A Cappadocian Wonderworker

St. Arsenios’ place among the modern Greek saints and within the long Cappadocian Christian heritage: an Anatolian priest-monk of a vanished world, glorified in the same generation as the great Athonite elders to whom he is bound, and a bearer of the memory of Cappadocian Hellenism into the modern Church.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Cappadocian)

Among the Modern Greek Saints

St. Arsenios belongs to a remarkable flowering of Greek Orthodox sanctity glorified in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — a group of holy figures, many of them recent, whose canonizations by the Ecumenical Patriarchate have reshaped the modern Orthodox imagination. His own glorification in 1986 stands near the beginning of this wave, and is bound to it above all through his godson St. Paisios, canonized in 2015, and through the wider circle of Athonite and Greek elders of the twentieth century (see St. Paisios of Mount Athos). Where St. Nektarios of Aegina, St. Paisios, St. Porphyrios, and others represent the modern Greek saint of the twentieth century, St. Arsenios represents its immediate root — a nineteenth-century Anatolian priest whose life reached its end just as this modern era began, and whose sanctity was recovered and proclaimed by the very elders who define it.

His profile within this company is distinctive. He was not an Athonite monk, not a bishop, not a theological writer, not a martyr in the strict sense; he was a village priest-monk and wonderworker of the Anatolian countryside — closer in type to the healing holy men of the older Byzantine and Ottoman world than to the urban or academic saints of the modern period. In this he offers the modern Church a bridge back to an older kind of sanctity: the local thaumaturge, physician of a whole community, whose holiness was hidden in the ordinary offices of a parish. That such a figure could be received into the calendar of the twentieth-century Church is itself significant — a recognition that the ancient shape of the wonderworking priest had persisted, unbroken, into the modern age (see Legacy).

The Cappadocian Heritage

St. Arsenios is also, and consciously, a saint of Cappadocia — the region that gave the Church some of its greatest luminaries, above all the fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. Gregory of Nyssa (on the Cappadocian Fathers see Orthodoxy: The Church Fathers). To call him “the Cappadocian” is to place him, across fifteen centuries, in the same land and lineage — the last great saint of a Christian Cappadocia that had begun with the Fathers and ended with the uprooting of 1924 (see The Uprooting of 1924). The tradition feels this continuity keenly: the Greek-speaking Orthodoxy of the Cappadocian highlands, which had survived from Byzantine antiquity in villages like Farasa, produced in its final generation one more saint, and then was gone.

There is a further, quieter link within the name itself. In taking the monastic name Arsenios, the priest of Farasa bore the name of one of the great desert fathers — St. Arsenius the Great, the fourth-century Egyptian anchorite — and so carried, in his own person, an homage to the ascetic tradition of the early Church into the modern Anatolian countryside. (The two must never be confused: they are separated by fifteen centuries and by everything else; see the disambiguation in the master README.) The Cappadocian wonderworker thus stands at a meeting-point of memories: the Cappadocian Fathers of his homeland, the desert fathers of his name, and the Athonite elders of his cult.

A Saint of a Vanished World

What makes St. Arsenios finally distinctive among the modern Greek saints is that he is the saint of a world that no longer exists. The Christianity of Cappadocia — its villages, its dialect, its parishes, its whole two-thousand-year presence — was removed from Anatolia in 1924, and St. Arsenios’ life spans and closes that history (see Theodoros of Farasa). He is venerated not only as a wonderworker but as a kind of memorial: in honouring him, the Church honours the vanished Orthodox world of Asia Minor whose last shepherd he was. The Farasiot refugees who carried his memory into exile were carrying the memory of their lost homeland with it; and the cult that grew up around him at Souroti is, among other things, an act of remembrance for a Christianity that Greece received as refugees and that no longer has a home in the land of its birth (the theme is continued in Legacy).

This gives his veneration a particular resonance for the Greek diaspora and for the descendants of the Asia Minor refugees, for whom St. Arsenios is not a distant Byzantine figure but a saint of their own grandparents’ world — a holy man who walked the same road out of Anatolia that their families walked, and who blessed and healed the very communities from which they descend. In him the catastrophe of 1924 is given a saint, and the loss a face of holiness.

See Also

References

  • Elder Paisios the Athonite (Hieromonk Paisios). Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian. Souroti, Thessaloniki: Holy Hesychasterion “Evangelist John the Theologian,” Greek 1st ed. 1975; English translation, Souroti. (St. Arsenios as the wonderworking priest of Farasa and last shepherd of a Cappadocian Christian community.)
  • Hieromonk Isaac. Elder Paisios of Mount Athos. Greek original 2004; English trans., Holy Monastery of Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, Chalkidiki, 2012. (His place within the world of the modern Greek and Athonite elders.)
  • Hirschon, Renée, ed. Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey. New York: Berghahn, 2003. (The vanished world of Anatolian Hellenism and the refugee memory it left.)