EUDOCIMUS OF CAPPADOCIA

In Orthodox hagiography, that is, the field of theology and piety devoted to the lives and veneration of saints, those saints are called righteous who, by the power of grace, became such not in martyrdom, but in a pious life, and, at the same time, were not monks. Due to certain circumstances of the emergence and formation of the Orthodox liturgical calendar, such saints are very few in number.

But there are other saints whom the Church calls righteous not by virtue of belonging to this “face of holiness,” but calls them such as a special addition to their name. Such are Joseph the Righteous, Jacob the Righteous Brother of the Lord, the Righteous Simeon and Anna the Prophetess from the Gospel. There are extremely few such saints. Among them is Saint Eudocimus of Cappadocia. His memory is celebrated on the last day of July according to the Julian orthodox menologion, namely on the day of the Forefeast of the Procession of the Venerable Wood of the Life-Giving Cross, which corresponds to August 13 in the secular calendar.

It is known about the saint that during the reign of the Byzantine emperor Theophilus (829-841), he served as an officer in the Roman army. For the impeccable performance of his duties, he received a promotion, and was eventually appointed ruler of Eastern Cappadocia. In this position he earned the love of his fellow citizens. In everything he was guided by the gospel commandments. In his personal piety he maintained his virginity.

He died at 33 for no apparent reason. And although the very authoritative early Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons (130-202) argued that the Lord lived through all ages in His earthly life, subsequent tradition believed that Jesus lived on earth for only about thirty-three years. The sudden death of Saint Eudoсimus at this age obviously “christologically shocked” his contemporaries.

His body, laid in a tomb at the church, was subsequently discovered incorrupt. Signs and miracles of healing began to take place at the relics. So that even the earth from his resting place, by the power of grace, served to get rid of illnesses. Eudocimus’ parents erected a church in Constantinople in memory of their son, which later became a place of special veneration for him as a saint. In this touching belated parental gesture there was something that made Eudocimus related to the great saint of Christian antiquity—Alexius the Man of God (+ c. 411).

“God does not look on personalities, but in every nation he who fears Him and practices righteousness is acceptable to Him,” said the Apostle Peter about the conversion of the Roman centurion (Acts 10:34-35). The image of Saint Eudocimus the Righteous, who “shone bright” at a time when iconoclast rulers stood at the head of the Empire, living in holiness in an incredibly high secular position, serves as an amazing example of the truth for all times of these words of the Apostle. But not only that.

This in the language of hagiography denotes a saint who, in his lifestyle and holiness, was very similar to one of the saints of Christian antiquity of the same name. However, we simply do not know any saint Eudocimus, a layman and righteous man who lived in holiness in previous centuries.

This gives us reason to assume that, seeing Saint Eudocimus, and knowing about his paradoxically righteous life in “glorious and prosperous” circumstances, his contemporaries believed that his sincere righteousness did not simply “repeat” the deeds of any of the previous saints of the same name, but literally, unexpectedly and incredibly, it reproduced the holiness of Joseph, Simeon, Nicodemus and other People of the Gospel in what then seemed to be the Last Times.

Saint Eudocimus is a rare example of a high imperial official of Byzantium who achieved the heights of holiness not through monasticism or martyrdom, but by “simple” fulfillment of the commandments. He professed what he preached. If, in the words of Giorgio Agamben, “angels are God’s bureaucrats”, then Saint Eudocimus was also an “official of Jesus”, during the gravest political and religious crisis of iconoclasm.

1 From October 2, 829, to January 20, 842, Emperor Theophilus reigned in Constantinople. He was the last iconoclastic ruler. Iconoclasm proved to be the bloodiest persecution of the Orthodox in the history of the ancient Church, perpetrated by the Orthodox themselves. It took place in two phases, lasting an entire century with one interruption. The Byzantine emperors’ stubbornness in destroying monuments of religious culture and persecuting monks and ordinary believers who continued to venerate icons was sometimes boundless. This stubbornness was based on the promise of military victories over the Muslim Arabs, who also rejected sacred images and who, before the iconoclastic rulers ascended to the throne in Constantinople, constantly defeated and repelled the troops of the Orthodox Empire. After all, the beginning of iconoclasm in 730 coincided with the beginning of Byzantine military successes, which was interpreted as a divine sign.

2 At that time, there lived a man named Eudocimus. The son of very wealthy parents, he had a brilliant military career. He was later appointed governor of eastern Cappadocia. His rule was dignified and just. Sometime later, Eudocimus died. He lived only thirty-three years. After his death, it emerged that he had taken a vow of virginity to God and observed it scrupulously. Like Saint Alexis the Man of God, whom his parents only saw after his death, Eudocimus’s body was transferred to Constantinople and placed in the church his parents had built and dedicated to Mary, the Theotokos. It turned out that Eudocimus’s body was also intact. Healings began to take place from his tomb. The earthly dust that the believers carried with them brought healing. Demons were cast out from the saint’s tomb, and it was reported that children paralyzed from birth were restored to health.

3 It was a time when the Orthodox Church was going through a serious identity crisis. Accustomed to always remaining in solidarity with the Orthodox Empire and its rulers, it had not acquired the skill to oppose the authorities if they openly sided with heresy. The defenders of icon veneration were mainly monks who were able to hide from the large “official” monasteries and flee to the holy Byzantine mountains, located in Anatolia. The hierarchs of the Church generally supported the iconoclasts. It is probably precisely because of this period fraught with tragedy that the life of Eudocimus, despite the astonishing publicity it received, went almost unnoticed.

4 Eudocimus is one of the few saints to have entered the history of holiness under the name “Righteous.” Eudocimus the Just is thus mentioned in liturgical calendars. But he also bears another name: “Eudocimus the Younger.” This is generally the name of saints who literally reproduced the lifestyle and characteristic virtues of a specific ancient saint bearing the same name. For example, such were Hilarion the Great (291-371), the desert father and founder of monasticism in Gaza, and Hilarion the Younger (+845), abbot of Constantinople, and a contemporary of Eudocimus, during the era of iconoclasm.

5 However, Eudocimus is mentioned under the names “Eudocimus the Younger” or “Eudocimus the New.” Who was his prototype? This is unclear. No saint named “Eudocimus the Great” appears in the ancient calendars. It can be assumed that the great prototype of the saint was not “simply” one of the ancient saints, but one of the biblical models of Christian holiness, perhaps King David, Saint Joseph, husband of Mary, or James, brother of the Lord, first bishop of Jerusalem. It turns out that the humble saint, Saint Eudocimus, by his very name “Righteous,” was adorned by his contemporaries and disciples with incredible greatness, because in him, an imperial official, the true authenticity of the fulfillment of the commandments was visible. Eight hundred years after the earthly life of the Lord, in Byzantium, devoured by the heresy of the iconoclasts, oppressed by the Arab conquerors, in the person of Saint Eudocimus the Righteous, the people of God were visited by a simple and exemplary image of the original holiness of the New Testament.