Leontius the Athonite
Our Venerable Father Leontius the Myrrh-streamer, of the Monastery of Dionysiou on the Holy Mountain
Venerable · Wonderworker · b. 1520, at Argos in the Peloponnese — d. 16 March 1605, at the Monastery of Dionysiou, Mount Athos
Commemorated 18 June — Commemoration on the day of his patron, the martyr Leontius of Tripoli; he reposed on March 16
Leontius, born at Argos in the Peloponnese in 1520, took the monastic habit at seventeen in a hermitage of the Argolid, and after the Turkish capture of Nauplion in 1540 crossed to the Holy Mountain and entered the Monastery of Dionysiou. There he remained for sixty years without once passing outside the monastery's gate — the detail on which his whole tradition turns — and there he was given the gifts of discernment and of prophecy. He reposed on 16 March 1605, aged eighty-five; his relics streamed myrrh, from which he is called Myroblytes, the Myrrh-streamer. He is commemorated on June 18, the day of his patron the martyr Leontius of Tripoli.
Argos, and the flight to the Mountain
He was born in 1520 at Argos, in a Peloponnese that had been Ottoman for two generations and was about to become a war zone again. At seventeen, in 1537, he entered a small hermitage in the Argolid and was tonsured. Three years later, in 1540, the Venetians surrendered Nauplion — the last Venetian stronghold in the eastern Peloponnese — to the Ottomans under the treaty that closed the war of 1537–40, and the Christian population of the Argolid was left exposed. Like a great many Peloponnesian monks of that generation, Leontius went to Mount Athos, where the Ottoman conquest had left the monasteries standing and taxed rather than destroyed.
He was received at the Monastery of Dionysiou, on the steep south-western coast of the peninsula — the house of St Dionysius of Korisos, founded in the fourteenth century under the patronage of the emperor Alexios III of Trebizond. It became, and remained, the whole of his world.
Sixty years within the gate
The tradition of Dionysiou records of Leontius a single, austere fact and builds everything on it: that from his entry until his death — sixty years — he never once went outside the monastery. On the Holy Mountain that is a discipline of a particular kind. Athonite monks travel: to the kellia and dependencies of their houses, to the port and the arsanás, to Karyes for the assemblies of the community, on the begging journeys by which monasteries in the Ottoman centuries raised their taxes. To refuse all of it for sixty years is a form of enclosure — the deliberate reduction of a life to the church, the refectory, the cell and the obediences — and it is the mark of the hesychast tradition in its most literal reading of stability.
The fruit ascribed to it is the classic one. He was granted discernment (διάκρισις), the gift of reading the state of a soul; and prophecy or clairvoyance, foreknowledge of things at a distance and to come. The Dionysiou tradition remembers him as a man consulted by his brethren rather than as a teacher who sought disciples.
Repose and the myrrh
He died on 16 March 1605, at eighty-five. When his relics were taken up they were found to give out a fragrant myrrh, and the healings that followed fixed on him the epithet Μυροβλύτης, the Myrrh-streamer — the same title borne by Simeon of Serbia, by Simon of Athos and by Demetrius of Thessalonica. His relics are kept at Dionysiou, and a portion was given to the Monastery of the Zerbitsa (Zervitsa) near Sparta, in his own Peloponnese, so that the Argive who never left the Mountain returned to the Argolid in his bones.
His Life survives in an eighteenth-century manuscript of the Monastery of Dionysiou, which reworks a seventeenth-century original composed within living memory of him. That is an unusually short interval for an Athonite saint's Life and gives the account better standing than most.
Feast and commemoration
June 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 1). Greek and Athonite usage, carried also by the Orthodox Church in America; the Slavonic books do not have him. He is kept with particular honour at Dionysiou, where his relics lie, and at the Zerbitsa monastery in Laconia, which holds a portion of them. A proper service was composed for him on the Holy Mountain; it is available to this collection only in modern printings, so the common of an ascetic father is given below.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8
In thee, O Father, was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to overlook the flesh, which passes away, and to attend to the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Leontius, thy spirit rejoices with the angels.
Iconography
Leontius is painted as an aged Athonite monk: a long white beard, the rason, the koukoulion thrown back or drawn over the head, the great schema with its crosses on the analavos, and in the hands a scroll — often inscribed with an admonition to stability — or a cross. Where the painter wishes to name his gift he sets beside him a vessel of myrrh, the attribute of the myrrh-streaming saints, and where the icon is made for Dionysiou it is usual to show the monastery itself, the tall fortified block on its rock above the sea, held in his hand or set at his feet in the manner of a founder's icon. Modern Athonite icons of him are numerous; all are the work of living or recent iconographers and none is free-licensed, so none can be stored here, and no pre-1900 image of him has been located.
Disputed questions
- March 16 or June 18? He reposed on 16 March, and the Dionysiou tradition knows the day; but his general commemoration is kept on June 18, the feast of the martyr Leontius of Tripoli whose name he bore. Transferring an Athonite father's memory to the day of his patronal saint is a common and unremarkable practice, and there is no conflict between the two dates: March 16 is the day of his death, June 18 the day of his feast. This entry gives June 18 as the single feast and records the date of repose in the entry's record.
- The century. Born 1520, died March 1605: his life is overwhelmingly a sixteenth-century one, but the century field records the century of repose, which is the seventeenth.
- Not to be confused with the other Leontii of this same day — Leontius of Tripoli, Leontius the Canonarch of the Kiev Caves, and Leontius the Shepherd — nor with Leontius of Jerusalem (May 14) or Leontius of Rostov (May 23).