Philosophus of Alexandria
The Holy Martyr Philosophus, who suffered at Alexandria
Martyr · d. c. 250
Commemorated 31 May — Martyrdom by beheading at Alexandria under Decius
Philosophus was a young Christian of Alexandria who was put to death in the persecution of the emperor Decius (249–251). His passion is remembered for one episode: when torture failed to move him, the magistrates changed their method and attempted to break him by defilement rather than pain, binding him hand and foot upon a soft bed and shutting a prostitute in the room with him. Unable to resist with his hands, he bit off his own tongue and spat it in her face, so that she fled from the room in horror; and his judges, defeated by an act they could not answer, ordered him beheaded. He stands in the synaxarion as the type of the martyr whose chastity, not merely his confession, was the thing on trial.
Alexandria under Decius
The persecution of Decius, begun in the winter of 249–250, was the first empire-wide and systematically administered attempt to compel the whole population to sacrifice. Every subject was required to present himself before a local commission, offer, and receive a certificate (libellus) attesting that he had done so; the machinery pressed on Christians not by hunting them out but by requiring them, like everyone else, to produce the document. Alexandria — where Dionysius was bishop, and whose sufferings in these years Eusebius records at length from Dionysius's own letters — was among the cities where the persecution bit hardest, and where the number both of martyrs and of the lapsed was very great.
Philosophus belongs to this moment. The synaxarion gives him no family, no office and no age beyond the implication of youth carried by what was done to him, and there is no reason to think the notice preserves more than the single memorable scene of his passion.
The trial by torture
Arrested and refusing to sacrifice, he was subjected first to the ordinary tortures of a provincial tribunal, and bore them without yielding. The account is not detailed here; it treats the tortures as the expected and unsuccessful first stage.
The trial by defilement
What the notice does dwell on is the second stage. Finding that pain would not move him, the magistrates attempted the opposite: he was taken from the instruments and laid on a soft bed, his hands and feet bound so that he could neither resist nor flee, and a prostitute was sent in to him. The intention was not simply to shame him but to destroy the ground of his confession — to make him a fornicator, and so to make his martyrdom worthless in his own eyes.
Philosophus, having no other member free, used the one he had: he bit through his own tongue and spat it in the woman's face. She fled. The tribunal, the account says, was so struck by the deed — the word used of the executioners is one of astonishment rather than rage — that they broke off the attempt and beheaded him with the sword, and so he received the crown.
The meaning the tradition draws
The synaxarion's interest in this passion is precise. Where most martyrdoms show the body destroyed by another's hand, this one shows the martyr mutilating himself to keep his chastity, and giving up the very organ of confession to avoid a sin he could not otherwise avoid — a paradox the hagiographers found eloquent: he was silenced, and yet confessed more loudly than speech. The episode places him alongside the virgin-martyrs whose passions turn on an assault upon chastity rather than on faith directly (Potamiaena and Theodora at Alexandria, Justina at Antioch), and it is chiefly for this that his brief notice was kept.
Feast and commemoration
May 31 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 13). Philosophus is kept in the Slavonic and Russian calendars with the Apostle Hermas and the martyr Hermias of Comana; the Greek books of this day give the notice of a martyr Philosophus with companions (there Bovis and Nicholas), whose relation to the Alexandrian martyr is not settled (see Disputed questions). No proper service is appointed, and the office is sung from the common of a martyr.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Philosophus, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Philosophus is shown as a young lay martyr — beardless or with the first growth of a beard, in tunic and mantle, holding the cross of his witness; there is no distinguishing attribute in the ordinary single-figure type, and in menologion ranks he is identified only by the inscription. Where the passion is illustrated, the scene chosen is invariably the one the notice dwells on: the martyr bound upon the bed and the woman recoiling from him — an image the Greek painters' manuals treat with restraint, showing the recoil rather than the mutilation. No pre-1900 icon of him has been identified for this collection; searches of the Wikimedia Commons holdings under his name return nothing, in part because the name in modern collections attaches to the Russian hieromartyr of 1918.
Disputed questions
- Not the Russian hieromartyr of the same name. The Russian calendars keep on this same day the Hieromartyr Philosophus Ornatsky, archpriest of St Petersburg, shot with his two sons in 1918 — a new-martyr of the twentieth century and an entirely different person. The coincidence of a rare name on a single day is not: Ornatsky bore the rare name because Russian baptismal naming drew on the fixed calendar, and it is this martyr's May 31 notice that supplied it — but the two commemorations are distinct and must never be merged.
- The Greek notice of the day. The Greek synaxaristes for May 31 carries a Philosophus styled hieromartyr, with companions Bovis and Nicholas. Whether this is a variant transmission of the Alexandrian martyr — a priestly rank and companions accrued in the tradition — or a separate commemoration of Latin origin that has drifted onto the same day cannot be settled from the notice, and no identification is asserted here.
- Date and place. Only "Alexandria" and "under Decius" are transmitted; c. 250 is the conventional dating and reflects the first and most intense year of that persecution. No relics, tomb or church of this martyr is recorded, and he has no proper office.