Philonides of Kourion
The Holy Hieromartyr Philonides, Bishop of Kourion in Cyprus
Hieromartyr · Bishop · b. c. 250 — d. c. 306
Commemorated 17 June — Martyrdom at Kourion in the persecution of Diocletian, 30 August — Cypriot commemoration
The first bishop of Kourion whose name is preserved — the Cypriot city on the cliff above the southern sea whose great sanctuary of Apollo Hylates made it one of the strongholds of the old religion on the island. Philonides was taken in the persecution of Diocletian, about the year 306, with a presbyter, a deacon and a reader of his church, who were put to death before his eyes. When his captors threatened, if he would not sacrifice, to hand him over to be sexually violated, the aged bishop got out to the edge of the cliff, prayed, signed himself three times with the cross, and cast himself down, choosing death over defilement. He is commemorated on June 17 and, in Cyprus, again on August 30.
Bishop of Kourion
Philonides was a Cypriot, born about the middle of the third century, and became bishop of Kourion (Curium) — the ancient city on the headland west of Amathus, above the bay, whose territory contained the celebrated sanctuary of Apollo Hylates, "Apollo of the woodland." The detail matters for what follows: Kourion was not a place where Christianity had displaced the old worship quietly. Its temple was a working, wealthy, well-attended cult centre with an established priesthood, and its bishop stood against it in the open.
Nothing of his episcopate survives beyond the fact of it. He is the earliest bishop of Kourion known by name, and the see is one of the ancient Cypriot foundations that traced itself to the apostolic mission of Barnabas and Mark to the island.
The persecution, and his clergy
In the persecution of Diocletian — on the island, as elsewhere, at its fiercest in the years 303 to 311 — the bishop was arrested. With him, the Cypriot tradition says, were taken three of his clergy: the presbyter Aristocles, the deacon Demetrian and the reader Athanasius. The three were killed; the bishop was kept.
(These three are commemorated in their own right, at Aristocles, Demetrian and Athanasius, on June 20 and June 23, where the passion is set at Salamis and the death is by beheading. The two traditions are not reconciled in the sources, and the corpus does not reconcile them here: the Cypriot tradition binds the four together in one arrest, and the transmitted passion of the three gives them their own place and manner of death. Both are recorded.)
The threat, and the cliff
Philonides was pressed to sacrifice, and refused. His captors then made the threat that the passion records without euphemism: if he would not offer to the gods, he would be handed over to be violated. It is a threat aimed at the one thing the torturers judged an old bishop would not be able to bear, and the point of it was not lust but the annihilation of a man's standing before his own church.
The account says he asked to be left a moment, made his way out — through a passage, or a low opening in the building where he was held — to the cliff at the edge of the city, knelt, prayed, made the sign of the cross three times, and threw himself over. The passion adds the phrase in which the whole reading of the act is contained: before his body reached the ground, his soul had gone up.
The Christians of Kourion took up the body. The tradition preserves an apparition following the martyrdom: he was seen by travellers, running, unclothed and fragrant with myrrh, crowned and carrying a palm — the two emblems by which the Church declares a death to have been a victory and not a defeat.
Feast and commemoration
June 17 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 30), with a second, Cypriot commemoration on August 30 (Old Calendar civil September 12). He is kept especially in the Church of Cyprus, among the island's own hierarch-martyrs, and appears in the Greek and Slavonic day-lists for June 17 alongside Manuel, Sabel and Ismael and Hypatius of Rufinianae. The feast falls within the window of the Apostles' Fast in most years, though not in all — the fast has no fixed beginning.
Hymns
Troparion — 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 Philonides: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Philonides is painted in the hierarch type: an elderly bishop, white-bearded, in phelonion and omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel in the left, and — as a martyr — sometimes bearing the cross instead. In Cypriot painting he belongs to the rank of the island's own hierarchs, beside Barnabas, Epiphanius of Salamis, Tychon of Amathus and Spyridon of Trimythous, and is identified by the inscription rather than by any attribute of his own. Where his passion is illustrated the scene is the fall from the cliff, the bishop shown mid-air above the sea with his hands still joined in prayer, the city and its temple behind.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Self-inflicted death and the Church's judgement. The manner of Philonides's death — a martyr who dies by his own act, to escape defilement — is the hardest thing in his passion, and the Church has never treated it as a licence. The tradition places him with a small group of saints, mostly virgins and mostly women, of whom the same is told: Pelagia of Antioch, who threw herself from a roof, and Domnina and her daughters, who went into the river. The Fathers who discuss these cases — Ambrose, Eusebius, and after them Augustine, who argues the point at length and with visible unease — treat them as exceptions permitted by the Spirit and not to be imitated, not as a general rule that chastity may be preserved by suicide. The corpus records the difficulty in place rather than passing over it. What the synaxarion asserts is that the persecutors, and not the bishop, killed him.
- The date and the two feasts. June 17 is the general commemoration, kept in the Greek and Slavonic lists; August 30 is a Cypriot commemoration of the same saint. A death in or about 306 is what the frame of the Diocletianic persecution on Cyprus supports; no source gives an exact year.
- Attestation. Philonides is not in the printed Greek Menaion service for June 17, which is the office of Isaurus and his companions. He is carried by the synaxaria, by the Cypriot books and by the day-lists, and his cultus at Kourion is local and ancient; the corpus notes that his June 17 place rests on the synaxarion and not on a proper office.