Saints & Church Fathers
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EssentialSaints & Church FathersSs. Peter & Paul, ApostlesThe two foremost Apostles, kept together on 29 June. St Peter confessed Christ as 'the Son of the living God', and the Fathers read the rock of Matthew 16:18 as the faith of that confession rather than as an office lodged in one man: so St John Chrysostom, and after him the Greek tradition. Peter is first in order among the Twelve and is counted founder of Antioch and of Rome. St Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, wrote fourteen epistles and carried the Gospel across the empire. Both were martyred at Rome under Nero, about 64 to 67. Feast: June 29.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Anthony the Great (c. 251-356)The father of monks. A young Egyptian landowner who heard the Gospel read in church - go, sell what you have and give it to the poor - and did exactly that, around the year 270. He lived near his village, then in a tomb, then twenty years sealed in an abandoned fort on the Nile, and walked out of it, by the account of those who were there, neither wasted nor wild but whole. He went on into the inner desert near the Red Sea, where the monastery that bears his name still stands. His Life, written by St Athanasius who knew him, crossed the empire within a generation and made monasticism a way of life for thousands. The Sayings keep him plain and humane: he saw the snares of the enemy spread over the whole earth, and asked who could get through them, and heard: humility. Feast: January 17.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Athanasius the Great (c. 296-373)Patriarch of Alexandria for forty-five years, of which seventeen were spent in five exiles under four emperors, and the man more than any other who held the Church to Nicaea when the empire had decided otherwise. As a young deacon he was at the council; as a bishop he refused to readmit Arius, and was deposed, banished to Trier, hidden by monks in the Egyptian desert, and restored, again and again. His On the Incarnation, written while still young, gives the reason the whole fight mattered: God became man so that man might become god. A Saviour who was a creature could not give us what He did not have. His Life of Antony spread monasticism through the empire, and his thirty-ninth Festal Letter is the first list of the New Testament that matches the one in use now. The phrase Athanasius against the world was meant as praise. Feast: January 18.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Basil the Great (330-379)Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia and one of the Three Holy Hierarchs. He studied at Athens with Gregory the Theologian, came home a celebrated rhetor, and was turned by his sister Macrina toward the monastic life, for which he wrote the Rules that Orthodox monasteries still keep. As bishop he defended the divinity of the Holy Spirit in a treatise that prepared the Creed of 381, and he built outside Caesarea a whole new town of hospitals, hospices and workshops for the poor that people called the Basiliad. His preaching on wealth is the hardest the Church has: the bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry, the cloak in your chest to the naked. The Liturgy that carries his name is served ten times a year and holds the longest and oldest anaphora in use. He died at forty-nine. Feast: January 1.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Cyril of AlexandriaArchbishop of Alexandria and the measure by which the Church judged Chalcedon. He presided at Ephesus in 431, and his Twelve Chapters against Nestorius forced the question the council answered: whether the one born of the Virgin is God, so that she is Theotokos and not merely Christotokos. Two years later he signed the Formula of Reunion with the Antiochenes, which is the part of him most often forgotten, and it shows a man who fought for a truth rather than for a victory. When Chalcedon met seven years after his death, the test applied to every phrase was whether Cyril would have owned it, and the Fifth Council later read Chalcedon through him on purpose. Feast: June 9.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359)Athonite monk, then Archbishop of Thessalonica, and the theologian of the uncreated light. When Barlaam the Calabrian mocked the hesychasts and denied that anyone could see the light of Tabor, Gregory answered in the Triads: God is unknowable in His essence and truly given in His energies, which are God and not a creature, so the saints who see that light see God. Councils at Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 upheld him, and the Synodikon of Orthodoxy has read his teaching out every year since. He spent a year as a captive of the Turks, and his letters from captivity are gentle about his captors. The Church keeps him twice: on the day of his repose, and on the Second Sunday of Great Lent, where his victory is set beside the victory of the icons. Feast: November 14.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory the Theologian (329-390)Archbishop of Constantinople and one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, and one of only three saints the Church calls the Theologian, with St John the Evangelist and St Symeon. In 380, preaching in a small chapel in a city whose churches were all held by the Arians, he gave the five Theological Orations that settled how the Church speaks of the Trinity: one God because one Father, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding, three Persons in one nature. Against those who gave Christ a divine mind in place of a human one he answered with the principle every later Christology depends on: what has not been assumed has not been healed. He presided for a time over the Second Ecumenical Council and resigned his see rather than be the cause of a quarrel, went home to Nazianzus and wrote poetry. Feast: January 25.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. John Chrysostom (c. 349-407)Archbishop of Constantinople and one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, called Golden Mouth for his preaching. At Antioch he preached through whole books of Scripture, verse by verse, and his homilies on Matthew, John and the letters of Paul remain the Church’s great commentary on them. Made archbishop of the capital against his will, he cut the palace’s luxuries, sold the episcopal furniture for the poor, and preached against the empress in terms she took personally. He was deposed, exiled twice, and died on a forced march to the Black Sea in 407, saying glory to God for all things. His Paschal Homily is read at every Paschal Matins in the world, and the Liturgy that bears his name is the one served on most Sundays. His relics were brought back to the city in 438. Feast: November 13.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. John the Forerunner (the Baptist)The last of the prophets and the first to point at Christ: behold the Lamb of God. Son of the priest Zechariah and of Elizabeth in their old age, he leapt in the womb when the Theotokos came to his mother, grew up in the wilderness, and preached repentance at the Jordan to crowds that came out from all Judaea. He baptised Christ, saw the Spirit descend and heard the Father’s voice, which is why Theophany is also his feast. Christ called him the greatest of those born of women. He rebuked Herod Antipas for taking his brother’s wife, and was beheaded at her daughter’s request. The Church keeps his conception, his birth, his beheading as a strict fast, and the finding of his head, remembers him every Tuesday, and paints him with wings as the angel sent before the Lord’s face. Feast: June 24.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. John the Theologian (the Evangelist)Son of Zebedee, brother of James, a fisherman of Galilee and the disciple whom Jesus loved, who leaned on His breast at the Supper, stood at the cross when the others had gone, and was given the Theotokos to take into his home. He wrote the fourth Gospel, which opens with the Word who was with God and was God and became flesh, and three letters whose whole argument is that God is love; the Church also receives the Revelation under his name. He was exiled to Patmos and died in great old age at Ephesus, where by the account St Jerome gives he had himself carried into the church and said only: little children, love one another. He is the first of the three the Church calls Theologian. Feast: September 26.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Sergius of RadonezhThe great monastic founder of Russia and, by common consent, the man who held the country together in the century of Mongol overlordship. He went into the forest north of Moscow with his brother, built a wooden church to the Holy Trinity, and a monastery grew around him that he never intended and repeatedly tried to leave. He refused the metropolitan’s throne when it was offered. He blessed Grand Prince Dmitry before Kulikovo in 1380 and sent two monks with him. The spirituality he left is Trinitarian and plain: his disciples founded scores of houses across the north, and St Andrei Rublev painted the Trinity in his memory for the church over his grave. Feast: September 25.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSs. Cyril & Methodius (9th c.)Two brothers from Thessalonica who grew up speaking the Slavonic of the villages around the city. Constantine, a scholar, and Methodius, a former governor turned monk, were sent in 863 by the Emperor and the Patriarch Photius to Great Moravia at its prince’s request for teachers who could preach in the people’s own tongue. Constantine made an alphabet, the Glagolitic, and they translated the Gospels and the services. German clergy objected that God could be worshipped only in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and the brothers took the argument to Rome and won it. Constantine died there in 869, having taken the name Cyril as a monk; Methodius, imprisoned for years by Bavarian bishops, finished the work. Their disciples, driven out, carried it to Bulgaria, where the Cyrillic alphabet was made in his memory. Feast: May 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSs. Joachim and Anna, the Ancestors of GodThe parents of the Theotokos, remembered at the end of every service, where the priest names the holy and righteous ancestors of God. Scripture does not name them. The tradition the Church sings, from the ancient book called the Protevangelium of James, tells of a couple shamed for their childlessness, of Joachim’s offering refused at the Temple, of Anna praying in her garden beside a nest of sparrows, and of an angel sent to both. The Church keeps the conception of their daughter on 9 December, her birth on 8 September and them on the day after. She was conceived as every child is, in the Orthodox teaching: the Latin dogma that she was preserved from the inheritance of Adam is not received. Feast: September 9.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Andrew the First-CalledA fisherman of Bethsaida and a disciple of John the Baptist, who heard him point to Christ, followed, and was the first of the Twelve to be called; then he went and found his brother Simon Peter and brought him. Tradition sends him north and west to preach around the Black Sea, among the Scythians and in Greece, and has him crucified at Patras on a cross shaped like an X. The Church of Constantinople traces its beginning to him, which is why the Ecumenical Patriarch keeps his day with the see’s full solemnity; Rome keeps his brother Peter on 29 June, and each year the two sees send delegations to each other’s feast. He is the patron of Russia and of Romania, and his head was returned to Patras in 1964. Feast: November 30.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Barnabas the ApostleJoseph, a Levite of Cyprus, whom the Apostles called Barnabas, son of encouragement. He sold a field and laid the money at their feet, and when Paul came to Jerusalem a convert no one trusted, it was Barnabas who took him by the hand to the Apostles. He fetched Paul to Antioch, and the two of them sailed to Cyprus on the first journey, where the proconsul believed. They parted over John Mark, and Barnabas took Mark home to Cyprus. By tradition he was stoned at Salamis. In 478 his tomb was found with a copy of Matthew’s Gospel on his breast, and on the strength of it the emperor confirmed that the Church of Cyprus, founded by an Apostle, owed nothing to Antioch: its autocephaly rests on this grave. Feast: June 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Cyril of JerusalemBishop of Jerusalem in the middle of the fourth century, exiled three times by emperors of the Arian party and restored three times, who took part in the Second Ecumenical Council at the end of his life. His Catechetical Lectures, given in the church of the Holy Sepulchre to those preparing for baptism in Lent around 350, are the fullest picture there is of how the ancient Church taught the Creed. The five Mystagogical Catecheses that follow them, explaining baptism, chrismation and the Eucharist to the newly baptised in Easter week, are the oldest account of the eucharistic change by the calling down of the Spirit; some scholars give them to his successor John. Feast: March 18.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Demetrios of ThessalonicaA young officer of Thessalonica, martyred around 306 under Maximian, and the patron the city has claimed ever since. By the account the Church reads, he was imprisoned for teaching Christ, and blessed the young Nestor, who went into the arena and killed the emperor’s champion gladiator; the soldiers were sent to the prison and ran Demetrios through with spears. A great basilica rose over his grave in the fifth century and still stands. The Miracles of St Demetrios, written in the seventh century, credit him with defending the city in the sieges by the Slavs and Avars. A fragrant oil that gathered at his tomb gave him the name Myrrh-streaming. His feast is a holiday in the city. Feast: October 26.