Eustathius of Constantinople
Our Father among the Saints Eustathius, Patriarch of Constantinople
Patriarch · Bishop · d. 1025
Commemorated 31 May — Commemoration of the patriarch, who reposed in peace
Eustathius was Patriarch of Constantinople from 1019 to 1025, in the last years of the emperor Basil II. He came to the throne of the Great Church not from a monastery or a provincial see but from the imperial palace, where he had been protopresbyter — the senior priest of the court clergy — and he governed the Church, in the words of the notice that preserves his memory, in a manner pleasing to God, reposing in peace towards the end of 1025. His sanctity is not carried by the printed Menaia: it survives in a manuscript synaxarion of the metochion of the Holy Sepulchre, which enters his commemoration on May 31, and he is one of the most obscure of all the canonised occupants of the see.
The protopresbyter of the palace
The office Eustathius held before his elevation, protopresbyter (or protopapas) of the palace, was one of the significant ecclesiastical positions in the Byzantine capital and is easily underestimated. The holder was the first of the priests attached to the imperial household and its chapels, in daily contact with the emperor, and frequently the emperor's confessor. It was a court office rather than a hierarchical one, and appointment from it to the patriarchal throne signalled — as it had in earlier cases — that the choice was substantially the emperor's own.
The emperor in 1019 was Basil II, the greatest of the Macedonian rulers, in the years immediately following the final subjugation of Bulgaria. Basil's dealings with the Church were famously businesslike: he had reduced the patriarchate's independence in practice while leaving its dignity intact, and he preferred patriarchs who would not obstruct him. Eustathius succeeded Sergius II and held the throne for the remainder of Basil's reign and into the first months of Constantine VIII's.
The patriarchate, 1019–1025
Almost nothing of his administration is recorded, and the honest statement of the matter is that the notice which preserves his sanctity is also very nearly the only notice we have of him. The regnal dates are secure from the patriarchal lists; the character of the tenure is given only in the formula that he shepherded the Church in a God-pleasing manner.
Two things may be said of the period without going beyond the evidence. The first is that his patriarchate falls in the years when the question of the newly conquered Bulgarian church was being settled — Basil having provided for the autocephalous archbishopric of Ohrid by imperial sigillia rather than by patriarchal act — so that the see of Constantinople was, during Eustathius's tenure, absorbing an enormous new ecclesiastical territory on terms it had not itself dictated. The second is that these are the years well before the rupture of 1054, when relations with Rome were formally intact though increasingly distant; his patriarchate produced no recorded controversy on either front.
Repose
Eustathius reposed in peace in November or December 1025 — that is, in the same weeks as the death of the emperor Basil II (15 December 1025), so that patriarch and emperor left the scene together and the notice does not allow us to say which went first. He was succeeded by Alexius Studites. The commemoration nevertheless stands on May 31, which is therefore not his day of death but a day assigned to his memory in the manuscript that records it — an ordinary feature of synaxarial transmission, where a saint's day is fixed by the compiler's calendar rather than by an anniversary.
The witness that preserves him
His memory rests on Codex 426 of the metochion of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the manuscript synaxaria of the Jerusalem patriarchal library, which enters his name on this day. He is absent from the printed Menaia and from the standard synaxaria, and the modern Greek synaxaristes says as much when it notes that he remains unknown to the ordinary service books. Cases of this kind — a canonised patriarch surviving in a single manuscript notice — are a reminder that the liturgical calendar as printed is a selection from a much larger transmitted memory, and that the Church's roll of saints was never closed by the printers.
Feast and commemoration
May 31 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 13), the last day of the church month of May. The commemoration is Greek and manuscript in its transmission, unknown to the Slavonic calendars and to the printed Menaia; no proper service exists, and where he is commemorated the office is sung from the common of a hierarch. He is kept on a day whose principal memories are the Apostle Hermas and the martyr Hermias of Comana, and he is the only hierarch of the day.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
O God of our fathers, who dealest with us ever according to thy gentleness: take not thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of our father among the saints Eustathius, direct our life in peace.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Eustathius is painted, when he is painted at all, in the ordinary type of a Byzantine patriarch of the middle period: an elderly hierarch in phelonion, epitrachelion and cross-bordered omophorion, the head bare in the older manner, blessing with the right hand and holding the jewelled Gospel in the left — the same type as the great patriarchs of the same century, and distinguishable only by inscription. No pre-1900 icon of him has been identified for this collection, and it is doubtful that a distinct image exists: a saint whose commemoration survives in a single manuscript synaxarion, with no proper office and no church dedication, does not ordinarily acquire an iconographic type. Searches of the Wikimedia Commons holdings under his name and title return nothing depicting him.
Disputed questions
- Which Eustathius. Several churchmen of the name must be kept apart: this patriarch of Constantinople (1019–1025); Eustathius of Antioch, the confessor-patriarch deposed by the Arians (February 21); Eustathius, the twelfth-century metropolitan of Thessalonica and Homeric commentator, who is not a saint of the calendar; and the martyr Eustathius Placidas (September 20). Modern indexes conflate them freely.
- The year of repose. 1025 is secure from the patriarchal lists; whether the death falls in November or in December of that year, and therefore whether it precedes or follows the death of Basil II on 15 December 1025, is not determinable from the notice.
- The rank of the commemoration. Because he is entered in one manuscript synaxarion and in no printed Menaion, some Greek lists print him with a query. This repository records the commemoration as transmitted, and records with it that it rests on a single witness.