Theodore of the Jordan
Our Venerable Father Theodore the Wonderworker, Hermit of the Jordan
Venerable · Wonderworker · d. 6th century
Commemorated 5 June — Repose in the wilderness of the Jordan
Theodore, called the Wonderworker, was a hermit of the wilderness of the Jordan in the sixth century, one of the great generation of Palestinian ascetics that produced Sabbas, Gerasimus and John the Silent. The one deed the tradition attaches firmly to his name is a miracle of mercy at sea: sailing on a ship whose drinking water had run out and whose passengers were dying of thirst, he blessed the salt water of the sea with the sign of the Cross and bade them draw and drink, and it was found sweet. He is commemorated on June 5.
The wilderness of the Jordan
The little that survives places Theodore in the sixth century and in the desert of the lower Jordan — the tract of wilderness between Jericho, the river and the Dead Sea which in that age was thick with lauras, coenobia and solitary cells, and which the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschus and the Lives written by Cyril of Scythopolis make one of the best-documented ascetic landscapes of antiquity. Theodore, the synaxarion says, forsook the world for that desert, took the monastic habit, and gave himself to the ordinary and unsparing regime of the Jordan hermits: fasting, unbroken prayer, the psalter, manual work, and long solitude broken only by the Sunday synaxis. He attained, as the notice puts it, "to a great measure of dispassion," and with it the gift of wonderworking, so that his epithet — ὁ θαυματουργός — belongs to him in the calendar as firmly as his name.
The sweetening of the sea
One miracle is transmitted in detail. Theodore was making a voyage by ship — the occasion is not given, but the coastal traffic between Palestine, Cyprus and Constantinople was the ordinary way a Palestinian monk travelled on the Church's business. The ship's water casks were exhausted, whether through a long calm or through mismanagement, and the crew and passengers were in extremity of thirst, with the undrinkable sea all round them. Theodore prayed, made the sign of the Cross over the sea-water, and told them to draw it up and drink; and the water, drawn, was found sweet and drinkable, and so remained until the ship made land.
The miracle is of a recognisable Palestinian type — the desert fathers' wonders are almost always about water, bread or wild beasts, the three things on which life in that country turned — and it is told of Theodore in the terms in which Scripture tells of Moses at Marah and Elisha at Jericho, deliberately, as the synaxarion's way of placing him in the line of the prophets of the same wilderness.
Repose
The synaxarion adds that he worked many other miracles, which it does not enumerate, and that he reposed in peace in his desert. No date, no monastery and no disciples are named, and there is no surviving Life; his memory rests on the calendar notice alone.
Feast and commemoration
June 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 18), among the ascetic commemorations of the day, after Dorotheus of Tyre and beside Abba Dorotheus of Gaza and Anubius the Confessor — so that June 5 carries, in effect, a small synaxis of the fathers of the Egyptian and Palestinian deserts. No proper service is appointed; the common of a venerable father is used. The commemoration is universal, and is kept with particular attachment in the monasteries of the Jordan and in the Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O Father, the image was preserved unfailing; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by deed thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Theodore, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Theodore is written as a desert ascetic: an old man, gaunt, with a long white beard, in the monastic schema with the cowl either raised or lowered, holding a scroll or with both hands raised in prayer. His distinguishing scene — where a narrative panel is given at all — is the ship at sea, with the saint standing at the gunwale blessing the water while a sailor lowers a bucket over the side, a composition close to that used for Nicholas of Myra's sea-miracles and easily mistaken for it if the inscription is lost. Since he is normally shown without any attribute, the Greek inscription Ὁ Ἅγιος Θεόδωρος ὁ θαυματουργός is the only secure identification.
No pre-1900 icon of this Theodore has been located for this collection, and the difficulty is real: images inscribed simply "Saint Theodore" belong far more often to the two great soldier-martyrs of the name, and none may be assigned to the hermit of the Jordan without an explicit inscription. As a June saint he does not appear in the Menologion of Basil II, whose miniatures cover only September to February.
Disputed questions
- Sources and identity. There is no independent Vita. Theodore of the Jordan is known only from the synaxarion notice of June 5, and attempts have been made to identify him with one or another Theodore of the Palestinian Spiritual Meadow or of the Lives of the Sabbaite fathers; none is convincing, and the safe position is that he is a distinct hermit whose fuller memory has not survived.
- Not to be confused with the other Theodores, and especially not with Theodore Yaroslavich, the young prince of Novgorod commemorated on this same day, June 5 — two saints named Theodore share the date, and the coincidence has caused calendars to print the two notices as one. Nor with Theodore the Studite (November 11), Theodore the Sykeote (April 22), Theodore of Tarsus (September 19), nor with the soldier-martyrs Theodore the Recruit and Theodore Stratelates.