Faustus of Constantinople
Our Venerable Father Faustus, Abbot of the Monastery of the Dalmatians at Constantinople
Venerable · d. 5th century, at his monastery outside the walls of Constantinople
Commemorated 3 August — Kept with Isaac and Dalmatus, the fathers of the Dalmatian monastery
Faustus was the son of Dalmatus, the guardsman of Theodosius the Great who left the palace for the monastic life. Father and son entered the monastery that Isaac had founded outside the walls of Constantinople between 381 and 383, and were tonsured together by Isaac's own hand. Faustus grew old in that house, was famed for fasting, and on his father's death succeeded him as its abbot. He is the third of the three fathers of the Dalmatian monastery commemorated on August 3, and — the synaxarion says so in as many words — the details of his ascetic life are not known.
The son who went with his father
Everything transmitted about Faustus begins with his father. Dalmatus was an officer of the second schola of the imperial guard under Theodosius the Great, married and with children, when he resolved on the monastic life; and when he went out to the monastery of the Syrian ascetic Isaac beyond the Golden Gate he took this son with him. They were received and tonsured together by Isaac, in the years 381–383.
Faustus was therefore raised, or at least finished, in the first coenobitic house of the capital, under the founder himself — an unusual inheritance: he is one of the very few saints of the Byzantine calendar whose father, and whose father's spiritual father, are both commemorated with him on the same day.
Ascetic struggle
The notices give Faustus one distinguishing virtue, and they give it without ornament: he attained, like his father, the heights of the monastic life, and he excelled at fasting. Beyond that, the synaxarion is explicit that nothing has come down — "the details of his ascetical life are not known." The repository records the silence rather than filling it. It is worth noting what the silence itself tells: Faustus was remembered and kept in the calendar not for a deed or a confession but simply as a monk of a certain house, and the tradition has been content to hold his name in the company of the two men who formed him.
Abbot
On the death of Dalmatus — about 440, at something near ninety years of age — Faustus took the government of the monastery as its hegumen. He was by then an old man himself. The acts of the mid-fifth-century synods of Constantinople that dealt with Eutyches list among the heads of the city's monasteries a Faustus, presbyter and archimandrite of the monastery of the blessed Dalmatus; if, as the tradition assumes, this is the same man, it places him in the ordinary business of the Church of the capital in the years around the Council of Chalcedon, subscribing with the other archimandrites, and it fixes the succession that the hagiographic notices assert. The identification is likely but not demonstrable, and the repository marks it as such.
The year and manner of his repose are not transmitted. He was buried, on the natural supposition, in the monastery, with Isaac and Dalmatus.
Feast and commemoration
August 3 (church date; New Calendar civil August 3, Old Calendar civil August 16), kept with Dalmatus his father and Isaac the founder as the joint memory of the three fathers of the Dalmatian monastery. The Greek calendars name them in the order Dalmatus, Faustus and Isaacius; the Slavic in the order Isaac, Dalmatus and Faustus. Isaac's own principal feast is May 30. The day falls within the Dormition fast (August 1–14).
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8
With the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren desert to bring forth, and with sighs from the depths thou didst render thy labours fruitful a hundredfold; thou becamest a beacon shining upon the world by miracles, O Faustus our father: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Faustus is not given an independent iconographic type. He is painted as one of the three fathers of the Dalmatian monastery — the youngest of the three, dark- or grey-bearded rather than white, in the monastic mantle and cowl, standing at the side of Isaac and Dalmatus with hands raised in prayer. In Russian menologion icons of the month of August the three occupy together the compartment of the third day. No pre-1900 image of Faustus, alone or identifiable within a group, has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Why a separate entry. Faustus has no independent cultus: he has no feast of his own, no proper hymnography, and no Life. He is nevertheless a separately named figure in the synaxarion notice of August 3, distinguished by name and by office from the other two, and the fathers of the Dalmatian monastery are not a martyred company but three successive abbots whose principal member, Isaac, already has his own entry. A joint file for two of the three would misrepresent the commemoration. He is therefore given an honest short entry of his own, cross-linked to the other two, in preference to a fabricated long one.
- Not to be confused with the several other Fausti of the calendars — the martyr Faustus, the companions of Meletius Stratelates, or the Latin Faustus of Riez.