Olympias the Deaconess

The Holy and Venerable Olympias the Deaconess of the Great Church of Constantinople

Deaconess · Venerable · Righteous · b. c. 361–368, Constantinople — d. 25 July 408 (409 and 410 also transmitted), Nicomedia

Commemorated 25 July — Repose in exile at Nicomedia

Olympias (c. 361–408) was the greatest of the deaconesses of Constantinople: an orphaned heiress of the senatorial aristocracy, widowed within two years of her marriage, who refused the emperor's pressure to marry again, was ordained deaconess of the Great Church by the patriarch Nectarius while still in her twenties, and spent one of the largest private fortunes in the eastern empire on the poor, the churches and the bishops of her age. Beside Hagia Sophia she built a monastery of some two hundred and fifty women whose enclosure adjoined the cathedral itself. She was the closest friend and the most steadfast supporter of John Chrysostom, and when he fell she fell with him: interrogated over the burning of the cathedral, fined, deprived of her community and driven from the city, she died in exile at Nicomedia on 25 July, probably in 408 — the year of Chrysostom's own death. Seventeen of his letters to her survive, the finest of his exile correspondence, and an anonymous contemporary Life preserves her memory. She is the standing type in the Orthodox tradition of the ordained deaconess of the ancient Church.

Origins and early life

Olympias was born at Constantinople about 361 — some accounts put her birth as late as 368 — into the highest rank of the eastern senatorial aristocracy. Her father was Anicius Secundus, a senator (in the Greek sources a comes); her mother, whose name the tradition does not preserve with certainty, belonged to the house of the eparch Eulalius, and the synaxarial notice adds that she had earlier been married to the Armenian king Arsaces (Arsak) — so that the girl stood at the meeting-point of the Roman senatorial nobility and the Armenian royal house. Her grandfather Eulalius had been prefect of the city. She was orphaned young and placed under the guardianship of Procopius, a kinsman and a prefect, and her education was entrusted to Theodosia, sister of Amphilochius of Iconium — a woman whom Gregory the Theologian praised in his letters, and through whom the child was formed from the beginning within the circle of the great Cappadocian bishops.

About the year 386, still very young, she was married to Nebridius, prefect of the city of Constantinople. Gregory the Theologian, then in retirement, sent a poem for the wedding — a hundred and odd lines of counsel to a Christian bride, one of the few personal documents of her life to survive from a named hand. The marriage lasted at most twenty months, and may have been shorter: Nebridius died, and the tradition received by the Church holds that she remained a virgin in it. She was perhaps twenty-five, immensely rich, and free.

The refusal to remarry

The emperor Theodosius the Great wished her to marry again, and had a candidate: Elpidius, a Spaniard and a kinsman of his own. Olympias refused, answering — in the exchange the Life transmits — that if God had wished her to live as a wife He would not have taken her first husband away, and that having been found unfit for marriage once she would not ask for it twice. The refusal of an emperor's match by a young woman with one of the largest fortunes in the East was not a private matter, and Theodosius answered it with the machinery of the law: he placed her whole estate under the administration of the city prefect Clementinus, to be held in trust until she should be thirty years old, and forbade her the company of bishops and the churches.

Olympias replied with a letter of thanks which is the sharpest thing recorded of her. She thanked the emperor for having relieved her of a burden that only the love of money makes light, and asked him to divide her wealth among the poor and the churches, so that she might be spared both the vainglory of giving it away herself and the anxiety of managing it. Theodosius, the Life says, was struck by the answer; on his return from the West he restored her property to her, and left her to dispose of it.

The deaconess of the Great Church

The patriarch Nectarius (381–397), successor of Gregory the Theologian, ordained her deaconess of the Great Church — the cathedral of Hagia Sophia — about the year 391, while she was still in her late twenties or barely thirty. The ordination was a canonical irregularity of the kind that greatness sometimes extracts from the Church: the civil law of Theodosius (390) and the later canon of Chalcedon set the minimum age of a deaconess at sixty and then at forty, and the sources are frank that an exception was made for her. Nectarius, an unbaptised imperial official at his own election and no theologian, is said by the Life to have taken her counsel in the affairs of the church of Constantinople.

The office she held was a real one and not honorary. In the eastern Church of the fourth and fifth centuries the deaconess assisted at the baptism of women — the anointing and the reception from the font, where the presence of a male minister was not thought fitting — instructed the newly illumined, carried the communion to women who were sick, kept order among the women in the assembly, and acted as the bishop's intermediary with the women of his flock. Olympias was ordained by the laying-on of hands within the sanctuary, and the sources place her first among four deaconesses of the cathedral: with her are named Pentadia, Proclia and Salvina, who appear again in Chrysostom's correspondence.

