The Veneration of Poemen the Great

St. Poemen the Great is venerated across the Orthodox Church as one of the supreme fathers of the Egyptian desert, commemorated on 27 August as “Poemen the Great,” with the title Hosios (Venerable) borne by the monastic saints. His is an unusual cult: he has no shrine, no surviving relics, and no developed vita — he is venerated almost entirely through his sayings, the largest dossier in the Apophthegmata Patrum, rather than through a tomb or a Life. This file sets out the feast and its calendar questions, the absence of a relics-cult, his place in the Synaxarion, his iconography as a desert elder, and his commemoration in the East and in the Western martyrologies, where he appears under the translated name Pastor.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; master of discernment)

The Feast: 27 August

St. Poemen the Great is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar on 27 August (the date of the Julian-calendar liturgical books; on the civil Gregorian calendar this currently falls on 9 September for Churches that keep the Old Style). On this day he is named in the Synaxarion as Our Venerable Father Poemen the Great (Greek Hosios Poimēn ho Megas), the title Hosios / “Venerable” marking him as a monastic saint — the standard category for a desert father who was neither bishop nor martyr but a holy ascetic (the Great Synaxaristes, under 27 August; Ware and Mary, The Festal Menaion and the Synaxarion tradition; cross-checked against the printed Menaion for August). The same date is given across the principal Orthodox calendars — Greek, Slavic, and others — so that the feast itself is not in serious dispute; the qualifications concern, rather, which Poemen the date commemorates and the precise classification of the day, treated below.

The byname “the Great” (ho Megas) is itself a piece of his veneration. It is the Church’s own verdict on his stature, the same epithet borne by Antony, Macarius, Arsenius, and the other towering fathers of the desert, and it reflects the sheer weight of his dossier and the depth of his teaching rather than any office he held (Ward 1984, the Poemen series; Regnault 1999). To call him “Poemen the Great” is to place him in the first rank of the desert fathers on the strength of his sayings alone.

A Calendar Caution: Which Poemen?

The hagiographical calendars know more than one Poemen, and the commemorations must be held apart with care. Besides Poemen the Great of Scetis on 27 August, the Orthodox menologion commemorates other bearers of this not-uncommon monastic name — among them a Poemen the Much-Ailing (Mnogoboleznennyi) of the Kiev Caves, a Russian saint of an entirely different time and place, and other minor Poemens in the wider Synaxarion. [Disputed: the calendars and synaxaria are unanimous in placing **Poemen the Great** of the Egyptian desert on 27 August (the Great Synaxaristes under 27 August; the August Menaion; corroborated in the Greek and Slavic calendars), but because "Poemen" is a recurring monastic name, popular calendars and online listings sometimes conflate or cross-list the desert Poemen with the homonymous **Poemen the Much-Ailing of the Kiev Caves** (commemorated 7 August in the Russian calendar) and with other minor Poemens; the desert Poemen the Great is the 27 August commemoration, and the others are distinct saints despite the shared name.] This homonymy is the same fact that, at the level of the Apophthegmata itself, generates the “one Poemen or many?” source-critical question (treated at The Poemen Collection Problem); at the level of the calendar it requires only that the reader keep the desert Poemen of 27 August distinct from his later namesakes.

Veneration Without Relics: An Unusual Cult

The most striking feature of Poemen’s veneration is what it lacks. For most great saints of the early Church the cult is anchored in a body — a tomb, a reliquary, a shrine that becomes a place of pilgrimage and miracle — and frequently in a vita, a Life written by a disciple or admirer that supplies the narrative the feast celebrates. Poemen has neither. There is no known tomb, no surviving relics, and no shrine associated with him; the desert that produced him was scattered by the barbarian raids of the early fifth century, and no tradition preserves where the great old man was buried (Chitty 1966, ch. 4–5; Regnault 1999; on the absence of a death-narrative see The Historical Poemen). Nor is there any contemporary or early vita: Poemen is the subject of no Life, no funeral oration, no biography. The Apophthegmata records sayings, not a death-account of the kind it gives some fathers.

