Theoclete the Wonderworker
Our Righteous Mother Theoclete the Wonderworker, of the Theme of the Optimatoi
Righteous · Wonderworker · d. 9th century, in the theme of the Optimatoi
Commemorated 3 August — Memory of the righteous wonderworker of the Optimatoi
Theoclete lived in the ninth century, in the reign of the iconoclast emperor Theophilos (829–842), in the theme of the Optimatoi on the Asian shore opposite Constantinople. The Greek synaxarion gives her a life without a single dramatic event in it: pious and wealthy parents, Constantine and Anastasia, who brought her up in the Scriptures; a marriage to a merciful man named Zacharias; a household kept open to whoever came; and a reputation for holiness in the ordinary state of a wife in the world, which after her death was confirmed by miracles — so that the calendars style her, of all things, ἡ Θαυματουργός, the Wonderworker.
Family and upbringing
Theoclete was born, the synaxarion says, "of the theme of the Optimatoi" — the small military province on the Asiatic side of the Bosphoros and the Gulf of Nicomedia, carved out of the older Opsikion, whose chief city was Nicomedia. Her parents, Constantine and Anastasia, were people of substance and, more to the point of the notice, of genuine piety, and they gave their daughter the upbringing that went with it. She is described as faithful, devout and modest, and as one who studied the word of God without ceasing — a phrase the synaxarist uses of very few women.
Marriage in the world
She was married to Zacharias, himself named as a devout and merciful man, and the notice turns at that point into a portrait of a Christian marriage rather than of an ascetic career. She was, it says, a model of what a Christian wife should be, and her house stood continually open — to the poor, to strangers, to whoever needed it. There is no tonsure in her story, no desert, no cell. Her sanctity is domestic and financial: she and her husband had money and spent it on other people.
This is why the repository classifies her as righteous rather than venerable, though the Greek calendars style her ὁσία, the term ordinarily reserved for a monastic. The Greek usage here reflects the honour paid to her, not a monastic profession; the taxonomy of this corpus (TAXONOMY.md) reserves venerable for monastics and gives righteous to lay saints glorified in ordinary life in the world, which is precisely what her notice describes.
Repose and the miracles
Neither the year of her death nor the place of her burial is transmitted. What earned her the title she carries in the calendars are the miracles worked afterwards at her intercession and at her relics — unspecified in the surviving notice, but sufficient for her to be enrolled among the wonderworkers, a rank granted to very few saints who never left their own household.
Her lifetime is worth noticing for its setting. The years of Theophilos were the last and harshest phase of the second Iconoclasm, when the confessors of the icons were being flogged and exiled and the empress Theodora was keeping her icons hidden in the palace. The synaxarion says nothing of Theoclete's part in that conflict, and the repository does not supply one; but the notice's insistence on an unremarkable household piety, set precisely in those years, is itself an observation about how the faith was in fact preserved.
Feast and commemoration
August 3 (church date; New Calendar civil August 3, Old Calendar civil August 16), a synaxarion commemoration in the Greek calendars, where the office of the day is that of the fathers of the Dalmatian monastery. The Slavic and Antiochian calendars do not list her. The day falls within the Dormition fast (August 1–14).
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a righteous woman)
In thee, O mother, was the divine image preserved with exactness; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passes away, and to attend to the soul, which is immortal. Wherefore, O righteous Theoclete, thy spirit rejoices with the angels.
Iconography
No iconographic type is attached to Theoclete, and no image of her, old or modern, has been located for this collection. Where a painter has need of her — for a name-day icon or a calendar cycle — she would take the ordinary form of a righteous laywoman of the middle Byzantine period: standing frontally, veiled in the maphorion over a long tunic, without monastic cowl or martyr's crown, the right hand raised in prayer and the left holding a scroll or open before the breast, and identified by her inscription.
Disputed questions
- A one-paragraph saint. The whole of what is known comes from the brief notice in the Greek synaxaria for August 3, and the notice ends without a date of repose. There is no Life, no relics tradition on record, and no independent attestation. The entry is deliberately short.
- Ὁσία or righteous. See above: the Greek title ὁσία is not evidence of monastic profession in her case, since the same notice describes a marriage and a household.
- The spelling of the name. Θεοκλητώ is a rare form, and the name appears in modern lists as Theokleto, Theoclito and Theoclete. It should not be confused with the more common Theoktiste (Θεοκτίστη) of Lesbos (November 9), with whom she is occasionally conflated in popular calendars.