Dios of Antioch
Our Venerable Father Dios the Wonderworker, of Antioch, founder of the monastery at Constantinople
Venerable · Wonderworker · Priest · b. mid-4th century, at Antioch in Syria — d. c. 430, at Constantinople
Commemorated 19 July — Repose at his monastery in Constantinople
Dios (Δῖος, "of Zeus" by the accident of a pagan name) was an Antiochene ascetic of the later fourth century who carried the discipline of the Syrian fathers into the capital. Sent to Constantinople by a vision, he settled in a waste place outside the walls that the city shunned as demon-haunted, and made it a monastery: the Monastery of Dios, one of the earliest and longest-lived houses of the imperial city. The emperor Theodosius built it at his own charge and the patriarch Atticus ordained him priest and set him over it. He was famous for an abstinence that took food only at intervals of days, for a dry staff that struck root and grew into a great oak, for a spring opened by his prayer, and for raising a drowned man; and, having once been laid out for burial and revived, he lived fifteen years more and reposed in extreme old age about the year 430.
An Antiochene beginning
Dios was born at Antioch on the Orontes, of Christian parents, in the middle years of the fourth century — the Antioch of the great preaching and of a monastic hinterland unmatched anywhere in the East, where the mountains behind the city were already thick with solitaries and the ascetic life was the ordinary ambition of a devout young man. His synaxarion says he was marked from boyhood by temperance: he took food in very small quantity and not every day, sometimes at intervals of two or three days, and wore his body down with standing vigils and unceasing prayer. The tradition is emphatic that this was Syrian severity rather than Egyptian moderation — the discipline of the region that produced the pillar-saints — and it is the Antiochene stamp that he carried with him ever afterwards.
For this he received, the notice says, ἀπάθεια — dispassion, freedom from the tyranny of the passions — and with it the gift of wonderworking, the two being understood in the Antiochene tradition as the same grace seen from within and from without.
Sent to the capital
A vision commanded him to leave Syria for Constantinople, "for the profit of many": his own countrymen already had fathers enough, and the new capital, swollen and unsettled, had few. He came to the city and did not go into it. Instead he chose a deserted and ill-reputed place outside the inhabited quarter, a spot the citizens avoided because it was believed to be held by demons, and there built himself a hut.
The account of what followed is the standard grammar of Christian settlement in a pagan landscape: the demons made war on him with terrors and apparitions, and he outlasted them by prayer and by refusing to leave. When men doubted that God had really sent him to that place, he planted his dry walking-staff in the ground; it took root, put out leaves, and grew in time into an immense oak, which was still standing and still shown long after his death. The tree fixed the site, and people began to come.
The monastery of Dios
Word of the ascetic outside the walls reached the palace. The emperor Theodosius came out to see him, was struck by what he found, and undertook the building of a monastery on the spot at his own expense; and the patriarch Atticus of Constantinople (406–425) ordained him presbyter and appointed him archimandrite over the community that had gathered. Dios, who had come to the city for solitude, spent the rest of his life as the abbot of one of its principal houses.
The Μονὴ τοῦ Δίου, the "Monastery of Dios," is not a legend of the synaxaria only: it is attested in the ecclesiastical records of Constantinople for centuries afterwards, its abbots subscribing at councils and its name recurring in the topography of the city. Together with the house of Alexander the Sleepless and that of Marcellus, and with the Dalmatou monastery, it belongs to the first generation of Constantinopolitan monasticism — and it is worth noticing how many of that generation, Dios among them, were Syrians and Antiochenes who brought the usage of the East into a city that had barely begun to have a monastic tradition of its own.
Miracles
The synaxarion gathers his wonders briefly. He opened a spring by prayer where there had been no water, and the water healed. He raised a man who had been drowned, restoring him alive to those who had brought the body. He cured many sicknesses, and the sick came out from the city to him. His name in the calendars is simply ὁ θαυματουργός, the Wonderworker.
Repose
In great age he fell so gravely ill that he was taken for dead. The community prepared the body and the funeral was set forward; by the tradition the patriarch himself came out to bury him. Then he revived — and lived, the notice says, fifteen years more, in which he governed his monastery as before. At the last he foreknew his end, gave his final charge to the brotherhood, and reposed in peace in extreme old age, about the year 430. He was buried in his own monastery, where his relics were venerated and where the oak grown from his staff stood as his memorial.
Feast and commemoration
July 19 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 1). He is kept on this day by the Synaxarion of Constantinople, by the Greek Menaion, by the Slavonic calendars and by the Orthodox Church in America, and stands in the same day's list as Macrina the Younger. The day falls in the open season between the Apostles' Fast and the Dormition Fast, and carries no fasting rule of its own. In the capital his memory was naturally kept with particular solemnity at his own monastery, whose typikon would have made the day its patronal feast.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8
With the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren wilderness bear fruit, and by thy groanings from the depths thou didst make thy labours fruitful a hundredfold; and thou wast made a beacon for the whole world, shining with miracles, O Dios our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou didst leave the city of Antioch at God's summons and take for thy dwelling the waste place that men feared; and there thy dry staff put forth leaves, and the dead was given back alive at thy word. Wherefore we cry to thee: cease not, O wonderworking Dios, to intercede for us all.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Dios is painted as a venerable elder: long white beard, monastic schema and mantle, the right hand raised in blessing or held to the breast, a scroll in the left. Two attributes are proper to him where a painter chooses to individualise the type. The first is the oak — the staff planted dry that rooted and grew — shown as a young tree beside him or as a leafing rod in his hand, which is his one distinctive sign in the menologia. The second is the spring opened at his prayer, indicated by water issuing from rock at his feet. In composite scenes he may be shown before the emperor, receiving the foundation of his monastery, or standing over the body of the drowned man.
No pre-1900 icon or manuscript miniature of Dios has been identified for this collection. The Menologion of Basil II, which would ordinarily supply such a figure for a minor saint of the fixed year, covers only September to February and is of no use for a July commemoration.
Disputed questions
- Which Theodosius? The Greek notices are divided. Some place his flourishing under Theodosius I the Great (379–395), which would make him a contemporary of the great Antiochene preaching and would put his arrival in the capital in the 380s; others name Theodosius II the Younger (408–450), which agrees with the ordination by Atticus (patriarch 406–425) and with a repose about 430. The two are not wholly irreconcilable — a man who lived to extreme old age could have come under the elder Theodosius and been ordained under the younger — and this entry follows that reading, while recording that the sources genuinely differ.
- The fifteen further years. If Atticus presided at the funeral that was not needed, and Dios lived fifteen years after it, his repose falls between about 421 and 440 depending on where in Atticus' patriarchate the episode is placed. "About 430" is a reasonable centre and is given as such; no source fixes the year.
- "Abbot of Antioch." The English form of his title in some calendars — "Venerable Dius, abbot of Antioch" — is misleading. Antioch is his origin, not his abbacy: every account places his monastery at Constantinople. The epithet should be read as "Dios the Antiochene."
- The name. Δῖος is a theophoric pagan name, and one of a small class of such names borne by saints of the period without embarrassment. It appears in Slavonic as Дий and in Latin lists as Dius, which has led to occasional confusion with other bearers of the name in the martyrologies; none of them is this man.