Hypatius of Rufinianae

Flight from Phrygia

Hypatius was born about 366 in Phrygia, the son of a man of some education who intended his son for the same learning. The Life is unusually frank about the break: at about eighteen the boy was severely beaten by his father, and rather than endure the house any longer he left it and did not go back. He went west into Thrace, and lived there for a time as a hired shepherd and a servant, praying and fasting on his own account, until he attached himself to an ascetic named Jonas and was formed by him in the monastic life.

This is not the usual hagiographic opening — no pious parents, no vision in childhood — and its awkwardness is a mark of the Life's honesty. Callinicus wrote about a man he had lived with, and he did not tidy him.

The Oak, and the ruins of the Rufinianae

With two companions, Timothy and Moschion, Hypatius crossed into Bithynia, and about the year 400 they came to a place on the Asian shore a few miles from Chalcedon that the Greeks called the Oak (ἡ Δρῦς) and, from its founder, the Rufinianae (τὰ Ῥουφινιανά).

The place had a short and violent history. Rufinus, praetorian prefect of the East under Theodosius the Great and the young Arcadius, had built there a great suburban villa, a church of the Apostles Peter and Paul, and a monastery, which he had peopled with monks brought from Egypt. In 395 Rufinus was cut down by the soldiery at Constantinople; his Egyptians went home or scattered; and the buildings stood empty. (The same site was, eight years later, the scene of the Synod of the Oak — the assembly under Theophilus of Alexandria that deposed John Chrysostom in 403. Hypatius was living there when it met; the Life does not make him a party to it.)

The three ascetics took the abandoned monastery, cleared and repaired it, and began the life again. Disciples came; the community grew; Hypatius, at first reluctantly, became its archimandrite, and governed it for the rest of his life. The Life gives the domestic detail that hagiography usually omits — what the brothers ate, what they grew, how the sick were nursed, how the poor of the district were fed at the gate in famine, how the abbot dealt with a monk who wanted to leave — and it is on that account a document historians of the fifth century use where they can use almost nothing else.

Against Nestorius

When Nestorius became archbishop of Constantinople in 428 and began to preach that the Virgin should not be called Theotokos, the monasteries of the capital and its suburbs were among the first and fiercest opponents of the new teaching. Hypatius acted before the Church had judged: he erased the archbishop's name from the diptychs of his monastery — that is, he broke communion with the reigning patriarch of the imperial city on his own authority as an abbot.

His own bishop, Eulalius of Chalcedon, remonstrated: the man had not been condemned, and the gesture was dangerous, for the monastery as much as for the abbot. Hypatius's answer, as the Life gives it, was that from the moment he heard Nestorius speak against the Mother of God he had ceased to be a bishop in his eyes, and he would not hear his name. He held to it until the Council of Ephesus in 431 vindicated the position, and he is on that account remembered among the monastic confessors of the Theotokos.

The Olympic games at Chalcedon

The most famous episode of the Life is a collision with the state. The patrician Leontius, who held high office and had rebuilt the theatre at Chalcedon, proposed to revive there the Olympic games — which in the fifth century meant not athletics only but a festival with its old cultic frame, sacrifices and processions included. Hypatius came down from the monastery to the bishop and told him plainly that if the games were held he would go into the theatre and stop them, and be killed there; and that the bishop, if he permitted them, would answer for it. Eulalius, more cautious, protested that the abbot would only get himself murdered. He was told that this was the point.

The games were not held. The episode is one of the clearest surviving instances of the fifth century's real balance of forces: an archimandrite with no office in the state and no army but his monks, able to stop a revived pagan festival by making credible his own willingness to die at it.

Wonders, healing and repose

Callinicus records healings and exorcisms in quantity — the barren given children, the possessed freed, the sick of the villages carried up to the monastery — and the small, characteristic miracles of an agricultural community: blight turned aside, a harvest saved. Hypatius is remembered as a wonderworker on that basis. He also, in the ordinary course of his office, received and sheltered the fugitive: when Alexander the Sleepless and his community of the Akoimetoi were expelled from Constantinople for their unsparing preaching, it was Hypatius who took them in, at some risk.

He died at the monastery of the Rufinianae in 446, aged about eighty, having governed it for some forty years. His tomb there became a place of pilgrimage, and the monastery — under the name of the Rufinianae, and later of St Hypatius — remained one of the great houses of the Chalcedon shore for centuries.

The Life by Callinicus

The Life of Hypatius (Vita Hypatii) was written soon after the saint's death by Callinicus, a monk of the monastery who had known him. It survives complete. It is prized far beyond hagiography, because it describes, from inside and in detail, how a suburban Constantinopolitan monastery of the fifth century actually worked: its economy, its relations with the bishop, with the villages, with the imperial administration, and with the surviving paganism of the Bithynian countryside. For the religious history of the age between Chrysostom and Chalcedon it is a source of the first rank.