Pausikakos of Synnada
Our Father among the Saints Pausikakos the Physician, Bishop of Synnada
Bishop · Venerable · Unmercenary · d. 606
Commemorated 13 May — Repose of the physician-bishop of Synnada
Pausikakos — whose name means "he who makes evil to cease" — was a physician who became a monk, went about the cities of Asia Minor healing the sick without payment while preaching the Gospel, and was ordained Bishop of Synnada in Phrygia by the Patriarch Cyriacus of Constantinople (595–606). The Church remembers him for the double gift of healing "sicknesses of soul and of body": he was a strict shepherd of his flock, is said to have healed the emperor Maurice on a visit to the capital, and to have brought water out of the ground by prayer for his thirsting companions on the road. He reposed in peace in the year 606, and is counted among the unmercenary healers of the Church.
Apamea and the physician's art
Pausikakos was born of noble and devout parents and brought up by them in the faith, in the years of the emperor Maurice (582–602) or a little before. The Greek synaxaristes places his birth at Apamea of Bithynia; the Slavic tradition, followed by the Orthodox Church in America, makes it the Syrian Apamea on the Orontes — a discrepancy noted below. He trained and practised as a physician (ἰατρός), and this is the first thing the calendars say about him: he was a doctor before he was anything else, and he never stopped being one.
From youth he was drawn to the monastic life, and took it up, giving himself to prayer, vigil and fasting. But his asceticism did not enclose him. He travelled from city to city, and in each of them did two things at once: he healed the sick free of charge — δωρεάν, the mark of the anargyroi, the unmercenaries — and preached the word of God to those he healed. The sources are careful to join the two: "the Lord gave him the gift of healing sicknesses both of soul and of body," and the bodily healing was the door by which he entered to heal the soul. That combination, more than any single miracle, is what the Church commemorates in him.
Bishop of Synnada
His reputation reached Constantinople. The Patriarch Cyriacus (595–606), having weighed what the sources call his God-pleasing labour, ordained him Bishop of Synnada, the metropolis of Phrygia Salutaris — a see of standing, whose bishops sat in the councils of the Church. In it Pausikakos proved a demanding pastor. He held his people to a strict rule of Christian life, would not indulge the compromises with paganism and with public amusement that the age tolerated, and used against sin the same directness he had used against disease.
Two miracles are transmitted from his episcopate. Going up to Constantinople, he found the emperor Maurice ill, and healed him — an episode which, if the traditional dating is kept, belongs to the last years of that reign. And travelling with his companions through a dry country where they could find no water, he prayed and water sprang from the ground, a miracle told of many holy travellers and told of him with the particular fitness of a physician who could not otherwise relieve his own people's thirst.
Repose
He reposed in peace in the year 606 — the same year in which Patriarch Cyriacus, who had consecrated him, died. He was not a martyr and suffered no persecution; the Church honours him as a hierarch and a healer, and his feast has kept its place in the synaxaria of both East and West ever since.
Feast and commemoration
May 13 (church date; New Calendar civil May 13, Old Calendar civil May 26). Pausikakos is a universal commemoration of the day, listed in the Greek, Antiochian and Slavic calendars after Glyceria; he has no proper service in the received Menaion, and the common of a hierarch is sung with his name. Because the date of Pascha moves, May 13 may fall in the Paschal season or after Pentecost, and no fixed seasonal note belongs to the day. He is properly invoked with the unmercenary physicians, and the Greek collections list him among the "wonderworking holy physicians" of the calendar.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
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 Pausikakos, guide our life in peace.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou didst heal the bodies of the poor without silver, and their souls with the word of God, O Pausikakos, physician and shepherd; wherefore, having made evil to cease according to thy name, thou dost pour out healing upon all who honour thee.
Iconography
Pausikakos is painted as a hierarch and not as a physician: an elderly bishop, white-bearded, in the phelonion and the crossed omophorion, blessing with his right hand and holding the jewelled Gospel in his left, as the hierarchs of Asia Minor are shown in the menologia. Where the painter wishes to mark the unmercenary healer, the Gospel is replaced by the physician's box of ointments and the surgical spoon carried by Cosmas and Damian and by Panteleimon — the attribute of the anargyroi — so that he appears in bishop's vesture with a healer's casket, an unusual and instantly legible combination. Narrative scenes are rare; where they occur they show him at the bedside of the emperor Maurice, or striking water from the dry ground for his companions. His feast falls in May, so the Menologion of Basil II (September–February) contains nothing for him, and a search of openly licensed repositories for a pre-1900 image of this saint returned no results; none is stored here.
Disputed questions
- Which Apamea? The Greek Great Synaxaristes says Pausikakos came from Apamea of Bithynia, in north-western Asia Minor — the natural reading, since Synnada and Bithynia lie in the same world and the young monk's travels would have been within Asia Minor. The OCA and the Slavic lives say the Syrian city of Apamea on the Orontes, in the patriarchate of Antioch. The two cities are both called Apamea and are frequently exchanged in hagiographic transmission. The disagreement is recorded and not resolved here; from an Antiochian point of view the Syrian identification is the more interesting claim, and precisely for that reason it should not be adopted without evidence beyond the Slavic calendars.
- The century of repose. His death in 606 falls in the seventh century by strict reckoning, though his life and his whole formation belong to the sixth, and the calendars routinely describe him as a saint of the late sixth century. He is indexed here by the year of his repose.
- The healing of Maurice. Maurice was deposed and killed in 602; a healing of the emperor by Pausikakos must therefore fall before that year, and so before or very early in the episcopate given him by Cyriacus (595–606). Some notices place the healing during his episcopate, which is possible only for the years 595–602. The chronology is tight but not impossible, and no source resolves it.
- The name. Παυσίκακος is a compound — pauō (to make cease) and kakon (evil) — and reads as a descriptive name rather than a family one; it may well have been given him, or taken by him, for the healing ministry itself. English calendars render it Pausicacus and Pausicacius.