Faustus the Martyr
The Holy Martyr Faustus, who was nailed to the cross
Martyr · d. c. 249–251, under the emperor Decius
Commemorated 16 July — Death on the cross after five days
Faustus is a martyr of the persecution of Decius (249–251) of whom the synaxarion transmits almost nothing except the manner of his death, which is unforgettable: arrested for his Christian activity and refusing to renounce Christ, he was cruelly tortured and then nailed to a cross, and lived upon it for five days, at the end of which — blessing and giving thanks to God — he gave up his spirit. The Greek synaxaristis states plainly that his country and family are unknown. He is commemorated on July 16.
The whole of the surviving record is a synaxarion notice of four lines, and this entry does not exceed it.
Faustus suffered in the reign of the emperor Decius, that is between 249 and 251 — the first empire-wide persecution, in which the requirement to sacrifice was imposed on the entire population and certificates of compliance were issued, and in which the Church lost a great number of its clergy and its most conspicuous laymen in the space of about eighteen months. Where Faustus lived and what he was by station or trade the Greek synaxaristis expressly declines to say: it is not known where he came from.
He was arrested on account of his activity — the phrase in the Greek suggests public Christian work of some kind rather than mere denunciation — and was called on to renounce Christ. He refused. He was tortured severely, and, when the tortures failed, was fixed to a cross with nails.
What the tradition preserves about him is what followed. He did not die quickly. His passion on the cross lasted five days, and the notice records that at the end of them he blessed and gave thanks to God, and so surrendered his spirit to his Lord. It is the detail on which the Church's memory of him rests: a martyrdom conformed with unusual literalness to the death of Christ, and prolonged past the point where endurance is a matter of nerve into the region where it can only be a matter of grace.
Feast and commemoration
July 16 (church date; New Calendar civil July 16, Old Calendar civil July 29), among the martyrs of the day, after Athenogenes of Pedachthoe and his ten disciples. There is no proper office; the synaxarion notice is read at the sixth ode of the canon and the common of a martyr is sung where his memory is kept at all.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Thy martyr Faustus, O Lord, in his contest received the crown of incorruption from Thee our God; for having Thy strength he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons: by his prayers save Thou our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Faustus has no developed iconography of his own. Where he is figured at all — in the menologion cycles that run a portrait of every martyr of the year along the walls of a katholikon — he is given as a bearded man in tunic and mantle with the martyr's cross in his right hand, the undifferentiated type of a lay martyr; and where a narrative scene is attempted, the subject is necessarily his crucifixion, the martyr nailed to the cross with his eyes open and his face turned upward, which the painters distinguish from the Crucifixion of Christ by the martyr's ordinary dress and by the absence of the two thieves.
No pre-1900 image identified by inscription has been located for this entry, and no candidate was found under his name in the digitised Byzantine material.
Disputed questions
- The epithet "of Syria." Faustus appears in some English-language calendar lists as "Martyr Faustus of Syria." No homeland is given for him in the Greek synaxaristis, which states the opposite — that his origin is unknown — and none is given in the Slavonic notice either, where he is frequently omitted altogether. The epithet should be treated as unverified; it may have arisen from confusion with one of the other martyrs of the name (see below), several of whom are indeed Eastern.
- Not to be confused with the other saints named Faustus in the Byzantine calendar: Faustus the presbyter of Alexandria, martyred as a very old man with the deacon Abibas and Cyriacus and eleven others (September 6); the soldier Faustus among the companions of Meletius Stratelates; and the fifth-century Faustus of Riez in Gaul, who is not a martyr at all. Faustus of Milevis, the Manichee whom Augustine answered in the Contra Faustum, is neither a saint nor an Orthodox figure and shares only the name.
- Absence from many day-lists. He stands in the Greek synaxaristis for July 16 and in the older English synaxarion listings, but is missing from the current Slavonic day-lists and from the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America for this date. The corpus therefore records his commemoration as of Greek usage principally, universal in the older synaxaria.