By Fr. George Dorbarakis
Our Venerable Father Hypatios was born in Cilicia and was the Bishop of Gangra. He was present at the First Ecumenical Synod in Nicea (325) and was renowned by all for his pious life and miracle-working. The Emperor Constantius ordered that a likeness of Hypatius be made during the Saint’s lifetime. The emperor kept the likeness in his palace as a weapon against all adverse powers. Once, upon returning from Constantinople, Hypatios was attacked in a narrow gorge by Novatian heretics and was thrown from the road into the mud. At that moment a woman from that group struck him on the head with a stone, and thus the Saint died. Immediately the woman went insane and took that same stone and struck herself with it. When they took her to the grave of Saint Hypatios, he interceded before God on her behalf. She was healed by the greatly compassionate soul of Hypatios, and lived the remainder of her life in repentance and prayer. Saint Hypatius was martyred in the year 326.
A great wonderworker was Saint Hypatios, one of the God-bearing Fathers of the First Ecumenical Synod, together with Saint Athanasios, Saint Spyridon, Saint Nicholas, Saint Alexander. This means that the Saint had a special illumination in his heart, so as both to proclaim the truth against the heretic Arius and all the offshoots of his demonic heresy — the truth concerning Jesus Christ as the incarnate God — and to become a pure channel of God for the performance of wondrous signs for the sake of his fellow human beings in need. And this is because, of course, no one can see the truth about Christ without the illumination of God — “no one can confess Jesus as God without the light of the Holy Spirit,” the Apostle Paul will say — and no one can acquire the gift of wonderworking without having a pure heart through which the Almighty God acts in him and in the world.
Saint Hypatios, therefore, was a man for whom faith was the most essential element of his life; it was the primary aim in his entire course, and indeed “from infancy.” From a young age he was illumined, his Holy Hymnographer tells us, by the light of the Holy Trinity, and he was nourished with the milk of faith that gives life to man. Thus, in a natural way, he was a virtuous presence in the world, who shone in the Church like the sun through his miracles (Ode 1). His Hymnographer indeed insists on presenting to us his God-formed soul, stating that the Saint, through his spiritual struggles, became “a dwelling of the divine Spirit and an image of prayer” (Ode 3). His self-control and fasting, moreover, enabled him to bridle his passions (Ode 1), in conjunction with his love for the study of the Scriptures. And this study was such that it made him like a tree irrigated by the very source itself, and therefore always remaining evergreen (Ode 3).
What motivates such a great faith, which seals all the dimensions of a person’s life and truly makes him radiant like the sun? Nothing other than what we see in all the saints: love for the Lord Jesus Christ. Hypatios became, as the holy poet insightfully notes, a “spy of God,” in the sense that he had directed the whole inclination of his soul toward acquiring the knowledge of Him. “You appeared as a pure mirror of the Holy Trinity, Father Hypatios. For you loved to behold in a pure manner (that is, far from sin and with the keeping of God’s commandments) the knowledge of our God” (Ode 4). “Your longing, Father, was for the water of divine ascent, and you desired the immaterial beauty of Paradise” (Ode 5).
And this is a truth that we often forget: the source of true Christian faith is love. The more one kindles his love for God and for his fellow man, the more he sees his faith in Christ tangibly inflamed within his heart. Faith and love constitute a sacred pair, and the one never exists without the other. For this reason the Hymnographer wisely notes here the tragic state of the heretic Novatus, who “proclaimed impious doctrines” (Ode 9), in his harshness refusing repentance to weak human beings. “As Novatus was drowning in the abyss of unbelief and adding the noose of despair to those who had fallen into shameful passions, he extinguished repentance. This repentance Saint Hypatios caused to shine forth for the faithful and burned up Novatus” (Ode 7).
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