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Dionysius the AreopagiteThe judge of the Areopagus who believed when St Paul preached in Athens, and by tradition the first bishop of that city and a martyr. The writings that carry his name, on the divine names, the mystical theology, and the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, shaped the whole apophatic tradition of the East and much of the West besides. Modern scholarship dates them to around the year 500, four centuries after the man in Acts, and the Church has not found that a reason to set them aside: The scholia of John of Scythopolis, handed down under the name of St Maximus the Confessor, and Maximus’s own interpretation secured their Orthodox reading, and it is in that reading that they are received. The saint is kept on his own day, and the corpus stands on its own authority. Feast: October 3.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Ephraim the SyrianA deacon of Nisibis and then Edessa, in the Syriac-speaking Church at the eastern edge of the empire, who wrote his theology as hymns and gave them to choirs of women to sing, so that the faith was taught in the streets the way the heretics were teaching theirs. He is called the Harp of the Spirit. His poems on faith, Paradise, the Nativity and the Church refuse to define God and are full of the wonder that God has let Himself be named at all. When Nisibis was handed to Persia he went with the refugees to Edessa, and he died there in 373 organising relief in a famine. The Greek Church knows him through works translated under his name, and above all through the short prayer every Orthodox Christian says with prostrations at the services of Great Lent. Feast: January 28.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395)Bishop of Nyssa, younger brother of St Basil, and the most daring mind among the Cappadocians. He was a married rhetor before he was a bishop, was deposed once by the Arian party, and after the Second Council, in 381, was named by imperial law one of the bishops whose communion defined Orthodoxy. His Life of Moses reads the ascent of Sinai as the soul’s ascent into the darkness where God is, and his teaching of epektasis - that the soul goes on stretching toward God forever, because God is infinite and so is the journey - is his gift to the Church. His language about the restoration of all things is the one place the Church reads him with care rather than as he wrote it, and it says so. His Catechetical Oration and On the Making of Man remain foundational. Feast: January 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 35-108)Bishop of Antioch after the Apostles, arrested under Trajan and taken under guard across Asia Minor to be thrown to the beasts in Rome. On the way he wrote seven letters to the churches, and they are the clearest window there is onto the Church in the generation after the Apostles: a bishop, presbyters and deacons in every city; a Eucharist that is the flesh of Christ, the medicine of immortality; and a Church he was the first to call catholic, in a sentence usually misquoted: wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church. He begged the Romans not to save him. I am the wheat of God, he wrote, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Feast: December 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130-202)Bishop of Lyon in Gaul, born in Asia Minor, who as a boy heard St Polycarp speak of what he had heard from the Apostle John: two links from the Apostles, and he said so. Against the Gnostics, who taught a secret knowledge above the Church’s faith and a creator god beneath the true one, he wrote the five books Against Heresies, the first great work of Christian theology after the New Testament. His answers are the ones the Church still gives: there is one God who made the world and saved it; the faith is public and handed down through the bishops of the churches the Apostles founded; and Christ recapitulates Adam, living our life again rightly from its start. The glory of God is a living man, he wrote, and the life of man is the vision of God. Feast: August 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Isaac the SyrianA monk of the seventh century from Beth Qatraye on the Persian Gulf, consecrated bishop of Nineveh and gone again after five months, to live in silence in the mountains and write. He was a bishop of the Church of the East, which did not accept Ephesus, and the Orthodox Church has venerated him for over a thousand years anyway, through the Greek translation of his Ascetical Homilies made at the Lavra of St Sabbas, because it recognised in them its own faith and its own prayer. He is the teacher of the merciful heart, which he describes as a heart that burns for the whole of creation, for people, birds, animals and even the demons, and cannot bear to see the least harm done to anything. Feast: January 28.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. James, the Brother of the LordThe first bishop of Jerusalem and the voice that settled the Apostolic Council, when the Church had to decide whether Gentiles must keep the Law: his judgement was that they should not be troubled. He wrote the letter that says faith without works is dead. The Orthodox tradition understands brother of the Lord as the Church always has, a son of Joseph by an earlier marriage, because the Mother of God remained a virgin. Josephus records that the high priest had him stoned in 62, and the account preserved by Eusebius has him thrown from the Temple and clubbed while he prayed for his killers. The oldest liturgy still served bears his name, and is celebrated on his day. Feast: October 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John Climacus (of the Ladder)Abbot of the monastery at Sinai in the seventh century and author of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, thirty steps for thirty hidden years of Christ. He came to Sinai at sixteen, spent forty years in silence at Tholas before being made abbot, and wrote the book at the request of another abbot who wanted a rule for his monks. The Church reads him twice over in Lent: his memory falls on 30 March and the Fourth Sunday of Great Lent is given to him, so that the Ladder is put in front of every parish and not only every monastery. Feast: March 30.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John of Damascus (c. 676-749)Son of a Christian family that served the Caliph in Damascus, and himself a financial official at the Umayyad court before he became a monk at the Lavra of St Sabbas near Jerusalem. From there, safely outside the emperor’s reach, he wrote the Three Treatises against those who destroyed the icons, with the argument the Seventh Council made its own: the invisible God became visible, so what is seen may be painted, and the honour given to an image passes to the one it shows. His Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith gathered the Fathers into the first systematic statement of the faith. He was also a hymnographer of the first rank: the Paschal Canon and much of the Octoechos are his. Tradition keeps the story of his severed hand restored by the Theotokos, which is why one of her icons is painted with three. Feast: December 4.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John of Shanghai and San FranciscoMichael Maximovitch, a refugee from the Russian Revolution who became a monk in Serbia and was sent in 1934 as bishop to Shanghai. He slept, when he slept, sitting up, served the Liturgy every day, walked barefoot, and took in orphans from the streets: some three thousand five hundred passed through his home. When the communists came in 1949 he got his whole flock out to a camp on the Philippine island of Tubabao and went to Washington himself to persuade Congress to admit them. He was then archbishop in Western Europe, where he restored the veneration of Western saints from before the Schism, and from 1962 in San Francisco. He died in 1966 in Seattle. Glorified by the Church Abroad in 1994. Feast: June 19 (on the Old Calendar, 2 July).ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Luke the EvangelistThe beloved physician, a Gentile and a companion of St Paul on his journeys, who stayed with him when the others had left. He wrote the Gospel that begins with the annunciation to Zechariah, then the Annunciation and the story of the Nativity as the Theotokos kept it in her heart, and its continuation, the Acts of the Apostles, in which his "we" marks the stretches of the journey he shared. Its parables of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan are his alone. Tradition makes him the first iconographer, painting the Mother of God from life, which the Church understands as a claim that the icon goes back to the Apostles. He died, by tradition, in Boeotia. Feast: October 18.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Mark the EvangelistJohn Mark, in whose mother’s house in Jerusalem the Church met to pray, a cousin of Barnabas who went with Paul on the first journey and turned back, and whom Paul later asked for because he was useful. Papias records that he became Peter’s interpreter and wrote down Peter’s preaching, which is why his Gospel is short, urgent and full of the things an eyewitness remembers. The Church of Alexandria calls itself the see of St Mark: by its tradition he founded it and was dragged to his death through its streets around 68. His relics were taken to Venice in 828. Feast: April 25.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Mary of EgyptA girl who ran away to Alexandria at twelve and lived seventeen years there in dissolution, and who joined a pilgrim ship to Jerusalem for the feast of the Cross out of nothing better to do. At the door of the church an invisible force held her back while everyone else went in, and in that moment she saw her life. She prayed to the icon of the Mother of God in the porch, was let in to venerate the Cross, and went out across the Jordan into the desert, where she lived alone forty-seven years. The monk Zosimas found her there, heard her story and brought her communion, and a year later found her body. St Sophronius wrote the Life, and the Church reads it in Lent with the Great Canon and gives her a Sunday. Feast: April 1, and the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662)A court official who became a monk, and the theologian who held the Church to the full humanity of Christ when the emperor, the patriarchs of three sees and very nearly everyone else had agreed to teach one will in Him. Maximus answered that a nature without its own will is not a nature, so a Christ without a human will has not saved the human will, which is the thing that needed saving: in the garden He willed as man what He willed as God. For refusing to be silent he was tried in Constantinople, his tongue cut out and his right hand cut off, and he died in exile in Lazica in 662. The Sixth Ecumenical Council vindicated him eighteen years later. His Ambigua and his writings on the logoi of creation are among the deepest things in Orthodox theology. Feast: January 21.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nektarios of Aegina (1846-1920)Anastasios Kephalas, born in Thrace in 1846, who worked as a shop boy in Constantinople and wrote verses from Scripture on the wrappings of the goods he sold. He became a monk on Chios, studied in Athens, and was consecrated Metropolitan of Pentapolis in Egypt, where slander at the patriarchal court had him removed without a hearing in 1890. He never defended himself. He preached in Greek villages as a travelling preacher, ran the Rizarios seminary in Athens for fourteen years, and in 1904 founded the convent of the Holy Trinity on Aegina, where he lived as its confessor and gardener. He died in a paupers’ ward in Athens in 1920. He is among the most loved saints of modern Greece, and his tomb on Aegina is visited daily. Glorified in 1961. Feast: November 9.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nicholas of Myra (c. 270-343)Bishop of Myra in Lycia in the fourth century, imprisoned under Diocletian and freed under Constantine, and after the Mother of God perhaps the most widely loved saint in the Christian world. The stories told of him are about justice before they are about miracles: the gold thrown by night through the window of a ruined man so that his three daughters would not be sold, and the three innocent men he took down from the executioner’s block by seizing the sword. Tradition places him at Nicaea and has him strike Arius; the oldest lists of the bishops there do not name him, and the Church sings it anyway, as a story about what the truth is worth. His relics were carried off to Bari in 1087, and the day is kept. The western Santa Claus is his distant descendant. Feast: December 6.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain (1749-1809)Nicholas Kallivourtsis from Naxos, who came to the Holy Mountain at twenty-six and spent the rest of his life there editing, and did more than anyone of his century to put the Fathers back into Greek hands. With St Makarios of Corinth he published the Philokalia in Venice in 1782; with the monk Agapios, the Rudder, the canons with a commentary still used; and he edited the Evergetinos and wrote the Exomologetarion for confessors. He was a leader of the Kollyvades, who defended frequent communion and the keeping of memorials on Saturday rather than Sunday, and were persecuted for it. His Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises are adaptations of Western Catholic devotional books, reworked for Orthodox readers, a fact his critics raise and his admirers do not hide. Glorified in 1955. Feast: July 14.