The Warrior Saint in Icons

St. Theodore the Recruit is depicted in Orthodox iconography in two principal modes: as a standing soldier-martyr in military dress, bearing shield, spear, and sword and sometimes the martyr’s cross, shown in the company of the other great warrior-saints; and as the mounted dragon-slayer who drives his lance into the serpent. This file sets out the conventions and attributes of the warrior-saint type, its placement in the church’s decorative program, and the theology of the icon — and it gives particular weight to Gregory of Nyssa’s encomium, which describes painted images of Theodore’s passion on the walls of his shrine at Euchaita around 379–381, one of the earliest literary witnesses to Christian narrative martyr-iconography. The analysis follows Christopher Walter’s standard study of the warrior-saints in Byzantine art.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; warrior-saint)

The Two Iconographic Modes

In the mature Orthodox tradition St. Theodore the Recruit appears in two distinct iconographic modes, and the distinction is fundamental to understanding his image (Walter 2003). The first and older mode is the standing soldier-martyr: Theodore shown frontally, at rest, clad in the panoply of a Roman or Byzantine soldier and holding the instruments of the soldier’s craft together — in the developed type — with the martyr’s small cross that marks him as one who conquered not by arms but by confession. The second mode is the equestrian dragon-slayer: Theodore mounted on a charging horse, lance lowered, transfixing a serpent or dragon beneath the hooves. The two modes are not competing portraits but complementary expressions of the one saint, the first emphasizing his witness unto death and his place in the heavenly host, the second his triumph over the powers of evil under the figure of the serpent (Walter 2003; on the dragon motif, see The Dragon-Slayer Tradition).

The standing type is the more ancient and the more central. It belongs to the general iconography of the martyrs — the saint depicted in glory, holding the cross of his confession — but inflected by the soldier’s dress that fixes Theodore among the military saints. The equestrian type, by contrast, is a later development within Byzantine art, and its diffusion is bound up with the rise of the dragon-slaying legend, which attached itself to several of the warrior-saints and most famously to St. George (Walter 2003; ODB s.v. “Theodore Teron”). For Theodore the standing soldier-martyr remains the defining image; the dragon-slayer is the dramatic elaboration.

The Company of the Warrior-Saints

Theodore is rarely conceived in isolation. He belongs to a recognized company of military martyrs who are habitually grouped together in Byzantine art and devotion: George, Demetrios of Thessaloniki, Procopius, Mercurius, Nestor, and the two Theodores — Tyro the Recruit and Stratelates the General (Walter 2003). These saints share a common iconographic vocabulary: the soldier’s cuirass and military cloak, the round or almond shield, the spear, and frequently the sword at the side. In the decoration of a church they are often ranged together as a phalanx of heavenly soldiers, a visual host standing guard, so that the company itself becomes an image of the Church militant arrayed for the spiritual war (Walter 2003; see Theodore Among the Military Martyrs).

Within this company the two Theodores form a still tighter pair, sharing not only the panoply but the name and the Pontic homeland, and they are frequently depicted side by side as a matched couple, distinguished from one another mainly by inscription and by the conventions of age and beard (Walter 2003; treated fully in Theodore Tyro and Stratelates in Art). The grouping of the warrior-saints is therefore the natural setting of Theodore’s image: he is a figure best read in his company, one soldier among the soldiers of Christ, his individuality carried by the inscription and by the few attributes proper to his person.

Attributes and the Conventions of the Type

The attributes of the warrior-saint type are a small and stable repertory, and Walter’s study sets them out with precision (Walter 2003). The saint wears military dress: a tunic, a cuirass (often the lamellar or scale armor of the Byzantine soldier in middle- and late-Byzantine renderings, or a more classicizing muscle-cuirass in earlier and more antiquarian images), and a cloak (chlamys) fastened at the shoulder and falling behind. He bears a shield, round or almond-shaped, often resting at his side or held on the arm; a spear or lance, held upright in the standing type or couched in the equestrian; and frequently a sword, sheathed at the side or drawn, sometimes a bow and quiver in fuller military renderings. Crucially, the developed martyr-soldier type also places in his hand, or shows behind the weapons, the martyr’s cross — the small cross of victory that signifies that the true conquest of this soldier was his martyrdom, his witness unto death, and not his earthly arms (Walter 2003).

