Sergius and Stephen
Our Venerable Fathers Sergius and Stephen, who reposed in peace
Venerable
Commemorated 12 August — Commemoration of the venerable Sergius and Stephen, who reposed in peace
Sergius and Stephen are two monastic fathers commemorated together in the Greek synaxaria on August 12, of whom the record preserves two names and one verb: they reposed in peace. No country, no monastery, no century, no relationship and no act is transmitted. They belong to the substantial class of paired ascetic commemorations that the Constantinopolitan synaxarion carries without lives, and this entry states what is known and declines to supply what is not.
What is transmitted
The notice reads, in the standard form: the venerable Sergius and Stephen are perfected in peace — ἐν εἰρήνῃ τελειοῦνται, the formula reserved in the synaxaria for ascetics who died a natural death, as against the martyrs of the same day who are "perfected by the sword." A commemorative distich follows, composed for the calendar and containing no information beyond a play on the names.
Two things only can be said with confidence, and both follow from the form of the entry rather than from any independent source. First, they were monastics: ὅσιοι is the technical term, and the calendars do not use it loosely. Second, they are transmitted as a pair, which in this literature ordinarily means that they were kept together in one place — two fathers of a single house, or two founders, or an elder and his disciple, whose memorial was made on one day. Which of these they were is not recoverable.
The names
Sergius (Σέργιος) is a Roman gentilicial name naturalised in the Greek East, borne in the calendar most famously by the soldier-martyr of Rusafa and, much later, by Sergius of Radonezh. Stephen (Στέφανος), "crown," is among the commonest of Christian names from the first century onward. Neither combination nor either element points anywhere in particular. Attempts in modern lists to attach these two to a known monastery — usually a Constantinopolitan or Bithynian house — rest on nothing in the manuscript tradition.
Why so little survives
The Synaxarion of Constantinople was assembled as a practical directory of the liturgical year of the capital, and a large minority of its entries are of this kind: a name or a pair of names against a day, sometimes with a shrine, usually without. Behind such an entry there normally stood a real local memorial that the compiler could still observe but whose written life, if there ever was one, had already been lost. The Church's practice has been to keep the names, and the fathers with them, rather than to prune the calendar down to those whose biographies happen to have survived — a discipline this collection follows.
Feast and commemoration
August 12 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 25), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and the Dormition Fast. They stand last among the Greek synaxarion's entries for the day and are commemorated at the synaxarion reading at Orthros, without proper hymns; the office of the day belongs to Anicetus and Photius.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of venerable fathers)
O God of our fathers, who dealest with us ever according to Thy gentleness: take not Thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of Thy venerable ones Sergius and Stephen direct our lives in peace.
Iconography
Two monastic fathers of whom nothing is transmitted are painted by the type and distinguished only by the inscription: both in the coarse tunic, analavos and mantle of the monastic habit, the koukoulion worn or laid back, one older and long-bearded and the other younger — the convention by which painters signal an elder and his disciple when the sources do not say — each holding a scroll or with the right hand raised before the breast. Where a pair are shown together the painter usually turns them slightly toward one another and toward a common blessing from the segment of heaven above.
No image of them has been located for this collection, and none is likely to exist outside the crowded registers of a month-icon. The Menologion of Basil II, the usual source for such figures, covers only September to February and cannot serve an August commemoration.
Disputed questions
- No date, no place. No century, country or house is transmitted; the entry carries no century field and is indexed under unknown.
- The relationship. Elder and disciple, brothers by blood, or simply co-founders — the synaxarion does not say, and no recension supplies it.
- Jurisdiction. The commemoration is Greek. It stands in the Greek synaxaristes for August 12 but is absent from the Slavonic Menaion and from the OCA's list for the day.
- Not to be confused with the many better-known bearers of these names on other days: the martyrs Sergius and Bacchus (October 7), Sergius of Radonezh (September 25), the Protomartyr Stephen (December 27), or Stephen I of Constantinople. None of them is commemorated on August 12, and none is a candidate for identification with this pair.