Fantinus of Calabria
Our Venerable Father Fantinus the Wonderworker, of Calabria and Thessalonica
Venerable · Wonderworker · b. c. 927, in southern Calabria — d. c. 974–1000, at Thessalonica
Commemorated 30 August — Repose at Thessalonica
Fantinus the Wonderworker (c. 927 – c. 1000) is the last and greatest of the Italo-Greek ascetics of Calabria: a Byzantine monk of the Greek-speaking south of Italy, formed in the caves of the Mercurion in the Basilian revival of the tenth century, master of the generation of Nilus of Rossano, and — after Saracen raids destroyed his monastery — a wandering preacher through Corinth, Athens, Larissa and at last Thessalonica, where he died in extreme old age at the tomb of the Great Martyr Demetrius. He belongs equally to Greek and Latin hagiography, and is one of the very few saints of medieval Italy whose Greek Life survives entire.
Calabria and the Mercurion
He was born about 927 in the far south of Calabria, near the strait facing Sicily, of parents named George and Bryaene. The Greek synaxarion, which knows his parents by name, records that he was given over to a monastery as a boy and accustomed to asceticism from childhood. He was placed, the fuller tradition says, under Elias the Cave-Dweller (Elias Speleotes), took the habit at thirteen, and served first as cook and afterwards as porter. At thirty-three he went out into the hermit country of Mount Mercurion in northern Calabria — the great Basilian wilderness of the tenth century, thick with Greek monasteries and lavras, where the monks of the Byzantine themes of Italy kept the discipline of the Eastern fathers under the pressure of the Arab raids from Sicily.
There his asceticism became extreme: raw vegetables only, long fasts, spells of twenty days at a time without food or covering, and much of his time given to copying manuscripts. Visions of paradise and of the punishments are ascribed to him. He founded a monastery for men and, when he withdrew again into solitude, set his brother Lucas over it; and he brought his ageing parents, his brothers Luke and Cosmas and his sister Caterina into the monastic life after him. Among the disciples formed in his circle the tradition counts Nilus the Younger of Rossano and Nicodemus of Mammola, the two names that carried Italo-Greek monasticism into the next generation and, in Nilus's case, to Grottaferrata outside Rome.
The crossing to Greece
The Saracen raids that had been eating at Byzantine Calabria for a century at last destroyed his monastery. The Life relates that an angel then commanded him to go and preach in Greece, and he took two of his disciples, Vitalis and Nicephorus, and crossed the Adriatic. On the voyage, when the drinking water gave out, he is said to have made the sign of the cross over a vessel filled from the sea, and the water in it became sweet.
He landed in the Peloponnese and stayed a while at Corinth, then went up to Athens — where, the Greek synaxarion says, he venerated in the church of the Theotokos, that is, the Parthenon, then serving as the cathedral of Athens — and on through Larissa in Thessaly to Thessalonica. In each place he preached repentance and gathered hearers, and healings are ascribed to him along the road; at Thessalonica he venerated the relics of the Great Martyr Demetrius, and there he stayed. He lived in the city eight years by the Greek account, honoured as a wonderworker, healing the sick; the tradition credits his prayers with turning aside a Bulgarian siege of the city. He reposed there in peace at a very great age.
Cult
His body remained at Thessalonica, and his memory was kept from the first in the Byzantine south of Italy, from which it passed into the Constantinopolitan synaxarion and so into the universal Byzantine calendar on August 30. In the Latin West he is remembered in Calabria as Fantino il Giovane, "the Younger," to distinguish him from an earlier Calabrian saint of the same name; there is a Greek Bios of him of the eleventh century, one of the small group of Italo-Greek lives (with those of Nilus of Rossano and Elias Speleotes) that are the chief documentary witness to Greek monasticism in Norman-eve Italy. A fresco of him survives on Mount Athos in the katholikon of Hilandar.
Feast and commemoration
August 30 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 12). He heads the day in the Greek synaxaristes immediately after the three patriarchs of Constantinople, and stands in the Slavonic books as well ("Fantinus the Wonderworker, in Thessalonica"). He is honoured particularly in Calabria — where a number of churches and the town of San Fantino carry his name — and at Thessalonica, and among the Athonite monasteries with Italo-Greek roots.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was preserved unfailingly that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passes away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Fantinus, thy spirit rejoices with the angels.
Iconography
Fantinus is painted as a very old monk, gaunt from long fasting, with a long white beard, in the analavos and mantle of the Greek monastic habit and holding either a scroll or a hand cross. In the Italo-Greek and Athonite tradition he is grouped with the other Calabrian fathers — Elias Speleotes, Nilus of Rossano, Nicodemus of Mammola — as one of the founders of Basilian monasticism in the Byzantine south, and he is occasionally shown with a ship or with a vessel of water at his feet, for the miracle of the sweetened sea-water on the crossing to Greece. A fourteenth-century fresco of him is reported in the katholikon of the monastery of Hilandar on Mount Athos, inscribed as "Fantinus the New"; no photograph of it under a usable licence was located for this collection, and no pre-1900 panel icon of him has been found.
Disputed questions
- When did he die? The dating is genuinely unsettled. The Greek synaxaristes gives 974; the OCA's notice places him vaguely "at the end of the ninth and beginning of the tenth century"; the Russian calendars date him "IX–X c."; while the critical study of the Greek Bios puts his birth about 927 and his death about 1000, which agrees with making him the elder contemporary and master of Nilus of Rossano (†1004). This reference follows the Bios, records the alternatives, and notes that the earlier datings are probably an artefact of the synaxarion notices, which give no year at all.
- Which Fantinus? He must be kept apart from Fantinus the Elder (Fantino il Vecchio, c. 294 – c. 336) of Tauriana in Calabria, a martyr or confessor of the age of Constantine who is also called "the Wonderworker" in Latin sources. The two are Calabrians of the same name with overlapping epithets, and Italian local devotion has repeatedly run them together; the saint of August 30 in the Byzantine books is the younger.
- His mother and "the venerable Bryaene." The Greek synaxaristes lists on this same August 30 an Ὁσία Βρυαίνη — a venerable Bryaene — and suggests she may be Fantinus's mother, whom the Life names Bryaene. But the propers Nikodemos prints for that Bryaene belong unmistakably to another woman: the abbess and teacher of the virgin-martyr Febronia of Nisibis (June 25), whose oikos names her the spiritual planting of the deaconess Platonis and the trainer of Febronia. The August 30 Bryaene therefore looks like a conflation of Fantinus's mother with Febronia's aunt, and this reference declines to mint an entry for her until the two can be separated.