Hypatius of Bithynia

Hypatius of Bithynia, also called Hypatius of Rufinianae, was a monk and abbot of the eastern Roman Empire in the fifth century. Almost all that can be said of him with any confidence derives from a Greek Life written shortly after his death by his disciple Callinicus, together with the notices that later entered the Byzantine synaxaria and the Roman Martyrology. He was born in Phrygia in the later fourth century, traditionally about 366, the son of a scholasticus, or professional advocate, who intended him for a legal career. At about the age of eighteen he left home, made his way to Thrace, and entered a rural monastery under an abbot named Jonas. There he spent many years in manual labour and severe asceticism, working at times as a shepherd and gardener, before any public reputation attached to his name.

After roughly two decades of this formation he travelled toward Constantinople and then into Bithynia. Near Chalcedon he found the monastery of Rufinianae, a house dedicated to the Apostles Peter and Paul that the praetorian prefect Rufinus had founded in the late fourth century and that had been deserted after Rufinus’s fall and death in 395. With a few companions Hypatius restored the buildings, gathered a community, and became its higoumenos. He is said to have governed the house for about forty years. Under his rule Rufinianae became known for hospitality to the poor and to travellers, for the care of the sick, and for exorcisms. Callinicus presents him as a wonder-worker whose authority in the countryside around Chalcedon was considerable.

The same Life records his hostility to remaining pagan cults and festivals in Bithynia, including local games of a still partly pagan character, and his readiness to confront landowners and officials who oppressed the rural population. In the Christological crisis of the 420s and 430s he took an early and uncompromising line against Nestorius. According to Callinicus, when Nestorius was appointed bishop of Constantinople in 428 Hypatius, after a visionary warning, ordered that Nestorius’s name be omitted from the liturgical diptychs of Rufinianae, well before the Council of Ephesus condemned him in 431. The episode, whether or not every visionary detail is accepted, is consistent with the picture of an abbot who regarded doctrinal orthodoxy as part of his pastoral charge and who did not wait for synodical decisions to act.

Hypatius continued as abbot into old age and died at Rufinianae in the mid-fifth century, by traditional reckoning on 17 June 446, at about eighty years of age. He was buried at his monastery. Veneration began there and spread in the Byzantine church; his feast is kept on 17 June in the Eastern Orthodox calendar and in the Roman Martyrology. He was never the object of a later medieval or modern papal canonization. No reliable ancient or medieval source assigns him a specific patronage of cities, trades, illnesses, or causes beyond the memory of his own community.