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Paisios of Mount Athos (1924-1994)Born Arsenios Eznepidis in Farasa in Cappadocia in 1924, baptised by the saint of the village, St Arsenios, and carried to Greece as a baby in the exchange of populations. He was a carpenter and a wireless operator in the civil war before he became a monk, and lived at Stomion near Konitsa, at Sinai, and from 1979 in the cell called Panagouda on the Holy Mountain, where for fifteen years thousands came to him. His counsel is practical, funny and searching, always turning the visitor from blaming others to the one thing they could change, and it is written down in the six volumes of Spiritual Counsels. He died of cancer on 12 July 1994 at the monastery of Souroti near Thessaloniki, where he is buried, and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2015. Feast: July 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Panteleimon the HealerA physician of Nicomedia, the son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, taught the faith by the priest Hermolaus, who healed in the name of Christ and took no fee: the Church counts him among the Unmercenaries, the doctor saints who would not be paid. Denounced by colleagues whose patients had gone to him, he was martyred around 305 under Maximian. His name was Pantoleon, all a lion, and a voice from heaven changed it to Panteleimon, all-merciful. He is remembered at the blessing of water, the anointing of the sick and many services for the sick, and the Russian monastery on the Holy Mountain bears his name and keeps his head. Feast: July 27.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Paul the ApostleSaul of Tarsus in Cilicia, a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin and a Roman citizen by birth, was trained in the Law at Jerusalem under Gamaliel. A Pharisee zealous against the Church, he consented to the stoning of St Stephen. On the road to Damascus the risen Christ appeared to him; he was blinded, baptised by Ananias, and from then on preached the Christ he had persecuted. In three journeys, with Barnabas, Silas, Timothy and Luke, he carried the Gospel to the Gentiles of Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece, founding churches and writing to them; the Church counts fourteen epistles as his. Arrested at Jerusalem, he appealed to Caesar and was taken to Rome, where he was beheaded under Nero and buried on the road to Ostia. Feast: June 29.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Peter the ApostleSimon son of Jonah, a fisherman of Bethsaida who lived at Capernaum, was brought to Christ by his brother Andrew, and Christ named him Cephas, Peter, the rock. He confessed Jesus as 'the Christ, the Son of the living God', the rock being, in St John Chrysostom's reading, the faith of that confession. On the night of the Passion he denied his Lord three times, and the risen Christ restored him at the Sea of Tiberias with the threefold charge 'Feed my sheep'. At Pentecost he preached the first sermon; at Joppa he raised Tabitha; at Caesarea he received the Gentile Cornelius and his household. Two epistles bear his name. He was crucified at Rome under Nero, by tradition head downward. The chains that fell from him in Herod's prison are venerated on January 16. Feast: January 16; with St Paul, June 29.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia (1906-1991)A shepherd boy from Euboea with one year of school who ran away to the Holy Mountain at twelve, to the skete of Kavsokalyvia, and received there the gift of clear sight that his elders told him to guard by obedience. Illness sent him back into the world, and for thirty-three years he was chaplain at the Polyclinic in the middle of Athens, hearing confessions in a city he loved. His teaching turns away from fighting evil head on: fill the soul with the love of Christ, he said, and there is no room left for anything else, so the Christian life is joy before it is struggle. His words were gathered after his death as Wounded by Love. He went back to Kavsokalyvia to die, in 1991, and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2013. Feast: December 2.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Sabbas the SanctifiedA Cappadocian who went to Palestine at eighteen, became a disciple of St Euthymius, and in 483 founded in the gorge of the Kidron the Great Lavra that still carries his name and has been inhabited almost without a break for fifteen centuries. At its height it held some hundred and fifty monks in cells cut into the cliff. He defended Chalcedon against emperors who favoured its opponents and travelled to Constantinople at ninety on behalf of the people of Palestine. The rule of prayer kept at his Lavra became the Typikon of Jerusalem, which is the order of services the whole Orthodox Church follows. He died in 532. Feast: December 5.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Sava of SerbiaRastko, the youngest son of the Serbian ruler Stefan Nemanja, who ran away at seventeen to the Holy Mountain and was tonsured there; his father followed him and became the monk Simeon, and together they founded the Serbian monastery of Hilandar in 1198. In 1219 Sava obtained from the Patriarch at Nicaea the independence of the Serbian Church and was consecrated its first archbishop. He organised its dioceses, compiled its book of canon law and wrote its first literature, and reconciled his quarrelling brothers. He died in 1236 at Tarnovo. In 1594 the Ottomans burned his relics in Belgrade to break the people’s spirit; the great church of St Sava stands on the place. Feast: January 14.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Seraphim of Sarov (1754-1833)A merchant’s son from Kursk who entered the monastery of Sarov at twenty-four and spent most of the next fifty years alone: in a hut in the forest, on a rock where by his own account he prayed a thousand nights, and in a sealed cell. Robbers who beat him nearly to death were forgiven, and he asked that they not be punished. From 1825 he opened the door, and crowds came to a man who greeted each of them with my joy, Christ is risen, whatever the season. His conversation with the landowner Motovilov is the plainest statement in Russian spirituality of what the Christian life is for: the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, which Motovilov saw shining from his face in the snow. Acquire the spirit of peace, he said, and thousands around you will be saved. Glorified in 1903. Feast: January 2.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938)Simeon Antonov, a strong young peasant from Tambov province who came to the Russian monastery of St Panteleimon on Athos in 1892 and stayed forty-six years, most of them as steward of the mill and the workshops. After months of struggle so dark he thought himself abandoned, he saw Christ in the church, and later heard the word that became his whole teaching: keep thy mind in hell, and despair not. What he wrote in the notebooks found after his death is simple and very hard: the love of enemies is the test of whether anyone knows God at all, and a monk’s work is to pray for the whole world, for all Adam, as for himself. His disciple St Sophrony published them. He died in 1938 and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1987. Feast: September 24.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Spyridon of TrimythousA shepherd of Cyprus, married, with a daughter, who was made bishop of Trimythous and went on keeping sheep. He suffered in the last persecution and by tradition came to Nicaea, where he is said to have answered a philosopher with a single potsherd that burst into fire, ran with water and left clay in his hand: three and one. The Church sings him as simple and unlearned and a match for the learned, and a wonderworker whose gifts were for the poor. His body, incorrupt, was carried out of Constantinople when the city fell and came to Corfu in 1456, and Corfu has kept him since, carrying him through the streets four times a year. Feast: December 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Stephen the ProtomartyrOne of the seven men appointed by the Apostles to serve the tables so that they could give themselves to prayer and the word, the first deacons, and the first to die for Christ. Accused before the Sanhedrin, he answered with a speech that runs from Abraham to the Temple and ends by accusing his judges, saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, and was stoned outside the city, praying Lord, do not hold this sin against them. The young man holding the coats was Saul. The Church calls him archdeacon and keeps him on the third day of the Nativity, so that the feast of the birth is followed at once by the first birth into heaven. His relics were found in 415. Feast: December 27.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022)The third of the three the Church calls Theologian, and the one whose theology is almost entirely an account of what he saw. A young courtier in Constantinople, he was taught by the monk Symeon the Pious, saw the uncreated light as a layman, and became a monk at Stoudios and then abbot of St Mamas for twenty-five years. He taught that anyone who has not consciously received the Holy Spirit has not yet become a Christian in the full sense, and that the vision of God is not for the saints of old alone but for anyone now; the church authorities heard in that a challenge, and he was exiled across the Bosphorus in 1009. His Hymns of Divine Love are among the great mystical poetry of the Church. He died in 1022. Feast: March 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Vladimir, Equal-to-the-ApostlesGrand Prince of Kiev, a pagan who by the chronicle’s own account had set up new idols, killed a brother and kept hundreds of concubines, and who sent envoys to examine the faiths and was told of the Great Church at Constantinople that they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth. He was baptised at Cherson in 988, married the emperor’s sister Anna, and had the people of Kiev baptised in the Dnieper. The chronicle notices the change in the man: he fed the poor from his own table, and hesitated to execute even robbers, for fear of sin. He founded schools and churches and died in 1015. Feast: July 15.ImportantSaints & Church FathersThe Prophet ElijahThe Tishbite, who shut the sky for three years against the idolatry of Ahab and Jezebel, was fed by ravens at the brook and by a widow at Zarephath whose son he raised, and called down fire on Carmel before the prophets of Baal. Fleeing for his life, he went forty days to Horeb and found God not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire but in a still small voice. He did not die: a chariot of fire took him up, and he appeared again with Moses on Tabor, speaking with Christ of His departure. The monks of Carmel and of every desert took him as their father, and in Greece and Cyprus his chapels stand on the tops of hills, as near the sky as he went. Feast: July 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSs. Boris and Gleb, the Passion-bearersTwo young sons of St Vladimir, killed in 1015 on the orders of their elder brother Sviatopolk in the struggle for Kiev. Boris had his father’s army with him and would not lead it against his brother; he sent it away and waited, praying, for the men who came to kill him, and Gleb was killed soon after. They were not martyred for confessing the faith, and the Russian Church made them the first of its saints anyway, as passion-bearers: those who accept an unjust death without resisting it, in the likeness of Christ. The category is the Russian Church’s own and begins with them. Feast: July 24.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSs. Constantine & HelenThe emperor who ended the persecution and the mother who went looking for the places of the Gospel, kept together on one day as Equal-to-the-Apostles. Constantine saw the sign of the cross before the battle at the Milvian Bridge in 312, gave the Church its freedom the next year, called the bishops to Nicaea in 325, and founded Constantinople. He was baptised only on his deathbed in 337, by a bishop of Arian sympathies, and the Church has not pretended otherwise. Helena, in her seventies, travelled to the Holy Land around 326, where the Cross was found at Golgotha, and her son built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the place and churches at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. The Exaltation of the Cross keeps what she found. Feast: May 21.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Alexander NevskyPrince of Novgorod and then Grand Prince of Vladimir in the century of the Mongol conquest. He beat the Swedes on the Neva in 1240, which gave him his name, and the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus in 1242, and he turned down the Pope’s offer of alliance against the Mongols on the condition of submitting to Rome. To the Mongols he made himself a tributary and went to the Horde four times to plead for his people, choosing, as the Church remembers it, to save Rus by humility where he could not save it by arms. He took the monastic schema on his deathbed and died in 1263. Feast: November 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Ambrose of MilanThe Roman governor of northern Italy who went into the cathedral of Milan in 374 to keep order at a disputed election and heard the crowd shout for him to be bishop; he was not yet baptised, and was baptised and consecrated within a week. He held the city for the Creed of Nicaea against the Arian empress, occupying a church with his people and teaching them hymns to sing through the siege, which is how the West learned to sing hymns in church. When the emperor Theodosius had thousands massacred at Thessalonica in 390, Ambrose kept him from communion until he did public penance, and he did. He baptised Augustine. Feast: December 7.