Heron the Philosopher
Our Holy Father Heron the Philosopher
Righteous
Commemorated 10 August — Commemoration of Heron the Philosopher
Heron "the Philosopher" is one of the smallest entries in the Greek calendar: a name, an epithet, and a couplet of iambic verse under August 10, with no life, no country, and no date. The synaxarion says of him only that he was perfected in peace — the formula for a saint who died in his bed and not by violence — and the verses over the notice, which speak of a sophist crowned and of a head given up to the confounding of the sophist of error, sit awkwardly beside it. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and the later Greek editors suggest that he may be the philosopher Hero to whom Gregory the Theologian addressed an oration; the suggestion is old and has never been proved. He is entered here as the tradition transmits him, with the little that can be said and the several things that cannot.
What the synaxarion says
The Greek Menaion for August 10, after the notice of Laurence the Archdeacon and his companions, adds the memory of Ἥρων ὁ φιλόσοφος with two lines of verse and the closing formula ἐν εἰρήνῃ τελειοῦται — "he is perfected in peace." No place, no reign, no manner of life is given. That he is called φιλόσοφος rather than ὅσιος or ἀσκητής suggests a man of learning honoured for the Christian use of his learning rather than for the monastic habit; the epithet is used in Byzantine sources both of professional teachers of philosophy and, more loosely, of any Christian sage.
The couplet and its problem
The distich attached to the notice runs:
Θανὼν σοφιστὴς ἐστεφανώθη κάραν, Πλάνης σοφιστοῦ συντριβῇ δοὺς τὴν κάραν.
— "The sophist, dying, was crowned upon the head, having given his head to the crushing of the sophist of deceit." The word-play turns on σοφιστής used of the saint and of the devil, "the sophist of error," and on the head twice repeated: the head that is crowned and the head that is surrendered. Read strictly, the second line is the language of beheading, and would make Heron a martyr. Read as figure — the head "given" to the bruising of the serpent's head, in the manner of Genesis 3:15 — it is compatible with the notice's own statement that he died in peace. The tension between the verse and the prose is not rare in the synaxaria, where couplets were sometimes composed at a distance from the notices they head, and it cannot be resolved from the text. This entry follows the prose, which is the older element, and classes Heron among the righteous rather than the martyrs.
The suggested identification
Nikodemos the Hagiorite, and the Greek editors after him, raise the possibility that this Heron is the Hero the Philosopher in whose honour Gregory the Theologian delivered his twenty-fifth Oration at Constantinople about 380 — a panegyric of a philosopher who had suffered exile for the orthodox faith in Egypt and come to the capital, and whose opening words are quoted in the notices: I shall praise the philosopher, though my body is weary. The identification is attractive and weak. Modern study of Gregory's corpus holds, on strong internal grounds, that "Hero" in Oration 25 is a pseudonym for Maximus the Cynic, the Alexandrian adventurer whom Gregory praised warmly and then denounced with equal warmth after Maximus attempted to seize the see of Constantinople from under him; Gregory's later Oration 26 and his autobiographical poem take back everything the twenty-fifth had granted. If that is right, the "philosopher Hero" of the oration is not a saint at all, and the synaxarion's Heron must be someone else, otherwise unknown. The alternative — that a real Heron underlies the pseudonym — has its defenders, but the calendar cannot be made to bear the weight.
Feast and commemoration
August 10 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 23), within the Dormition Fast (August 1–14) and the afterfeast of the Transfiguration. He is a purely Greek commemoration: the Menaion and the Synaxarion of Constantinople carry him, the Slavic calendars and the Orthodox Church in America do not list him for the day. No office is appointed beyond the synaxarion reading at Orthros, and where a service is sung it is the common of a righteous man.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a righteous man)
In thee, O father, was the divine image surely preserved: for taking up the Cross, thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to overlook the flesh, for it passeth away, and to care rather for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O righteous Heron, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
There is no established icon-type for Heron. Where Greek menologion painters supply a figure for a notice of this kind they give the standard type of the Christian sage: an elderly man, grey-bearded, in a long tunic and mantle rather than the monastic schema, holding a scroll or a book in the left hand and blessing or gesturing in speech with the right — the dress that distinguishes a lay teacher from a monk and from a hierarch. Nothing survives that can be identified as his portrait, and no pre-1900 image has been located for this collection. The Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for figures of this kind, covers only September to February and is of no help for an August commemoration.
Disputed questions
- Martyr or not? See above: the notice says he reposed in peace; the couplet is the language of beheading. Some modern Greek lists in consequence style him ἅγιος μάρτυς. This entry types him righteous and records the disagreement.
- Not to be confused with Heron the neophyte of Alexandria, one of the pupils of Origen martyred under Septimius Severus about 202–203 and kept on June 28 with Plutarch and Companions. The confusion is real and has a visible trace: some Greek notices for August 10 mention a martyr Heraïs in connection with this Heron, and Heraïs is a member of the June 28 company — a sign that the two entries have contaminated one another somewhere in the transmission. The August Heron is not a martyr in the older notice and is not associated with Alexandria; the June Heron is both.
- Not to be confused, further, with Heron of Alexandria, the pagan mathematician and engineer of the first century, whose name attaches itself to this notice in modern reference works purely by homonymy; nor with the desert father Heron of the Lausiac History, the brilliant young ascetic who fell into vainglory and was for a time lost to the Church.