Eutyches, Disciple of John the Theologian
The Holy Hieromartyr Eutyches, Disciple of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian
Hieromartyr · Bishop · d. early 2nd century
Commemorated 24 August — Martyrdom by the sword in his native city
Eutyches is honoured on August 24 as a hieromartyr of the apostolic age: a hearer first of the Apostle John the Theologian and afterwards a fellow-labourer of the Apostle Paul, ordained bishop by apostolic hands and sent out to preach. The synaxarion remembers him for the sheer extravagance of the torments he outlived — starving, the iron rods, the fire, the arena — and for the wonder in which they culminated, when the lion loosed upon him lay down and glorified God with a human voice. He was at last beheaded in his own city, at the beginning of the second century. Because he preached with the apostles and by their commission, the tradition calls him "an apostle" without numbering him among the Seventy.
A disciple of two apostles
The account transmitted in the synaxaria makes Eutyches a native of Sebaste, and places him in that first generation which received the Gospel from the apostles' own mouths. He attached himself first to John the Theologian, whose disciple he is called in every notice of the day and in the title by which the Church knows him; afterwards, the record says, he fell in with the Apostle Paul and laboured with him. The two discipleships are not rivals: the picture the tradition draws is of a man who received the contemplative theology of the Evangelist and the missionary restlessness of the Apostle to the Nations, and who spent his life carrying both wherever he was sent.
By the apostles' hands he was ordained bishop. The sources do not agree on a see — this is one of the marks of an authentically early and thinly transmitted memory — and no city in Asia or Palestine has succeeded in claiming him as its own founder. What is transmitted instead is the shape of his labour: preaching, the conversion of pagans, the planting of churches, and the wandering life of a man with a commission rather than a throne. It is on this ground, and not on any list, that the synaxaria say he was "called an apostle."
The torments
The passion, as the Greek notice preserves it, is a catalogue of trials survived rather than a single execution. He was shut up and starved; he was beaten with rods of iron; he was cast into fire; and, when neither hunger nor iron nor flame had killed him, he was thrown to the beasts. It is at this last point that the account gives the detail for which he is chiefly remembered: a lion was loosed into the arena against him, and the beast, instead of tearing him, spoke with a human voice and glorified the Creator — the crowd hearing what the lion said, and the saint left untouched.
The wonder belongs to a family of arena-miracles that runs through the martyr-literature of the second and third centuries, in which the irrational creation acknowledges the God whom the rational spectators deny; and it is told of Eutyches with the same economy the synaxarist gives to the tortures themselves. Its function in the narrative is plain: the world may kill the saint, but it cannot make the creation testify against him.
Martyrdom
Neither the tortures nor the arena ended him. He was carried back at last to his own city, and there beheaded with the sword, at what the tradition places at the opening of the second century — that is, within living memory of the apostles who had ordained him. The Church numbers him a hieromartyr: a bishop who sealed his priesthood with his blood.
Feast and commemoration
August 24 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 6). He stands first in the day's synaxarion in the Greek and Slavonic Menaia alike, and the day is his in the strict sense: the other great commemorations of August 24 — the translation of the relics of Peter of Moscow and the repose of Cosmas the Aetolian — are later accretions to a day whose oldest layer is this apostolic hieromartyr. The date falls the day after the leavetaking of the Dormition, so that his memory is the first to be kept unshadowed by the great feast of the month.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, O divinely-inspired one, thou didst find in contemplation the means to ascend to divine heights; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst struggle for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Eutyches: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Taught by the Theologian and sent forth by Paul, thou didst preach the Word who was in the beginning; and the fire and the iron and the beasts of the arena could not silence thee, O Eutyches, for the very lion glorified thy God. Wherefore, beheaded for Christ, thou standest now before him, and prayest for us all.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Eutyches is written as a hierarch-martyr of the first age: middle-aged or elderly, bearded, in phelonion and omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel-book in the left, with the martyr's cross sometimes substituted for the book. Where a narrative scene is given him, it is the arena with the lion — the beast crouching or lifting its head as though speaking, and the saint standing unbound — an image whose obvious neighbours in the iconographic repertoire are Daniel in the lions' den and the lion of Gerasimus of the Jordan, and which is meant to be read against them. His association with John the Theologian occasionally puts him in the group of the Evangelist's disciples in Ephesian cycles, where he is identified only by inscription.
No pre-1900 image of him alone has been located for this collection. The Menologion of Basil II, the first-resort source for minor saints of the fixed year, covers only September–February and therefore cannot serve an August commemoration; a search of freely licensed collections returned no icon inscribed with his name.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with Eutyches the heresiarch. The most dangerous collision of names in the calendar. The Eutyches of August 24 is a saint of the apostolic age; the Eutyches who gives his name to Eutychianism was an archimandrite of a monastery at Constantinople in the fifth century, condemned by the Council of Chalcedon (451) for teaching that after the union the Lord's humanity was absorbed into his divinity. The two have nothing in common but a name, and the confusion is worth guarding against precisely because the heresiarch's name is far the better known. He appears in this collection only in the entries of the fathers who withstood him — among them Flavian of Constantinople, Leo the Great and Anatolius of Constantinople.
- Not to be confused with the hierarchs Eutychius, a distinct name in Greek (Εὐτύχιος, not Εὐτυχής): Eutychius of Constantinople (April 6) and Eutychius of Melitene.
- Was he one of the Seventy? Several later catalogues and popular lives slip him into the company of the Seventy Apostles, on the strength of the epithet "apostle" which the synaxarion gives him. The classical roll of the Seventy as kept in the synaxaria and in Dimitry of Rostov does not contain him, and this collection's Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles accordingly does not list him. The safest statement of the tradition is the one the sources themselves make: he was not numbered among the Seventy, but he was called an apostle because he did an apostle's work under apostolic commission.
- Eutyches of Troas. The young man of Acts 20:9–12 who fell from the third-storey window at Troas while Paul preached long into the night, and was raised up by the apostle, is named Eutychus — the same name — and the coincidence of a disciple of Paul bearing it has led some to identify the two. No synaxarion asserts the identification, and the Menaion's notice of August 24 does not allude to the fall at Troas; it is best left as a possibility the tradition never took up.
- Which Sebaste? The notices name Sebastea/Sebaste without qualification, and at least three cities bore the name: Sebaste in Palestine (Samaria, rebuilt by Herod), Sebasteia in Armenia Minor (the city of the Forty Martyrs), and Sebaste in Cilicia. The Palestinian city is the reading usually printed, and it fits a disciple of the apostles better than the Armenian; but the sources do not settle it.