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Ambrose of OptinaAlexander Grenkov, a teacher at a church school who became a monk of the Optina hermitage and, from 1860, its elder, receiving from dawn to night the stream of people who came to him from every class: peasants with a sick cow, students losing their faith, and writers, Dostoevsky after the death of his son and Tolstoy more than once. His counsel was short, homely and often funny, and he was almost always ill. He founded the women’s monastery at Shamordino and died there in 1891. The eldership that Optina made famous, handed down from St Paisius Velichkovsky, reached its height in him. Glorified in 1988. Feast: October 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Amphilochius of Iconium (c. 340-394)Born at Caesarea in Cappadocia, the son of another Amphilochius, brother of Nonna, which made him cousin to Gregory the Theologian. He studied rhetoric under Libanius at Antioch and practised law in Constantinople, then left it for three years of prayer at Ozizala in Cappadocia, writing to Gregory and to Basil. In 374, at Basil’s urging, he became bishop of Iconium, and it was at his asking that Basil wrote On the Holy Spirit, which is addressed to him. He held a synod at Iconium on the divinity of the Spirit, sat at the Second Ecumenical Council in 381, and his verses to Seleucus, which list the books of Scripture, stand among the canons of the Church. Feast: November 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Andrew of CreteArchbishop of Gortyna in Crete and the hymnographer who gave the Church the canon as a form. His Great Canon, two hundred and fifty troparia walking through the whole of Scripture and turning every figure in it back on the singer, is read in four parts in the first week of Great Lent and entire on the Thursday of the fifth week. He was born mute by tradition and spoke first at the age of seven after receiving communion, which the Church has never tired of pointing out about the man who then wrote more hymns than almost anyone. Feast: July 4.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Anthony of the Kiev CavesA man of Liubech who went to the Holy Mountain as a young man, was tonsured there, and was sent back to Rus by his abbot to plant monasticism in it. He dug himself a cave in the bluffs above the Dnieper at Kiev around 1051 and lived there in silence; disciples came and dug their own, and from those caves grew the Lavra of the Caves. He left the building of the community to St Theodosius, who gave it the rule of the Stoudios monastery, and went on living underground. The two of them are the fathers of Russian monasticism, and the saints of the Caves lie in the tunnels they dug. He died in 1073. Feast: July 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Arsenios of CappadociaThe priest and schoolmaster of Farasa, a Greek village in Cappadocia, for more than fifty years, who taught the children their letters and the whole village their faith and was sought by Christians and Muslims alike for healing. He baptised a baby of the village in 1924 and gave him his own name, Arsenios, saying he would leave a monk behind him: the child became St Paisios. That year the exchange of populations uprooted Farasa, and he walked with his people to the sea and brought them to Greece, and died on Corfu forty days after landing, as he had said he would. Glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1986. Feast: November 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Arsenios the GreatA Roman of senatorial rank, by tradition tutor to the sons of the emperor Theodosius, who left the palace secretly around 394 and went to the monks of Scetis. The Sayings keep the voice he heard: Arsenios, flee from men and you will be saved; and again: flee, keep silence, be still, for these are the roots of sinlessness. He lived fifty-five years in the desert, so silent that visitors went away without a word from him, and remembered for the tears he shed at his work all his life. He died around 449 near Memphis, saying that the fear he felt at that hour had been with him since the day he became a monk. Feast: May 8.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Artemius the Great Martyr (d. 362)A general of Constantine the Great, who made him a patrician, and of his son Constantius, under whom he commanded in Egypt: a papyrus of 360 names Flavius Artemius as its dux. In 357 Constantius sent him to Patras for the relics of the Apostle Andrew, and his Passion adds those of Luke and Timothy, all laid in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. When Julian, who had turned back to the gods, persecuted the Church, Artemius went to him at Antioch, confessed Christ to his face and rebuked him, and in 362 he was tortured and beheaded. The deaconess Ariste carried his body to Constantinople, where his shrine became known for healing: a book of forty-five of his miracles, written down late in the seventh century, is chiefly of men cured of hernias, and he is asked for help with them still. Feast: October 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Barbara the Great MartyrBy the account the Church reads, the daughter of a rich pagan who shut her in a tower to keep her from suitors and from the Christians. She became a Christian in secret, and had a third window cut into the bath house he was building for her, for the Trinity. When he found out he handed her over to the governor, and after torture he beheaded her himself, and was killed by lightning on the way home. Because of that death she has long been prayed to by those who fear a sudden end without repentance, and she is loved across the Orthodox world, from the Levant, where the dish of boiled wheat made on her day carries her name, to Russia. Feast: December 4.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Catherine of AlexandriaBy the account the Church reads, a young noblewoman of Alexandria of great learning who confronted the emperor at a pagan festival, was set to debate fifty philosophers, and converted them, and they were burned for it. A spiked wheel meant for her broke, and she was beheaded. The tradition holds that angels carried her body to Mount Sinai, and the monastery there has borne her name since the Middle Ages and keeps her relics. Historians cannot find her in the early record, and the Church keeps her anyway as what she has always been in the liturgy: the patron of those who seek wisdom and a witness that learning belongs to Christ. Feast: November 25.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Clement of OhridA disciple of Sts Cyril and Methodius who was driven out of Moravia with the others after Methodius died and came to Bulgaria, where Prince Boris sent him to Ohrid to teach. In seven years he trained thousands of Slavic clergy, and he is credited with making the Cyrillic alphabet or bringing it into use, so that the Church of the Slavs could read in letters simpler than his teachers’ Glagolitic. He wrote sermons for the feasts in plain Slavonic for priests to read aloud, and in 893 became the first bishop of Slavic birth. He died in 916 and is one of the Seven Holy Enlighteners of the Bulgarian Church. Feast: July 27.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Clement of Rome (d. c. 101)Clement, of a noble Roman family and learned in Greek, came to the faith through the Apostle Peter and became, by the old lists, the third bishop of Rome after him, from about 92. His letter from the church of Rome to the church of Corinth, written about 96 to heal a quarrel in which its presbyters had been thrown out, is the oldest Christian writing outside the New Testament whose author is known. Tradition says he was exiled to the quarries of the Crimea, where many came to baptism through him, and that he was thrown into the sea with an anchor round his neck. In 861 Constantine, the future St Cyril, found relics held to be his at Chersonesos and carried them to Rome. Feast: November 24.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Dorotheos of GazaA well-educated young man who entered the monastery of Abba Seridos near Gaza in the sixth century under the guidance of the two great elders Barsanuphius and John, whose letters to him survive, and who later founded a monastery of his own. His Discourses to his monks are the most practical book of the ascetic tradition and have been read aloud in monasteries for fourteen hundred years. The most famous page in them draws a circle with God at the centre and people on the lines running in toward Him: the nearer they come to God, the nearer they come to one another, and the nearer to one another, the nearer to God. Feast: August 13.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Elizabeth the New MartyrPrincess Elisabeth of Hesse, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the sister of the last Empress of Russia, married the Grand Duke Sergei and was received into the Orthodox Church of her own choice. When her husband was killed by a revolutionary’s bomb in 1905 she went to the prison and asked his killer to repent. She sold her jewels, founded the Convent of Sts Martha and Mary in Moscow for nursing and the poor, and was its abbess. Arrested in 1918, she was thrown alive down a mine shaft at Alapaevsk with her companions, where they were heard singing. Her body lies in Jerusalem, at the church of St Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives. Glorified by the Church Abroad in 1981 and by Moscow in 1992. Feast: July 5 (on the Old Calendar, 18 July).ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Epiphanius of CyprusA Palestinian monk who knew Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, Coptic and some Latin, and was made bishop of Salamis in Cyprus in 367 and held it thirty-six years. His Panarion, the Medicine Chest, describes eighty heresies and gives the remedy for each, and is for many of them the only record that survives. He fought Origenism with a zeal that took him to Constantinople in extreme old age to oppose St John Chrysostom, whom he had been misled about, and he left the city and died at sea on the way home in 403. Iconoclasts later circulated writings against images under his name, which the Seventh Council did not accept as his. His Ancoratus contains a creed close to the one the Church confesses. Feast: May 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Euthymius the GreatAn Armenian priest from Melitene who went to Palestine in 406 and became the father of the monks of the Judaean desert, founding lavras where hermits lived alone in the week and came together on Saturday and Sunday. He baptised an Arab chieftain and his tribe, who settled beside the lavra and were given a bishop of their own. After Chalcedon, when most of the monks of Palestine rejected it, he held to it almost alone, and it was his counsel that brought the Empress Eudocia back into communion. His disciples included St Sabbas. He died in 473 aged ninety-six. Feast: January 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. George the Great Martyr (c. 275-303)A Roman officer from a Christian family of Cappadocia and Palestine, martyred at Nicomedia in 303 when Diocletian began the last and greatest persecution, and among the first of the martyrs whose cult spread across the whole Church. The Church calls him Great Martyr and Trophy-bearer, and his church at Lydda, where he was buried, was a place of pilgrimage within a century. The dragon on his icons is later than his cult by several hundred years and is read as it is painted: the victory of faith over the enemy, a warrior who belongs to Christ. He is the patron of Georgia and of England, of soldiers and farmers, and his feast in spring is one of the great days of the year in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Feast: April 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Germanus of ConstantinoplePatriarch of Constantinople from 715, who refused the emperor Leo III when he began the war on the icons in 726 and was deposed four years later rather than sign. His defence of the icons is cited by the Seventh Council. His treatise On the Divine Liturgy, explaining each part of the service as a moment in the life of Christ and the worship of heaven, was the standard Byzantine commentary on the Liturgy for centuries, and he wrote hymns the Church still sings on the feasts of the Theotokos. He died in retirement around 740. Feast: May 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory of SinaiA monk of Sinai in the fourteenth century who learned the prayer of the heart from an elder on Crete and came to the Holy Mountain to find almost no one practising it. He taught it there, and then, when raiders made Athos unsafe, moved to Paroria in the mountains between Byzantium and Bulgaria, where he founded a monastery that trained Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek monks together. Through his disciples, St Theodosius of Tarnovo above all, hesychasm passed into the Slavic churches a generation before it reached Russia. His writings on prayer are in the Philokalia. He died in 1346. Feast: August 8 (in the Greek and Romanian Churches, April 6).ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory the IlluminatorThe apostle of Armenia. Raised a Christian at Caesarea in Cappadocia, he returned to Armenia and was thrown by King Tiridates III into a pit at Khor Virap, where tradition keeps him for thirteen years. When the king fell into madness it was Gregory, brought up out of the pit, who healed him, and around the turn of the fourth century Tiridates was baptised and Armenia became the first kingdom to confess Christ. Gregory was consecrated at Caesarea and organised the Church of his country, and his cathedral at Etchmiadzin still stands. He lived long before Chalcedon divided the Armenian Church from the Orthodox, and both keep him. Feast: September 30.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 210-270)Born at Neocaesarea in Pontus about 210, of pagan parents of rank, he set out to study law and found instead the school of Origen at Caesarea in Palestine, where he stayed five years and became a Christian. Made bishop of his own city, he found seventeen Christians there, and it is said that when he died, about 270, seventeen pagans were left. Gregory of Nyssa wrote his Life, which tells how the Theotokos and John the Theologian appeared to him and gave him the confession of the Trinity that bears his name; Basil the Great cites him in On the Holy Spirit as a witness to the faith, which Basil’s grandmother Macrina had learned from his disciples. The wonders he worked in Pontus gave him his name. Feast: November 17.