Eudocia of Heliopolis

Heliopolis and the courtesan

Eudocia was a Samaritan by birth and religion, a native of Heliopolis — the ancient "City of the Sun" in the valley of the Beqaa in Phoenicia, the modern Baalbek in Lebanon, famed through the Roman world for the vast temples of its sun-cult. The tradition sets her life in the second century, in the age of the Antonine emperors, though the sources vary and some strands reach back to the reign of Trajan (see Disputed questions below).

Of extraordinary beauty, she used it, in the frank language of the synaxarion, as the instrument of a life of luxury and sin: she was a courtesan, sought by the wealthy and the powerful of the city and of the province, and by her trade she gathered a great fortune — gold, silver, precious stones, and estates — so that she was among the richest women of Heliopolis. Her name, "Eudokia," means good pleasure or good will; the Church loves the irony by which the woman who had lived for the pleasures of the flesh became, by repentance, a vessel of the good pleasure of God.

The reading through the wall

The turning of her life came not by a preacher sent to her, but by a word overheard. A travelling monk named Germanus, returning to his monastery, was lodged in a house that shared a wall with Eudocia's own; and in the night, keeping his rule, he read aloud — as was the ancient custom — from a book that set forth the Second Coming of Christ, the Last Judgement, the torments prepared for the unrepentant and the unfading joy prepared for the righteous. Through the wall the words reached Eudocia as she lay wakeful, and they entered her like fire. For the first time she saw her life as it was, and trembled at the account she would have to give; and when she could bear it no longer she sent to the stranger and begged him to come and speak with her.

Germanus came, and — carefully, as one instructing a soul that had never known the Gospel — he taught her the faith of Christ: the mercy of God that receives the returning sinner, the cleansing of baptism, the reward of repentance. He set her to a period of fasting and prayer, and left her to the working of grace. The tradition adds that in these days she was granted a vision — of an angel who caught her up and showed her the ranks of the blessed and the place prepared for the penitent, and of the Enemy raging at the loss of her — which sealed her resolve. She sent for the monk again, and asked to be made a Christian.

Baptism and the renunciation of her fortune

Eudocia was baptised by Theodotus, bishop of Heliopolis. Before or upon her baptism she made the great renunciation on which the whole of her later sanctity rests: she gave away her entire fortune — all the wealth gathered in her years of sin — distributing it to the poor and the churches through the hands of the bishop, keeping nothing back, that the price of her sin might become the seed of mercy. Stripped of everything she had lived for, she entered a convent near the city, received the monastic habit, and began the life of repentance that would fill the rest of her days.

The ascetic and wonderworker

In the convent Eudocia gave herself to a repentance as extreme as her sin had been. She wept without ceasing for her past; she fasted, kept vigil, and laboured in obedience, seeking to wear away in the flesh what the flesh had loved. Over the long years — the tradition speaks of a monastic course of some fifty-six years — she rose from penitent to mother, and was at length made abbess of her community, guiding others in the way she had learned so hard herself. And God, who had received her repentance, crowned it with the gift of wonders, so that the former courtesan became a worker of miracles and a raiser of the dead.

The synaxarion gathers several of these signs, in which her past and her sanctity meet. A former lover, Philostratus, unable to believe that the beauty of Heliopolis had truly forsaken the world, came to the convent to draw her back to her old life; at her word — or at the touch of her rebuke — he fell down dead, and then, at her prayer over him, was raised again, rose a changed man, and went away to be baptised and to end his days in penitence. When the governor Aurelian, stirred up against the Christians and against the wealth she had given away, sent soldiers to seize her, they were struck powerless; and when Aurelian's own son died, Eudocia raised him to life, so that the governor and his household believed and were baptised. The tradition tells also of a widow's son, killed by the bite of a serpent, whom she restored alive to his mother. Through these wonders many of the pagans of Heliopolis — among them her former companions in sin — were brought to Christ, so that her repentance became the salvation of others.

Martyrdom

The long course of her penitence was sealed at the last by martyrdom. In a renewed persecution, under a governor whom the sources name Vincent (Vicentius) — a fierce enemy of the Christians — Eudocia was arrested as the abbess who had turned the city, confessed Christ before the tribunal, and refused to sacrifice to the gods of Heliopolis whose temples still towered over the city. Condemned for her confession, she was led out and beheaded by the sword, and so the woman who had been baptised into the death of Christ was made perfect in His death — a venerable-martyr, a monastic crowned with the martyr's blood. The Church keeps the day of her beheading as her feast, March 1. The year is uncertain: the common reckonings give a date about 152, or between 160 and 170, in the Antonine age; an older strand, followed by some synaxaria, sets the whole story a generation earlier under Trajan and dates the martyrdom to 107 (see below).

Veneration and later cultus

Eudocia's memory spread early and widely, carried by her extraordinary story — the courtesan turned wonderworker and martyr — which made her, with Mary of Egypt, Pelagia of Antioch, and the harlot-saints of the desert tradition, one of the Church's supreme icons of repentance. Her Passion (the Acts of Eudocia) was read in the East and translated into Latin, and her feast, fixed at the head of March, opens the month in the Byzantine calendar. The Greek, Slavic, and Antiochian books all keep her on the day, and her name — Eudokia, Evdokia — has been borne by empresses and saints after her. That her home was Heliopolis in Phoenicia, a city long within the Patriarchate of Antioch, gives her a particular place among the saints of the Antiochian East, though her veneration is universal.