Magnus the Venerable
Our Venerable Father Magnus, who reposed at prayer
Venerable
Commemorated 28 June — Repose in peace while at prayer
Magnus is an ascetic of the Greek synaxarion of June 28 of whom one thing only is recorded, and it is the thing the Church thought worth recording: that he reposed in peace while he was praying. The notice preserves no country, no century, no monastery and no deed. The manner of his death is his whole memorial, and it is a considerable one — the tradition sets him among those whom the Lord found watching.
What the synaxarion says
The Greek notice reads: Ὁ Ὅσιος Μάγνος ἐτελειώθηκε μὲ εἰρήνη, ἐνῶ προσευχόταν — "The venerable Magnus was perfected in peace while he was praying." The verb ἐτελειώθη, "was perfected," is the word the synaxaria use of the completion of a saint's course, whether by martyrdom or by a peaceful death; the added clause ἐνῶ προσευχόταν is what distinguishes this notice from the hundreds of others like it, and is presumably what preserved his name at all. Death at prayer is a recurring mark of blessedness in the monastic literature — the desert fathers reckoned it the seal of a life of watchfulness, the servant found doing what he was set to do — and a hagiographic notice reduced to that single fact is still, in the tradition's own terms, a complete one.
The name Magnus is Latin (magnus, "great"), which suggests a Western or Italo-Greek origin, or at least a Latin-speaking milieu; but the synaxarion draws no such inference and neither does this entry.
Feast and commemoration
June 28 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 11), in the Greek books; the Slavonic Menaion does not carry him. No proper service is appointed, and he is kept in the commemoration of the saints of the day.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
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, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Magnus, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No image of this Magnus is known. He would be painted, if at all, in the common type of the venerable: an elder in the monastic mantle and schema, with a scroll; and the one thing the notice gives could be shown by placing him at prayer, hands raised in the orans posture, which is how the tradition remembers him. Because the name is shared with the Western bishop-martyr of Anagni and with Magnus of Füssen — both of whom have a developed Latin iconography, mitred or abbatial — no image labelled "St Magnus" may be stored for this entry without a Greek inscription identifying an ὅσιος; none has been.
Disputed questions
- No date, no place, no acts. The frontmatter omits century; the entry indexes under unknown. Nothing beyond the one line is transmitted, and this repository does not supply a Life where none exists.
- He is not Magnus of Anagni. Some working lists of June 28 attach to this name the Latin bishop-martyr Magnus of Anagni in Latium, patron of that city. That identification is not supported by any source consulted for this entry: the Greek synaxarion presents an unnamed-of-place ὅσιος who died at prayer — a venerable, not a bishop and not a martyr — and the Anagni saint's own commemoration in the Western martyrologies falls on 19 August. The two should be kept apart, and the Anagni bishop is not entered under this day.
- He is likewise not Magnus of Füssen (September 6), the Alemannic missionary, nor Magnus of Cuneo, nor the martyr Magnus who appears in some Eastern lists among the companions of other saints.