The Life
Spyridon was born about 270 in the small village of Assia in Cyprus, into a peasant family. He grew up tending sheep. He never learned to read; he never received any formal education; he never traveled outside his village. He married a local girl, had a daughter named Irene, and lived a quiet rural life. He was simply a good man: kind to neighbors, generous to the poor, faithful in prayer. The Lord noticed. Miracles began to happen around him: incurable diseases healed, demons cast out, suspended judgments reversed by his prayers. When his wife died, Spyridon and Irene both entered the monastic life. The local Christians, recognizing his sanctity, elected him bishop of Trimythous, even though he could not read. He kept his shepherd’s clothes, refused to put on bishop’s pomp, continued to live simply. When the emperor Constantine summoned all the bishops to Nicaea in 325 to deal with the Arian heresy, the unschooled shepherd-bishop attended. There, by the simplicity of his speech and the demonstrative miracle of holding up a roof tile that crumbled into fire, water, and clay at his words, he countered an educated Arian philosopher and won him for orthodoxy. He returned to his diocese, served quietly until his death in 348, and was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Trimythous. His incorrupt body has continued to perform miracles for sixteen centuries; his relics now rest at his cathedral in Corfu, where he is the patron of the island and where, the people will tell you, his slippers wear out every year because he walks everywhere helping people.
Long before he was a bishop, Spyridon was simply known throughout his region as the kindest man anyone had met. He had a small herd of sheep on the hills above Assia. When a poor neighbor needed wool, Spyridon gave him wool. When a hungry traveler stopped at his house, Spyridon gave him a meal. When his neighbors’ crops failed in a bad year, Spyridon shared his own. He never seemed to keep score; he never seemed to tire of giving; he never seemed to worry about running out. The local poor began to depend on him, and the local rich began to send their disputes to him for arbitration because he was honest and uninterested in their bribes. The local sick began to come to him for prayers because, even in those days, his prayers were known to heal. By the time of the Decian persecution, when the empire was once again hunting Christians, Spyridon was a recognizable spiritual figure in the Cypriot countryside. He suffered some persecution under Maximinus Daia in the early fourth century but was not killed. After his wife’s death, his daughter Irene chose the monastic life, and Spyridon, free from family obligations, gave himself even more completely to the service of his neighbors. When the bishop’s seat at Trimythous fell vacant, the people of the city looked at the simple shepherd in the hills and said: this is the man.
When the bishop of Trimythous died and the people elected Spyridon, the new bishop did something unusual. He refused to dress like a bishop. The other bishops of his time wore elaborate vestments, lived in fine houses, ate at well-set tables, and spoke the polished Greek of the educated classes. Spyridon kept his shepherd’s clothes, including a simple basket-weave straw hat woven from local plant fibers. He continued to live in his small rural cottage. He continued to take part in the work of the local people, baptizing babies, performing weddings, burying the dead, settling disputes. When important visitors came he received them in the same clothes. The hagiographical tradition records a famous moment when he attended a local synod of bishops in his shepherd’s outfit and was barred from entering by the doorkeepers, who took him for a beggar; another bishop who knew him intervened and the doorkeepers were embarrassed. Spyridon never minded these incidents. He understood that his authority did not come from his clothes or his learning but from his pastoral relationship with his people and from the grace that the Lord had given him in his ordination. He did not need to look like a bishop to be one.
In 325 the emperor Constantine summoned all the bishops of the empire to Nicaea to settle the Arian dispute. The teaching of Arius, an Alexandrian priest, was that Jesus Christ was not eternally God but a created being, the highest of God’s creatures but not himself God in the same sense as the Father. The orthodox bishops, led by Saint Athanasius (then a young deacon to Bishop Alexander of Alexandria), maintained that the Son was eternally God of the same essence as the Father. The dispute was technical, philosophical, and very heated. At one of the sessions a Greek philosopher who had been hired to defend the Arian position was running rhetorical circles around the orthodox speakers. The philosopher knew his Plato; he knew his Aristotle; he could parse Greek subtleties; he was making the orthodox position look intellectually crude. Spyridon, the unschooled shepherd-bishop from Cyprus, asked permission to respond. The other orthodox bishops, knowing his reputation but worried about his lack of philosophical training, hesitated. Spyridon insisted. He stepped forward. He picked up a roof tile from the floor of the council hall. He held it up. He said simply: in the name of the Father; and at that word fire shot out of the top of the tile. He said: and of the Son; and water dripped from the bottom. He said: and of the Holy Spirit; and only dust remained in his hand. Three things, he said, in one tile. Three Persons in one God. The philosopher, struck dumb, fell at his feet. He was converted on the spot.
After Spyridon’s daughter Irene became a nun, she sometimes received deposits from people who needed someone to keep their valuables safe. One day a widow brought her a small treasure of gold ornaments and asked her to keep it for her until she could come back for it. Irene took the treasure and hid it carefully. Then, before the widow returned, Irene died. She was buried with the secret of the hiding place still in her keeping. The widow came back to ask for her treasure; nobody knew where it was; the widow began to weep, fearing that she had lost everything. Spyridon understood at once what had happened. He went to his daughter’s grave. He prayed. He called Irene by name and told her to come back briefly, just long enough to answer a question. Irene’s voice answered from the tomb. He asked her: where did you put the deposit? She told him: it is buried in such-and-such a place in the corner of the garden. He thanked her. He told her she could rest now. Her voice was silent. He went and dug at the place she had named, and the treasure was there. He gave it back to the widow. The hagiographical tradition has preserved this incident as one of the most beautiful demonstrations of the saint’s authority and his pastoral concern for the small people who could so easily be cheated.
