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.
