Parthenios of Lampsakos

Parthenios of Lampsakos († in the 4th century) was an early church bishop at the time of Emperor Constantine the Great . He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic as well as in the Orthodox Church . His feast day is February 7th.

Surname

Parthenios comes from the Greek and means "the virgin".

Life

Parthenios was born in Miletopolis in Mysia (Roman province of Asia ) as the son of a deacon in the second half of the 3rd century . Only a few ruins near Karacabey in the Turkish province of Bursa still bear witness to his hometown . The city is located about 10 km northeast of the city of Mustafakemalpaşa on the Marmara Sea . As a child, he learned the gospel by heart and tried to fulfill it. So he settled down on a lake without any further training as a fisherman, kept only the bare essentials and gave most of his money to the poor. In this way he wanted to follow Jesus Christ .

Bishop Philip became aware of Parthenios and ordained him as a priest for his diocese . Miletopolis belonged to the ecclesiastical province of Cyzikus ( ancient Greek Κύζικος ). The former fisherman gained such a good reputation that he was soon elected Bishop of Lampsakos . There he saw himself following Peter as a “fisherman of men”.

In 318 Constantine renamed the Bithynian city Drepanon ( Δρέπανον ) in honor of his mother Helena to Helenopolis and presumably stayed there often because of the warm baths. So there were frequent meetings between the emperor and the bishop of the nearby Lampsakos. Constantine commissioned Parthenios to convert the pagan temples of his diocese into churches.

Parthenios then successfully fought against the pagan faith in his sphere of influence and strengthened the Christians in their faith. Before that, Lampsakos was well known for the fertility cult of Priapus , who is said to have been born here and whose worship was celebrated in Lampsakos with a donkey sacrifice.

Instead, Parthenios introduced the veneration of the martyr Lucia of Syracuse, to whom the emperor also had a church built in Helenopolis. The feast day of this 304 killed young woman is December 13th, which fell on the winter solstice before the Gregorian calendar reform . The celebrations in honor of Lucia, whose name means "the shining one" (from Latin lux 'light'), were connected with many rites of light.

After 324, Constantine moved his residence from the west to the east of the empire, where he died in 337. Parthenios was blessed with a long life and is said to have died long after Constantine.

Legend

According to a testimony of Philip of Melitopolis, Parthenios possessed the gifts of healing and the casting out of demons, which induced the bishop to ordain Parthenius as a priest despite his lack of education. Parthenios received the power to heal and the power over evil spirits through his prayers.

During an expulsion from a man, the demon begged him to leave him alone. Parthenios offered to the evil spirit: “I will give you another man to drive into. You can live in it. ”The evil spirit then asked him:“ Who is this man? ”Parthenios replied:“ I am this man, come in and live in me! ”Then the demon fled as if he had been burned by the fire and shouted, "How can I enter the house of God?"

Parthenios is also said to have been one of the 318 bishops of the First Ecumenical Council in Nikaia (Nicaea) in 325, which, however, cannot be confirmed by the sources.

Web links

• Joachim Schäfer: Article Parthenios, from the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints , accessed on February 6, 2015

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nikolaj Velimirović : The prologue of Ohrid. Verlag Johannes A. Wolf, Apelern 2009, ISBN 978-3-937912-04-2 , p. 98