The result is a cult of an unusual and instructive kind: Poemen is venerated through his words. What the Church keeps of him is not a relic but a teaching — the dossier of sayings on the thoughts, on discretion, on weeping and self-accusation, on covering the brother’s sin and refusing to judge. His “shrine” is the Apophthegmata itself, read in monasteries East and West; his “relics” are his logoi (compare the Martyrdom of Polycarp‘s sense that a martyr’s memory is kept by gathering, but here the gathering is of sayings, not bones). This is consistent with the whole shape of his record: a figure transmitted as teaching leaves a rich deposit of words and an almost blank record of events, and the veneration follows the record — it honors the teacher whose voice survives, not a body or a place (Ward 1984; Regnault 1999; Harmless 2004, ch. 5). For an Orthodox reader this is not a deficiency in the cult but a particular form of it: the desert’s most quoted father is venerated exactly as the desert knew him, by his word.

Poemen in the Synaxarion

Poemen’s principal liturgical “biography” is therefore his Synaxarion notice — the short hagiographical reading appointed for his feast and gathered in the great compilations of saints’ lives ordered by the calendar. The Synaxarion entry for 27 August presents him as the great elder of Scetis, draws its substance from the sayings (the flight from the raids, the refusal of worldly entanglement in the Poemen 1 episode of the magistrate, the teaching on discretion and mercy), and so itself depends on the Apophthegmata for almost everything it tells — which is the same dependence that governs every attempt to write his life (the Great Synaxaristes / Megas Synaxaristēs under 27 August; Ward 1984; per METHODOLOGY §2.4 and §3.5, the Synaxarion notice is treated as the Church’s liturgical remembrance drawn from the sayings, not as independent documentary biography). The Synaxarion is thus both the chief vehicle of his veneration and a witness to its source-critical peculiarity: even the liturgical “Life” is, in substance, the sayings re-told.

The desert fathers as a class are also commemorated collectively in the Orthodox calendar — notably on the Saturday of Cheesefare week, before the beginning of Great Lent, which keeps the memory of “all the holy and God-bearing fathers who shone forth in the ascetic life,” the desert and monastic saints together (the Triodion, Cheesefare Saturday; Ware and Mary, The Lenten Triodion). Poemen belongs to that company by right, and is honored in it whether or not he is named, as one of the chief of the holy ascetics the day commemorates.

Iconography: The Desert Elder

In iconography Poemen is depicted according to the settled type of the desert monk-elder: an aged ascetic in the monastic schema, with a long white or grey beard, his hand often raised in blessing or holding a scroll — the scroll being the natural attribute of a father known for his words (the Hermeneia / painter’s-manual tradition for the venerable fathers; the standard menologion iconography of the Hosioi). He bears no instrument of martyrdom and no episcopal insignia, because he was neither martyr nor bishop; his image is simply that of the holy old monk, the gerōn (elder) to whom the desert came for counsel. Where he is named in an inscription it is as Hosios Poimēn ho Megas (“Venerable Poemen the Great”). The iconographic type is generic to the desert fathers — Poemen is not distinguished from Antony, Macarius, or Sisoes by any individual emblem — which again reflects the nature of his fame: he is remembered for a teaching held in common with his brothers, not for a singular legend, and his icon shows the ascetic ideal he embodied rather than a personal episode.

Commemoration in East and West

Because Poemen’s memory crossed into the Latin West as part of the Verba Seniorum, his veneration too has a Western as well as an Eastern face — again as the patrimony of the undivided Church rather than a divided one (see Poemen in Monastic Memory and Pre-Schism Church).

