John of Kathara
Our Venerable Father John the Confessor, Abbot of the Monastery of Kathara
Venerable · Confessor · b. c. 778, at Irenopolis in the Decapolis of Coele-Syria — d. c. 839, in exile on the island of Aphousia
Commemorated 27 April — Repose in exile on Aphousia
John the Confessor, abbot of the monastery τῶν Καθαρῶν, "of the Pure," was one of the iconodule superiors broken by the second iconoclasm of the ninth century. Born about 778 at Irenopolis in the Decapolis of Coele-Syria, he was brought as a young monk into the orbit of the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea (787) and of the court of the Empress Irene and the Patriarch Tarasius, was ordained priest, and was set over the monastery of Kathara in the reign of Nicephorus I. When Leo V the Armenian revived the war on the holy icons, John's monastery was plundered and his community scattered; brought before the emperor, he rebuked him to his face and foretold his violent end, and was thrown into prison, then into the fortress of Pentadaktylon for eighteen months, then into the fortress of Kriotauron for two years. Leo's murder vindicated the prophecy; but John's confession was not finished, and under Theophilus the iconoclast patriarch John VII the Grammarian banished him at last to the island of Aphousia in the Propontis, where he reposed in peace about the year 839. His feast is April 27, and the Menaion's verse for him plays on the name of his house: suffering, it says, made John pure, who presided over the Pure.
From Irenopolis to the monastery
John was born about the year 778 at Irenopolis, a town of the Decapolis in Coele-Syria, to parents named Theodore and Gregoria, whom the synaxarion describes as pious people who taught their son the faith carefully and by their own works of mercy as much as by instruction — the ordinary and reliable formula of the hagiographers, and in his case borne out by what he became. The family belonged, then, not to the imperial capital but to the Syrian provinces, and John is one of a considerable number of Syrian-born monks who made their way into the Bithynian and Constantinopolitan houses in the century of the icon controversy.
He was given to the monastic life while still young, and distinguished himself, the notice says, by zeal and by learning — the two qualifications that would later make him useful in the capital and dangerous to an iconoclast emperor.
The Seventh Council and the abbacy of Kathara
About the year 787 his abbot took him to Nicaea, to the council which restored the veneration of the holy icons — the Seventh Ecumenical Council — and afterwards brought him on to Constantinople. There both made a favourable impression on the Empress Irene and on the Patriarch Tarasius, the architects of the restoration: John's abbot was given the great monastery of Dalmatos in the capital, and John himself was ordained priest, and in the reign of the emperor Nicephorus I (802–811) was appointed hegumen of the monastery of Kathara (τῶν Καθαρῶν, "of the Pure"), the house whose name he was to carry into the calendar.
The monastery of Kathara belonged to the monastic world of the capital's Asian hinterland — it is usually placed in Bithynia, in the country of monastic foundations about Mount Olympus which supplied so many of the iconodule confessors — and the sources for the icon struggle mention it as a house of consequence. Its abbot, in the years after the restoration of the icons, would have counted among the recognised leaders of the party that had won at Nicaea and had everything to lose if the decision were reversed.
Confession under Leo the Armenian
It was reversed. The emperor Leo V the Armenian (813–820), coming to the throne after the disaster of Bulgarophygon and the death of Nicephorus, revived the iconoclast policy of the Isaurians, and set about breaking the monastic and episcopal resistance which was its chief obstacle. Bishops, abbots, monks and laypeople were harried; and in the course of this campaign imperial soldiers sacked the monastery of Kathara, drove out its monks, and carried its abbot to Constantinople in custody.
Summoned before the emperor, John did what the confessors of that generation did: he argued. The synaxarion says that he laid bare the un-Orthodox and destructive character of the campaign against the icons, and, when the emperor would not be moved, rebuked his obstinacy and foretold that the divine judgement would fall on him. This was the posture of Theodore the Studite and of the whole Studite tradition of resistance, and it had the same result. John was imprisoned in the capital, then exiled to the fortress of Pentadaktylon in the district of Lampe, where he was held eighteen months; then brought back to Constantinople; then shut up in the fortress of Kriotauron for two years more.
The prophecy fulfilled, and the last exile
Leo the Armenian was murdered in the palace church at the Nativity liturgy of December 820, cut down at the altar by conspirators — an end which the Church, and John's biographer, read as precisely the judgement he had been warned of. His successor Michael II (820–829) suspended the persecution and let the exiled confessors come home; but Michael did not restore the icons, and the iconoclast party retained the means to keep an inconvenient abbot at a distance. John was not allowed back to Kathara; he was confined instead at Chalcedon, across the water from the capital.
