Feast and Cult

Moses is commemorated on 28 August across the Orthodox tradition, and honored in the Coptic and Western calendars as well. This file sets out the feast and its dating, the shape of the cult that keeps his memory — the synaxarion notices, the iconography, the hymns — and the vigorous modern devotion, especially in the English-speaking world, that has made him one of the most loved of the desert fathers in the present day.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; martyr)

The Feast of 28 August

In the Orthodox Church, St. Moses the Ethiopian is commemorated on 28 August (the date in the fixed liturgical calendar; for those Churches following the Julian calendar, 28 August falls on 10 September of the civil Gregorian calendar). The date is firm and general across the Byzantine tradition, kept in the synaxaria and menologia and observed annually wherever the Orthodox calendar is followed (Ward 1984; the Byzantine synaxarion tradition). On this day the Church reads the notice of his life — the slave and robber converted to the desert, the ascetic and father of Scetis, the priest, and the martyr — and honors him with the hymns appointed for a venerable martyr.

[Disputed: the feast-date of 28 August is firm in the Byzantine Orthodox tradition; the Coptic Orthodox Church, which honors Moses as one of its own desert fathers, keeps his commemoration according to its own (Coptic) calendar, and the correspondence between the calendars accounts for variation in the civil date of the feast. The fixed liturgical date of 28 August is the standard Orthodox commemoration.]

The Synaxarion and the Hymns

The cult is carried liturgically by the synaxarion — the notice of his life read at the appointed commemoration — and by the hymnography appointed for his feast. The synaxarion gathers the tradition into a connected narrative: his origins as a slave dismissed for theft and violence, his career as a brigand-chief, his conversion and flight to Scetis, his fierce asceticism and the counsel of the elders, his sayings of humility and non-judgment, his ordination, and his martyrdom with his seven companions in the barbarian raid (see The Barbarian Raid on Scetis and The Historical Moses for the source-critical weighing of these elements). The hymns honor him under his double character as ascetic father and martyr, celebrating the grace that raised the robber to sanctity — the very theme the desert loved in him (see The Universality of the Desert). These liturgical texts are later than the Apophthegmata and dependent on the tradition, but they are the living vehicle of his memory in the Church’s worship.

The Iconography

Moses is depicted in the icons as a black African elder — the dark skin a fixed and deliberate feature — vested as a monk and often as a priest, and sometimes shown in the scenes of his martyrdom (see Veneration for the iconography in full). The icon presents to the praying Church the image of a black father and martyr of the first rank, keeping faith with sources that never forgot his Ethiopian identity and making his image a standing witness that the communion of saints crosses every line of origin. In recent decades this dimension of his iconography has been especially treasured.

The Modern Cult

The veneration of Moses has taken on particular vigor in the modern period, above all in the English-speaking world and among black Christians, for whom he is a father of the Church of their own people and a witness against racial contempt (Harmless 2004). Parishes, brotherhoods, monastic communities, and ministries have been placed under his patronage; his icon is widely reproduced and venerated; and he is invoked as a patron of repentance, of reconciliation, and of all who fear their past has placed them beyond grace. This modern devotion is a genuine flowering of the ancient cult, grounded in the secure facts of his identity, his sanctity, and his power as a witness of transformation — while the most careful devotion keeps the methodological distinction between honoring Moses as the Church has always honored him and reading the fourth-century desert through modern categories (METHODOLOGY §4; see The Black Desert Father).

A Living Commemoration

The feast of 28 August is not an antiquarian observance but a living commemoration, renewed each year in the Church’s worship and sustained between the feasts by the daily reading of Moses’s sayings, the veneration of his icon, and the prayers of those who have taken him as their patron. The robber who became a father and a martyr is honored still, across the Orthodox, Coptic, and Western traditions, as one of the great witnesses to the gospel’s power to remake a life. What that witness has finally meant, and how it is soberly to be assessed, is the subject of the closing file (see Legacy and Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Abba Moses; the figure commemorated.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The desert fathers and their commemoration; the Coptic tradition.)
  • Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The modern devotion to Moses; the desert fathers in the calendars.)