Irene of Chrysovalantou
Our Venerable Mother Irene, Abbess of the Monastery of Chrysovalantou
Venerable · Virgin · Wonderworker · b. c. 820, in Cappadocia — d. c. 912–921, at Constantinople
Commemorated 28 July — Repose at the monastery of Chrysovalantou
Irene was a Cappadocian noblewoman of the ninth century who was summoned to Constantinople as a candidate for the hand of the young emperor Michael III, and who — finding on her arrival that the choice had already fallen elsewhere — received the news with joy, freed her slaves, gave away her wealth and entered the small women's monastery of Chrysovalantou in the capital. Chosen abbess while still a young nun, she governed it for many decades in a life of extraordinary prayer and clairvoyance, and reposed at a great age on July 28. She is among the best-loved of the women saints of the Greek world, invoked for childlessness and for the discernment of hidden griefs, and remembered above all for the three apples sent her, in the tradition, from the paradise of God by the hand of the Apostle John.
Cappadocia and the bride-show
Irene was born in Cappadocia, about the year 820, into a family of rank and wealth. Her beauty and her family's standing brought her to the notice of the imperial court: on the death of the iconoclast emperor Theophilus in 842 his widow Theodora ruled as regent for their son Michael, and when the time came to find the boy a wife, Irene was among the young women called up to the capital for the choice — the Byzantine bride-show, an institution of the ninth-century court which the sources describe more than once.
On the road, passing the foot of Mount Olympus in Bithynia, she turned aside to ask the blessing of the great ascetic Joannicius, who was then the oracle of the whole region. The old man — who, the Life says, had been told of her coming before she arrived — refused to speak of marriage at all, and told her to go on to Constantinople, where "the monastery of Chrysovalantou awaits you." She went; and found that a few days before her arrival the emperor had been betrothed to another. What would have been humiliation to another woman she received as a deliverance, and understood that she had been kept for a different bridegroom.
The monastery of Chrysovalantou
Chrysovalantou was a small women's house within the walls of Constantinople, of no great fame before Irene entered it. She was tonsured there while still very young. Her Life dwells on the completeness of her renunciation: she freed the slaves who had come up with her from Cappadocia and settled portions on them, distributed her inheritance to the poor and to the monastery, and asked for the humblest of the community's tasks, which she performed without a word of complaint and without ever claiming the deference her birth would have commanded. She read the Ladder of John Climacus and the lives of the desert fathers, and set herself to the pattern of the men of the desert rather than to the milder rule of a city convent — standing whole nights at prayer with her arms raised like Moses on the mountain, at times from vespers until the wooden semantron called the sisters to matins, and afterwards for successive nights together.
Abbess
When the abbess died, the community was at a loss for a successor. The Life records that the Patriarch Methodius — the confessor who had restored the icons in 843 — sent to ask whether there was among them a humble nun named Irene, having had no communication with the dying superior and no knowledge of her wishes; and that the sisters, hearing the name, recognised at once that the choice was God's. Irene was ordained deaconess and set over the house, and governed it, according to the received chronology, for the greater part of a century.
As superior she was famous for a gift of clairvoyance exercised with unusual delicacy: she is said to have known the secret thoughts and hidden temptations of her nuns, and to have spoken to each so as to heal without exposing. Her Life is unusually full of small domestic miracles of this kind — the sister rebuked for a concealed grudge, the novice saved from despair, the demon expelled from a woman brought to the gate.
The cypresses and the light
The most famous vision in her Life belongs to a nun who rose in the night and, going out into the courtyard, saw the abbess standing at prayer raised a little above the ground, her face and hands shining, while two cypress trees of the enclosure had bowed their crowns to the earth as though in homage. Irene, becoming aware of it, made the sign of the cross over the trees and they stood up again; and the sister was charged to say nothing. The detail of the bowing cypresses passed into the iconography and is one of the marks by which Irene is recognised. She is also said to have stood unharmed in the midst of a fire that broke out in the monastery.
The three apples
Late in her life a ship put in at Constantinople, and one of its passengers came to Chrysovalantou with three apples and a message. He told her that as the ship lay off Patmos, an old man had walked to it across the water and had given him the fruit, bidding him carry it to Irene, the abbess of Chrysovalantou, "from John the Theologian, out of the paradise of God." She took the first apple and ate nothing else for forty days, tasting it a little at a time; the second she divided among the sisters at the Liturgy, that they might have a foretaste of the sweetness of paradise; and the third she kept, and it sustained her through the last week of her life. In many Greek parishes apples are blessed and distributed on her feast, and it is under this sign that she is most widely known.
