George Limniotes
Our Venerable Father George Limniotes, Confessor of Mount Olympus
Venerable · Confessor · d. c. 716–730, on Mount Olympus in Bithynia
Commemorated 24 August — Repose after mutilation for the holy icons
George, surnamed Limniotes — "of the Lake" — was a monk of the holy mountain of Olympus in Bithynia, the great monastic massif across the water from Constantinople which was to iconoclast-era Byzantium what Athos became later. When the emperors of the Isaurian house began the war on the holy icons, George, already very old, refused to give them up. For that refusal his persecutors burned his head, destroying his hair and his scalp, and cut off his nose — the standard Byzantine punishment of political disgrace, applied here to a monk for a theological confession. He survived the mutilation and reposed soon after, and the Church numbers him among the confessors of the first iconoclast persecution.
The monk of Olympus
Everything transmitted about George before his confession is contained in two words: he was a monk and he lived on Mount Olympus in Bithynia. That is less thin than it sounds. In the seventh and eighth centuries the Bithynian Olympus (the modern Uludağ, above Bursa) was the densest concentration of monastic life in the Byzantine world — a mountain of lavrai, cells and hermitages within a few days of the capital, and, precisely because of that nearness, the place where imperial religious policy was felt first and resisted hardest. The monasteries of Olympus supplied the iconodule party with a great part of its confessors and its argument; Theodore the Studite and the Studite reform drew on it, and the mountain's elders are named again and again in the acts of the struggle.
His surname Limniotes, "of the lake," is the mark by which the calendar distinguishes him from the many other Georges. It most probably locates his monastery among the settlements around the lakes of Bithynia — Apollonias and Ascania, in the plain below the mountain, whose shores carried monastic houses in the same period.
Confession under the Isaurians
The iconoclast persecution initiated by Leo III the Isaurian (717–741) and pressed far harder by his son Constantine V fell on the monks before it fell on anyone else. It was the monasteries that owned and made the icons, that taught their theology, and that had least to lose by refusing; and the imperial policy, which began by removing images from public places, quickly became a campaign against monastic life as such.
George was, the tradition says, very old when the demand came to him, and he would not comply. The sentence recorded against him is precise and terrible: they burned his head — the account means the scalp and hair set alight, a punishment attested elsewhere in the period — and they cut off his nose. Rhinotomy was the classic Byzantine mutilation inflicted on deposed emperors and failed usurpers, a permanent public disfigurement intended to make a man unfit to be seen; using it against an aged monk for venerating an image tells us how the iconoclast administration understood the offence.
Repose
He did not die under the torture. He survived it, and reposed shortly afterwards; the calendars give the year 718, though the chronology is difficult (see below). He is honoured as a confessor — one who suffered for the faith without dying of the suffering — and the Church has kept him in the same rank as the great confessors of the icons.
Feast and commemoration
August 24 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 6). He is kept in the Greek and Slavonic synaxaria of the day with a short notice and no proper office, and is commemorated at the common service of a venerable confessor. His memory belongs to the wider commemoration of the confessors of the holy icons, whose collective triumph the Church keeps on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, and it is there, rather than on his own thinly attested day, that his witness is most audible.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable confessor)
In thee, O father, was preserved unfailingly that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable George, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou didst not surrender the likeness of the Master, though they burned the head that would not bow and took away thy face; and being disfigured for the sake of the Image, thou wast made comely in the sight of God, O confessor George: pray for us who venerate the holy icons.
Iconography
There is a proper irony in the iconography of a confessor of the icons who is barely painted. Where he appears, George Limniotes is written as an aged monk: white-bearded, in the analavos and mantle of the great schema, the hands raised or holding a scroll. The distinguishing attribute in fuller treatments is the confession itself — an icon of Christ held to the breast, the gesture by which iconodule confessors are marked out in the post-Triumph painting; and painters who follow the notice closely show the scarred head and the mutilated face, since the disfigurement is the whole of what the Church remembers of him.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection; a search of freely licensed collections in Greek and in English returned nothing inscribed with his name. The Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for minor saints, covers only September–February and cannot serve an August day.
Disputed questions
- The date, and the chronology of the persecution. The synaxaria and the calendars give the year of his repose as 716, and the OCA notice as 718, while naming the reign of Leo the Isaurian as the persecution. Both dates are difficult: Leo came to the throne in 717, and his first move against the icons is placed in 726 with the removal of the image of Christ from the Chalke gate, the full imperial edict following about 730. A monk mutilated for the icons cannot well have died in 716 or 718. The likeliest resolutions are that the traditional date has been corrupted, or that it records something other than the year of death; the honest statement is that he suffered under the first iconoclast persecution, in the second quarter of the eighth century, and that the transmitted year is not to be trusted. This entry therefore gives the date as c. 716–730 with the problem stated rather than concealed.
- Not to be confused with the many other saints named George in the calendar, and in particular with George the Great Martyr (April 23), nor with the iconodule hierarchs of the same struggle. Among the confessors of the icons his nearest neighbours in the calendar are those who suffered the same mutilations, and his entry belongs beside theirs.
- What "Limniotes" means. The epithet is generally read as "of the lake," from λίμνη; a minority reading takes it as a family name rather than a place-name. Nothing in the sources decides it.