Thomas the Fool-for-Christ of Syria

A monk of Coele-Syria in the city

The whole of what is certainly known of Thomas comes from a single chapter of the Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus (Book IV, ch. 34–35 in the modern divisions), written at Antioch in the 590s. Evagrius has just told the story of Symeon the Fool-for-Christ of Emesa, and introduces Thomas as one who "pursued the same mode of life in Coele-Syria" — that is, as a salos, a holy fool. The pairing is significant: it shows that by the end of the sixth century the deliberate assumption of madness was already recognised at Antioch as an identifiable ascetic vocation with more than one practitioner, and it makes Thomas, with Symeon, one of the two earliest historically attested fools-for-Christ of the Christian East.

Coele-Syria — the inland Syria of the Orontes and the Bekaa — was thick with monasteries, and Thomas belonged to one of them. His errand in Antioch was an entirely ordinary piece of ecclesiastical business: monasteries of the patriarchate drew a fixed annual stipend assigned out of the revenues of the church of Antioch, and Thomas came down each year as his house's collector. It is precisely the ordinariness of the errand that makes the story what it is. The fool's vocation was not exercised in a desert but in the offices, streets and almonries of the greatest city of the Christian East, and his poverty was not private but the poverty of a man who had to ask.

The blow of the almoner

Thomas made himself, in the manner of his calling, a nuisance. He came repeatedly and importunately; he behaved, as the tradition puts it, as a man out of his wits; and Anastasius, the steward (oikonomos) of the church — the official who administered exactly the fund Thomas had come for — lost patience and struck him on the head with his hand.

The bystanders were scandalised, and Thomas said the one thing recorded from his lips: that he would receive nothing further from Anastasius, and Anastasius would never pay him anything again. It reads at first hearing as a rebuke, or a renunciation. Evagrius records that both halves of it came to pass at once. Anastasius died after the interval of a single day. And Thomas, on his way back toward his monastery, was taken ill and died in the hospice for the sick in the suburb of Daphne — the famous laurel-shaded pleasure suburb of Antioch, five miles from the city, with its springs, its shrines and, by the sixth century, its charitable institutions.

Later retellings, following the sequence rather than the text, have Thomas die of the blow. Evagrius does not say so, and the older reading is the better one: the word of a holy fool was fulfilled in both men, and the two deaths together were what convinced Antioch that it had been dealing with a saint.

The grave that would not hold another

The hospice at Daphne buried him where it buried its unclaimed dead — the common tomb appointed for strangers (xenoi), the pauper's grave. Twice afterwards other bodies were laid in the same grave; and both times Thomas's body was found lying above them, the others having been thrown some distance off. Evagrius calls it an extraordinary wonder proceeding from God, who bore witness to His servant after his death — and the theological point is exact and rather beautiful: the man who had made himself the least and the most despised in Antioch, and who was buried in the plot for people nobody claimed, could not be kept underneath anyone.

Translation to Antioch and the ending of the plague

The marvel was reported to the patriarch, who ordered the relics brought into the city. Thomas's body was carried up from Daphne to Antioch with a public festival and procession and laid in the cemetery of the martyrs; a chapel raised over the place became a shrine of healings. And by that translation, Evagrius says plainly, the pestilence then visiting the city was stopped.

This is almost certainly the great plague of Justinian's reign, which reached Antioch in or soon after 542 and returned in waves for two centuries. What Evagrius reports is therefore not a generic wonder but the response of a specific city to a specific catastrophe: Antioch, ruined by earthquake in 526 and 528, sacked by the Persians in 540, and then swept by the bubonic plague, took up the body of a holy fool out of a paupers' grave and carried it through her streets, and reckoned ever afterwards that the dying had stopped because of it. Evagrius, himself an Antiochene who had lived through the later returns of the plague, adds that the annual festival in Thomas's honour was still being celebrated "by the sons of the Antiochenes, to our own time, with great magnificence." That sentence is the earliest datable notice of an Antiochene saint's feast kept as a civic event, and it is the reason this comparatively obscure fool holds a fixed place in the Byzantine calendar.

Veneration and later cultus

From the Antiochene dies festus the commemoration passed into the Synaxarion of Constantinople and thence into the general Byzantine calendar at April 24, where the Slavonic and Russian books keep him as "the Venerable Thomas the Fool of Syria." He is one of the small company of holy fools in the fixed calendar — with Symeon of Emesa (July 21), his older contemporary and the pattern of the vocation, Andrew the Fool-for-Christ of Constantinople, and the later Russian fools such as Nicholas of Pskov and Xenia of Petersburg — and he is the only one of them whose cultus can be shown, from a nearly contemporary historian, to have begun as a plague-deliverance in the patriarchal city of Antioch.

For a reference compiled from the Antiochian standpoint, Thomas has a particular claim. He is not a saint of the Antiochene hierarchy or of its great theological quarrels; he is a country monk who begged in the city, was hit by a church official, died among the anonymous poor in a suburban infirmary, and became the patron of Antioch's deliverance from the plague. The whole of his veneration is an Antiochene judgement about who is great.