Repose
An angel, the Life says, told her the day of her departure — July 28, the day after the feast of the Great-martyr Panteleimon. She prepared herself, appointed a sister named Mary to succeed her, took leave of the community, and died smiling at the angels who came for her, at an age the Life gives as one hundred and one (other recensions, one hundred and three). Her face is said to have kept the beauty of a young woman, and her body to have given off a fragrance. A great crowd came to the burial and the healings at her tomb began at once. The monastery of Chrysovalantou, obscure before her, became a place of pilgrimage on her account.
Feast and commemoration
July 28 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 10), the day of her repose, immediately after the feast of the Great-martyr Panteleimon on July 27 — a sequence her Life makes much of, since the angel announced her death by reference to it. The day falls in the open season between the Apostles' Fast and the Dormition Fast, so that only the ordinary Wednesday and Friday rule applies. Her cult is strongest in the Greek world and in the Greek diaspora, where the monastery of St Irene Chrysovalantou in Astoria, New York, has carried her name far beyond Constantinople; the blessing of apples at her feast is the characteristic usage. She is invoked especially by the childless, and by those seeking the resolution of hidden or shameful troubles — the two petitions her Life most often records her answering. The Slavonic and OCA calendars carry her; the Antiochian enumeration of the day is headed by the four deacons.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a venerable woman)
In thee, O Mother, was the divine image preserved with exactness: for taking up the cross, thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Irene, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Irene is shown as an abbess of advanced years in the full black monastic habit — rasson, mantle and koukoulion — with a serene, unlined face that the Life's account of her youthful appearance in death encouraged the painters to preserve. Her hands are most often raised in prayer, or one hand holds an abbess's staff while the other holds a scroll. Two attributes identify her without ambiguity: the cypress trees bowing their heads to the ground at either side of the standing figure, and the three apples, held in a dish, in a fold of the mantle, or offered to her by an angel or by the Apostle John in a small scene at the upper corner. Composite icons of her life add the bride-show, the meeting with Joannicius, the levitation in the courtyard and the repose.
No storable pre-1900 icon of Irene has been located. The one image on Wikimedia Commons — Venerable Irene Chrysovolantou of Cappadocia.jpg — is a modern painted icon from a commercial iconographic studio, uploaded under a bare public-domain tag by someone who is not the painter and who cites only a website's "used with permission" notice. A licence granted by an uploader over a photograph leaves the living iconographer's rights in the painting untouched, so the file cannot be stored here; it is rejected on that ground. Her images are in any case overwhelmingly modern, the great expansion of her cult having come in the twentieth century.
Disputed questions
- The dating is genuinely difficult. The Life sets her arrival at Constantinople in the regency of Theodora (842–856), makes Joannicius (†846) and Patriarch Methodius (843–847) actors in her early years, and yet gives her a repose in the second decade of the tenth century at over a hundred years of age. The arithmetic just about closes — a girl of twenty-two in 842 would be a hundred and one in 921 — but it is tight, and the appearance of two named figures of the 840s at the beginning of so long a career has made historians cautious. Jan Olof Rosenqvist, whose critical edition of the Greek text (The Life of St Irene, Abbess of Chrysobalanton, Uppsala, 1986) is the standard, edits the Life from seven Byzantine manuscripts and argues that the work is a considerably later composition than the events it narrates, shaped by the hagiographer's aims rather than by archival memory. The year of her repose is variously given as 912 and 921.
- The bride-show. Whether Irene was really a candidate at the choice of a bride for Michael III is not independently attested. Rosenqvist notes competing versions in which she is said rather to have been betrothed to the emperor as a child, or to have been passed over at the contest. The episode is of the type Byzantine hagiographers liked, and it may be a literary frame for the renunciation that follows.
- Not to be confused with Irene the Great-martyr of Magedon (May 5), the virgin-martyr of the early Church, with whom she shares only the name; nor with the Empress Irene who summoned the Seventh Ecumenical Council. The monastery's own name — Χρυσοβαλάντου, "of the golden weight" — is what distinguishes her in every calendar.