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory V of ConstantinoplePatriarch of Constantinople three times, a builder of schools and printer of books, who was on the patriarchal throne when the Greek War of Independence began in 1821. Pressed by the Sultan, he had pronounced an excommunication of the rising, and it did not save him or his flock. On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1821, after serving the Liturgy, he was hanged in his vestments from the main gate of the Patriarchate, and his body was thrown into the Bosphorus; Greek sailors recovered it and took it to Odessa, and it was brought to Athens in 1871. The gate has been kept shut ever since. Glorified in 1921. Feast: April 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Herman of Alaska (c. 1756-1836)One of the monks of Valaam sent in 1794 with the mission to Kodiak, in what was then Russian America, and the one who stayed. He was never ordained. He defended the Aleut and Alutiiq people against the traders of the Russian-American Company who were abusing them, and was hated by the company for it. He moved to Spruce Island, which he called New Valaam, kept a garden and a school for orphans, and nursed the sick through an epidemic when no one else would. He told the officers of a ship from St Petersburg that from this day, from this hour, from this minute, we should love God above all. He died in 1836 and was the first saint glorified in America, by the Orthodox Church in America in 1970. Feast: August 9.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Innocent of AlaskaA married priest from Irkutsk who volunteered for the Aleutians, sailed with his family to Unalaska in 1824, and stayed in America for most of forty years. He built his own church and his own furniture, learned Unangan, made an alphabet for it, translated the Gospel of Matthew and wrote in it an Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven that is still in print. He became bishop of Kamchatka and the Aleutians after his wife died, and ended as Metropolitan of Moscow. The Orthodox mission in America is his work as much as anyone’s. Glorified in 1977. Feast: March 31.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John of Kronstadt (1829-1908)A parish priest for fifty-three years in one place: St Andrew’s Cathedral at Kronstadt, the naval base outside Petersburg, where he arrived in 1855 and found a town of dockers, exiles and drunks. He served the Liturgy every day, which was nearly unheard of, and communed his people often, which was rarer. He founded a House of Industry in 1882 with workshops, a school, a shelter and a free dining hall, and gave away nearly everything that was given to him. By the end thousands came to each Liturgy, and he heard their sins in a general confession because no one man could hear them one by one. His diary, My Life in Christ, is still one of the most read books of Russian spirituality. Glorified by the Church Abroad in 1964 and by Moscow in 1990. Feast: December 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John of RilaA Bulgarian who gave away everything as a young man and went into the mountains to live alone, first in a hollow oak and then in a cave in the Rila range, where he lived on plants and prayer for decades. Disciples gathered in spite of him, and the monastery they built became the Rila Monastery, which kept Bulgarian learning and faith alive through the Ottoman centuries. The tsar came to see him, and he sent back most of the tsar’s gifts. His Testament to his disciples warns them against money and against honours. He died in 946 and is the patron of Bulgaria. Feast: October 19.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John the Merciful (d. 619)John was born at Amathus in Cyprus to a rich family, and was married and widowed before the people of Alexandria asked the emperor Heraclius for him as their patriarch, about 610. He held that whoever is able to give is bound to: he had the city’s poor counted, some seven thousand five hundred of them, fed them every day and called them his masters, and he spent the church’s wealth ransoming captives and sheltering the refugees who fled the Persian conquest of Palestine. When the Persians came against Alexandria he sailed home to Cyprus, and he died at Amathus in 619. His Life was written by a Cypriot bishop, Leontius of Neapolis, and Limassol keeps his feast in his own church. Feast: November 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Joseph the HesychastThe man through whom the Jesus Prayer came back to Athos in the twentieth century. He lived in the caves of the Little St Anne skete in real poverty, kept the night vigil and the prayer of the heart with a strictness that alarmed people, and taught a small brotherhood by letter and by example. When he died in 1959 the Holy Mountain was emptying. His disciples and their disciples afterwards took over and refilled Philotheou, Karakallou, Xeropotamou, Konstamonitou and Vatopaidi, and founded houses in Greece, Cyprus and America, so that most of the Athonite revival traces back to that cave. Glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2020. Feast: August 16.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Justin Martyr (c. 100-165)A philosopher from Flavia Neapolis in Samaria who went through the schools - Stoic, Peripatetic, Pythagorean, Platonist - and was brought to Christ by an old man on a beach who told him the prophets had seen what the philosophers were looking for. He kept his philosopher’s cloak, opened a school in Rome, and wrote some of the first reasoned defences of the faith addressed to the emperors. His teaching that seeds of the Word were scattered among the Greeks, so that whatever anyone said well belongs to Christians, gave the Church a way to receive what was true in philosophy. His First Apology contains the oldest description of a Sunday Eucharist outside the New Testament. Denounced by a rival, he was beheaded in Rome with six of his students around 165. Feast: June 1.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Justin PopovicSerbian monk, theologian and confessor, kept for decades under the communist authorities in the monastery of Celije where he was forbidden to teach and wrote anyway. His Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church runs to three volumes and his Lives of the Saints to twelve, written by hand, month by month, for a Church that had lost the books. His theme is that the Church is the God-man Christ extended through the ages, and that any humanism which stops at man is therefore an amputation. He was a sharp critic of ecumenism as practised in his lifetime and said so in print at some cost. Glorified by the Serbian Church in 2010. Feast: June 1.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Lazarus of the Four DaysThe friend of Christ from Bethany, whose death made Jesus weep and whom He called out of the tomb after four days, still bound in the grave clothes. The chief priests plotted to kill him as well, because many believed on his account. The tradition of the Church of Cyprus is that he fled there, was made bishop of Kition by Barnabas and Paul, and lived thirty more years; his tomb is under the church that bears his name in Larnaca, where bones were found beneath the altar in 1972. The whole Church keeps the Saturday before Palm Sunday as his, Lazarus Saturday, when the Resurrection is announced a week early. Feast: October 17.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Leo the Great, Pope of RomeBishop of Rome from 440 to 461, whom the Orthodox Church keeps among the Fathers. His letter to Flavian of Constantinople, the Tome, set out that Christ is one Person in two natures, each doing what belongs to it, and at Chalcedon it was read aloud and received with the acclamation that Peter had spoken through Leo and that Cyril had taught the same: the bishops accepted it because they had checked it against St Cyril, not because Rome had spoken. He himself refused to accept the council’s twenty-eighth canon, which gave Constantinople the second place. He met Attila by the Mincio in northern Italy in 452 and Rome was spared. Feast: February 18.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Longinus the CenturionThe centurion in charge at the Crucifixion, who, when the earth shook as Christ died, said: "Truly this was the Son of God" (Matthew 27:54). Tradition names him Longinus, a Cappadocian serving under Pilate in the reign of Tiberius, and gives his unit the sealing and the guard of the tomb as well, so that he was a witness of the Resurrection too. He gave up his rank and his wealth and went home to Cappadocia with two of his men to preach it. When soldiers came to Cappadocia to kill him, he received them as his guests and had his grave made ready, and he and his two companions were beheaded. His head was carried to Jerusalem as proof of his death, and a blind widow of Cappadocia, shown in a dream where it lay, found it outside the city and received her sight. Feast: October 16.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Macarius the GreatA camel driver from the Nile delta who went into the desert of Scetis at thirty and stayed sixty years, and around whom one of the four great monastic settlements of Egypt grew. The Sayings preserve him as one of the desert’s most quoted fathers, and as the one who answered a brother asking how to be saved by telling him to go and speak to the dead, praise them and insult them, and learn from their silence. The Spiritual Homilies that circulate under his name are of disputed authorship and are read for their teaching on the heart as the place where God is met, which is one of the springs of the hesychast tradition. Feast: January 19.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Macrina the YoungerThe eldest of the ten children of a Cappadocian family that gave the Church three bishops, and by the account of her brother Gregory of Nyssa the one who taught them all. After her betrothed died she refused to marry, turned the family estate at Annesi into a community of women where she and her mother lived with their former servants as equals, and drew her brother Basil, back from Athens full of himself, toward the monastic life. Gregory wrote her Life, and set his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection at her deathbed, where she argues with him about death and wins. She died in 379. Feast: July 19.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Maria of ParisElizabeth Pilenko, a poet of the Petersburg literary world and a revolutionary, deputy mayor of Anapa in 1918, who emigrated to Paris, buried a daughter, and was tonsured a nun in 1932 on the condition that she would not be sent to a convent. She rented a house in the rue de Lourmel and filled it with the destitute: a hostel, a canteen, a chapel she decorated herself. Under the German occupation she and Fr Dimitri Klepinin issued baptismal certificates to Jews and hid people in the house. She was arrested in 1943 and died at Ravensbruck on 31 March 1945, sent to the gas chamber - by a tradition that came from the camp, in place of another woman. Glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2004 with her son and Fr Dimitri. Feast: July 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Marina the Great MartyrBy the account the Church reads, a girl of fifteen at Antioch in Pisidia, the daughter of a pagan priest, brought up by a Christian nurse, who refused the governor both his gods and his proposal of marriage. In prison, the story goes, the devil came to her and she seized him and beat him with a hammer, which is how she is painted; she was beheaded around 304. The West knows her as Margaret. Her right hand is kept at the Vatopedi monastery on the Holy Mountain, and she is loved especially by the islands, where her day is one of the feasts of the summer. Feast: July 17.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Mark of Ephesus (1394-1444)Manuel Eugenikos, a teacher of rhetoric who became a monk and, in 1437, Metropolitan of Ephesus, the see of St John, in order to go to the council of union at Ferrara and Florence as the leading theologian of the Greek delegation. For fifteen months, with the empire asking for Western help against the Turks, he argued the Filioque, purgatory, the epiclesis and the papal claims, and when the decree of union was put before the Greeks he alone of the bishops present would not sign it. At home he became the voice of those who rejected it, and they were most of the Church: the clergy and people of Constantinople would not receive the union, and the Eastern patriarchs repudiated it. He died in 1444, asking that no one who had accepted it pray at his funeral. Glorified in 1734. Feast: January 19.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Mary MagdaleneA woman of Magdala in Galilee out of whom Christ cast seven demons, who followed Him and provided for Him, stood at the cross when the disciples had fled, came to the tomb with myrrh before dawn, and was the first to see Him risen, sent by Him to tell the Apostles. The Church calls her Equal-to-the-Apostles. The Orthodox tradition has never made her the sinful woman of Luke 7: that identification comes from a sermon of Pope Gregory the Great in 591, and it is the reason the West painted her as a penitent for a thousand years. The East kept her as a witness. By tradition she preached in Rome and came before Tiberius with a red egg, the reason for the eggs of Pascha, and died at Ephesus. Feast: July 22.