Mamas of Caesarea

Origins and early life

The tradition places Mamas's parents, Theodotus and Rufina, among the Christian nobility of Gangra in Paphlagonia. In the persecutions of the later third century Theodotus was arrested for his open confession of Christ and, as a man of rank, was sent for judgement to Caesarea, the metropolis of Cappadocia, where he died in prison; Rufina, who had followed her husband into confinement though she was with child, gave birth there and died soon after the delivery. The infant born in the prison was taken in by a wealthy and pious widow of Caesarea named Ammia, who obtained the bodies of the martyred parents for burial and raised the boy as her own son. The name by which the Church knows him is explained in the Lives from his infancy: the child was slow to speak, and his first word, addressed to his foster-mother, was "mama."

Ammia had the boy educated in Caesarea, where his quickness and his piety were noticed together. She died when he was about fifteen, leaving him her heir — and leaving him, in the renewed persecution which the Lives set under the emperor Aurelian (270–275), an exposed and conspicuous young confessor, for he made no secret of his faith and drew his schoolfellows after him.

Martyrdom

Denounced to Democritus, the governor, Mamas refused to sacrifice to the gods; because of his noble birth he was not judged summarily but sent on to the emperor himself. Neither flattery nor torture moved him: the Lives recount beatings, burning with torches, and finally an attempt to drown him in the sea, from which he was delivered — the tradition says by an angel, who directed him to a mountain in the wilderness near Caesarea.

There the martyr's life took the pastoral turn that the hymnography and iconography of the Church have never forgotten. Living as a hermit on the mountain, he was surrounded by the wild animals of the desert, which came to him tamely as to a shepherd; he milked the wild deer and the goats, made cheese of the milk, and carried it down to feed the poor of the city. His fame spread, and with it the attention of the authorities. Alexander, the governor of Cappadocia, sent a detachment of soldiers to take him; Mamas met them on the road, received them hospitably, and — as they did not recognise him — revealed himself as the man they sought.

Brought to trial, he was tortured and condemned to the beasts, but the animals of the arena would not touch him; the accounts tell that a lion, released against him, lay down at his feet and defended him. At last a pagan priest struck him in the belly with a trident. Mortally wounded, the martyr dragged himself outside the city to a cave, where he gave up his soul to God. The verses of the synaxarion fix the manner of his death — "wounded by the points of the trident, Mamas endured" — and the received chronology places it around the year 275, when he was about fifteen years of age. He was buried at the place of his death, and his tomb became a fountain of healings.

Relics and veneration

The cultus of Mamas is among the best attested of any Cappadocian martyr. A century after his death, Basil the Great preached his Homily 23 on the martyr Mamas at his festival in Caesarea, and Gregory the Theologian, in the oration read on New Sunday, invokes the memory of "Mamas the famous shepherd, who milked the does" — a contemporary witness that the pastoral traditions of the saint were already fixed in the fourth century.

From Cappadocia his veneration spread through the whole Christian world. In Constantinople a quarter, a palace, and a celebrated monastery of St. Mamas (later the home of Symeon the New Theologian) bore his name. In Cyprus his shrine at Morphou, where a tomb held to be the saint's exudes a healing myrrh, remains one of the island's great pilgrimage churches, and dozens of Cypriot villages and churches are dedicated to him. In Lebanon the church of Mar Mama at Ehden, founded in 749, is reckoned among the oldest Maronite churches — a witness to his early veneration in the Patriarchate of Antioch's own heartland. In Georgia he has been beloved since the early Middle Ages, depicted riding the lion in manuscript and metalwork. In the West, relics brought from the East made the cathedral of Langres in Gaul a centre of his cultus (Saint-Mammès), and a town on the Seine bears his name. He is invoked as a patron of shepherds, herdsmen and flocks, and in popular devotion as a protector of those who suffer in the body, since he was pierced in the bowels.

Miracles and traditions

Two traditions above all shaped his image. The first is Cappadocian: the hermit-shepherd of the mountain, feeding the poor with the milk of wild creatures, the beasts obedient to him as to unfallen Adam. The second is Cypriot: there it is told that Mamas, a hermit who refused to pay the poll-tax, was being led to the duke when a lion sprang upon a lamb by the road; the saint took the lamb in his arms, mounted the lion, and rode it to the ruler's seat — who, astonished, exempted him from the tax. This local legend, whatever its relation to the Cappadocian martyr, fixed the most famous iconographic type of the saint: Mamas riding a lion, the lamb in his arms.