medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
5. October is also, in some Orthodox churches (others celebrate this saint on 14. June), the feast day of:
John of Euchaita (d. later eleventh cent.). A salient figure in the mid-eleventh-century renewal of high culture in the Roman Empire of the East, the learned J. is better known by the name he bears in non-calendrical contexts, John Mauropus (in Greek: Mauropous or Mavropous). A scion of a priestly family of Claudiopolis in Paphlagonia, he moved early to Constantinople where he taught rhetoric and where one of his students was the imperially well-connected Michael Psellus. J. became a monk, wrote speeches for the imperial court as well as private letters and secular verse, opposed various official policies, complained that the otherwise very generous emperor Constantine IX Monomachus was not generous to him, and in about 1050 was removed from the capital by being made metropolitan of Euchaita in Pontus, whose status as the center of the cult of the great military martyr St. Theodore the Recruit did nothing to lessen its great physical distance from Constantinople. Eventually J. was allowed to return. His final years were spent in the Prodromos (John the Forerunner) monastery in Constantinople's Petra section.
In addition to his secular productions J. has left a large corpus of religious writing, most of which consists of verse epigrams and of kanons (lengthy hymns) for various feasts. Some sixty of the latter are attributed to him with reasonable certainty. By far the most familiar is his kanon for the Three Holy Hierarchs (Sts. Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, and Gregory of Nazianzen) used in the liturgy for that particular feast, a development of the earlier eleventh century. In a tradition preserved in the Great Horologion and in other service books, J. is said to have experienced a vision of the three saints in which they asked him to compose this work in order to unify devotees who contentiously preferred their own personal favorite over the other two. Another of J.'s better known compositions is a kanon on one's Guardian Angel.
We know about J. primarily from his own writings, though he is also the subject of an Encomium by Michael Psellus and of an Akolouthia (Office) by his nephew Theodore, an imperial notary and fellow monk of the Prodromos in Petra. Like certain other scholar-saints (Ado of Vienne and Albertus Magnus come to mind) his cult seems medievally to have been a very local one.
Best,
John Dillon
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