Mary Syncletica

The Holy Mary of Senatorial Rank, who was healed by the Image of the Saviour Not-Made-by-Hands

Righteous · d. after 582

Commemorated 11 August — Her healing by the Image of the Saviour Not-Made-by-Hands

Mary is a saint of the Byzantine calendar for August 11 known from a single sentence: a woman of senatorial rank — which is what the epithet Syncletica means, and it is a rank and not a surname — who was healed by the Image of the Saviour Not-Made-by-Hands at the time when that image appeared, in the reign of the emperor Tiberius (578–582). Nothing else about her is transmitted: not her city, not her illness, not her family, not the year or manner of her death. She is remembered because a miracle of the acheiropoietos image happened to her, and her commemoration is in substance a commemoration of the image.

One sentence

The whole of the record is the synaxarial notice: that the holy Mary, of senatorial rank, was healed by the Image of the Saviour Not-Made-by-Hands which appeared in the days of the emperor Tiberius. The Slavonic Menaion and the calendars derived from it carry the notice in this form; the Greek books have it likewise, immediately after the day's martyrs.

Two things are fixed by it. The first is her station: συγκλητική is the feminine of the adjective from σύγκλητος, the Senate, and denotes a woman of the senatorial order — a lady of the highest civil class of the empire, whether in her own right or by her husband. English lists sometimes print "Syncletica" as though it were a name, which invites confusion with the great ascetic Syncletica of Alexandria; it is a rank. The second is the date: Tiberius II Constantine reigned as Justin II's caesar from 574 and as emperor from 578 to 582, which places the healing in the last quarter of the sixth century.

The image

The Image Not-Made-by-Hands — ἡ ἀχειροποίητος εἰκών, the likeness of Christ's face held to have been imprinted without a painter's work — was the object of an intense cult in the sixth century, and Mary's notice belongs to its history rather than to hers. Two great acheiropoietoi were then coming into prominence in the East: the Mandylion of Edessa, the cloth sent to King Abgar, whose fame rose sharply after the Persian siege of 544; and the image of Camuliana in Cappadocia, which was discovered in the previous century and was carried to Constantinople in 574 — precisely in the years the notice names — where it was received with enormous ceremony and thereafter borne at the head of armies as the empire's palladium.

An imperial reign fixed at 578–582 and an image said to have "appeared" in it point to this Constantinopolitan moment, when the Camuliana image was newly in the capital and its miracles were being recorded. A woman of the senatorial order in the capital, healed by the newly arrived image and remembered by name in the calendar, fits the setting exactly. The identification is inference and not testimony, and the notice itself names no image and no city.

Feast and commemoration

August 11 (church date; New Calendar civil August 11, Old Calendar civil August 24), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and the Dormition Fast (August 1–14). She is a synaxarial commemoration without a proper office; the day's service belongs to the afterfeast and to the martyr Euplus.

There is a fitness in the placing that the compilers of the calendar are unlikely to have missed: August 11 lies within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration, the feast of the uncreated light of the face of Christ, and on that day the calendar remembers a woman healed by an image of that face which no hand made. The Icon of the Mother of God of Constantinople is likewise commemorated on this day in the Slavonic books, so that August 11 carries two image-commemorations under the light of Tabor.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a righteous woman)

Thou didst seek out the likeness of the face of Christ which no hand had made, O Mary, and touching it in faith thou wast made whole; wherefore, honoured in the world and healed by the Lord of the world, thou dost intercede with Him that our souls may be saved.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Mary has no independent iconographic type. Where a menologion rank includes her, she would be painted by the calendar's formula for a righteous laywoman of rank: standing frontally, the head covered, in the long tunic and mantle of a Byzantine lady of the senatorial order — which in painting means richer stuffs and often a jewelled border, the visual shorthand for patrikia — with the hands raised or extended in prayer, and the inscription Η ΑΓΙΑ ΜΑΡΙΑ. The scene her notice implies, and the only one that could distinguish her, is her healing before the Image Not-Made-by-Hands: the acheiropoietos, the face of Christ on its cloth held out by two angels or hung above an altar, with the woman kneeling or prostrate before it. That scene is part of the iconography of the Holy Napkin, one of the most widely painted subjects in Byzantine and Russian art, but it is not, so far as is known, painted with her in it.

No image identifiable as this Mary has been located for this collection, and the Menologion of Basil II covers only September to February.

Disputed questions

Which image? The notice says only "the Image of the Saviour Not-Made-by-Hands, which appeared in the reign of Tiberius." The Camuliana image, brought to Constantinople in 574, is the best candidate on the chronology; the Mandylion of Edessa is the other possibility, and the Byzantine tradition itself did not always distinguish them sharply. Nothing in the sources consulted decides it.
Name or rank? Syncletica is a rank, "of senatorial order," and this entry treats it so. Because the English lists print it as an epithet, she must be carefully distinguished from Syncletica of Alexandria (January 5), the fourth-century amma and desert mother, with whom she has nothing in common but the accident of the word.
A saint by miracle. Mary is honoured not for a martyrdom, an ascetic labour, or an office, but as the recipient of a miracle — an unusual category, and one that arises where a commemoration of a holy object has attached to itself the name of the person to whom it was shown. Her feast is best read as a feast of the image with a name attached.
No date of death is transmitted; the died field records only that she lived after the healing, and the century is assigned from the reign of Tiberius.