HIS father, who was governor of the isles of the Archipelago, died when
he was only three years old, and left him heir to a very great estate,
under the guardianship of the Iconoclast emperor, Constantine
Copronymus. Amidst the dangers of such an education, a faithful pious
servant instilled into his tender mind the most generous sentiments of
virtue and religion. Being arrived at man's estate, he was compelled by
his friends to take a wife; but on the day of his marriage, he spoke in
so moving a manner to his consort on the shortness and uncertainty of
this life, that they made a mutual vow of perpetual chastity. She
afterwards became a nun, and he for his part built two monasteries in
Mysia; one of which, called Megal-Agre, near the Propontis, he governed
himself. He lived, as it were, dead to the world and the flesh, in the
greatest purity of life, and in the exercises of continual mortification
and prayer. In 787, he assisted at the second council of Nice, where all
admired to see one, whom they had formerly known in so much worldly
grandeur, now so meanly clad, so modest, and so full of self-contempt as
he appeared to be. He never laid aside his hair shirt; his bed was a
mat, and his pillow a stone; his sustenance was hard coarse bread and
water. At fifty years of age, he began to be grievously afflicted with
the stone and nephritic colic; but bore with cheerfulness the most
excruciating pains of his distemper. The emperor Leo, the Armenian, in
814, renewed the persecution against the church, and abolished the use
of holy images, which had been restored under Constantine and Irene.
Knowing the great reputation and authority of Theophanes, he endeavored
to gain him by civilities and crafty letters. The saint discovered the
hook concealed under his alluring baits, which did not, however, hinder
him from obeying the emperor's summons to Constantinople, though at that
time under a violent fit of the stone; which distemper, for the
remaining part of his life, allowed him very short intervals of ease.
The emperor sent him this message: "From your mild and obliging
disposition, I flatter myself you are come to confirm my sentiments on
the point in question with your suffrage. It is your readiest way for
obtaining my favor, and with that the greatest riches and honors for
yourself, your monastery, and relations, which it is in the power of an
emperor to bestow. But if you refuse to comply with my desires in this
affair, you will incur my highest displeasure, and draw misery and
disgrace on yourself and friends." The holy man returned for answer:
"Being now far advanced in years, and much broken with pains and
infirmities, I have neither relish nor inclination for any of these
things which I despised fox Christ's sake in my youth, when I was in a
condition to enjoy the world. As to my monastery and my friends, I
recommend them to God. If you think to frighten me into a compliance by
your threats, as a child is awed by the rod, you only lose your labor.
For though unable to walk, and subject to many other corporeal
infirmities, I trust in Christ that he will enable me to undergo, in
defence of his cause, the sharpest tortures you can inflict on nay weak
body." The emperor employed several persons to endeavor to overcome his
resolution, but in vain: so seeing himself vanquished by his constancy,
he confined him two years in a close stinking dungeon, where he suffered
much from his distemper and want of necessaries. He was also cruelly
scourged, having received three hundred stripes. In 818, he was, removed
out of his dungeon, and banished into the isle of Samothracia, where he
died in seventeen days after his arrival, on the 12th of March. His
relics were honored by many miraculous cures. He has {588} left us his
Chronographia, or short history from the year 824, the first of
Dioclesian, where George Syncellus left off, to the year 813.[1] His
imprisonment did not allow him leisure to polish the style. See his
contemporary life, and the notes of Goar and Combefis, two learned
Dominicans, on his works, printed at Paris, in 1655.
Footnotes:
1. George Syncellus, (i. e. secretary to the patriarch St. Tarasius,) a
holy monk, and zealous defender of holy images, was a close friend
of St. Theophanes, and died about the year 800. In his chronicle are
preserved excellent fragments of Manetho, the Egyptian, of Julius
Africanus, Eusebius, &c.