Beside the cathedral, on ground of her own, she built a monastery of women whose wall adjoined the south side of the Great Church, with a door opening into the narthex; there she gathered, the Life says, some two hundred and fifty virgins, among them her own household servants, whom she freed. Her sister-in-law Elisanthia and her relatives Martyria and Palladia joined the community. The house kept a rigorous enclosure — Olympias herself is said never to have gone to the public baths, and to have eaten no meat — and it became the model of the great urban women's monasteries of Constantinople.

The disposal of a fortune

Palladius, who knew her, and Sozomen, who wrote a generation later, both give the same picture: a torrent of money moving outward. She gave to the poor, to prisoners, to the exiled, to hospitals and hostels and homes for the destitute; she supported churches in Constantinople, in Cappadocia, in Syria, in Palestine, in Egypt; she paid the expenses of bishops who came to the capital on the business of their sees. Palladius names among those she received and provisioned Amphilochius of Iconium, Epiphanius of Cyprus, Gregory of Nyssa, Optimus of Antioch in Pisidia and Peter of Sebaste, and reports that she gave Epiphanius a thousand gold pieces even though he had come to Constantinople against Chrysostom. Gregory of Nyssa dedicated to her his Commentary on the Song of Songs.

The estate itself was enormous: landed property in Thrace, Galatia, Cappadocia and Bithynia, houses at Constantinople and Nicomedia, gold and silver plate. Chrysostom, who took over the administration of what remained of it after his enthronement, famously restrained her: he did not forbid her almsgiving but told her to hold and dispense it herself with discretion rather than pour it out indiscriminately, since she had received her wealth from God as a stewardship and would answer for its use. It is the one recorded instance of a father in God asking a great almsgiver to give less and give better.

She was also, Palladius records, a disciple at second hand of Melania the Elder — Olympias "followed the counsel of Melania, attending to her precepts and walking in her footsteps" — and so belonged to the same current of aristocratic ascetic women, learned and Origenist in sympathy, that ran from Rome through Jerusalem to the capital.

Chrysostom, the fall, and the persecution

When John Chrysostom came from Antioch to the throne of Constantinople in 398 he found in Olympias his most valuable ally and, in the end, his dearest friend. She fed his poor, funded his mission to the Goths and to Phoenicia, and sheltered the monks of Egypt — the "Tall Brothers" — whom Theophilus of Alexandria had driven out; and that shelter was the beginning of her ruin, for Theophilus, who arrived in the capital in 403 to destroy Chrysostom, never forgave it.

After the Synod of the Oak and the second and final deposition of Chrysostom in June 404, the archbishop, going into exile, wrote to the four deaconesses — Olympias, Pentadia, Proclia and Salvina — charging them not to abandon the Church whatever should follow, and to give to whoever should be canonically elected in his place the obedience they had given him, provided he was chosen with the consent of all and by no ambition of his own. On the night of his departure the Great Church took fire, and the flames spread to the senate house; the government fastened the arson on the Johannites. Olympias was summoned before the city prefect Optatus, a pagan, and interrogated. She would not confess to a crime she had not committed, and — the point of the whole proceeding — she would not enter into communion with Arsacius, the aged brother of Nectarius whom the court had installed in Chrysostom's place. No evidence was produced; she was fined a very large sum, her community was broken up and its members scattered, and she left the city.

She withdrew first to Cyzicus, and the persecution followed her: in 405 she was brought to Nicomedia and confined there, in poverty, in bad health, and — the letters make it plain — in a depression of spirit that her friend in his own exile laboured to lift.

The letters from exile

Seventeen letters of Chrysostom to Olympias survive from Cucusus and the road to Pityus, written between 404 and 407: they are the largest surviving block of his exile correspondence to one person and among the greatest documents of Christian friendship in the patristic age. They are not consolations in the rhetorical manner. He argues with her; he scolds her gently for her athymia, her despondency, and tells her that no one is really harmed except by himself; he reports his fevers, the Isaurian raids, the cold, the state of his stomach; he thanks her for money and for shirts; he asks her not to spend herself into the ground. The long treatise "That no one can harm the man who does not injure himself" grew out of this exchange. Her own letters to him are lost, and the absence is felt: everything we hear of her mind in these years is heard through his answers.

Chrysostom died on the road at Comana in Pontus on 14 September 407. Olympias survived him by some months and died at Nicomedia on 25 July, in the year 408 by the reckoning most commonly accepted, though 409 and 410 are also given.

Relics and translations

The Life relates that after her death she appeared in a dream to the bishop of Nicomedia and directed that her body be laid in a wooden coffin and committed to the sea, to be carried where God should will. The coffin came ashore at Brochthoi, near Constantinople, and the relics were laid in the church of the Apostle Thomas there; when that church later burned, they were found unharmed. Under the patriarch Sergius (610–638) they were brought into the city and placed in the monastery Olympias herself had founded beside the Great Church, where healings were reported at the shrine. The Life was very probably composed in that community, and its interest in the relics is the interest of the nuns who kept them.

