Ibistion the Confessor
Our Venerable Father Ibistion the Confessor
Venerable · Confessor · d. date unknown; in Egypt
Commemorated 26 August — Peaceful repose
Ibistion is an Egyptian ascetic whose entire surviving record is a single line of the Greek synaxarion — that he reposed in peace — together with a metrical couplet built on the image of the hyssop, in which he is described as washed clean with the hyssop of his own tears and departing to a country where there are no tears. The English calendars style him "the Confessor," and the Latin transmission of the name is unstable. He is a good example of the honest limits of the fixed calendar: the Church keeps his day without pretending to know his life.
What survives
The synaxarion notice consists of the name, the day, and the words ἀπεβίωσε εἰρηνικά — "he departed this life peacefully." No birthplace, no monastery, no century, no teacher and no disciple is transmitted. The couplet appended to the notice reads, in substance: Washed with the hyssop of thy tears, Ibistion, thou passest in good cheer to the place where there is no weeping — a play on Psalm 50 ("Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop and I shall be clean") which tells us that he was remembered as a man of penitential tears, and tells us nothing else. The verse is the only characterisation of him that exists.
The English day-lists add that he was an Egyptian ascetic and give him the title Confessor — implying that he suffered for the faith and survived, which would place him in one of the persecutions or, more probably, in the Arian or the iconoclast troubles. Neither the Greek notice nor the couplet supports the title; it appears to be an inference of the later compilers from the epithet, and this entry records it as such rather than building a biography on it.
Feast and commemoration
August 26 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 8), in the Greek synaxaria. He is absent from the Russian day-lists for the date and from the Antiochian books. The day is served, where he is kept at all, with the common of a venerable one.
Iconography
No image of Ibistion is known, and the record contains nothing on which an iconographer could work. He would take the general form of an Egyptian monastic father — an aged man in the schema, holding a scroll — and the only motif proper to him would be the tears of the synaxarion couplet, which is not in itself a paintable attribute. No pre-1900 depiction has been located.
Disputed questions
The name. Ἰβιστίων is rendered variously as Ibistion, Ibistios, Ibestion, Ivistion and Ievystios in the calendars and their translations; the Greek genitive and the Slavonic transliteration have pulled the form in different directions. The slug follows the Greek nominative.
The title "Confessor." Carried by the English-language lists, absent from the Greek notice. It is retained in types because it is the form in which the saint is commonly listed, but the reader should know that no act of confession is transmitted.
Century. None is given, and none is guessed here; the entry therefore carries no century field.