Phosterius the Hermit
Our Venerable Father Phosterius the Hermit
Venerable · d. iconoclast era (8th–9th century)
Commemorated 5 January — Commemoration of the mountain hermit — kept on the Eve of the Theophany
Phosterius (whose Greek name means "luminary" or "light-bearer") was an ascetic of the age of the Iconoclast controversy, remembered in the synaxarion for a life of great austerity on a high mountain, where — the tradition says — he was fed by an angel. Through his holiness and the miracles God worked by him he drew many away from the Iconoclast heresy and back to the Orthodox veneration of the holy icons. Little more of his life is recorded; he is commemorated on January 5, the Eve of the Theophany.
The record of Phosterius is a synaxarion notice, not a biography, and it is honoured as such. He is placed in the era of Iconoclasm — the long eighth-and-ninth-century struggle over the holy images — and set on the side of Orthodoxy against the imperial heresy. He lived, the notice says, as a solitary on a lofty mountain, in extreme asceticism and withdrawal from men, and was sustained by an angel who brought him food, a mark of the desert tradition's holiest anchorites (as of Onuphrius, Mark of Thrace, and others fed by heaven). The gift of wonderworking accompanied his sanctity, and by his miracles and his word he converted many from the Iconoclast error to the true faith and the honour of the icons — the one deed for which the tradition specifically remembers him. Neither his birthplace, nor the mountain, nor the year of his repose is transmitted; he is a saint known to the Church by his holiness and his defence of the images rather than by a documented life.
Feast and commemoration
Phosterius is commemorated on January 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil January 18), the Eve of the Theophany, his memory kept with the Forefeast within the strict-fast vigil. His association with the defence of the icons places him among the confessors of Orthodoxy of the iconoclast age, though the calendars style him simply "venerable."
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
By the streams of thy tears thou didst cultivate the barrenness of the desert, and by thy groanings from the depths thou didst bear fruit a hundredfold in labours, and becamest a **luminary** shining upon the world by thy miracles, O our venerable Father Phosterius. Intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Phosterius is depicted in the type of the desert hermit — an aged, long-bearded ascetic in a monastic or rough garment, sometimes with the angel who fed him. No storable image identified to him has been found.