Feast and commemoration

July 25 (church date; New Calendar civil July 25, Old Calendar civil August 7), the day of her repose. She is kept universally, but not as the office of the day: July 25 belongs liturgically to the Dormition of the Righteous Anna, and Olympias is a synaxarion notice beneath it, sung with the common of a venerable woman where she is sung at all. The Greek books style her Ὁσία, venerable, and the Slavonic prepodobnaya, adding the office she held — "Olympias the deaconess" — in every calendar; the OCA prints her as "the holy woman Olympias (Olympiada) the deaconess of Constantinople." She shares the day with Eupraxia of Tabenna, and the two are almost always listed together, so that July 25 has become in practice the commemoration of two women of the Theodosian age who gave away everything they had.

Her Antiochian interest is direct and personal: her friend and father in God was a priest and deacon of Antioch before he was archbishop of Constantinople, and much of what is known of her comes from letters written to her by an Antiochene in exile. Among the bishops she housed was Optimus of Antioch in Pisidia.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable woman)

In thee, O mother, was the divine image preserved unimpaired: for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care rather for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Olympias, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.

Original translation from the Greek

Kontakion — Tone 2

Having poured out thy riches upon the poor as water upon the earth, thou wast found rich toward God, O Olympias; and ministering in the courts of the Great Church thou didst not forsake thy shepherd in his affliction. Wherefore thou hast received in exile the crown of them that endure.

Original translation from the Greek

Appointed readings

Epistle — Galatians 4:22–31

²²For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. ²³But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise. ²⁴Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. ²⁵For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. ²⁶But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. ²⁷For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband. ²⁸Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise. ²⁹But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now. ³⁰Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman. ³¹So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.

Gospel — Luke 8:16–21

¹⁶No man, when he hath lighted a candle, covereth it with a vessel, or putteth it under a bed; but setteth it on a candlestick, that they which enter in may see the light. ¹⁷For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad. ¹⁸Take heed therefore how ye hear: for whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have. ¹⁹Then came to him his mother and his brethren, and could not come at him for the press. ²⁰And it was told him by certain which said, Thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to see thee. ²¹And he answered and said unto them, My mother and my brethren are these which hear the word of God, and do it.

Iconography

Olympias is written as a mature woman in the dark monastic mantle with a maphorion, and — where the iconographer knows his subject — with the mark of her office: the orarion of the deaconess worn about the neck, or a censer, or the communion vessel she was permitted to carry to the sick. A cross in the right hand is usual, as for all venerable women; a scroll appears in some Greek recensions. The inscription is Ἡ ἁγία Ὀλυμπιὰς ἡ διακόνισσα. In modern Greek and Russian practice she is often painted beside John Chrysostom, standing to receive his blessing or holding one of his letters, and in that pairing she is unmistakable. Where the deaconesses of the ancient Church are painted as a group — a subject revived in the twentieth century — she stands first, with Phoebe of Cenchreae.

No storable pre-1900 image has been secured for this entry. Two Commons candidates were examined and both rejected: a Greek panel inscribed Ἡ ἁγία Ὀλυμπιὰς — the identity is certain from the inscription, but the file carries no author, no provenance beyond a devotional website, and a bare uploader's assertion of "19th century" that the printed caption band along the foot of the panel contradicts; and a second file whose own description dates the underlying icon only to the "19th–20th century" and names no author. Under §8 of the PRD an undated candidate that may be a living iconographer's work is not stored, and neither was kept.

Disputed questions

The year of her death. The Life gives the day, 25 July, without dispute; the year is variously computed as 408, 409, 410 or (rarely) 419. The OCA synaxarion prints 409, the Greek notices most often 408. This entry gives 408 as the likeliest and records the alternatives; nothing of substance hangs on it, except that on the earlier reckoning she outlived Chrysostom by only ten months.
Her age at ordination. That a woman under thirty was ordained deaconess is stated plainly in the sources and conflicts with both the imperial law of 390 and canon 15 of Chalcedon (451), which set the age at forty. The conflict is real and is not to be smoothed away: the canon was framed later, and Nectarius made an exception which the Church has never held against her.
The nature of the office. Whether the ordination of a deaconess in the Byzantine rite was a cheirotonia (a sacramental ordination within the sanctuary) or a cheirothesia (a blessing) is a live modern question, and Olympias is the case most often cited in it, since the sources describe her as ordained by the patriarch himself for the Great Church. This entry records the ancient language and does not adjudicate the modern debate.
"Olympias the Younger." Some Greek lists distinguish an "Olympias the elder" — her mother's generation — from our saint. The distinction is a genealogical one and does not produce a second commemoration.
Not to be confused with Olympia of Lesbos, the abbess of Karyes martyred by pirates in 1235 and kept on May 11, whose name is sometimes given as Olympias; nor with the apostle Olympas of the Seventy, a man, kept on November 10; nor with Olympias the mother of Alexander the Great, with whom the name is chiefly associated outside the Church.