Kanides of Cappadocia
Our Venerable Father Kanides of Cappadocia
Venerable · b. c. 387 — d. c. 460
Commemorated 10 June — Repose in his cave in Cappadocia
Kanides was a Cappadocian ascetic of the fifth century whose whole recorded life is one extreme: he entered a cave on a mountain at the age of seven and never left the ascetic life again, passing some sixty-six years in it and dying at seventy-three, about the year 460. The notice makes his mother the beginning of the story — she is said to have kept a strict abstinence through her pregnancy and to have watched over the child's food afterwards — and dwells on the severity of his rule: one meal a week, of raw vegetables. The damp of the cave, the synaxarion adds, cost him his hair and beard. He is a saint of the Greek synaxaristes, kept on June 10.
Parents and childhood
The notice names his parents, Theodotos and Theophano, and calls them godly people of Cappadocia. He was born, the Greek tradition says, in the reign of Theodosius the Great — a bracket that gives roughly 379–395, and, worked back from the age and year of his repose, a birth about 387.
His mother is given an unusual prominence for a synaxarion notice of this brevity. She is said to have abstained from rich and fatty food throughout her pregnancy, and after the birth to have brought the child up on a careful and sparing diet. The detail is not decoration: in the hagiography of the Anatolian ascetics, the abstinence of the mother before the birth is the recognised sign that the child is set apart for God from the womb, and it prepares the reader for what follows.
The cave, at seven years old
At seven years of age — the notices are firm on the number — Kanides left his parents' house for a mountain, found a cave, and settled in it to fast and pray. The Greek tradition does not describe a novitiate, a monastery, or a teacher; his is the eremitical form of the Cappadocian ascetic life, of which the region's rock-cut cells and cave-churches are the surviving evidence.
His rule, as the notice gives it, was one meal in a week, and that of uncooked vegetables. He kept it, the tradition says, for the rest of his life. The cave itself was extremely damp, and the notice records the physical effect with the concreteness the Greek synaxaria reserve for the ascetics: the moisture caused him to lose all his hair, and his beard with it, so that he was smooth-faced in old age — an odd and memorable detail which is also, in the painters' tradition, his identifying mark.
Repose
He reposed in peace, without persecution or martyrdom, at the age of seventy-three, about the year 460, having spent some sixty-six years in the cave. That reckoning — seventy-three years of life, sixty-six of them ascetic — is the frame in which the Greek books present him, and it is the reason his notice survived: he is a standing example, in the June synaxarion, of the ascetic struggle begun in childhood and never relaxed.
Feast and commemoration
June 10 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 23), among the minor commemorations of the day in the Greek and Antiochian calendars. He has no proper office; the common of a venerable monastic is sung. In the Greek synaxaristes his notice stands after the martyrs of the day — Timothy of Prusa, Alexander and Antonina, and Neaniskos — and immediately before Theophanes and Pansemne, the day's other ascetic commemoration.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O Father, the image of God was preserved unimpaired: 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, which is immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Kanides, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Iconography
Kanides is painted as an aged ascetic in the monastic rason and koukoulion or with the head bare, holding a scroll or with the hands raised in prayer, standing before the mouth of a cave on a rocky mountain. His singular identifying feature in the painters' tradition follows the notice exactly: he is shown without hair and without a beard, smooth-faced in old age — unusual in a portrait of an elder, where the long white beard is almost invariable, and therefore diagnostic. Where the childhood is shown, a small figure of a boy entering the cave may be added in a lower register.
No pre-1900 icon of Kanides has been located for this collection; he has no independent painted tradition outside the Greek menologion registers, and Wikimedia Commons holds nothing under any transliteration of his name.
Disputed questions
- The name. Κανίδης appears also as Κανίδιος and is Latinised as Canidius or Canidus; English-language calendars render him "Kanides," "Kanidios," and "Canidus of Cappadocia" indifferently. All are one saint.
- The dates. "Born in the reign of Theodosius the Great (c. 379)" and "reposed in 460 at the age of seventy-three" cannot both be exactly right — seventy-three years from 379 gives 452, and 460 less seventy-three gives 387. The Greek notices carry both figures without reconciling them; this entry gives the birth as c. 387 on the arithmetic of the death-date and age, which are the more specific data, and records the discrepancy here rather than silently correcting either figure.
- Absent from the Slavonic books. Kanides is a Greek commemoration; the Russian menologion for June 10 does not carry him. He passed into the Antiochian usage with the Greek synaxaristes.
- No monastery is named. Later local traditions in Cappadocia have attached his name to particular caves, but the notice names no place beyond "a mountain," and no site is identified here.