Eutychius and Florentius of Nursia
Our Venerable Fathers Eutychius the Abbot and Florentius the Hermit, of Nursia
Venerable · d. 540 (Eutychius) and 547 (Florentius)
Commemorated 23 August — Joint commemoration of the two fathers of Valcastoria in the Byzantine calendar
Eutychius and Florentius were two monks of the valley of Valcastoria near Nursia in Umbria, in the generation of St Benedict, whose story is preserved by Gregory the Great in the first book of his Dialogues. They shared one small monastery until Eutychius was called away to govern a neighbouring house, and Florentius stayed on alone as a hermit — the one a teacher who won many souls and worked no miracle in his life, the other a simple wonderworker whose prayer brought a bear out of the woods to pasture his sheep. When four envious monks killed the bear, Florentius cursed them and they died of leprosy, and he wept for it for the rest of his life. Eutychius reposed about 540 and Florentius about 547; Eutychius's tunic, carried into the fields in the drought of 1492, brought rain. The Byzantine calendar keeps them together on August 23.
Two monks of Valcastoria
The pair belong to the monastic springtime of central Italy, in the country around Nursia (Norcia) — the same hills that produced Benedict — and the whole record of them is chapter twelve of the first book of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (†604), who had it from men who remembered them. They lived in a small monastery in the Valcastoria, the valley of the Castoria; Eutychius was its spiritual father, Florentius his companion.
Eutychius's gift was teaching. Gregory says he drew many to God by his word, and it was this reputation that took him away: when the abbot of a neighbouring monastery died, the brethren there came and would not be refused, and Eutychius went to govern them, leaving Florentius alone in the old house.
Florentius and the bear
Left alone and lonely, Florentius asked God for help in his solitude, and going out one day found a bear standing at the door with its head bowed. The account is careful to keep the bear a bear: it did not speak, and it was not tame, but it was obedient. Florentius had a few sheep and nobody to herd them, and he appointed the bear their shepherd, with instructions which it kept exactly — to take them out in the morning, to bring them home at the appointed hour, at first the sixth hour and afterwards, when the hermit wished to fast until evening, the ninth. The bear also, the tradition adds, carried water and did what the elder told it. For years the arrangement held, and the countryside came to see it.
Four monks of the monastery Eutychius now governed grew envious — that their own father worked no wonders, and this solitary had a miracle at his door. They lay in wait and killed the bear. When Florentius learned of it he wept, and then he cursed them: he prayed that they might receive in this life, before the eyes of all, the reward of what they had done to a beast that had done them no wrong. The four were struck with leprosy and died of it.
Then Gregory's story turns, and it is why the Church keeps it. Florentius, hearing what had befallen them, was appalled at his own prayer, called himself a murderer, and grieved for it every day of his life, holding that a man who has power with God must never use it to avenge himself. Gregory sets him down not as a model of authority but as a warning about it — that God sometimes grants what we ask in anger precisely so that we may learn to fear our own prayers.
Repose, relics and the rain of 1492
Eutychius reposed on 23 May 540, having in his whole life — Gregory notes it deliberately — worked no miracle at all, while his gift for making souls was greater than any wonder. After his death the miracles came: his tunic was kept as a relic, and Gregory already knew of its power. Nine and a half centuries later, in the drought of 1492, the people of Nursia carried Eutychius's garment in procession through the parched fields, and rain fell. Florentius reposed on 1 June 547.
Gregory draws the moral of the pair explicitly: the one who did no wonder in his lifetime was not the lesser man. Miracles are the outward sign; the conversion of souls is the work.
Feast and commemoration
August 23 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 5) — the leavetaking (apodosis) of the Dormition of the Theotokos, whose festal office governs the day; the two fathers have their notice in the synaxarion and no proper service. They are among the small number of Western saints of the age before the schism carried in the Byzantine calendar, entering it through the immense authority of Gregory the Dialogist, whose Dialogues were translated into Greek by Pope Zacharias in the eighth century and read all over the Orthodox East — which is why the Greek and Slavonic books know these Umbrian monks at all. In the Latin calendar Eutychius is kept on May 23 and Florentius on June 1.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of ascetics)
By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and with sighs from the depths thou didst bear fruit a hundredfold in labours; and ye became beacons shining over the world by your miracles, O Eutychius and Florentius our fathers: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
The two are shown together as monastic elders in the analavos and mantle, grey- or white-bearded, one holding a scroll — Eutychius the teacher — and the other with his hands raised in prayer. Where the Italian tradition paints Florentius he is given his bear, standing at his side or leading a small flock of sheep, exactly as Gregory tells it; the Byzantine tradition, which knows the pair only from the synaxarion line, generally gives them no attribute at all. Eutychius may be shown holding out his tunic, the relic of the rain. No pre-1900 icon of either has been located for this collection; the Menologion of Basil II covers only September to February and has nothing for August 23.
Disputed questions
- Three feast days. In the Latin books the two fathers are kept separately on their days of repose — Eutychius on May 23, Florentius on June 1. The Byzantine synaxaria and the Slavonic and Antiochian calendars keep them together on August 23. The August date is a joint commemoration, not a third death-date, and this entry's single primary feast follows the Byzantine usage under which the repository is built.
- Eutychius or Euthymius? Slavonic service books and some Greek printings give the abbot's name as Евтихий/Eutychius; a few render it Euthymius by the ordinary confusion of the two names. Gregory's Latin is Eutychius.
- Not to be confused with the patriarch Eutychius of Constantinople (April 6), nor with Eutychius of Melitene, nor with the several Florentii of the Latin martyrologies (Florentius of Strasbourg, Florentius of Seville). The Nursian pair are known from Gregory's Dialogues alone.
- The bear. Gregory's Italy is full of animal stories, and the modern reader may take the bear as a topos; but the point Gregory himself makes has nothing to do with the animal. The story exists in his book to set the wonderworker beside the teacher, and to let the teacher win.