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Matrona of MoscowBorn blind and without eyes in a village in Tula province in 1881, and unable to walk from the age of seventeen. She spent the Soviet decades moved from one room to another across Moscow by whoever would take her, praying with the stream of people who found her, and she died in 1952 saying they should come to her grave and speak to her as if she were alive. They did, in such numbers that the grave became one of the few open places of pilgrimage in the Soviet Union. Glorified in 1999 and now among the most visited saints in Russia. Feast: April 19 (on the Old Calendar, 2 May).ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Matthew the EvangelistLevi, a tax collector at Capernaum, a collaborator in the eyes of his people, who got up from his table when Christ said follow me and gave a dinner for his fellow publicans, at which the Pharisees asked why the Teacher ate with sinners. His Gospel was written, by the earliest account, for Jews who had believed, and shows Christ fulfilling the Law and the prophets at every turn; it holds the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s Prayer in the form the Church says it. Tradition sends him to preach in the East and has him die a martyr. Feast: November 16.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Menas the Great Martyr (d. c. 304)An Egyptian, born to pagan parents in the middle of the third century and a Christian from his youth, who served with distinction in the Roman cavalry. When Diocletian and Maximian ordered the persecution he laid down his command and withdrew to live as an ascetic; at about fifty he came down into the city on a pagan feast day, confessed Christ before the crowd, and was imprisoned, tortured and beheaded, about 304, at Cotyaeum in Phrygia by the Greek synaxarion. His body was carried home to Egypt, and his shrine at Abu Mena, west of Alexandria, became one of the great pilgrimages of the ancient world, its little clay flasks of oil taken home all round the Mediterranean. The Patriarchate of Alexandria keeps him as its own, and Heraklion in Crete as its patron since the Easter of 1826, when the city’s Christians believed he saved them. Feast: November 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Methodius the ConfessorA monk from Syracuse in Sicily who carried a letter from the Pope defending the icons to the iconoclast emperor Michael II, and was flogged and shut for years in a tomb on an island with two thieves. Freed, he went on defending the icons. In 843, after the death of the last iconoclast emperor, the Empress Theodora had him made Patriarch, and on the first Sunday of Lent that year they carried the icons back into Hagia Sophia: the Triumph of Orthodoxy, which the Church keeps on that Sunday every year and for which the Synodikon was drawn up. He died in 847. Feast: June 14.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Moses the BlackAn Ethiopian slave in Egypt, dismissed by his master for theft and violence, who became the leader of a band of robbers and was feared along the Nile, and then became a monk at Scetis and a priest. The Sayings keep him as the father who would not judge: summoned to a council to condemn a brother, he came carrying a basket full of holes, filled with sand, and said, my sins run out behind me and I do not see them, and I have come today to judge the sins of another. When Berber raiders came in about 405 he told his brothers to flee and stayed, with seven who would not leave him, and they were killed. Feast: August 28.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nicholas CabasilasA layman of Thessalonica in the fourteenth century, a court official and friend of emperors, who wrote two of the finest books of Orthodox theology without ever being ordained. His Commentary on the Divine Liturgy explains the service as the work of Christ and the offering of the whole Church, and defends the epiclesis against the Latin theologians of his day. The Life in Christ shows the Christian life as flowing from baptism, chrismation and communion rather than from private effort: the mysteries are Christ Himself given, and holiness is living what one has received. He stood with St Gregory Palamas. The Ecumenical Patriarchate glorified him in 1983. Feast: June 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nicholas of JapanIvan Kasatkin, a graduate of the Smolensk seminary, read an account of Japan and volunteered for the consular chapel at Hakodate, which he reached in 1861. He gave eight years to the language, the history and the Buddhist and Shinto classics before he attempted to preach, on the principle that a missionary who has not understood a people has nothing to say to them. His first convert was Sawabe Takuma, a Shinto priest and swordsman who came to kill him and stayed to argue. He translated the services and much of the Scriptures into Japanese, built the cathedral in Tokyo, and in the war of 1904 told the Japanese Orthodox to pray for their own country while he himself did not serve, and cared for the Russian prisoners. Glorified in 1970. Feast: February 3.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nil SorskyA monk who went to the Holy Mountain in the fifteenth century, learned the prayer of the heart there, and came home to found a skete in the forests on the Sora river, where a few monks lived in separate cells, worked with their hands and owned nothing. He wrote a rule for skete life drawn from the Fathers of the Philokalia. At the council of 1503 he spoke for those who held that monasteries should not own villages and serfs, against St Joseph of Volokolamsk, and lost; the two are both saints, and the argument between the non-possessors and the possessors ran through Russian monasticism for centuries. He died in 1508. Feast: May 7.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nino, Equal-to-the-ApostlesA young woman from Cappadocia who, by the Georgian tradition, came to Kartli in the fourth century as a captive or a pilgrim carrying a cross made of two vine branches bound with her own hair. She lived by the royal city of Mtskheta, prayed, and healed: a child, then Queen Nana. King Mirian held out until, lost in a sudden darkness on a hunt, he prayed to the God of Nino and saw the light return; he and his people were baptised, and he asked the emperor for priests. The church of Svetitskhoveli rose over the place where she prayed. She died at Bodbe in Kakheti, where she is buried and where a convent keeps her grave, and her vine cross is the emblem of the Georgian Church. Feast: January 14.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Olga, Equal-to-the-ApostlesPrincess of Kiev, the widow of Prince Igor, whom the Drevlians killed, and whose revenge on them the chronicle tells without softening. Ruling for her young son, she went to Constantinople around 957 and was baptised there, the first of the ruling house of Rus to become a Christian. She could not persuade her son Sviatoslav, who said his warriors would laugh at him, but she raised her grandson Vladimir, who would baptise the land. She died in 969 and asked for a Christian burial without a pagan feast. The Church calls her the morning star before the sun. Feast: July 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Pachomius the GreatThe father of communal monasticism. A conscript in the Roman army, he was fed by Christians at Thebes who expected nothing for it, and he resolved to serve their God. After years as a hermit he founded at Tabennisi a monastery where monks lived under one roof, one rule, one table and one superior, which is the form almost every monastery in the world has kept since. His Rule reached the West through the translation of St Jerome and stands behind the Rule of St Benedict. By his death nine monasteries and two convents followed it. Feast: May 15.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722-1794)A priest’s son from Poltava who left the Kiev Academy because it taught him nothing he wanted to know, wandered the monasteries of Moldavia and came to the Holy Mountain, where he began collecting and correcting the Greek texts on the prayer of the heart. He gathered a brotherhood that grew to several hundred and moved it across the Danube to Moldavia, to Dragomirna, Secu and finally Neamt, where the brothers served in Slavonic and Romanian and copied and translated day and night. His Slavonic Philokalia, printed in Moscow in 1793, carried hesychasm north into Russia, and through his disciples the eldership of Optina and the Russian startsy began. He died at Neamt in 1794. Glorified by the Russian Church in 1988 and by the Romanian Church in 1992. Feast: November 15.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Parascheva of IasiAn eleventh-century woman from Epivates on the Sea of Marmara who gave away her clothes to a beggar as a child, left home, and lived as a solitary in the desert of the Jordan until she was warned in a dream to go home to die. Her relics made a long journey after her, following the fortunes of the Orthodox peoples: to Tarnovo in Bulgaria, to Belgrade, to Constantinople, and in 1641 to Iasi in Moldavia, where they are kept in the cathedral. Every October hundreds of thousands of pilgrims queue for days to venerate them. She is called Petka among the Serbs and Bulgarians. Feast: October 14.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Paraskevi of RomeA second-century Christian of Rome named for Friday, the day of the Cross, because she was born on one. By the account the Church reads, she gave away her inheritance, preached, and was tortured under Antoninus Pius, and restored the sight of an emperor who had been blinded; she was beheaded. The Church prays to her for the healing of eyes and she is painted holding a dish with two eyes on it. There are chapels to her and springs named for her across Greece, Cyprus and the Balkans, and her day at the height of summer is a festival in hundreds of villages. Feast: July 26.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Photius the Great (c. 810-893)The most learned man of ninth-century Byzantium, a layman and imperial secretary, made Patriarch of Constantinople in 858 in six days, from layman to patriarch, when his predecessor was forced out. Pope Nicholas I refused to recognise him, and the quarrel that followed was the first open break between Rome and the East. Photius answered on the ground that mattered: in his encyclical of 867 and his Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit he named the Filioque, then spreading in the West, as a change to the Creed and an error about the Trinity. Deposed and restored, he presided at the council of 879-880, which Rome’s own legates attended and which forbade any addition to the Creed. It was under him that Cyril and Methodius went to the Slavs. His Bibliotheca preserves summaries and extracts of hundreds of ancient books, many of them otherwise lost. Feast: February 6.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Polycarp of Smyrna (c. 69-155)Bishop of Smyrna, taught by the Apostle John and teacher in his turn of St Irenaeus. In old age he travelled to Rome to talk with its bishop about the date of Pascha, and the two parted in peace keeping different customs, which the Church has remembered ever since as the way a disagreement about practice should end. Arrested at eighty-six and told to curse Christ to save himself, he answered: eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong; how can I blaspheme my King who saved me? The account of his death, written by his own church to another, is the oldest martyrdom narrative outside the New Testament, and the first place the Church is seen keeping the day of a martyr’s death as his birthday. Feast: February 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Raphael of BrooklynRaphael Hawaweeny, born in Beirut to a Damascene family, educated at Halki and the Kiev Academy, who came to New York in 1895 at the request of the Syrian Orthodox immigrants there, who had no priest who spoke their language. He built St Nicholas Cathedral in Brooklyn, travelled the continent on foot and by rail looking for scattered Orthodox families, founded some thirty parishes and an Arabic journal, and in 1904 became the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in North America, at the hands of St Tikhon. He died in 1915. Glorified by the Orthodox Church in America and the Antiochian Archdiocese in 2000. Feast: February 27.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Romanos the Melodist (c. 490-556)A Syrian from Emesa, a deacon at Beirut and then at the church of the Theotokos in Constantinople, who by tradition had no gift for singing until, on the eve of the Nativity, the Mother of God appeared to him in sleep and gave him a scroll to eat, and he rose and sang Today the Virgin gives birth to the One above all being. That hymn is still sung on the feast. He is the master of the kontakion, the long sung sermon in verse, with a refrain taken up by the people after every stanza, in which Scripture is dramatised with dialogue between its characters. Tradition credits him with a thousand; about sixty survive that are certainly his. The Akathist is sometimes attributed to him and the attribution is disputed. Feast: October 1.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Simeon the StyliteA Syrian shepherd boy whose asceticism was too severe for any monastery to keep him, who in about 423 climbed a pillar near Aleppo to escape the crowds that came to him, and lived on top of pillars, each taller than the last, for thirty-seven years. He preached from it twice a day, settled disputes, wrote to emperors about the defence of Chalcedon, and converted whole tribes of nomads. Theodoret, who visited him, is the eyewitness. After his death in 459 a great church was built around the column, and its ruins stand north-west of Aleppo. His day is the first of the Church year. Feast: September 1.