Leontius of Rădăuți
Our Father among the Saints Leontius the Wonderworker, Bishop of Rădăuți
Venerable · Bishop · Wonderworker · d. c. 1432, Rădăuți
Commemorated 1 July — Commemoration of the hierarch and wonderworker of Rădăuți
Leontius (in the world and in his first monastic tonsure, Lawrence) was a priest-monk of northern Moldavia who founded a hermitage near his native Rădăuți, became the spiritual father of a generation of Moldavian ascetics — among them Daniel the Hesychast — and was drawn out of it by the prince Alexander the Good to be bishop of Rădăuți, the senior see of the principality, whose cathedral was the old princely church of Bogdana. Late in life he laid down the episcopate, withdrew to the wilderness, received the great schema with the name Leontius, and reposed soon after, about 1432. His body was found incorrupt and his tomb became a place of healing; the Romanian Orthodox Church glorified him formally in 1992, and his relics are venerated in a chapel of the Bogdana monastery at Rădăuți. His feast is July 1.
Lawrence of Rădăuți
He was born at Rădăuți in northern Moldavia in the fourteenth century, and was given the name Lawrence — the name he kept through his first tonsure and his whole active life, so that the monastery he founded was known for centuries as Laura, "St Lawrence's." The change to Leontius came only at the very end, with the great schema, and it is the schema-name that the calendar keeps: a small point, but the reason a reader meets the same man under two names in the Moldavian sources.
He entered monastic life young, and in time was ordained to the priesthood. Near his birthplace, in the forested hill-country toward the Carpathians, he gathered a settlement of hermits about himself which grew into a monastery. It stood in the country of Vicovu above Rădăuți, and its name survived the foundation itself.
Father of the Moldavian hermits
What the tradition remembers of his monastic years is not administration but fatherhood. He was a spiritual father of unusual reputation, and men came to him from across Moldavia; the notice says that the sick were healed at his prayers and that "he became a father, a teacher and a protector to all." The most consequential of those who passed under his direction was Daniel the Hesychast (†c. 1482), the great recluse of Voroneț and confessor of Stephen the Great — which sets Leontius at the head of the whole fifteenth-century Moldavian hesychast line, the tradition out of which the painted monasteries of Bukovina and the counsel that shaped Stephen's reign both came. That is the largest claim the sources make for him, and it is made in a single clause.
Bishop of Rădăuți
The prince Alexander the Good (Alexandru cel Bun, 1400–1432), who did more than any other Moldavian ruler to give the young principality an ordered church, pressed for his election to the see of Rădăuți. Rădăuți was the oldest bishopric of Moldavia; its cathedral was the church of St Nicholas at Bogdana, raised by Bogdan I about 1360, the oldest stone church in the country and the burial-place of the first Moldavian princes. Leontius governed it, the account says, "with spiritual wisdom," for a long time.
Withdrawal, schema and repose
In old age he did what few bishops do: he resigned the see and went back to the wilderness, to end his life as he had begun it. There he was clothed in the great schema — the highest degree of the monastic profession — and took the name Leontius, and reposed not long afterwards, about 1432, the year in which his patron Alexander the Good also died. The Romanian tradition adds that he foreknew the day of his death and called the whole brotherhood together to give them his last instruction before it.
Relics, cultus and glorification
His body was found incorrupt, and his tomb at Rădăuți drew the sick from the surrounding country; the veneration was continuous and local from the fifteenth century onward, which is the ordinary Moldavian pattern — a cultus kept by the people and the monastery for centuries before any synodal act. The later history of the relics is variously reported in the Moldavian sources and cannot be reconstructed with confidence here; a portion is venerated today in a chapel dedicated to him at the Bogdana monastery in Rădăuți, which remains the centre of his pilgrimage.
The Romanian Orthodox Church proclaimed his sanctity formally in 1992, in the general act by which the Holy Synod glorified a group of Romanian saints whose veneration had long been local — the same act that canonised Gelasius of Rimet and others. His feast was set on July 1.
Feast and commemoration
July 1 on the church calendar (Old Calendar civil July 14). The commemoration is Romanian: it is kept by the Romanian Orthodox Church and by the OCA, whose Romanian Episcopate carries it, and does not appear in the Greek or Russian Menaia. He is honoured particularly at Bogdana in Rădăuți and throughout Bukovina and northern Moldavia, and is named in the general synaxis of the Romanian saints. The day is shared with the unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian of Rome, whose service the Menaion appoints.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
O God of our fathers, who ever dealest with us according to Thy gentleness: take not Thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of the hierarch Leontius, guide our life in peace.
Original translation from the Romanian
Iconography
Leontius is painted as a hierarch — an aged man with a long white beard, in the phelonion (or, in the Romanian manner, the sakkos) and the omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel in the left — and, because he died in the great schema, some Romanian icons give him instead the black analavos and cowl of the schema-monk over the episcopal vestments, or show him holding a scroll rather than the book. He may be shown with the church of Bogdana in his hand or beside him. Every image of him is modern: he had no painted cultus outside Rădăuți before the twentieth century, and the icons produced since the glorification of 1992 are the copyrighted work of living Romanian iconographers, which no uploader's licence on a photograph of them can release. No pre-1900 image is therefore stored here.
Disputed questions
- Lawrence and Leontius. The two names belong to one man: Lawrence from his first tonsure, under which he founded and governed his monastery and held the episcopate, and Leontius from the great schema taken at the end of his life. Moldavian documents and local tradition therefore speak of "the monastery of St Lawrence" and "St Leontius of Rădăuți" without always making the connection explicit, and the two have occasionally been listed as separate persons.
- Dates. Nothing is precisely dated. The fourteenth-century birth, the episcopate under Alexander the Good (1400–1432) and a repose about 1432 are the received frame and are what this entry indexes; some Romanian accounts extend his life a few years past the prince's death.
- Not to be confused with the other Leontii of the calendar — Leontius of Tripoli the martyr (June 18), Leontius of Rostov (May 23), Leontius of the Kiev Caves, or Leontius the Athonite; nor with Leontius, the brother of Cosmas and Damian of Arabia, who has no separate entry. A garbled form of this saint's name as "Leontius of Monemvasia" circulates in some working lists; there is no such July 1 commemoration, and the name appears to have been contaminated by Peter of Monembasia, a wholly unrelated synaxarion ascetic of February 7.