Plato of Sakkoudion

Plato of Sakkoudion, also called Plato the Studite, was a Byzantine abbot and monastic reformer of the eighth and early ninth centuries and the uncle of Theodore the Studite. He was born in Constantinople in 735 into a well-to-do family connected with the imperial civil service. His parents died in the plague that devastated the capital in the mid-740s, when he was about twelve years of age. An uncle who held high office in the financial administration then took charge of his upbringing and prepared him for a career in the same bureaucracy. Plato served for some years in the imperial treasury and was regarded as able and incorruptible, but he grew dissatisfied with secular life.

In about 759 he renounced his prospects, gave away his property, and entered the monastery of the Symbols on Mount Olympus in Bithynia, a mountain that was then one of the principal holy mountains of the empire. Under the abbot Theoktistos he adopted a severe ascetic discipline and was subsequently ordained priest. In the early 780s he used family lands at the foot of Olympus to found the monastery of Sakkoudion, of which he became the first abbot. His widowed sister Theoktiste became a nun, and her sons Theodore and Joseph, together with other relatives, entered the new house. Sakkoudion was organized as a coenobium on Basilian lines, with common life, liturgical observance, and manual work. Plato was a firm iconophile and supported the decisions of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which restored the veneration of images.

His later career was shaped by two successive conflicts with the court. In 795 Emperor Constantine VI put away his wife Maria of Amnia and married Theodote, a kinswoman of Plato and Theodore. Plato judged the marriage adulterous and, with Theodore, withdrew from communion with Patriarch Tarasios of Constantinople for having allowed it, thereby opening the Moechian controversy. He suffered imprisonment under Constantine VI and was released after Empress Irene recovered power. In 798 or 799 Arab raids in Bithynia led Plato and Theodore to leave Sakkoudion and settle in the monastery of St. John the Baptist of Studios in Constantinople, where Theodore became abbot and Plato the community’s spiritual elder. After Tarasios died in 806, Emperor Nikephoros I appointed the lay official Nikephoros as patriarch. Plato and Theodore objected both to the elevation of a layman and to the new patriarch’s willingness to rehabilitate the priest who had blessed Constantine’s second marriage. The emperor had Plato imprisoned and then held in confinement until the emperor’s own death in battle in 811, after which Michael I Rangabe restored the Studite leaders.

Plato passed his remaining years in retirement at Studios, his health broken by age and by successive detentions. He died on 4 April 814. Theodore delivered a long funeral oration that is the chief biographical source for his uncle’s life. Plato was honored as a saint in the Byzantine Church from the ninth century; his feast is observed on 4 April in the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic calendars. He is remembered as a restorer of coenobitic order, a defender of the church’s marriage canons against imperial pressure, and the founder of the monastic tradition that his nephew Theodore would make famous at Studios.