Photius the Monk

Our Venerable Father Photius, who reposed in peace

Venerable

Commemorated 6 June — Commemoration of the venerable Photius, who reposed in peace

Photius — printed in the Greek books also as Φώτας, Photas — is a venerable monastic commemorated on June 6, of whom the service-books preserve, quite literally, one line: ὁ Ὅσιος Φώτας ἀπεβίωσεν εἰρηνικῶς, "the venerable Photas reposed in peace." Beyond that sentence and the commemorative distich which plays on his name — phōs, light, and its illumination — nothing is transmitted: no country, no century, no monastery, no act. He is entered here because his commemoration is genuine and consistently printed for the day, and because the honest record of such a saint is a line and not a page.

What is transmitted

The whole of the surviving record is the synaxarion formula ἀπεβίωσεν εἰρηνικῶς, "he reposed in peace" — the standard notation by which the Byzantine calendars mark a saint who was not a martyr and about whom the compiler had nothing further. It tells us two things and no more: that Photius was not martyred, and that he was received into the calendar as an ascetic (ὅσιος, the title reserved for monastics and the righteous, not for hierarchs or martyrs).

Accompanying it is the day's distich for him, a two-line iambic couplet of the kind composed for every entry in the versified synaxaria, which turns on the meaning of his name: Φώτιος, from φῶς, light — the saint who bore the name of light and was enlightened, or who passed into the light. The distich is a poet's gloss on a name, not a report of a life, and cannot be made to yield biography.

Why so little

This is not an accident of preservation peculiar to Photius. The Byzantine synaxaria carry several hundred commemorations of exactly this kind: a name, a category, a formula of repose. Some are saints whose Lives were lost between the sixth century and the tenth; some are local saints whose memory travelled to Constantinople with a name and nothing else; some are duplications, the same person entered twice under variant forms of a name and then furnished with the neutral formula on the second entry. Which of these Photius is cannot be determined from the evidence, and the Greek synaxarists themselves add nothing.

Feast and commemoration

June 6 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 19). Photius is commemorated in the Greek synaxaria for the day, ordinarily named immediately after Attalus the Wonderworker and in the same breath with him, among the venerable fathers of a day headed by Hilarion the New of Dalmatia and Bessarion the Wonderworker. He has no office, no canon and no proper hymn; the commemoration is made in the reading of the synaxarion at Matins, and the common of a venerable father supplies whatever is sung. He is not in the Slavonic calendars for the day.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)

By the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren desert to bear fruit, and by thy sighings from the depths thou didst bring thy labours to hundredfold increase; and thou wast made a beacon to the world, shining with miracles, O Photius our father: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Iconography

There is no iconography of Photius the monk. No image of him has been identified, and none is to be expected: a saint without a Life, without attributes and without a local shrine gives a painter nothing to work from, and even in the painted menologia for June his name is more likely to be written over a generic monastic figure than to have generated a portrait of its own. Where he must be represented, the type is the plain formula for a venerable father — an aged monk in mantle and analavos, bare-headed, with a scroll — distinguished only by the inscription Ο ΑΓΙΟΣ ΦΩΤΙΟΣ. Care is needed that such a figure not be taken for the Patriarch Photius, who is painted as a hierarch in omophorion and is a different saint entirely.

Disputed questions

Photius or Photas. The Greek books print both Φώτιος and Φώτας; the second is the popular or dialectal form of the same name and the two entries are one. English calendars give "Photius, monk."
"Photius and Cyril." A number of modern lists and some derivative calendars print the June 6 commemoration as "Photius and Cyril." No Cyril appears with Photius in the Greek synaxaria for the day, nor in the Greek Menaion, nor in the Slavonic calendars, nor in the standard modern Greek lists of the day, all of which give Photius alone (and usually in the same clause as Attalus the Wonderworker: "Attalus the wonderworker, and Photius"). The pairing appears to be a conflation, most likely of the clause "Attalus and Photius" with one of the numerous Cyrils of the calendar; it is not followed here, and the coordinator is asked to treat "Cyril of June 6" as unattested until a primary witness is produced.
Not to be confused with Photius the Great, Patriarch of Constantinople (†891, kept February 6), the great confessor and scholar — by far the most likely confusion, since both bear the name and the two feasts fall on the sixth of a month. This Photius is a monastic of unknown date and no writings, kept in June; the Patriarch is a hierarch, kept in February. He is likewise distinct from Photina the Samaritan Woman (a different name, Φωτεινή), from Photius the Martyr commemorated with Aniketos (August 12), and from the later Russian hierarchs named Photius — chief among them Photius, Metropolitan of Kiev, Moscow and All Rus' (†1431, kept July 2).
Century. None is transmitted, and none is inferred; he is indexed among the saints whose era the sources do not fix.