Pappos

Our Venerable Father Pappos, who reposed in peace

Venerable

Pappos is a venerable father of the Greek synaxaria commemorated on June 3, of whom the record preserves exactly one clause: Ὁ Ὅσιος Πάππος ἀπεβίωσεν εἰρηνικά — "the venerable Pappos departed this life peacefully." The synaxarion adds only a distich playing on his name, which means "grandfather": that he died not the grandfather of grandchildren but rather the father of daughters that are the virtues. Neither his country, his century, his monastery nor any act of his life has come down. He is entered here because the calendar keeps him, and at the length the sources allow.

The whole of the transmitted record is that Pappos was a monastic saint — hosios, the title of the ascetic and not of the martyr — and that he reposed in peace, which in the synaxarion's idiom means precisely that he did not die violently: no persecution, no confession before a magistrate, no exile. The Greek notice states this and then states explicitly that nothing more is known: "Δὲν ἔχουμε ἄλλες λεπτομέρειες γιὰ τὸν βίο τοῦ Ὁσίου" — we have no other details of the venerable one's life.

What survives instead of a life is a pun, and the pun is worth attention, because it is the only interpretation of him the Church has left us. His name, Πάππος, is the ordinary Greek word for grandfather or old man. The synaxarist's couplet turns it:

Τέθνηκε Πάππος, οὐχὶ πάππος ἐγγόνων, / Πατὴρ δὲ μᾶλλον ἀρετῶν θυγατέρων.

— he died a pappos who was grandfather to no grandchildren, but was instead a father, and what he fathered were the virtues, figured (as the Greek grammatical gender allows) as his daughters. It is the standard consolation of the monastic epitaph — celibacy is not childlessness — compressed into two lines and hung on a name; and it implies, at the least, a man who lived to a great age in the monastic life and was remembered for what he had produced in it.

Beyond this the entry cannot honestly go. There is no Life, no dossier, no relics that can be traced, no monastery that claims him.

Feast and commemoration

June 3 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 16). The commemoration is Greek and appears in the Greek synaxaria of the day in fourth place, after Lucillian and his companions, Athanasius the Wonderworker and Hieria. He is not carried by the Slavonic calendar, and is not named in the Antiochian or Russian June 3. There is no office: he is named in the synaxarion notice read at the sixth ode, with his distich, and the propers of the day are those of the martyrs.

Hymns

Synaxarion

Pappos hath died, no grandfather of grandchildren, but rather a father whose daughters are the virtues.

Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)

By a flood of tears thou didst make the desert fruitful, and by thy sighing from the depths thou didst bear fruit a hundredfold in labours; thou becamest a beacon, shining upon the world by miracles, O Pappos our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Iconography

No type exists, and none can be reconstructed, since nothing of his life offers an attribute. If he is depicted at all it can only be in the general form of the venerable elder — an aged monk, long white beard, black rason and monastic cowl, blessing or holding an unrolled scroll — as such figures fill the calendar-frescoes of monastic refectories and katholika, where every day of the year receives its saint whether or not anything is known of him. His name, meaning grandfather, would in practice guarantee that any iconographer painting him made him an old man.

No image of Pappos has been located, and none is stored. It is doubtful that an identifiable one exists.

Disputed questions

Nothing is transmitted. No century, no reign, no province. Accordingly this entry carries no century field, as the schema requires of synaxarion-only saints, and is indexed among those of undetermined date. Speculation that he is to be identified with one or another better-documented ascetic has no foundation in the sources.
The form of the name. Πάππος is given in Latin lists as Pappus and in some English ones as Pappos the Venerable; there is no difference of person behind the spellings.
Not to be confused with the martyr Papas of Lycaonia (March 16), who suffered under Maximian and whose name is a different word, nor with Papias the martyr of the several companies of that name, nor with Papias of Hierapolis the sub-apostolic writer. None of these is a monastic saint and none is kept on June 3.