Veneration and the Feast
The Church keeps the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke on October 18 — a date shared, remarkably, by the Orthodox East and the Roman and Anglican West alike — and numbers him also among the Seventy commemorated on January 4. This file sets out the feast and its place in the calendar, the iconography of the winged ox, Luke depicted writing the Gospel and painting the Theotokos, the liturgical use of his two volumes, and the patronages — of physicians, artists, and iconographers — gathered around his name.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)
The Feast of October 18
Luke is commemorated on October 18 throughout the Orthodox calendar; the Synaxarion appoints the day to the holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke (The Synaxarion, 18 October; trans. Hookway). The date is one of the rare points of agreement spanning the calendars of East and West: the Roman Catholic Church keeps the Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist on the same 18 October (Roman Martyrology, 18 October; General Roman Calendar), and the Anglican Communion likewise observes Saint Luke the Evangelist on 18 October (Book of Common Prayer; Common Worship calendar). The shared date reflects an ancient and undivided commemoration carried over from the pre-schism Church and never displaced (on the structure of the liturgical year in which the fixed feasts fall, see Great Feasts; on the common patrimony of the undivided Church, Pre-Schism Church).
Beyond his own feast, Luke is also commemorated in the Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles on January 4, the collective feast of the seventy (or seventy-two) whom the Lord sent out ahead of Him (Luke 10:1–20). Orthodox tradition numbers Luke among them, and it is on this basis that he is titled not merely Evangelist but Apostle in the Church’s usage — a tradition received in the Synaxarion and held alongside, not in place of, Luke’s own prefatory distinction between himself and “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses” (Luke 1:2; on this, see The Physician of Antioch).
The Winged Ox: Luke’s Evangelist Symbol
In the iconography of the four Evangelists, Luke is figured by the ox (or calf), commonly winged. The symbol derives from the four living creatures of Scripture — the man, the lion, the ox, and the eagle of Ezekiel’s vision (Ezekiel 1:10) and of the four “living creatures” around the throne in the Apocalypse, where the third creature has “a face like an ox” (Revelation 4:7). From an early date these four faces were read as figures of the four Gospels, and Irenaeus of Lyons gives the classic patristic statement of the four-fold gospel under the four faces, assigning the creatures to the Evangelists (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8; trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1).
The particular assignment of the ox to Luke is the scheme that became standard in the Latin West and in the common iconographic tradition, fixed above all by Jerome. It is fitting on its own terms: the ox is the animal of sacrifice and of priesthood, and Luke’s Gospel opens in the Temple with the priest Zechariah and is much concerned with sacrifice, with the priestly and with the Passion. [Disputed: the assignment of the four creatures to the Evangelists varies among the Fathers. Irenaeus (*AH* 3.11.8) assigns the ox not to Luke but reads the creatures differently (giving, e.g., the calf to Luke for its priestly and sacrificial character but the lion to John and the eagle to Mark in his ordering); Augustine offered yet another scheme. The arrangement now universal — Matthew the man, Mark the lion, Luke the ox, John the eagle — is that of Jerome, and it is Jerome's scheme that the Church's art has followed.] Whatever the variants among the Fathers, the Church’s settled iconography gives Luke the winged ox, and it is by this sign that he is recognized in the gospel-books, the pendentives, and the Evangelist portraits.
Luke Writing and Luke Painting
Two iconographic types belong to Luke above all. The first is the Evangelist portrait: Luke seated at his desk, pen or stylus in hand, the open or unrolled book before him, in the act of composing his Gospel — the type that stands at the head of his Gospel in countless Byzantine and medieval manuscripts, often with the winged ox above or beside him. The second, proper to Luke alone among the Evangelists, is Luke the iconographer: the saint depicted before an easel or panel, painting the Mother of God, who appears to him bearing the Christ-child. This second type is the visual expression of the tradition that Luke was the first iconographer, who painted the Theotokos from life — a tradition late in attestation but of great weight in the iconodule cause, treated in its own section (see The First Iconographer; on the Marian material in his Gospel that grounds the type, The Theotokos in Luke). The image of Luke painting is itself an argument in icon: it sets the making of icons under apostolic sanction, and it is unsurprising that the saint who is shown painting the Theotokos became the patron of the iconographer’s craft (on the doctrine of the icon, see Icons and Iconoclasm).