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Sophronius of JerusalemA scholar of Damascus who wandered the monasteries of the East with his friend John Moschus, whose Spiritual Meadow records what they found. He was the first to see that the compromise of one energy in Christ, which the emperor hoped would reunite the Church, gave away His humanity, and as Patriarch of Jerusalem from 634 his Synodical Letter set out the answer the Sixth Council later gave. In 638, with the city besieged, he surrendered Jerusalem to the Caliph Umar and died within months. He wrote the Life of St Mary of Egypt, and prayers of the Great Blessing of the Waters are traditionally his. Feast: March 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Sophrony of EssexA Russian painter who left Moscow for Paris, abandoned art because he judged it was taking him away from God, went to Athos, and there became the disciple and afterwards the witness of St Silouan. He published the elder’s writings with a long introduction that is a work of theology in its own right, and in 1959 founded a monastery of men and women together at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex. His own book, We Shall See Him as He Is, is an account of personhood and of the prayer for the whole Adam that he learned from Silouan. Glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2019. Feast: July 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Tamar, Queen of GeorgiaCrowned in 1184 and styled king of kings, who ruled Georgia at the height of its power and its culture. She summoned a church council at the start of her reign to reform the clergy, built churches and monasteries, among them the cave city of Vardzia, sent gifts to the monasteries of Athos, Sinai and Jerusalem, and was remembered for abolishing the death penalty and mutilation in her courts. The great Georgian poem, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, is dedicated to her. Her burial place was kept secret and has never been found. The Georgian Church keeps her as a righteous queen. Feast: May 1.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Tarasius of ConstantinopleA layman and imperial secretary made Patriarch of Constantinople in 784, at the Empress Irene’s wish and on his own condition that a council would restore the icons. The first attempt, in 786, was broken up by soldiers loyal to the iconoclast party; the second, at Nicaea in 787, met under his presidency and became the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which defined that icons are to be venerated and their honour passes to the one they show. He was known for his care of the poor and the strictness of his own life. He died in 806. Feast: February 25.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Thekla, Equal-to-the-ApostlesA young woman of Iconium who heard St Paul preaching from a window next door, broke off her engagement, and followed him. Her story is told in the second-century Acts of Paul and Thekla, which the Church reads for its witness rather than for its history: condemned to be burned, she was saved by a storm; thrown to the beasts, she was defended by a lioness. She taught and lived out her life near Seleucia, where her shrine became one of the great places of pilgrimage of the ancient world, visited by the pilgrim Egeria, and where St Gregory the Theologian went to pray. The Church calls her Protomartyr among women and Equal-to-the-Apostles. Feast: September 24.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Theodore the RecruitA newly enlisted soldier at Amasea in Pontus who refused to sacrifice, was given time to think better of it, and used it to set fire to the temple of the mother of the gods. He was burned alive around 306. St Gregory of Nyssa preached his panegyric at his shrine, and it is the earliest witness to him. The Church keeps him a second time on the first Saturday of Great Lent, remembering the tradition that when Julian the Apostate had the food in the markets of Constantinople sprinkled with the blood of sacrifices, Theodore appeared to the bishop and told him to feed the people boiled wheat instead: which is why koliva is blessed that day. Feast: February 17.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Theodore the Studite (759-826)Abbot of the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople, which he turned into a community of a thousand monks under a rule of work, obedience, frequent confession and liturgical order that Athos and the Caves of Kiev later adopted. He was exiled three times: twice for refusing to bless an emperor’s adulterous remarriage, and once for six years in the second wave of iconoclasm, after he led his monks in procession around the monastery on Palm Sunday of 815 carrying the icons the emperor had forbidden. His Refutations of the iconoclasts sharpened the argument of the Seventh Council: an icon shows the person, and Christ is a person who can be shown, so to refuse His image is to deny that He became flesh. His letters, more than five hundred of them, carried the resistance while he was in prison. He died in 826. Feast: November 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Theodosius the CenobiarchA Cappadocian who founded near Bethlehem the great common-life monastery of the Judaean desert, with guest houses, an infirmary, a home for the old and a house for the mentally ill, and churches so that Greeks, Armenians and the Bessi from Thrace could each serve in their own language, with all coming together for communion. He and St Sabbas were made heads of all the monks of Palestine, he of those in community, which is his title. When the emperor Anastasius tried to impose a creed against Chalcedon, the two of them read an anathema of it from the pulpit in Jerusalem. He died in 529 at a hundred and five. Feast: January 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894)George Govorov, a priest’s son who became a scholar-monk, served in the Russian mission in Jerusalem and in Constantinople, and was a bishop at Tambov and Vladimir before he asked to retire in 1866. At the hermitage of Vysha he shut himself into two rooms for the last twenty-two years of his life, served the Liturgy alone, and wrote. He translated the Philokalia into Russian in five volumes and adapted it for readers in the world, wrote The Path to Salvation, commented on the Psalms and the letters of Paul, and answered letters: twenty or forty a day, to anyone who wrote, which is how most of his teaching on prayer of the heart reached ordinary people. Glorified in 1988. Feast: January 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Thomas the ApostleThe Twin, who said let us go and die with Him when Christ turned toward Jerusalem, and who was not there on the evening of the Resurrection. Unless I see and touch, I will not believe, he said, and a week later Christ came and let him, and Thomas answered with the first plain confession in the Gospels that Jesus is God: my Lord and my God. The Church keeps that Sunday, the first after Pascha, as his, and calls his unbelief good, because it made the Resurrection something touched. By the tradition of the Christians of India, who carry his name, he preached there and was killed with a spear near Madras. Feast: October 6.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Tikhon of Moscow (1865-1925)Vasily Bellavin, a village priest’s son who became bishop of the Aleutians and North America from 1898 to 1907, moved its see to New York, built St Nicholas Cathedral there and founded St Tikhon’s Monastery in Pennsylvania. In November 1917, eleven days after the Bolsheviks took power, the restored Council of the Russian Church elected him Patriarch of Moscow, the first in two centuries, and he led the Church through the first years of the persecution. He anathematised those who shed innocent blood, protested the seizure of church valuables in 1922, was arrested and held for a year, and was kept under watch in the Donskoy Monastery until his death on the Annunciation in 1925. Glorified by the Church Abroad in 1981 and by Moscow in 1989. Feast: March 25 (on the Old Calendar, 7 April).ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Tikhon of ZadonskThe son of a poor village sexton who became Bishop of Voronezh, worked himself into illness in four years, and retired to the monastery at Zadonsk, where he spent his last fourteen years in a cell giving everything he had to the poor. He wrote On True Christianity and A Spiritual Treasure Gathered from the World, which finds a lesson of the Gospel in everything from a ploughed field to a stove. He was known to bear insults without answering them, and once asked forgiveness of a nobleman who had struck him. Dostoevsky drew on him for the elder Zosima. He died in 1783 and was glorified in 1861. Feast: August 13.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Xenia of PetersburgA fool for Christ in eighteenth century Petersburg. Widowed at twenty-six when her husband died without confession or communion, she gave away the house and everything in it, put on his uniform, answered to his name and not her own, and spent forty-five years in the streets of the city taking his repentance on herself. She was thought mad and then she was thought holy. She carried bricks by night to the builders of the church on the Smolensk cemetery, and people still write to her at the chapel over her grave. Glorified by the Russian Church in 1988. Feast: January 24.ImportantSaints & Church FathersThe Forty Martyrs of SebasteForty soldiers of a Roman legion stationed at Sebaste in Armenia who refused to sacrifice under Licinius around 320 and were stripped and left all night on a frozen lake, with a warm bath house lit on the shore for any who would deny Christ. One went. He died on the threshold, and one of the guards, seeing crowns come down on the thirty-nine, threw off his clothes and walked out on to the ice to make the forty. St Basil preached on them at Caesarea a generation later, and his homily is how the Church has told it since. Their day usually falls in Lent and is then kept with the Presanctified Liturgy. Feast: March 9.Saints & Church FathersSs. Boniface and AglaeAglae, a rich and noble woman of Rome known for her charity, and Boniface, the honest and open-handed steward of her estates, lived together in sin, and both came to repent of it. She sent him to the East to bring back the relics of martyrs, and at Tarsus in Cilicia, seeing Christians tortured for their faith, he declared that he was one of them, and was put to death, about 290. His companions brought his body home to Rome, where Aglae received it as a martyr’s, gave away all she had, and lived the rest of her life in penance and prayer. The Church keeps the two together as witnesses that repentance restores what sin had lost. Feast: December 19.Saints & Church FathersSs. Cosmas and Damian of AsiaTwo brothers of Asia Minor whose father died when they were small, and whose mother, Theodotia, brought them up in the faith and had them taught medicine. They healed for nothing, taking the Lord’s word as it stands, "freely ye have received, freely give" (Matthew 10:8), and so the Church calls them the Unmercenaries, anargyroi, "without silver"; tradition adds that they tended animals too. Unlike the two other pairs of the same names, the Romans kept on 1 July and the Arabians on 17 October, who died as martyrs, these two died in peace. They are named with Panteleimon and the other unmercenary physicians in the prayer of Holy Unction. Feast: November 1.Saints & Church FathersSs. Gurias, Samonas and AbibusThree confessors of Edessa, kept together because they were buried together. Gurias and Samonas were seized in the persecution of Diocletian for turning people from the idols, and beheaded after long torture, about 306. Abibus, a deacon of the same country, was burned alive under Licinius some years later for his preaching, and laid in their tomb. The tomb is the setting of the story of Euphemia, a girl of Edessa married to a Gothic soldier who deceived her, whom the three delivered, and ever since they have been asked to guard marriages and to reconcile husband and wife. Their day is the first of the Nativity Fast, and Nicosia has their church. Feast: November 15.Saints & Church FathersSs. Menas, Hermogenes and EugraphusMenas, called Kallikelados, "the fair-voiced", for his eloquence, was an Athenian of a pagan family who came to the faith by reading the Scriptures and the lives of the saints, and was baptized. Not knowing it, the emperor Maximinus sent him to govern Alexandria, and when the order came to persecute, Menas not only refused it but brought many to Christ. Maximinus sent Hermogenes to replace him. Hermogenes had Menas tortured and left in prison to die, and finding him alive and healed, believed, was baptized by him, and was afterwards made a bishop. Then both confessed Christ before the emperor himself, with Eugraphus, Menas’s secretary, and all three were put to death, about 313. This is not the Great Martyr Menas of 11 November. Feast: December 10.Saints & Church FathersSs. Neophytos, Ignatios, Prokopios and Neilos of MachairasNeophytos and Ignatios, hermits from the desert of the Jordan, came to Cyprus, and in 1145, by the tradition of the house, found in a cave on the mountain of Machairas an icon of the Theotokos held to have been painted by the Apostle Luke; in 1148 they founded a monastery round it. After Neophytos died, Ignatios and the monk Prokopios went to Constantinople and obtained from the emperor Manuel Komnenos the whole mountain and the rank of a stavropegion, answerable to no local bishop. Neilos, who joined them, became the first abbot, enlarged the church, and left the monastery the written rule for a common life that bears his name. Feast: December 13.Saints & Church FathersSt. Anastasia the Deliverer from PotionsA Roman woman who spent her fortune going from prison to prison in the last persecution, feeding, washing and treating the confessors in chains, and who was burned at Sirmium around 304. Her name means resurrection. Her relics were brought to Constantinople in the fifth century, and she was called Pharmakolytria, the one who loosens the effects of poison and potions, because of the healings asked of her. The monastery that bears her name near Thessaloniki