Thaddeus the Confessor
Our Venerable Father Thaddeus the Confessor, of the Monastery of Stoudios
Confessor · Venerable · d. 818, at Constantinople
Commemorated 29 December — Repose from his sufferings under the iconoclast Leo the Armenian
Thaddeus (†818) was a monk of the great Monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople and a disciple of Theodore the Studite, who suffered as a confessor for the holy icons in the second iconoclast persecution under the emperor Leo V the Armenian. Brought to trial and ordered to trample an icon of the Saviour set beneath his feet, he protested that he had been forced upon it against his will and openly cursed the impiety of the iconoclasts; for this he was beaten with cudgels, dragged by the feet, and cast outside the city walls. Cared for by a compassionate Christian, he lived three days more and reposed of his wounds in the year 818. The Church keeps him on December 29, within the afterfeast of the Nativity.
Thaddeus belonged to the Monastery of Stoudios in its heroic age, the years when its abbot Theodore the Studite led the Church's resistance to the renewed war on the holy images. The received tradition remembers Thaddeus as of servile or foreign origin — a bondsman, by some accounts a Scythian by birth, who found freedom and a father in the monastic life under Theodore, and who shared to the end his abbot's steadfastness in the veneration of icons.
The second iconoclasm opened under the emperor Leo V the Armenian (813–820), who revived the condemned heresy and moved against the images and their defenders; the Stoudite monks, with Theodore at their head, were among the foremost to suffer exile, imprisonment, and stripes. Thaddeus was seized and brought to trial. His judges devised a calculated humiliation to break him: they laid an icon of the Saviour upon the ground and stood him bodily upon it, then declared that, having trodden the sacred image underfoot, he had shown the icons to be nothing and should now abandon his cause and join the iconoclasts. Thaddeus answered that he had been set upon the icon by force and against his will, and he cursed the impiety of the iconoclasts to their faces, refusing their communion.
His confession enraged them. They beat him with cudgels without mercy, and then dragged him by the legs through the city and threw him, seemingly lifeless, beyond the walls. He was not yet dead: a compassionate Christian found him where he had been cast out and tended his wounds, but the injuries were mortal, and after three days the confessor reposed, in the year 818. He had not been slain outright by the sword, and so the Church honours him not as a martyr in the strict sense but as a confessor — one who suffered torture and death for the faith without being formally executed for it — though the narrative of his end reads as a martyrdom in all but name.
Feast and commemoration
Thaddeus is kept on December 29 (church date; New Calendar civil December 29, Old Calendar civil January 11), within the afterfeast of the Nativity, together with the day's leading commemoration of the Holy Innocents and with the elder Stoudite lineage's own forefather, Marcellus of the Akoimetoi, whose monks first peopled the Monastery of Stoudios to which Thaddeus belonged. His commemoration is a universal one of the fixed synaxarion, kept chiefly in the Greek and Slavic calendars.
Iconography
Thaddeus is depicted as a monk of middle or advanced years in the monastic schema, often holding an icon of Christ or a scroll — the attribute proper to a confessor for the images — in the manner of the Stoudite defenders of iconography. No storable identity-verified image has been secured for this entry.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with the two apostolic Thaddaei, with whom he shares nothing but the name. Jude the Apostle (June 19), one of the Twelve and brother of James, is called Thaddaeus and Lebbaeus in the Gospel lists; Thaddaeus of the Seventy (August 21) is the apostle sent to King Abgar of Edessa. Those two are constantly confused with one another — see the Disputed questions of Jude's entry — but neither has any connection with this ninth-century Stoudite monk, who is a confessor of the second iconoclasm and not an apostle at all. The coincidence is worth stating because English lists that give only "St Thaddeus" and a date invite the error.