Psoy of Egypt
Our Venerable Father Psoes of Egypt
Venerable · d. 4th–5th century
Commemorated 9 August — Repose in peace at prayer
Psoy — in Greek Ψόης, Psoes, a Coptic name borne by many monks of the Egyptian desert — is commemorated by the Byzantine books on August 9 as a venerable father of Egypt who reposed in peace while at prayer. That, with a couplet praising the scourge of his prayers against the demons, is the whole of what the Greek synaxarion transmits. The modern Slavic and American synaxaria fill out the notice from the Coptic tradition, making him a disciple of Pachomius the Great who settled in Scetis near the cell of Macarius, gathered disciples, founded a monastery of his own, and twice received Christ in the form of a stranger. That fuller life belongs, on the face of it, to the Coptic Anba Bishoy — whom this collection already carries as Paisius the Great (June 19) — and the relation between the two notices is an open question set out below.
The notice of the synaxarion
The entry in the Synaxarion of Constantinople for August 9 is of the shortest kind: the name, the designation hosios, and the statement that he was perfected in peace, giving up his spirit in the act of prayer. The Menaion's couplet turns on a play the Greek allows and English does not — the scourges (μάστιγες) of his prayers striking the loins (ψόας) of the demons, the pun binding the saint's name to the blow he deals the enemy. From this alone one may say only that he was an Egyptian monk of the great age of the desert, that he was remembered for the power of his prayer against unclean spirits, and that he did not die a martyr's death.
The Pachomian and Scetiote traditions
The name Psoi / Psoes is common in the Egyptian monastic dossiers, and more than one man bearing it is remembered: monks of the Pachomian koinonia in the Thebaid, whose houses lay along the upper Nile at Tabennisi, Pbow and Tsmine, and ascetics of Scetis in the Wadi al-Natrun far to the north. The modern synaxaria which describe the August 9 Psoy make him a disciple of Pachomius the Great and then place him in Scetis — a combination that joins two different monastic worlds, several hundred miles and two distinct traditions apart, and which is itself a sign that more than one figure has been drawn into the notice.
The fuller life given by these synaxaria runs as follows: born in the village of Shansa in Lower Egypt early in the fourth century, orphaned of his father and raised by a devout mother to whom an angel foretold that the child was chosen; a monk under Pachomius; then a solitary near the cave of Abba John, who sent him into the Nitrian desert, where he settled some fifteen kilometres from the cell of Macarius the Great; disciples gathering to him until the place became a monastery, whereupon he withdrew further to found another that bore his name; two visions of Christ, once in the person of a wayfarer whose feet he washed and in whose feet he saw the print of the nails, and once in a cripple whom he carried on his own shoulders up the mountain to a gathering of the fathers — from which he drew the saying that Christ is not to be sought on the mountain but in one's neighbour; and repose in the year 417, at prayer, with the body afterwards preserved incorrupt in the church of the Monastery of the Syrians (Deir al-Surian) in the Wadi al-Natrun.
Every distinctive element of that account — the village of Shansa, the angelic annunciation to the mother, the washing of the traveller's feet, the carrying of the cripple, the year 417, the incorrupt body in the Wadi al-Natrun — belongs in the Coptic books to Anba Bishoy, whose own monastery stands beside Deir al-Surian and whose feast the Coptic Church keeps on 8 Epip. This repository therefore keeps the Greek notice and the Coptic life distinct, and does not repeat the latter as though it were the transmitted record of the August 9 commemoration.
Repose
The one fact the Byzantine tradition asserts is the manner of his end: he died in peace, in prayer — the death the desert fathers prized above every other, and the reason the couplet can speak of his prayers striking the demons "even at the end of life."
Feast and commemoration
August 9 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 22), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition Fast. The day's office belongs to the Apostle Matthias; Psoy is commemorated by his synaxarion notice and couplet, without proper hymns. He is kept in the Greek and Slavic calendars and by the Orthodox Church in America; the Coptic Church commemorates Anba Bishoy on 8 Epip (July 15 by the Julian reckoning).
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was preserved unfailing that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care rather for the soul, a thing immortal: wherefore, O venerable Psoy, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Iconography
There is no Byzantine portrait type proper to the August 9 Psoy: where he is painted at all he takes the general form of a desert father — an elder in the dark monastic rason and koukoulion, white-bearded, holding a scroll or with hands raised in prayer. In the Coptic tradition, by contrast, the saint of this name is among the most recognisable of all: Anba Bishoy is shown erect and frontal, in the Coptic monastic habit with the crossed analavos, carrying the Saviour upon his shoulders — the visual form of the story of the crippled stranger — and frequently paired with St Paul of Tammah. Modern Coptic icons of that type are the work of living iconographers and are not storable here.
No pre-1900 image identifiable as the August 9 Psoes has been located for this collection, and the Coptic images of Anba Bishoy would prejudge the identity question set out above. The Menologion of Basil II covers only September to February and offers nothing for this day.
Disputed questions
- Is Psoy of August 9 the same as Anba Bishoy? The Coptic Pishoi / Bishoy and the Greek Ψόης are, phonetically, forms of the same Coptic name; and the life the modern synaxaria attach to August 9 is Bishoy's. But the Byzantine calendar already keeps Bishoy, under the Greek form of his name, as Paisius the Great on June 19 — with a full life, a proper commemoration, and the same repose in about 417. A single saint kept twice in the same calendar under two forms of one name is possible and not unheard-of; so is the alternative, that the August 9 Ψόης is a distinct Egyptian ascetic of whom nothing survives but a line, and that the Coptic material has been drawn onto his name by later compilers on the strength of the resemblance. The Greek books themselves give no life to the August 9 saint at all, which is the strongest evidence that they did not think him the same man as the one they had already commemorated in June. This repository keeps both entries, cross-referenced, and does not merge them; the case is flagged for review.
- Pachomius or Scetis? The two settings the modern notice combines are incompatible as they stand. Pachomian monasticism was coenobitic and Upper Egyptian; Scetis was semi-eremitic and in the north-western delta desert. A monk could move between them, and some did, but the notice reads as a fusion of two traditions rather than as a biography.
- The date. The Greek synaxarion transmits no date whatever. The fourth-to-fifth-century placing, and the year 417, come from the Coptic tradition of Bishoy; they are recorded here as the received dating and not as an independent attestation.
- Not to be confused with the several martyrs named Psoes / Psotes in the Coptic martyrologies of the Diocletianic persecution, nor with Paul of Tammah, Bishoy's companion in the Coptic sources.