medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
The wealthy and ascetic Theophanes (d. 817 or 818) followed his father in pursuing a career as a military officer with court patronage in Constantinople. He married well at the age of eighteen or nineteen but about a year later, after the accession of the iconophiles Irene and Constantine VI, he experienced a religious conversion. Persuading his wife to enter a monastery on an island in the Propontis near Constantinople, he became a monk at a monastery of his foundation on the island of Calonymus in the Sea of Marmara. After six years Theophanes left, entering instead an already established monastery at Mount Sigriane on the southern side of the Propontis. Not long thereafter he purchased a property in the vicinity called Megas Agros ("Great Acre") and founded a new monastery there, serving as its abbot. Megas Agros attracted many to it and Theophanes seems to have found contentment there. But in 815 a council under the iconoclast emperor Leo V banned the icons and early in the following year Theophanes was interrogated in Constantinople in an attempt to wring from him an endorsement of the emperor's position, which was now that of the official church. A firm and outspoken refusal to go along brought him two years in prison. When the formerly stout Theophanes had become very frail he was exiled to Samothrace. He died there on 12. March, shortly after his arrival. In 822, after Leo's murder, Theophanes' body was returned to Megas Agros, where he was venerated as a confessor in the sense of someone who had suffered imprisonment or other privation in retaliation for adherence to the true faith and where he was interred in a ceremony at which his fellow sufferer St. Theodore the Stoudite delivered his eulogy (BHG 1792b). Theophanes has an earlier ninth-century Bios by the future patriarch St. Methodius I (BHG1787z; betw. 822 and 832) as well as others by later writers of the ninth and tenth centuries.
Theophanes is the author of an important chronicle covering the years 285-813, a continuation of that of his friend George the Syncellus who earlier had spent three years of exile at Megas Agros. In the 870s this was translated into Latin by Anastasius Bibliothecarius and thus became known in the Latin West.
Some period-pertinent images of Theophanes the Confessor (a.k.a. Theophanes of Megas Agros).
a) as depicted (at center; at left, St. Pionius; at right, St. Sabinus of Hermopolis) in a survey of saints of the March calendar in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) in the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo (some loss to facial figures):
http://tinyurl.com/hqmk6b7
b) as depicted (at left in the panel at lower right) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 31r):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/31r.jpg
c) as depicted (at left; at center, St. John of Damascus; at right, St. Theodosius the Coenobiarch) in the mid-sixteenth-century frescoes (1545-1546) by Theofanis Strelitzas-Bathas (a.k.a. Theophanes the Cretan) in the katholikon of the Stavronikita monastery on Mt. Athos:
https://modeoflife.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/1302627194_monastery-stavronikita-113.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: subscribe medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: unsubscribe medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/medieval-religion
|