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SOS

Judging by my mail, it seems to me that many readers were as surprised as I was about ancient Christians who took foul and insulting names for themselves.

I hasten to add that it didn’t only happen to the poor. History has tarred one Byzantine emperor with the same S-word equivalent: Constantine V, called “Copronymous” (literally, “Named S***”). Constantine was the son of Leo III, the fanatical iconoclast. But, while Leo was content just to smash the icons of the people, Constantine took the purge a step further. Here’s the historian J.J. Norwich in Byzantium: The Early Centuries:

he abhorred the cult of the Virgin Mary and refused outright to allow her the title of Theotokos, Mother of God, since he held that she had given birth only to the physical body of Jesus Christ, in which his Spirit has been temporarily contained. For the worship of the saints — and worse still, their relics — he showed a still greater contempt, as he did for any form of intercessory prayer. Even the use of the prefix “Saint” before a name would incur his wrath: St. Peter could be referred to only as “Peter the Apostle,” St. Mary’s church as “Mary’s.” If a member of his court forgot himself so far as to invoke the name of a saint in some exasperated expletive, the Emperor would immediately reprimand him — not for the implied lack of respect for the saint in question, but because the title was undeserved.

For a fuller telling of the iconoclastic controversies, see this post. Iconophobia was a spiritual sickness of the elites, while icons held the devotion of the orthodox poor. Constantine reigned from 741 to 775, writing his heresy up as theology and closing down monasteries that dared to harbor images. He was little loved by his subjects. They spread the rumor that, as an infant, he had befouled the waters of his own baptism. Thus he merited the name Coprion (Greek for the substance he allegedly left in the font).

Well, it’s at least true in an allegorical sense.

The difference between Constantine V and those Copronymic Christians in the Catacombs is that the former had the name foisted on him against his arrogant will, while the latter took the name (or kept it) willingly as a mark of humility (or at least ironic humor).