Theophanes of Nicaea

Theophanes was born in Palestine about 778 and became a monk at the great desert monastery of Mar Saba, near Jerusalem, together with his brother Theodore. Their father had brought them there as boys.

The Byzantine emperors had resumed the destruction of icons, and in the early ninth century the two brothers were sent from Palestine to Constantinople to argue against it. That decision cost them the next thirty years.

They were arrested under Leo V, flogged, and exiled. They were brought back, tried, and exiled again under Michael II. Under Theophilos the punishment turned into something the Byzantines had not tried before. In 836 the emperor had the brothers brought to the palace, argued with them, and when they would not yield, ordered twelve lines of iambic verse, bad verse, written to humiliate, tattooed into the skin of their faces with hot needles. The process took days. The court poet who composed the lines was told they were poor; the emperor is said to have replied that they were good enough for the faces they were going on.

From that day the brothers were called the Graptoi, the written-on. Theodore died in exile in 841, still branded.

Theophilos died in 842. His widow, the Empress Theodora, restored the icons, and in March 843 the Byzantine church celebrated what it still calls the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The new patriarch, Methodios, brought Theophanes out of exile and made him metropolitan of Nicaea, the city of the first ecumenical council. He was a bishop for about two years and died around 845, the verses still legible on his face.

He was also, through all of it, a hymnographer of great productivity. Something like a hundred and forty canons are attributed to him, and they are still sung: the canon of the Annunciation, in which the dialogue between the Virgin and the angel is set out line by line, is his, along with canons for the apostles, for the Sunday of Orthodoxy, and for many days of the church year. He wrote a funeral canon for his brother.

He is a plain example of something this wall keeps showing. The men who wrote the church's songs were often the men who had already paid for them.

Sources: Theophanes Graptos, canons in The Festal Menaion and the Byzantine Menaion; Theophanes Continuatus, Chronographia; J. M. Neale, A History of the Holy Eastern Church; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).