Susanna the Deaconess

Susanna the Deaconess is remembered in Christian hagiographical tradition as a woman who served in the ordained ministry of the female diaconate, an office well attested in the early Church. The New Testament already names Phoebe of Cenchreae as a diakonos of the church, and by the third and fourth centuries church orders such as the Didascalia Apostolorum and the Apostolic Constitutions describe deaconesses as assisting at the baptism of women, instructing female catechumens, visiting sick and poor women in their homes, and keeping order in the women's section of the congregation. A figure known as Susanna the Deaconess belongs to this ministerial tradition, yet the ancient sources that survive do not furnish a contemporary biography, a securely established place of origin, or verifiable dates of birth and death.

Later liturgical books of the Eastern churches preserve the names of a number of holy women called Susanna, among them virgins, martyrs, and monastics. Distinguishing a deaconess of that name from the Susanna of the Book of Daniel, from the Susanna who, according to the Gospel of Luke, provided for Jesus and the disciples out of her own means, and from the Roman virgin-martyr Susanna associated with the church of Santa Susanna on the Quirinal, is not possible on the basis of independent historical evidence. Brief notices in synaxaria are often late, formulaic, and liable to conflation. Responsible hagiography therefore refrains from assigning to Susanna the Deaconess a precise century, a native city, or a narrative of miracles and martyrdom that cannot be traced to a reliable early witness.

The historical setting in which such a ministry was exercised is, by contrast, well documented. From the reign of Constantine onward, and especially in the Greek-speaking provinces of the later Roman Empire, widows of good repute and consecrated virgins were sometimes set apart for the diaconate by prayer and the laying on of hands. Writers including Epiphanius of Salamis, Basil of Caesarea, and John Chrysostom refer to the order, and the career of Saint Olympias of Constantinople in the late fourth and early fifth centuries shows how a deaconess of high social standing could combine asceticism, patronage of the poor, and close collaboration with the episcopate. Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Constantinople were the principal theatres of this institution. Any reconstruction of Susanna's life must be content to place her within that world rather than to invent personal details.

Because no early vita, inscription, or conciliar record can be tied with certainty to this Susanna, claims concerning a feast day, a place of burial, a patronage, or a formal act of canonization or beatification cannot be verified. Recognition of holiness in the early centuries ordinarily arose from local cult and liturgical commemoration rather than from a centralized process. The memory of Susanna the Deaconess, insofar as it has been handed down, thus stands as a witness to the existence and pastoral importance of the female diaconate, even while the individual contours of her biography remain beyond the reach of the historian.