Theophilus the Myrrh-gusher
Our Venerable Father Theophilus the Myrrh-gusher of Mount Athos
Venerable · d. 1548
Commemorated 8 July — Repose in his cell near Karyes on Mount Athos, 1548
Theophilus (†1548) was a learned Macedonian who served the Ecumenical Patriarchate, refused a metropolitan see, and ended his life as a hermit of Mount Athos in a small cell near Karyes. He is remembered for the manner of his death: foreseeing it, he charged his disciple to treat his body with contempt — to drag it out of the cell and throw it into a ravine — so that no honour should come to him after death. The disciple obeyed; but the body was found, and myrrh flowed from it, so that the very self-abasement he had commanded became the occasion of his glory. His relics were taken to the monastery of the Pantokrator on Athos, and the Church styles him Myroblytes, the myrrh-gusher.
Zichna and the service of the Patriarchate
Theophilus was born at Zichna (Ziki) in eastern Macedonia and was well educated, in letters and in the Scriptures. He came into the service of the Ecumenical Patriarchate at Constantinople under the patriarch Niphon II, in the difficult first half-century after the fall of the city, when the Great Church was governing the Christians of the whole Ottoman dominion under conditions of extreme instability.
The one commission of his that the tradition records is a curious and revealing one. The patriarch Joachim I of Alexandria was reported to have worked signs — that he had moved a mountain at the demand of unbelievers, and that he had drunk poison prepared for him and taken no hurt. Theophilus was sent to Egypt to find out whether the reports were true. He went, examined the matter, and came back with the answer that they were.
Athos
He then withdrew to Mount Athos. He lived first in the great coenobium of Vatopedi, then at Iviron, and at last settled in a small cell dedicated to St Basil near Karyes, the administrative village at the centre of the Holy Mountain, where he could live in stillness. He was known there as a copyist and a painter of icons as well as an ascetic, and his reputation for holiness and for discernment passed beyond the Mountain.
When the archbishop of Thessalonica died, Theophilus was put forward for the vacant throne and was pressed to accept it. He refused, and stayed in his cell.
Repose, 1548
In 1548 he knew that his end had come. He gave his disciple Isaac a charge that belongs to the extreme tradition of monastic self-abasement: when he was dead, the disciple was to take the body, drag it out of the cell without funeral or honour, and cast it into a ravine, that it might be food for the beasts and that no one should venerate it. Isaac, unwilling but obedient, did as he was told.
The body was afterwards found, undecayed, and brought back to the cell; and there began to flow from it a fragrant myrrh, the sign the Greek Church reads as the seal of sanctity. The relics were received into the monastery of the Pantokrator on Athos, where they are kept and venerated, and Theophilus was numbered among the Athonite fathers with the title Myroblytes.
Feast and commemoration
July 8 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 21). He is kept on Athos, in the Greek calendars and by the Orthodox Church in America; the day belongs principally to the Great Martyr Procopius, and Theophilus is commemorated with him. On the Holy Mountain his memory is a feast of the Pantokrator monastery, which holds his relics, and he is counted among the myrrh-gushing saints of Athos.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and with sighs from the depths thou didst bring forth thy labours a hundredfold; thou wast made a beacon of the whole world, shining with miracles, O Theophilus our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Theophilus is painted as an Athonite elder in the full monastic habit — the black rason, the analavos of the great schema with its instruments of the Passion, and the koukoulion on the head or thrown back — grey- or white-bearded, one hand raised in blessing or held to the breast, the other holding a scroll. Where he is shown as a myrrh-gusher a vessel of myrrh may stand beside him, and in the icons of the Pantokrator his reliquary or the monastery itself is shown at his feet. He belongs iconographically with the other Athonite fathers of the post-Byzantine centuries, among whom he is often painted in the group compositions of the saints of the Holy Mountain.
No pre-1900 image of him of verified identity has been secured for this collection. His cult is Athonite and local, and the icons of him in circulation are modern.
Disputed questions
- The scale of the record. Everything known of Theophilus comes from Athonite synaxarial notices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and from the tradition of the Pantokrator, and the notices are brief. Nothing of his writing survives under his name, and the details of his years in the patriarchal service — the dates, the office he held — are not transmitted. The entry is deliberately short: there is no more.
- The mission to Alexandria. The story of the investigation of the wonders of Patriarch Joachim I of Alexandria (whose own reputation for such signs is independently attested in the Greek tradition of the period) is the only firm point of contact between Theophilus and datable events, and it fixes his active life in the first decades of the sixteenth century.