Under Theophilus (829–842), the last and in some respects the harshest of the iconoclast emperors, John attempted in 836 to settle in Constantinople itself, and was banished for it by the iconoclast patriarch John VII the Grammarian — the learned architect of Theophilus's iconoclasm — to the island of Aphousia in the Propontis, one of the small islands off the Asian shore used repeatedly as a place of ecclesiastical detention. There, after some three years, he reposed in peace, about the year 839, not living to see the Triumph of Orthodoxy of 843. He had spent something like a quarter of a century in prisons, fortresses and islands for the icons.
Memory
John's memory belongs to that broad company of ninth-century confessors — abbots, hymnographers, bishops — whose sufferings the Byzantine calendar records in large numbers and in short notices, and whose collective witness is what the Sunday of Orthodoxy celebrates. He left no writings that survive under his name and worked no recorded miracles; what the Church remembers is a man who told an emperor the truth and paid for it for the rest of his life. The Menaion's canon for him carries an acrostic that turns on the name of his monastery — "suffering made thee pure, blessed John, who didst rightly preside over the Pure" — a piece of Byzantine wordplay that is also an accurate summary of his life.
Feast and commemoration
April 27 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 10), in the Greek synaxarion, where he follows immediately after the day's principal commemoration, the hieromartyr Simeon of Jerusalem. The Greek books style him Ὅσιος Ἰωάννης ὁ Ὁμολογητής, ἡγούμενος Μονῆς Καθαρῶν — "Venerable John the Confessor, hegumen of the monastery of Kathara" — and appoint a canon with the acrostic on Katharoi. The commemoration is less prominent in the Slavonic books and does not appear in the OCA's April 27 listing, which is one of the ordinary Greek/Slavonic divergences of the fixed calendar and is recorded here rather than resolved.
Because April 27 falls in late April, its position in the year depends on the date of Pascha: it may come within Great Lent or Holy Week, or within the Pentecostarion.
John is also numbered among the confessors commemorated collectively on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the first Sunday of Great Lent, which is a movable commemoration (42 days before Pascha) and belongs with the movable cycle rather than to this day.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable confessor)
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, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable John, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Iconography
John is painted in the ordinary type of the venerable confessor-abbot: an elderly monk in analavos and cowl, or bare-headed with a high forehead and a long grey or white beard, holding a scroll with a text of admonition, or blessing; as a hegumen he may hold the abbot's staff, and as a confessor for the icons he is very properly shown holding a small icon — usually of Christ or of the Theotokos — which is the attribute the painter's tradition gives to the iconodule confessors as a class, distinguishing them at a glance from other monastic saints. Where the confessors of the second iconoclasm are grouped, as in the compositions for the Sunday of Orthodoxy, he takes his place among the abbots behind the hierarchs.
No pre-1900 icon of John of Kathara, securely identified by inscription, has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The chronology of his early years. The synaxarion's own figures are difficult: if John was born about 778 and was taken by his abbot to the Council of Nicaea in 787, he was a child of nine, which does not fit the notice's description of him as already a monk distinguished for zeal and learning. Either the birth date is too late (and he was born nearer 760–765), or the journey to Nicaea belongs to a later occasion than the council itself, or the abbot's visit to Nicaea and the impression made on Irene and Tarasius belong to the years after 787 rather than to the council's sessions. The notice is recorded here as it stands, with the difficulty flagged rather than smoothed over.
- The date of his repose. The Greek synaxarion gives c. 839, which agrees with an exile beginning in 836 and lasting about three years; some calendars give c. 835, which cannot be reconciled with the 836 banishment and is probably a rounding of the reign of Theophilus. Either way his death falls in the last iconoclast reign and before the restoration of 843.
- The site of Kathara. The monastery of the Pure (τῶν Καθαρῶν) is generally located in Bithynia, among the houses of the Olympus region, but the identification of its site is not secure and the name is rare enough in the sources to leave room for doubt.
- Not to be confused with the many other ninth-century Johns of the icon struggle, and in particular not with John VII the Grammarian, the iconoclast patriarch who banished him — the two share a name and a decade and stood on opposite sides. He is distinct also from John of Damascus, the great theologian of the icons of the previous century, with whom the epithet "the Confessor" and the Syrian birth invite confusion.