Passarion of Jerusalem
Our Venerable Father Passarion, Chorepiscopus and Archimandrite of the Monks of Palestine
Venerable · Bishop · d. 428, Jerusalem
Commemorated 11 August — Repose at Jerusalem
Passarion was one of the founding figures of Palestinian monasticism in the generation before the great laurae: a monk of Jerusalem who built a poorhouse outside the city walls and a monastery on Holy Sion, was made chorepiscopus — a country bishop, a suffragan without a city — and served as archimandrite of all the monks of Palestine, the head under the bishop of the whole monastic body of the province. He was the friend and, in the older accounts, the teacher of Euthymius the Great, and it is in Cyril of Scythopolis's Life of Euthymius that he chiefly survives: in 428 he went out into the Judaean desert with Juvenal, bishop of Jerusalem, to consecrate the church of Euthymius's laura, and died in that same year. His day is August 11.
Jerusalem in the first half of the fifth century
The Christian Jerusalem into which Passarion came was a city being rebuilt around its holy places and filling with monks. The Constantinian basilicas were seventy or eighty years old; pilgrims arrived in numbers; and the hills east and south of the city, and the desert falling away toward the Dead Sea, were being settled by ascetics from every province of the empire — Armenians, Cappadocians, Latins, Syrians. It was a monasticism still unorganised, without the network of laurae and coenobia that Euthymius and Sabbas would build, and its centre of gravity was in the city rather than in the desert: the monasteries clustered on Sion and about the gates, close to the shrines and to the poor.
Passarion belonged to this urban, philanthropic first phase, and he shaped it. He founded a poorhouse — a ptōchotropheion, a hospice for the destitute and for sick pilgrims — outside the city gate, one of the earliest such institutions attached to the Jerusalem church; and afterwards a monastery on Holy Sion, whose brethren served it. The combination is characteristic of the period: the monastery is not withdrawn from the city but planted against its wall, and its work is the reception of the poor.
Chorepiscopus and archimandrite
Two titles are attached to him, and both matter. He was made chorepiscopus — a bishop of the countryside, ordained to serve the villages and to represent the bishop of the city outside it, an order that was still functioning in Palestine in this period and would be suppressed and forgotten later. And he was archimandrite of the monks, that is, the superior set over all the monastic houses of the diocese of Jerusalem, the office through which the patriarchate governed a monastic population that was rapidly becoming the most formidable body of opinion in the Palestinian Church.
The archimandritate was a real power and would soon be a decisive one: within twenty-five years of Passarion's death the monks of Palestine, under his successors in the office, would determine the province's reception of the Council of Chalcedon (451). Passarion is the first holder of it whom the record names, and the office as Elpidius and Gerontius exercised it after him was substantially his creation.
Euthymius and the consecration of the laura
Passarion's memory is preserved above all by Cyril of Scythopolis, the sixth-century biographer of the desert fathers of Palestine, who names him among the men of authority around the young Euthymius the Great. Euthymius had come from Melitene to Palestine about 405 and had lived first in the laura of Pharan and then in the desert of Cutila; the tradition that Passarion was his teacher, or that Euthymius dwelt for a time in his monastery, reflects the natural relation between a newly arrived monk and the archimandrite of the province.
The one dated meeting is at the end of Passarion's life. In 428, Euthymius's laura east of Jerusalem had grown enough to need a church, and Juvenal, bishop of Jerusalem, came out into the desert to consecrate it. He brought with him the two men whose presence gave the act its weight: Passarion the chorepiscopus and archimandrite, and Hesychius the presbyter, the great biblical commentator of the Jerusalem church. It is the last notice of Passarion and the anchor of his chronology; he died in the same year.
The memory
His monastery on Sion continued after him and is still named in the sixth-century sources; his successor in the archimandritate, Elpidius, is named by Cyril; and his poorhouse is one of the roots of the long Jerusalem tradition of monastic hospitality to the poor and the pilgrim. In the Byzantine calendar he keeps a single line on August 11, and it is a fair measure of how much of the fifth-century Palestinian church has been lost: a man who governed all the monks of the Holy Land survives in the books as "the venerable Passarion, who founded a monastery at Jerusalem, was chorepiscopus of Palestine, and was a companion of Euthymius the Great."
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). He is a synaxarial commemoration without a proper office: the Greek Menaion and the Slavonic books carry the notice, the day's service being that of the afterfeast with the martyr Euplus. The commemoration passes into the Russian and American calendars from the Greek.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By a flood of tears thou didst make the desert fertile, and thy longing for God brought forth fruit a hundredfold; thou wast a shepherd to the monks of the Holy City and a shelter to her poor, O father Passarion; intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Passarion has no distinct iconographic type, and this is itself informative: the calendar knows him as a name and an office, and the painters have followed. Where a menologion rank includes him he is given the formula for a venerable father who is also a bishop — an elderly monk in the dark analavos and mantle, white-bearded, with the omophorion laid over the monastic habit to mark the episcopal order, blessing with the right hand and holding a scroll in the left; the inscription would read Ο ΑΓΙΟΣ ΠΑΣΣΑΡΙΩΝ. In Palestinian and Sinaitic contexts he would stand among the fathers of the Judaean desert — Euthymius, Sabbas, Theodosius, Chariton — and could be distinguished, if a painter wished, by a model of a hospice or church in his hands, the founder's attribute proper to a man remembered for a poorhouse and a monastery.
No pre-1900 image identifiable as Passarion has been located for this collection. The Menologion of Basil II, the standard first resort for the minor saints of the fixed year, covers only September to February and cannot serve an August commemoration.
Disputed questions
- Teacher or contemporary of Euthymius? The synaxarial notice calls him a sunomilētēs, a "converser" or companion, of Euthymius the Great; some later accounts make him Euthymius's teacher, and say that Euthymius lived in his monastery. Cyril of Scythopolis, the only early witness, presents them as contemporaries of unequal standing — the archimandrite of the province and a promising desert monk — and does not make Passarion his master. The stronger reading is companionship and patronage, not discipleship.
- The date of death. 428 is secured by Cyril's account of the consecration of Euthymius's church, at which Passarion was present, and by the notice of his death in the same period; but the exact year of the consecration is itself computed from Cyril's internal chronology and is given by different scholars as 428 or 429.
- August 11 and November 25. The Byzantine synaxaria keep him on August 11. The older Jerusalem calendar, preserved in the Georgian and Armenian lectionaries that transmit the fifth-century usage of the Holy City, commemorated a Passarion in late November. Whether these are two commemorations of the same man — a local day of burial and a later Byzantine entry — or a confusion with another bearer of the name, is not resolved; this collection records the Byzantine date, which is the one kept in the received books.
- The spelling appears as Passarion, Paschasion and Passarionos in the manuscripts and translations; the English lists usually print Passarion.