Patrick of Prusa
The Holy Hieromartyr Patrick, Bishop of Prusa, and with him the Priests Acacius, Menander and Polyaenus
Hieromartyr · Bishop · Priest · Martyr · d. c. 100
Commemorated 19 May — Martyrdom at the hot springs of Prusa
Patrick, bishop of Prusa in Bithynia, was put to death with three of his priests — Acacius, Menander and Polyaenus — at the famous hot springs of that city, in the early persecutions; the received notices place him in the first century, about the year 100. What has made his passion memorable is not the manner of his death but the argument that preceded it: brought to the springs and ordered to sacrifice to the gods who were thought to warm them, Patrick answered the governor Julius with a discourse on divine providence — that the one Creator made both the fire beneath the earth and the healing waters above it, the one prepared for the punishment of the impenitent and the other given freely for the good of all men. He was thrown into the boiling water and came out unharmed; and when that failed, he and the three priests were beheaded and so received their crowns together.
Prusa and its waters
Prusa (Προῦσα, the modern Bursa) lay at the foot of the Bithynian Olympus, and its fame in antiquity rested on the thermal springs that break out on the mountain's flank. The waters were a resort of the sick from the whole province, and the ancients accounted for their heat as they accounted for anything wonderful — by attributing them to the gods, so that the baths carried a cult of Asclepius and of the local healing divinities, and to bathe there had a religious as well as a medical character. This is the setting of the passion, and it is the reason the passion turns on the question it does. A bishop who preached that the springs were the work of the Creator and not of the demons was attacking the city's most profitable devotion.
Of Patrick himself the sources transmit no origins, no family and no dates other than the day of his death. He is presented simply as bishop of Prusa, preaching Christ openly and refuting the error of the pagans, until he was arrested together with three of his presbyters, Acacius, Menander and Polyaenus. The four are venerated as one company; the priests have no independent cultus and no separate notices, and the calendars name them only as "those with him."
The dialogue with Julius on providence
The governor — the notices call him Julius, and some manuscripts Junius — had the prisoners brought up to the hot springs themselves and ordered them to offer sacrifice there, no doubt judging that at the place of the cure the argument would be strongest. The answer that the passion preserves is the substance of the whole account, and it is a piece of reasoning rather than a defiance:
Patrick confessed himself a Christian and a worshipper of the one true God, Jesus Christ, who made heaven and earth and these warm waters also, for the benefit of mankind. To the objection that the gods of the place had given the springs, he replied by asking where their heat came from: from fire beneath the earth. And that fire, he said, God had prepared for another purpose — for the chastisement of the unrepentant after judgement, so that its existence is the standing proof of the two-fold providence by which God governs the world. Out of the same subterranean fire he draws up water that heals the bodies of men, believer and unbeliever alike; the punishment is not the whole of the story, and the mercy is not the whole of it either. What men call the gift of Asclepius is the overflow of a mercy they have not recognised, poured out of the very furnace kept for the impious.
The argument is remarkable for its date, and it belongs to a recognisable early Christian tradition of reasoning from natural phenomena to a single provident Creator, against a paganism which had a separate divinity for every spring and every hill.
Martyrdom
Julius, unable to answer him and enraged at being made a schoolboy before his own tribunal, ordered Patrick to be thrown into the boiling spring. The account relates that the bishop prayed as he was cast in and came out unhurt — the water, which was death to any other man, doing him no harm. It is the one miracle the passion records, and it is placed where it is in order to make the point of the dialogue: the God who governs the fire can also govern its heat.
The governor then fell back on the sword. Patrick and the three priests were led out and beheaded, and the Greek verses of the synaxarion remember precisely that: "Patrick, cut down, found a glory beyond all the glory of the patricians of earth; on the nineteenth the sharp sword cut Patrick down." The play on his name — patrikios, the Roman rank of "patrician" — is the point of the couplet: the title he inherited was the title of a Roman honour, and the honour he gained by the axe outweighed it.
Feast and commemoration
May 19 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 1), the day of the beheading, is the feast in every Byzantine calendar: the Greek Menaion heads the day with this company, the Slavonic books keep the four together, and the OCA lists them as "Hieromartyr Patrick, Bishop of Prusa, and his companions." Since the day always falls within the Pentecostarion, the Paschal or post-Ascension hymns of the season govern the service and the martyrs are sung with the ordinary commemoration of a hieromartyr. The Menaion supplies the verses quoted above, an apolytikion in Tone 4, and a kontakion in Tone 8 to the melody "As the first-fruits of nature." At Bursa the springs are still in use, and the memory of the bishop who was thrown into them survives locally in the naming of the baths.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, O divinely-inspired one, thou didst find in contemplation the means to ascend to divine heights; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst struggle for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Patrick: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 8 (common of the martyrs)
Thou wast shown to be a shepherd of the flock of Christ and a martyr of unbending mind, O Patrick; the boiling water thou didst tread as it were a meadow, and the sword thou didst receive as a crown; wherefore with Acacius, Menander and Polyaenus thou dost stand before the throne, praying for those who honour thee.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Patrick is painted as a bishop and a martyr together: middle-aged or elderly, bearded, in phelonion and omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel-book, and where the martyr is stressed he carries the cross instead. The three priests stand at his side in the phelonion of presbyters, without the omophorion, and are commonly shown as a group of three of similar age, undifferentiated. The proper scene of the passion is the boiling spring — a stone basin or a walled bath with steam or flames beneath it, the bishop standing in the water unharmed while soldiers and the seated governor look on — and it is this bath, rather than the beheading, that identifies the company in menologion cycles. No pre-1900 image of Patrick of Prusa has been located for this collection: Wikimedia Commons searches under the Greek and English forms of the name return nothing, and the Menologion of Basil II — the usual first resort for minor saints of the fixed year — covers only September to February and so cannot supply a May commemoration.
Disputed questions
- The date. The received notices, followed by the OCA and the Greek synaxaria, place Patrick "in the first century," about the year 100. The difficulty is that a settled episcopate at Prusa so early, with three presbyters under the bishop and a governor holding formal assizes over Christians, reads like the conditions of a later persecution; and the passion's literary shape — an extended set-piece dialogue on providence before a provincial governor — is characteristic of the acts composed in and after the third century. Some hagiographers have therefore placed the company under Diocletian or in the persecutions of the third century. The corpus keeps the traditional dating, which is what the liturgical books give, while recording that it is not secure.
- The governor's name. Julius in the common notices; Junius in some manuscripts; no such governor of Bithynia is otherwise attested, and the name may be a hagiographic convention.
- Not to be confused with Patrick of Ireland (March 17), the enlightener of the Irish, with whom he shares nothing but the Latin name — the coincidence is worth noting because the Greek Patrikios and the Latin Patricius are the same word, and Western calendars occasionally cross-refer the two entries in error.
- Prusa's other holy bishop, the confessor Theosteriktos — see Theosteriktos the Confessor — belongs to the iconoclast period, seven centuries later, and the two are not to be conflated as though one see could hold only one saint.