A young Christian of Alexandria who, bound and tempted to sin that he might be made to fall, overcame the snare by his own resolve, and after torture was beheaded under Decius.
Feast Day
May 31
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Philosophus was a young Christian of Alexandria who suffered martyrdom during the persecution of the emperor Decius (249-251). Pressed to deny Christ, he remained steadfast under torture, and is remembered chiefly for resisting a deliberate attempt to corrupt him into sin. He is commemorated on May 31.
According to the synaxarion, when ordinary tortures failed to break his resolve, his persecutors bound him hand and foot upon a soft bed and sent a harlot to tempt him. To overcome the temptation, the saint bit off his own tongue and spat it in the woman's face, so horrifying her that she fled. Seeing his fearlessness, the executioners beheaded him with a sword. The Prologue of Ohrid places his death about the year 252, in his youth.
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The Temptation and Martyrdom
The account of Philosophus is preserved in brief form in the Orthodox synaxaria, where the defining episode is his resistance to a temptation devised to make him fall. Having endured physical torture without renouncing Christ, he was restrained on a bed so that he could not flee, and a woman was brought to seduce him. By the tradition, when he felt desire beginning to stir, he bit through his own tongue and spat it at her, an act of self-mutilation that both ended the temptation and drove the woman away in terror.
His captors, unable to break him by either force or enticement, put him to death by beheading. The sources present his steadfastness through both modes of assault, violent and seductive, as the heart of his witness.
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