This combination of attributes encodes the theological tension at the heart of the warrior-saint: he is shown armed, yet the cross declares that his real weapon and his real victory lay in confession and suffering. The military panoply is not a celebration of war but a transfiguration of the soldier’s calling — the earthly soldier become a soldier of Christ, his armor become the armor of faith (cf. Ephesians 6:11–17), his triumph won by martyrdom (Walter 2003). The attributes are, in the standing type, displayed at rest rather than in action: the saint stands in glory holding his arms, not wielding them, which marks the icon as a portrait of the glorified martyr in heaven rather than a scene of battle.

Because the attributes are largely shared across the company, the individuation of any given warrior-saint depends heavily on two things: the inscription naming him, and the conventions of physiognomy — age, hair, and beard — by which the tradition keeps the soldier-saints distinct. For Theodore the Recruit, the convention is that of the younger man, beardless or with a short, dark, often curly beard, the youthful common soldier; this is the iconographic counterpart of his title Tyro, “the Recruit,” the newly enrolled soldier, and it is the chief means by which art holds him apart from the older, fuller-bearded Theodore Stratelates (Walter 2003; see Theodore Tyro and Stratelates in Art).

Placement in the Church Program

The warrior-saints occupy a characteristic place in the decorative program of the Byzantine church, and that placement is itself part of their meaning (Walter 2003). They are typically set in the lower zones of the church’s interior — on the piers, the lower walls, and the surfaces nearest the worshippers — rather than in the high vaults reserved for the dominical scenes and the celestial hierarchy. This lower placement is fitting: the soldier-saints stand, as it were, at the level of the faithful, guardians ranged around the nave, a visible host accompanying the congregation in its prayer (Walter 2003). Frequently they are disposed in pairs flanking an opening, a passage, or a composition, so that they appear as sentinels at the thresholds of the holy space — the two Theodores in particular often set on facing piers or flanking a central image as a matched guard (Walter 2003).

This deployment expresses the protective and intercessory role that the warrior-saints held in Byzantine devotion. They were invoked as defenders — of the city, of the army, of the individual believer — and their images, stationed at the lower level and at the thresholds, gave that protective function a visible form (Walter 2003; ODB s.v. “Theodore Teron”). The protective role is no late accretion: it is already present in the earliest secure witness to Theodore’s cult, Gregory of Nyssa’s closing invocation of the soldier-martyr against the barbarian incursion threatening Pontus (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore, PG 46:736–748; see The Passio and Gregory of Nyssa). The icon of the standing soldier-saint, ranged on the pier of the church, is the visual form of that same invocation: the martyr enlisted, after death, as the heavenly guardian of his people.

Gregory of Nyssa and the Painted Images at Euchaita

For the history of Theodore’s iconography the single most precious text is not an artwork but a sermon. Preaching at the martyr’s shrine at Euchaita around 379–381, Gregory of Nyssa, in his encomium On St. Theodore, describes the walls of the martyrium as adorned with painted images depicting the martyr’s deeds and his passion — the artist having rendered in color the acts and sufferings of the saint and the form of Christ presiding over the contest — so that the church became a kind of book, instructing the faithful through pictures as well as through words (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore, PG 46:736–748; Walter 2003). Gregory frames the images approvingly, as a legitimate and edifying mode of teaching: the painted passion of the martyr moves the beholder to devotion as a vivid sermon moves the hearer.

