time received the monastic tonsure there, and never left it: the one monastery was his cradle, his school, his arena and his grave. Of the long decades between, the tradition preserves no narrative, only the summary judgment that he attained a high measure of virtue and was granted by God the gift of wonderworking. He reposed in peace, aged about ninety, around the year 530.
Feast and commemoration
September 24 (church date; Old Calendar civil October 7), together with the Protomartyr Thecla, whose feast dominates the day; the Greek synaxarion gives Coprius a bare notice with verses. The commemoration is universal.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
In thee, O father, that which was made according to the image of God was preserved unimpaired; for taking up the Cross, thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to overlook the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore thy spirit, O venerable Coprius, rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No early iconography of Coprius is known to survive; he would be painted as a venerable elder in monastic habit. No public-domain or free-licensed image identifiable as this saint could be found; the saint is tracked in the the list of icons still being sought index.
Disputed questions
- Chronology. The transmitted data do not cohere exactly: if Coprius died about 530 at the age of ninety, his birth falls about 440, whereas the cenobium of St. Theodosius was founded only about 479. Either the ages and dates are round approximations (the likeliest solution), or the foundling story was attached to the monastery's name at a later stage. The sources give no means of deciding.
- "Hagarenes." Some received accounts (the OCA life among them) call the raiders "Hagarenes (Moslems)" — an anachronism for a life set wholly before Islam. The raiders of the age were the pagan Arab nomads of the desert fringe, whom the Byzantine sources call Saracens; the later term has been carried back by the synaxarists.
- Same-named saints. He is to be distinguished from Coprius of Egypt, the fourth-century anchorite commemorated July 9 with Patermuthius — whose name tradition explains in the same way, and from whom the Palestinian monk's story may borrow — and from the Russian Coprius of Gryazovets (15th–16th century, Vologda).