Paul the Confessor of Plousias
Our Father among the Saints Paul the Confessor, Bishop of Plousias in Bithynia
Confessor · Bishop · d. c. 850
Commemorated 7 March — Commemoration of the confessor-bishop, 8 March — Kept on this day in part of the Greek tradition
Paul the Confessor (died c. 850) was bishop of Plousias, a city of Bithynia in Asia Minor, and a defender of the holy icons in the second iconoclast persecution of the ninth century. His stand for the images, the tradition notes, was grounded above all in Holy Scripture. For it he was harassed, driven from his see, and — together with the confessor Theophylact, bishop of Nicomedia — sent into exile, where he ended his life as a confessor of the faith, never having yielded the veneration of the icons of Christ and the saints. He is commemorated on March 7.
Bishop of Plousias
Paul held the see of Plousias (also given as Prusias), a town of the province of Bithynia on the north-western edge of Asia Minor, in the first half of the ninth century. Little of his life before the episcopate is recorded; he enters the memory of the Church as one of the confessor-bishops of the second iconoclasm, the renewed campaign against the holy icons that opened under the emperor Leo V the Armenian (813–820) and continued under his successors until the final restoration of the images in 843.
Defender of the icons
When the iconoclasts, in the tradition's phrase, "raged against the Church of Christ," Paul refused to surrender the veneration of the holy images. His defence is remembered as resting on Holy Scripture — the witness of the Old and New Testaments to the making and honouring of sacred images, from the cherubim of the Ark to the Incarnation of the God who, having taken visible flesh, may be depicted. For this steadfastness he was subjected to harassment and persecution, and shared the sufferings of Theophylact of Nicomedia, one of the boldest of the iconodule hierarchs, who had withstood Leo the Armenian to his face and was banished to Strobilos. Paul was likewise sent into exile.
Confession and repose
Paul did not recant. He endured the loss of his see and the hardships of banishment for the sake of the icons, and died in exile — a confessor rather than a martyr in the strict sense, one worn down by his sufferings for the faith without being put to death. His repose is placed about the year 850; the veneration of the images for which he had contended had already been restored, in 843, by the Empress Theodora and the "Triumph of Orthodoxy," so that he died in the vindication of the cause he had confessed.
Feast and commemoration
Paul is commemorated on March 7 (church date; Old Calendar civil March 20), together with the Hieromartyrs of Cherson, Paul the Simple, and Emilian of Rome. The day often falls within Great Lent, and his office — that of a hierarch-confessor — is sung with the Triodion. His fellow-confessor Theophylact of Nicomedia, with whom the tradition joins his exile, is kept on the following day, March 8.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
O God of our Fathers, who dealest ever with us according to thy gentleness, take not thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of thy hierarch Paul guide our life in peace.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Paul is depicted as a bishop in the phelonion and omophorion, holding or blessing over the Gospel-book, in the settled type of the hierarch-confessor; where his confession is emphasised he may hold or point to an icon of Christ or the Theotokos, the sign of his stand for the holy images. No storable public-domain image identified with certainty as this Paul was found at the time of writing; the entry notes a wanted icon.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with Paul the Confessor, Archbishop of Constantinople (†c. 350, kept November 6) — a wholly different saint of the fourth century, the patriarch strangled in exile at Cucusus for opposing Arianism, whom the calendars also style "the Confessor." The two are easily confused by the shared title; this Paul is the ninth-century bishop of a small Bithynian see, a confessor of the icons, not of the Trinity.
- Not to be confused with Paul the Simple, the fourth-century disciple of Anthony the Great, who is commemorated on the same day, March 7, in Slavic usage — a desert monk of Egypt, and no bishop.
- Name of the see. "Plousias" and "Prusias" are variant forms of the name of the Bithynian town (Prusias ad Hypium); the entry follows the Greek "Plousias" of the synaxarion notice.