Prokopius of Decapolis

The Decapolis and the ascetic life

Prokopius takes his surname from the Decapolis — the "Ten Cities," the Hellenised region straddling the country east of the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan, extending into southern Syria — the same district that gives its name, a century later, to the more famous Gregory the Decapolite, with whom he is not to be confused. Of Prokopius's origins and early years the record preserves almost nothing; the tradition knows him simply as a monk who from his youth gave himself to the monastic struggle — to prayer, fasting, vigil, and the labour of the virtues — and who, in the settled ascetic discipline of the Christian East, made himself a vessel of the Spirit. The hymnography of his feast dwells on this hidden foundation: it praises the "streams of his tears" and his sighing "from the depths," the interior labour by which, long before his public confession, he had already become a martyr in will.

The iconoclast persecution under Leo the Isaurian

The event that lifted Prokopius from the anonymity of the desert into the calendar of the Church was the outbreak of iconoclasm. In the years around 726–730 the emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717–741), having repelled the Arab siege of Constantinople and consolidated his rule, set himself against the Church's immemorial veneration of the holy images. He ordered the icon of Christ over the Bronze Gate (the Chalke) of the imperial palace taken down, promulgated edicts against the icons, and deposed the Patriarch Germanus when he refused to comply; the same policy loosed persecution upon the monks, who were the icons' most tenacious defenders. Against this the Church raised the great theological answer of the age — most fully in the treatises On the Divine Images of John of Damascus, who wrote from the security of the Caliphate what the Christians under Roman rule could not safely say: that the icon is not an idol but a witness to the reality of the Incarnation, and that "the honour given to the image passes to the prototype."

Prokopius belonged to those who would not yield. Living within the reach of the imperial writ, he confessed openly that the icons of Christ, his Mother, and the saints were rightly to be venerated, and refused to surrender the practice or to keep silence. The synaxarion joins to him a companion in the same confession, Basil — the two are remembered together, the elder and his fellow-ascetic, sharing one imprisonment and one witness. Their stand was not a matter of speculation but of loyalty: they held to what the Church had always done, and paid for it.

Confession, imprisonment, and torture

For their refusal Prokopius and Basil were arrested by the iconoclast authorities, cast into prison, and subjected to the punishments the persecution reserved for the obdurate — beatings and scourgings, the tearing of the flesh, the long affliction of close confinement. The accounts are spare in detail, as they are for most of the confessors of this first iconoclast wave whose sufferings were not gathered into a formal martyrdom-act; but the tradition is firm that Prokopius endured torment for the icons and did not deny them, and that his body bore the marks of it. He was not put to death. The persecution, for all its severity, did not everywhere reach the shedding of blood, and Prokopius was among those whom God preserved through the fire rather than in it — the pattern of the confessor, whose crown is won by suffering borne to the end without apostasy.

Release and repose

Leo the Isaurian died in 741, and though his son Constantine V would renew the persecution with still greater ferocity, the death of the first iconoclast emperor brought a measure of relief to those he had imprisoned. Prokopius was set free, and — his confession sealed and his health spent — returned to the monastic quiet from which he had been taken, spending his remaining years in the same ascetic labour, now honoured by the faithful as one who had suffered for Christ. He reposed in peace about the year 750, an old man and a confessor. His companion Basil survived him, and is commemorated on the following day, February 28.

Veneration

Prokopius entered the Byzantine calendars as one of the confessors of the icons, his memory fixed on February 27 and bound to that of Basil on February 28 — the two names standing near the head of the roll of those who, in the words of the Synodikon of Orthodoxy read on the First Sunday of Great Lent, "contended for the icons" and are proclaimed with "Eternal memory." The Menologion of Basil II (c. 985) already gives the pair a miniature and a synaxarion notice, showing that their joint cultus was established at Constantinople within two centuries of their repose. He is a saint of the whole Byzantine world — kept by the Greek, Antiochian, and Slavic calendars alike — venerated not for a great body of writing or a famous monastery, but for the plain and costly thing the Church most needed in his age: fidelity to the holy images under an emperor who commanded their destruction.