In the East, the commemoration is the 27 August feast described above, kept across the Greek, Slavic, Romanian, Georgian, and other Orthodox calendars, and carried in the Synaxarion and the August Menaion (the Great Synaxaristes; the Menaion for August). In the West, Poemen appears in the Latin martyrologies under his translated name Pastor — the Latin rendering of the Greek Poimēn, “shepherd,” the same translation by which he is “abbas Pastor” in the Verba Seniorum (Ward 1984, introduction, noting the Latin Pastor; Regnault 1999). The Roman Martyrology has historically entered a commemoration of “Pastor,” abbot, among the holy monks of the Egyptian desert, reflecting the Western reception of the same desert father under his Latin name (the Martyrologium Romanum; the entry should be read in light of the homonym caution below). [Disputed: the identification of the Roman Martyrology's "Pastor" with Poemen the Great of Scetis is the natural reading of the Latin tradition, in which "Pastor" is the standing translation of "Poimēn" (Ward 1984; Regnault 1999); however, the name "Pastor" is borne by more than one figure in the Western martyrologies (including an early Roman martyr Pastor), so the martyrological "Pastor" entries must be sorted by context, and only the desert-abbot "Pastor" is Poemen of Scetis. The Eastern 27 August feast of Poemen the Great is secure and uncontested; the Western martyrological commemoration is the same saint under his translated name, but the martyrology entries should not be flattened together with the unrelated Roman martyr of the same name.] What the two halves of the tradition share is the saint himself: the Egyptian shepherd of souls, kept in Greek as Poemen and in Latin as Pastor, honored in both as a holy father of the desert.

Conclusion: Venerated by His Word

St. Poemen the Great is, in the end, venerated in the way the Church first knew him — by his sayings. His feast on 27 August honors a saint with no shrine, no relics, and no Life, whose entire memory is a body of words received by the whole monastic Church; his Synaxarion is the sayings re-told; his icon is the generic ascetic elder, scroll in hand; and his name crosses East and West as Poemen and Pastor over one teacher. The cult is unusual precisely because the man is: the most quoted of the desert fathers is venerated not at a tomb but in the daily reading of his Apophthegmata, which is, fittingly, exactly where the desert itself encountered him (Ward 1984; Regnault 1999; Harmless 2004, ch. 5).

References

The Great Synaxaristes (Megas Synaxaristēs), under 27 August — the Synaxarion notice of Our Venerable Father Poemen the Great; the standard liturgical hagiography of the feast, drawing its substance from the Apophthegmata. (Used per METHODOLOGY §3.5 as the Church’s liturgical remembrance; the underlying sayings are cited from Ward 1984.)
The Menaion for August (27 August) — the liturgical office and Synaxarion reading for the feast of Poemen the Great.
The Apophthegmata Patrum, alphabetical collection, Poemen series — the source from which the Synaxarion and all biographical notices derive; cited by saying-number in Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984). Greek text in PG 65.
Ward, Benedicta, S.L.G. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Introduction; the Poemen series; the note that Poemen appears in the Latin tradition as Pastor, the Latin translation of the Greek Poimēn, “shepherd.”)
Regnault, Lucien, O.S.B. The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers in Fourth-Century Egypt. Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1999 (French original Paris: Hachette, 1990). (The veneration and reception of the desert fathers East and West; the Latin Pastor.)
Harmless, William, S.J. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, esp. ch. 5 (Poemen, the limits of biography, and the absence of a vita).
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966, ch. 4–5 (the scattering of Scetis and the loss of the desert’s physical memory).
Martyrologium Romanum (the Roman Martyrology) — the Western martyrological commemoration of “Pastor,” abbot of the Egyptian desert, the Latin name of Poemen; to be distinguished from the unrelated early Roman martyr Pastor.
Ware, Kallistos, and Mother Mary, trans. The Lenten Triodion. London: Faber & Faber, 1978. (The commemoration of all the holy ascetic fathers on the Saturday of Cheesefare week, the collective memorial of the desert and monastic saints.)