PAUL CONFESSOR OF NEOCESAREA

In 2025, we celebrate exactly one thousand seven hundred years since the First Ecumenical Council. Saint Paul of Neocaesarea was one of its participants. We learn about him from the “Church History” of Theodoret of Cyrus (393-460).

Paul was a bishop in one of the fortresses on the banks of the Euphrates, called Neocaesarea. This settlement should be distinguished from another city of the same name of that era and an ecclesiastical metropolis in the Black Sea region of Anatolia, which now bears the Turkish name of Niksar. Apparently, Paul was a wandering bishop, missionary, ascetiс and preacher. It is no coincidence that Theodoret recorded his memory. After all, he himself came from that remote area where, a century later, he was a bishop in the city of Cyrus. Thanks to his other work, the Syrian Patericon or “Religious History,” the lives of many Syrian ascetics have come down to us, who without him would probably have remained unknown. Their names follow one another unnoticed in the Menologion, on the days preceding Great Lent and during the Christmas period. Perhaps this is how we can explain why in the Orthodox liturgical calendar the day of remembrance of St. Paul falls on January 5 (December 23), that is, the day before the Nativity of Jesus.

Paul, says Theodoret, “experienced the cruelty of Licinius.” Licinius (308-324) ruled the Roman Empire for some time together with Constantine. In 313 he signed the Edict of Milan, so formally, in matters of faith, he did not persecute Christians. However, as the names of martyrs in our calendar and the testimonies of historians indicate, persecutions continued during his reign. Theodoret says that “Paul’s hands were weakened by the fact that they were burned with a red-hot iron.”

“Our God is a consuming fire” - says the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews (Heb. 12:29). The Tradition of the Church has adopted these words to the highest degree in relation to the Holy Eucharist. The Fathers of the Church teach that by partaking of communion, a Christian, like the ancient prophets, and even to a superior degree, receives God Himself within himself. The pagans tortured Saint Paul with fire, as if they wanted to literally test the words of the Christian Scriptures and parody the sacraments. In this strange way, they laid the ominous paradigm of how Christians would be tortured by persecutors in all subsequent times. Paul stood firm and did not renounce the faith. From this confession by deed, he later testified to the right dogmatic faith in the Lord Jesus at the Council of Nicaea.

According to Theodoret, among the Fathers of the Council there were many confessors who had survived the Great Persecution of Diocletian (303-313) and his co-rulers and successors. They, in the words of Apostle Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians, “bore the marks of the Lord Jesus on their bodies” (Gal. 6:17), since they visibly showed on themselves the traces of wounds and suffering they had endured. Then Emperor Constantine himself, at the sight of Paul and the other crippled confessors, was moved and trembled. The tenderness of the visible helplessness of God’s servants here on earth, the horror of the evil that paganism had engendered in his predecessors.

The day of remembrance of St. Paul, the day before the Nativity of Christ, is an amazing example of how we can learn about the exploits of great ancient saints from just one ancient testimony. It teaches us to carefully study church antiquities. Just a few surviving quotations reveal the entire history of holiness, unique moments of the exploits of the witnesses of ancient Christianity. It is obvious that the great dogmas of Christianity were literally supported by the testimony of the lives of those who preached and confessed them. Finally, remembering St. Paul, we ourselves learn to receive communion with special fear and trembling; and we ask for the priest’s blessing, remembering that in the liturgy his hand touches the Body of Christ. So in this everyday gesture of Orthodox piety we remember the hands of Saint Paul the Confessor.