A poor man came to Spyridon in difficulty. He needed to pay a debt; if he could not pay it, he would lose his small farm. He had no money and nowhere to borrow. Spyridon listened. Then he picked up a small snake from the ground and held it up. The snake transformed in his hands into a gold ornament. He gave it to the poor man and told him to use it to pay his debt, and to return it to him afterward. The man, astonished, took the gold and went away. He paid his debt; his farm was saved; he returned the gold ornament to Spyridon as instructed. Spyridon took it back outside, set it on the ground, prayed, and the gold ornament transformed back into the snake, which slithered away unharmed. The hagiographical tradition has preserved this incident as another demonstration of the saint’s authority over the natural elements and his commitment to the relief of the poor. He did not need to keep the gold; he did not need to be remembered for the miracle; he simply needed to make sure that one poor neighbor did not lose his farm. He used the elements that the Lord had given him — his prayers, his charity, even a passing serpent — to do what needed to be done.
Spyridon died peacefully in 348, an old man of about seventy-eight, having served as bishop of Trimythous for several decades. He was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles in his city. From the very beginning, his body did not decay. People who came to venerate him at his tomb reported that he had the appearance of a living man and that the fragrance of basil rose from his grave. Pilgrimage to the tomb increased over the years. He continued to perform miracles. His incorrupt body remained at Trimythous for three hundred years. Then in the seventh century, when the Saracen Arabs invaded and conquered Cyprus, the Christians of Trimythous decided to take their bishop with them. They dug up his tomb. They found his body just as it had been buried, completely incorrupt, with a sprig of fresh basil resting on his chest. They wrapped him carefully and carried him by ship to Constantinople, where he was given a new church and where he continued to perform miracles for the next eight hundred years. Then in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. A Corfiote monk named Georgios Kalochairetis was in Constantinople at the time; he had a small property on Corfu. He took Saint Spyridon’s body, smuggled it out of the falling city, and brought it to Corfu, where it has remained ever since. The relics rest in the Cathedral of Saint Spyridon in the heart of the old city of Corfu. Pilgrims from across the Orthodox world come to venerate them. The body remains incorrupt to this day.
The people of Corfu have for centuries said something extraordinary about Saint Spyridon: he walks. They mean this concretely. They mean that the saint regularly leaves his shrine at night, walks around the island helping people in trouble, performing miracles, defending the city, and returns to his shrine before dawn. The evidence they point to is very specific. The saint’s relics are clothed with silk slippers on his feet, woven by the cathedral nuns. These slippers wear out. They are noticeably worn at the toes and the soles, as though their wearer had been walking on real streets in real shoes. The cathedral replaces them annually, on the saint’s feast day, December 12. Pilgrims who visit the shrine often see the worn slippers on display. Many Corfiotes have stories of being personally helped by Saint Spyridon — a stranger who appeared at the door at the right moment, a voice in a dream, a sudden inexplicable improvement in a sickness. The saint also walks, the people say, in great public crises: against the bubonic plague that struck Corfu in 1630 and was abruptly defeated; against the Turkish siege of 1716, when Turkish soldiers reported having seen a monk with a torch threatening them on the city walls. The Corfiotes know who that monk was. The whole island knows. The Polioucos walks.
Saint Spyridon stands for a particular conviction about the Christian episcopate: that the bishop’s authority does not depend on his learning, his social class, or his cultural sophistication. It depends on his sanctity, his pastoral relationship with his people, and the grace of his ordination. He is not finally a Christian aristocrat but a Christian shepherd. The patristic tradition has held this with particular clarity. Saint Athanasius came from a modest family in Alexandria. Saint John Chrysostom, though formally well-educated, lived simply and refused the manners of the aristocratic episcopate. Saint Basil the Great, though aristocratic by background, made his episcopal life one of austere poverty. Saint Spyridon represents this principle in the most extreme form: a peasant shepherd who could not read, who kept his straw hat after his consecration, who was barred from a synod for looking like a beggar, and who at the same time was an authority on the deepest mysteries of the orthodox faith. He stands as a continuing rebuke to every form of clerical aristocratization, every assumption that bishops must be sophisticated to be effective, every confusion of episcopal authority with social position. The Lord can call shepherds to be bishops. He has done so; He still does.
Saint Spyridon’s feast is December 12 in the old calendar, December 25 in the new. He is one of the saints invoked in every Orthodox Litia service, the special intercession at vespers; he is invoked there together with Saint Nicholas of Myra, the two of them functioning as the pair of beloved hierarchs for the entire Orthodox tradition. He is the patron of the island of Corfu, where his relics rest. He is the patron of potters, because of the brick at Nicaea. He is the patron of the city of Piraeus. The Tolstoy family of Russia adopted him as their patron in the fifteenth century when Andrei Tolstoy chose him; the family has preserved relic-fragments of him for centuries, and Count Nikolai Tolstoy in our own day still venerates the family relic. He is invoked across the Orthodox world for help in financial difficulty, for protection against plague, for the resolution of seemingly insoluble problems, for the recovery of lost objects. He continues to walk through the streets of Corfu at night. The cathedral nuns continue to weave new silk slippers each year for his feast. The basil at his shrine continues to be fragrant. He has been a bishop now for sixteen hundred years, longer than any organized state has existed in history; he will be the bishop of Trimythous, and of Corfu, and of the Tolstoys, until the Lord returns.