Monk Plato

Saint Plato of Sakkoudion, also called Plato the Confessor, was a Byzantine monk and abbot of the eighth and early ninth centuries, known chiefly through the writings of his nephew Saint Theodore the Studite. He was born in Constantinople in the mid-eighth century to a family of senatorial rank. His parents died in a plague while he was still a boy, and he was raised by an uncle who held office in the imperial administration. Plato received the literary and administrative education customary for the capital’s elite and for some years managed the family’s estates. Drawn to the ascetic life, he disposed of his property, distributed the proceeds to the poor, and entered the monastery of the Symbola on Mount Olympus in Bithynia, then a major center of Byzantine monasticism.

Under Abbot Theoctistus he followed a strict cenobitic rule and was later ordained priest, an office he is said to have accepted only under obedience. In the later eighth century he founded the monastery of Sakkoudion on ancestral land in Bithynia and became its abbot. Relatives entered the new house, among them his sister’s sons, of whom Theodore would become the principal organizer of Studite monasticism. The Sakkoudion community was noted for liturgical regularity, manual labor, and a determination to keep monastic life free of undue court interference. Plato’s reputation for holiness and learning made him a counselor to clergy and laypeople in both Bithynia and Constantinople. He declined higher ecclesiastical office, including a reported offer of the see of Nicomedia.

He took a leading part in the Moechian controversy that followed Emperor Constantine VI’s repudiation of Empress Maria of Amnia and marriage to Theodote, who was related to Plato’s family. Together with Theodore, Plato refused to treat the second marriage as canonical and suffered imprisonment and confinement. He upheld the veneration of icons and the decisions of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. In old age, during the revival of iconoclasm under Emperor Leo V, he again faced pressure from the imperial government. After the Sakkoudion monks had been established at the monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople, Plato remained a moral and spiritual authority for the brotherhood even when he no longer served as abbot.

Plato died in Constantinople in 814. Theodore composed both a Life and a funeral oration that are the principal sources for his career and for the Studite portrait of his virtues. He is venerated as a confessor in the Eastern Orthodox Church, with his feast on 4 April. Precise dates for his childhood and the year of his birth are not independently documented and rest on later calculation from his age at death. His historical importance lies in the founding of Sakkoudion, his mentorship of Theodore, and the example he offered of aristocratic Byzantine monasticism resisting imperial policy on marriage law and on the holy images.