Hyperechius of Egypt
Our Venerable Father Hyperechius, of the Desert Fathers
Venerable · d. late 4th or early 5th century
Commemorated 7 August — Repose in peace, full of the grace of God
Hyperechius was one of those monks who joined to the faith the treasures of the Christian philosophy — a father of the desert generation whose memory rests not on marvels but on what he said. His Exhortation to Monks (Παραίνεσις ἀσκητῶν), a collection of about a hundred and sixty maxims arranged alphabetically, survives, as do sayings under his name in the Apophthegmata Patrum. The tradition remembers him as calm and gentle, a man whom the flame of anger seldom approached, and preserves as his characteristic word: "He who does not control his tongue in the time of anger will not control his passions either." He reposed in peace, full of the grace of God, in the late fourth or early fifth century, and is commemorated on August 7.
The man behind the sayings
Almost nothing external is recorded of Hyperechius. The synaxarion notice describes him with an unusual precision of temperament rather than of biography: he was of those monks who possessed, along with the faith, the riches of Christian philosophy; he was quiet, sweet-tempered, and rarely touched by anger — and that last detail is not decorative, since the control of anger and of the tongue is the subject he returns to most often in his own writing.
He fell asleep in peace, filled with the grace of God. There is no martyrdom, no office, no foundation. The Greek verse-couplet appointed for him makes exactly that the point: though Hyperechius was hidden in a grave, he became the equal of the choirs of angels.
The Exhortation to Monks
His one surviving work is the Παραίνεσις ἀσκητῶν, the Exhortation (or Admonition) to Monks — some hundred and sixty short sentences, arranged in alphabetical order in the manner of a gnomic collection, on obedience, poverty, fasting, the guarding of the tongue, humility, and the warfare of thoughts. A number of the same maxims circulate in the great alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum under his name, which is how most readers of the desert literature have met him.
The Exhortation is what gives him his standing. It belongs to the same didactic tradition as the centuries of Evagrius and the sayings of the great abbas: compressed, practical, addressed to monks and not to the world.
Feast and commemoration
August 7 (church date; New Calendar civil August 7, Old Calendar civil August 20), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition fast (August 1–14). He is a minor commemoration of the day in the Greek synaxaria, carried into the wider calendars; he has no proper office, and the common of a venerable father is sung. He is also commemorated with the whole company of the ascetic fathers on the Saturday of Cheesefare week.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Hyperechius, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Hyperechius is painted as a desert father and teacher: an elder in the monastic habit and analavos, bearded, holding an open scroll — the attribute proper to the fathers remembered for their words rather than their deeds — inscribed, where the painter chooses a text, with his saying on the tongue and anger. He has no scene of his own and appears chiefly in the ranks of the ascetics in the compositions of the Cheesefare Saturday synaxis and in menologion cycles, identified by inscription alone. No pre-1900 image identified as Hyperechius has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Where and when he lived. The tradition places him among the Egyptian desert fathers, and the calendar keeps him with them; the internal evidence of the Exhortation has been read as pointing to Egypt or Roman Palestine, and to a writer of a Greek-speaking, comfortably-off urban background — Alexandria, Ascalon and Tyre have all been proposed — writing somewhere between the late fourth century and the Council of Chalcedon (451). Nothing narrower is secure, and the century given in this entry's frontmatter is a convention, not a datum.
- The epithet "of the Paradise." Some calendars style him "Hyperechius of the Paradise," which is not a place-name but a reference to the Paradise of the Fathers, the Syriac and Greek collections of desert sayings in which his maxims are transmitted.
- What he wrote and what was collected. The relation between the Exhortation as a book and the sayings attributed to Hyperechius in the Apophthegmata is the ordinary one for this literature: some overlap, some divergence, and no way of determining which form is prior for any given sentence.