This passage is one of the earliest explicit literary witnesses to Christian narrative iconography of a martyr — to the practice of depicting a saint’s life and sufferings in painted images at his shrine, and to a fourth-century Father’s positive theological estimate of that practice (Walter 2003). Its value is twofold. First, as a document of art history, it attests that already in the 380s the passion of a soldier-martyr was being narrated visually on the walls of his church in Pontus — pushing the demonstrable practice of Christian martyr-iconography back into the fourth century with the authority of a named and datable eyewitness. Second, as a document of theology, it shows a leading Cappadocian theologian commending such images as instruction and as an incitement to piety, an early patristic warrant for the very practice the Church would later have to defend against the iconoclasts (Walter 2003; on which see below and Icons and Iconoclasm).

It is worth marking the distance between this early witness and the developed type that is the subject of the rest of this file. What Gregory describes is narrative iconography — scenes of the martyr’s deeds and passion, a pictorial account of his struggle. The standing soldier-martyr and the equestrian dragon-slayer of the mature tradition are by contrast iconic portraits, fixed representations of the glorified saint rather than scenes of his life. The portrait type is the later crystallization; Gregory’s painted passion is the earlier narrative stratum. Both belong to the one tradition of depicting Theodore, but they are different in kind, and the encomium is the firm early evidence that the depicting of this martyr is no medieval invention but reaches back to the very century of the persecutions in which he died (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore, PG 46:736–748; Walter 2003; see The Passio and Gregory of Nyssa).

The Theology of the Icon

The image of the warrior-saint is not, in Orthodox understanding, a decorative or merely commemorative object but a holy image in the full theological sense defined by the Church’s defense of the icons. The icon of Theodore is venerated, not worshipped: the honor paid to it passes to its prototype, the saint himself, and through the saint to God who is glorified in His martyrs (Seventh Ecumenical Council, Nicaea II, 787, Definition; on the dogma see Icons and Iconoclasm). The painted soldier on the pier is a window: it makes present to the worshipper the living intercessor it depicts, and the veneration offered before it is offered to the person of the martyr, who stands in the presence of God and prays for the Church.

This theology gives the warrior-saint type its precise meaning. The military attributes are real — Theodore was a soldier, and his soldiering is not erased — but the martyr’s cross set among the weapons reinterprets them, declaring that the saint’s victory was won by the confession of Christ and not by the sword (Walter 2003). The icon thus preaches, in the very person of an armed soldier, the gospel paradox that the true conquest is martyrdom and the true power is in weakness made strong by grace. Gregory’s encomium had already articulated the underlying principle — that the painted passion of the martyr teaches and moves the faithful as a sermon does — and the later defenders of the icons would appeal to exactly this patristic estimate of the image’s didactic and devotional power (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore, PG 46:736–748; Walter 2003; see The Church Fathers).

The image of St. Theodore the Recruit, then, is to be read on several levels at once: as a portrait of a particular martyr of the early-fourth-century persecutions; as one figure in the great company of the soldier-saints who guard the Church; as the visual form of an intercession reaching back to Gregory’s fourth-century invocation against the barbarians; and as a holy icon through which the honor of veneration passes to the living saint. It is one of the most legible and most beloved types in the whole Orthodox repertory, and its theology is the theology of the icon itself: the visible made a door to the invisible, the soldier of Rome transfigured into a soldier of Christ.

References

Gregory of Nyssa. On St. Theodore (De Sancto Theodoro; Oratio de Sancto Theodoro). In Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 46, cols. 736–748. Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1858. (The encomium preached at the Euchaita martyrium c. 379–381: the painted images of the martyr’s deeds and passion on the shrine’s walls, commended as instruction; the closing invocation of the soldier-martyr against barbarian invasion.)
Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. (The standard study: the two iconographic modes — standing soldier-martyr and equestrian dragon-slayer; the company of military saints; the attributes, dress, and physiognomic conventions of the type; placement in the church program; Gregory’s encomium as an early witness to martyr-iconography.)
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (Entries on Theodore Teron/Tiron and the warrior-saints; the development and diffusion of the equestrian type.)
The Seventh Ecumenical Council (Second Council of Nicaea, 787), Definition on the holy icons. (The dogmatic basis for the veneration of the icon and the principle that the honor passes to the prototype.)