The Liturgical Place of His Two Volumes
Luke’s veneration is inseparable from the liturgical use of what he wrote. His Gospel is one of the four read through the liturgical year, and in the Byzantine lectionary the long stretch of weeks from after the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross through the autumn is the season of the Lukan Gospel readings — the so-called “Lukan jump” by which the Church turns to the third Gospel as the year moves toward the Nativity. His second volume has a place of singular honor: the Acts of the Apostles is read in its course during the Paschal season, from Pascha through Pentecost, so that the book of the Spirit’s coming and the Church’s beginning is heard precisely in the fifty days that celebrate the Resurrection and the descent of the Spirit (on Acts itself, see The Acts of the Apostles). The Church thus venerates Luke not only on his feast but continually, in the public reading of his Gospel and of the Acts that frame so much of her worshipping year.
The hymnography of October 18 gathers these themes. The troparion and kontakion of the feast praise Luke as physician and evangelist, as the companion and fellow-laborer of Paul, as the writer who set down the gospel for the Gentiles, and — in the Byzantine tradition — as the first to portray the image of the Theotokos; the apolytikion addresses him as “holy apostle and evangelist Luke,” interceding for the forgiveness of sins (The Synaxarion, 18 October, with the proper hymns; trans. Hookway). The hymns hold together in a single commemoration the physician, the evangelist, the apostle, and the iconographer.
Patronages
Around Luke’s several identities the Church and, especially, the Christian West have gathered a cluster of patronages. As “the beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14) he is the patron of physicians and surgeons, and of the medical art generally. As the first iconographer he is the patron of artists, painters, and iconographers — and in the medieval and early-modern West the painters’ guilds and academies commonly took his name, the “Guild of Saint Luke” and the “Academy of Saint Luke,” placing the craft of the image under his protection. By extension he is invoked as patron of bookbinders, notaries, and, in some places, butchers (by the figure of the sacrificial ox) and brewers. The Orthodox veneration is broader and simpler than any single patronage: Luke is honored as apostle and evangelist, one of the Seventy and one of the four, the Gentile who wrote the longest portion of the New Testament and, in the Church’s tradition, the first to take up the brush in the service of the Incarnate Word (on his place among the writers of the canon, see The Physician of Antioch; on the historical questions his writings raise, Reception and Legacy).
See Also
- The Repose and Relics — the death and the relics to which the feast’s veneration is joined
- The First Iconographer — the tradition behind the icon of Luke painting and his patronage of artists
- The Icons Attributed to Luke — the images traditionally ascribed to the Evangelist’s hand
- The Theotokos in Luke — the Marian material that grounds the image of Luke painting the Mother of God
- The Acts of the Apostles — the second volume read in the Church through the Paschal season
- The Third Gospel — the Gospel read in the autumn season of the Byzantine lectionary
- Great Feasts — the structure of the liturgical year in which October 18 falls
- Icons and Iconoclasm — the doctrine of the icon that the image of Luke painting expresses
- St. John of Damascus — the great defender of the icons whose cause the Lukan tradition serves
References
- The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version. Ezekiel 1:10; Revelation 4:7; Luke 1:2; 10:1–20; Colossians 4:14.
- The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church. 18 October. Trans. Christopher Hookway. Ormylia: Holy Convent of the Annunciation, 1998–2008. (The feast of the Apostle and Evangelist Luke; the proper hymns; the title “apostle”; the iconographer tradition.)
- Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.11.8. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885. (The four-fold gospel under the four living creatures; the patristic assignment of the symbols.)
- Jerome. Commentary on Matthew, Prologue; and De viris illustribus. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 3. 1892. (The standard scheme assigning the ox to Luke.)
- The Roman Martyrology and General Roman Calendar. (The Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist on 18 October in the Roman calendar.)
- The Book of Common Prayer and Common Worship (Church of England). (Saint Luke the Evangelist, 18 October, in the Anglican calendar.)
- The Festal Menaion and The Pentecostarion. (The Lukan Gospel cycle in the autumn lectionary; the reading of Acts through the Paschal season.)