has kept a relic of her since the ninth century. Feast: December 22.Saints & Church FathersSt. Anastasia the RomanLeft an orphan at three, Anastasia was brought up in a women’s monastery near Rome by its abbess, Sophia, and became a nun there. In one of the persecutions of the third century the governor Probus had her brought before him and urged her to spare her youth and her beauty, worship the gods and marry; she answered that the only youth and beauty she knew were the ones Christ gives. He had her stripped, beaten and mutilated, and at last beheaded; a Christian named Cyril, who brought her water, was beheaded for it. Sophia and two others buried her. Her right tibia is kept at the monastery of Grigoriou on Mount Athos. She is not St Anastasia the Deliverer from Potions, whose day is 22 December. Feast: October 29.Saints & Church FathersSt. Andrew in Krisei (d. 767)Not the archbishop of Crete who wrote the Great Canon, but a monk of the same island who died a generation after him. Andrew came to Constantinople in the reign of Constantine V, the emperor who made the destruction of icons law and filled his prisons with those who would not comply, and there, before the emperor himself, he rebuked him: whoever suffers for the icons suffers for Christ, and whoever insults the icon on which Christ is shown insults Christ. He was tortured and dragged through the streets to his death in 767. Christians buried him at a place called Krisis, "the Judgment", which gave him his name, and the monastery of St Andrew in Krisei, dedicated to him, still stands in Istanbul as the Koca Mustafa Pasha mosque. St Joseph the Hymnographer wrote his canon. Feast: October 17.Saints & Church FathersSt. Charalambos the HieromartyrA priest of Magnesia in Asia Minor who, by the tradition of the Church, was more than a hundred years old when he was tortured and put to death under Septimius Severus around 202 for refusing to stop preaching. He is prayed to against plague and epidemic. His skull is kept at the monastery of St Stephen at the Meteora, and churches dedicated to him are found in almost every Greek town. Feast: February 10.Saints & Church FathersSt. Cosmas of Aetolia (1714-1779)A monk of the Philotheou monastery on Athos who asked leave of the Patriarch in 1760 to preach, and spent the next nineteen years walking the villages of Ottoman Greece and southern Albania. He preached in the open air to crowds of thousands, from a portable wooden platform, in plain spoken Greek, and wherever he went he asked for a school: tradition counts two hundred founded, so that children would learn to read the faith for themselves. His sayings about the future were remembered and repeated long after him. Accused of stirring up the people, he was hanged near Berat in 1779 without a trial, and his body thrown into a river. He is called Equal-to-the-Apostles. Glorified in 1961. Feast: August 24.Saints & Church FathersSt. Daniel the Stylite (409-493)Given to God by his parents, Daniel was in a monastery by the age of twelve, and as a young monk he met Simeon the Stylite on his pillar and was blessed by him. He settled at Anaplus on the Bosporus, above Constantinople, and after Simeon died, in 460, went up a pillar of his own, where he stood for thirty-three years through heat and snow, praying, counselling and healing; the emperor Leo raised a taller pillar for him and a church beside it. Only once did he come down: in 476, when the usurper Basiliscus decreed against the Council of Chalcedon, Daniel went into the city, rebuked him before the people, and the decree was withdrawn. He died on his pillar in 493, aged eighty-four. Feast: December 11.Saints & Church FathersSt. George Karslidis (1901-1959)Athanasios Karslidis was born in 1901 at Argyroupolis in Pontus and orphaned young. At seven he went on pilgrimage to the monastery of Panagia Soumela and stayed as a novice; he was tonsured in 1919 as Symeon and ordained deacon. Driven out with the Greeks of Pontus, he lived in Georgia under the Soviets, where he was imprisoned, paraded in mockery and condemned to be shot, and lived. Ordained priest in 1925, when he was named George, he became a confessor to many, and in 1929 he came to Sipsa, now Taxiarches, near Drama in Macedonia, where he spent the thirty years left to him; the Bulgarian occupiers condemned him to death in 1941, and again he was spared. He died on 4 November 1959, and in 2008 Patriarch Bartholomew proclaimed him a saint at the monastery he had founded there. Feast: November 4.Saints & Church FathersSt. Gerasimos of the JordanA Lycian monk who founded a lavra near the Jordan in the fifth century, where hermits lived alone on bread, water and dates through the week and came in to the community on Saturday and Sunday. As a young monk he was drawn for a time into the teaching of Eutyches, and St Euthymius brought him back. The Spiritual Meadow tells the story he is painted with: a lion that came to him lame, whose paw he healed, and which stayed and served the monastery, and when he died lay down on his grave and would not eat, and died there. He died in 475. Feast: March 4.Saints & Church FathersSt. Iakovos of EviaIakovos Tsalikis, born in Asia Minor in 1920 and brought to Greece as a child in the expulsions of 1922, who grew up in a village of Evia, was tonsured at the monastery of St David the Elder, and was its abbot from 1975. He spent long hours in confession with the crowds who came to the monastery, was known for his simplicity and for a gift of healing, and said of himself that he was an uneducated man who knew only the services. He died on the feast of the Entry of the Theotokos in 1991. Glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2017. Feast: November 22.Saints & Church FathersSt. James the Persian (d. 421)James was a noble of Beth Lapat in Persia, born a Christian, who at the court of Yazdegerd I denied Christ to keep the king’s friendship. His mother and his wife wrote to him that they would have nothing more to do with him while he denied his Lord, and he repented; when Bahram V came to the throne James confessed Christ before him, and in 421 he was condemned to be cut apart joint by joint, fingers and toes, hands and feet, arms and legs, praising God at every cut, until he was beheaded. In Latin he is called Intercisus, "cut in pieces", and the Church sings that his body was pruned like a vine. His church in the walled city of Nicosia stands on the ceasefire line. Feast: November 27.Saints & Church FathersSt. John Lampadistis (10th c.)John was born in the tenth century at Lampadou in Cyprus, the only son, long prayed for, of a priest named Kyriakos and his wife Anna. At eighteen he was betrothed to the daughter of a rich family, though he wished to give his whole life to God, and when he drew back her people took it for an insult and had a sorcerer poison his food. He ate little, as was his habit, and lived, but he was blinded. He forgave them and went with his servant, another John, to the monastery of St Herakleidios in the Marathasa valley, where he lived as a hermit, known for healing the possessed, until he died at twenty-two on 4 October. The monastery, across the river from Kalopanagiotis, now bears his name: his tomb is in its chapel and his skull in a silver reliquary beside it, among the painted churches of the Troodos that UNESCO listed in 1985. Feast: October 4.Saints & Church FathersSt. Luke of Crimea (1877-1961)Valentin Voyno-Yasenetsky, a surgeon, who after his wife died in 1919 was ordained a priest in Tashkent and then consecrated a bishop in secret, taking the name Luke. He was arrested for the first time in 1923 and spent eleven years in prison and exile in Siberia, operating wherever they sent him and writing a textbook on septic surgery that the state awarded the Stalin Prize in 1946, while he was still a bishop, and whose prize money he gave to children orphaned by the war. As Archbishop of Crimea he operated, taught and served until he went blind. He died in 1961. A doctor who prayed before every operation and marked the incision site with iodine in the sign of the cross. Glorified in 2000. Feast: May 29 (on the Old Calendar, 11 June); the Greek and Romanian Churches keep him on 11 June.Saints & Church FathersSt. Marcellus of the Unsleeping Ones (d. 485)Marcellus came from Apamea in Syria, studied at Antioch and Ephesus, and joined the brotherhood that Alexander the Unsleeping had gathered near Constantinople, whose monks kept the praise of God going day and night, one choir relieving another. After Alexander and his successor he was made abbot against his will, and under him the Akoimetoi, "the unsleeping", in choirs of Greek, Latin and Syriac speakers, became the most renowned house of the city; he built a great church, a hospital and a hostel for the homeless. He stood with the Council of Chalcedon against the teaching of Eutyches, at the council and after it, and died in peace in 485. Feast: December 29.Saints & Church FathersSt. Melania the Younger (c. 383-439)Melania was born in Rome about 383 to one of its richest families and married at fourteen to Pinian, though she had wished to be a nun. When their two children died she persuaded her husband to live with her as brother and sister in the service of God, and together they sold estates across the empire to feed the poor, set thousands of slaves free and build churches and monasteries in Italy, Africa and the East. At last they settled in Jerusalem, where after Pinian’s death she lived in a cell on the Mount of Olives and founded communities of women and of men beside it. She died there on the last day of 439. Feast: December 31.Saints & Church FathersSt. Mnason of Tamassos"Mnason of Cyprus, an old disciple", with whom Paul and his companions lodged on their last journey up to Jerusalem (Acts 21:16): Luke’s word marks a believer of the very first years. The Church of Cyprus remembers the rest. Born to a pagan family, he came to the faith in Rome through some of the Seventy, went to Jerusalem to receive the blessing of Peter and John, and returned to his island, where he lived with his teacher Herakleidios in a cave near Tamassos. When Herakleidios knew that his end was near he ordained Mnason bishop of Tamassos in his place, and Mnason shepherded it, teaching and healing, until he in turn named Rhodon to follow him. The see of Tamassos was restored in 2007, after eight centuries. Feast: October 19.Saints & Church FathersSt. Neophytos the RecluseA farmer’s son from Lefkara in Cyprus who ran from an arranged marriage to the monastery, learned to read there as a young man, and went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land but found no place there for the hermit’s life. In 1159 he cut a cell for himself into a cliff above Paphos, the Enkleistra, had it painted, and lived in it for sixty years, while a monastery grew below him. He wrote a rule, homilies and commentaries, and a bitter account of the calamities of Cyprus when Richard the Lionheart took the island in 1191 and sold it to the Templars and then to the Lusignans: the first voice of Cypriot Orthodoxy under Latin rule, which lasted nearly four hundred years. His cell and its frescoes survive. Feast: January 24.Saints & Church FathersSt. Olympias the DeaconessA rich widow of Constantinople, widowed within two years, who refused the emperor’s choice of a second husband, was ordained a deaconess, and gave her fortune to the Church and the poor through a community of women beside the cathedral. She was the closest friend of St John Chrysostom, and when he was exiled she was tried and fined for her loyalty to him. Seventeen of his letters to her from exile survive, among the most personal things he wrote, on suffering and despondency. She died in exile at Nicomedia around 408. Feast: July 25.Saints & Church FathersSt. Philemon the ApostleA Christian of Colossae in Phrygia, taught by Paul, in whose house the church of the town met, and to whom Paul wrote the shortest of his letters. His slave Onesimus had wronged him and run away, met Paul in prison and was baptized by him, and Paul sent him back with the letter, asking Philemon to receive him "not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved" (Philemon 16). The letter greets Apphia, by tradition his wife, and Archippus, "our fellow soldier". Tradition counts Philemon among the Seventy and says that he, Apphia and Archippus were martyred at Colossae under Nero. Feast: November 22.Saints & Church FathersSt. Philoumenos of Jacob's Well (1913-1979)Sophocles Hasapis was born in 1913 at Orounda in Cyprus, one of twins; at fourteen he and his brother Elpidios became novices at Stavrovouni, and six years later they went to Jerusalem, where they became monks of the Holy Sepulchre. As Philoumenos he served the Patriarchate of Jerusalem for forty years, and in 1979 he was given the keeping of Jacob’s Well at Nablus, where Christ spoke with the Samaritan woman (John 4), though he had been threatened there by men who wanted the shrine cleared of Christians. On 29 November, while he served Vespers, a man broke in and killed him with an axe. His body was found undecayed when it was raised four years later; in 2009 Patriarch Theophilos numbered him among the saints, and his relics lie in the church at the well. Feast: November 29.Saints & Church FathersSt. Polychronius the Hieromartyr (4th c.)Polychronius was the son of a landowner, brought up to work and to pray. He hired himself out in the vineyards of a rich man, who marvelled at his labour and at how little of his wage he kept, and with that wage he built a church. He was ordained deacon and priest in Constantinople and taught his people the faith, and tradition counts him among those who defended the Creed against Arius at the First Ecumenical Council. The Arians could not bend him, so they killed him: they burst into his church as he served the Divine Liturgy and struck him down at the holy table, in the fourth century. In Cyprus the people of three villages in the north, occupied since 1974, Agios Nikolaos near Lefkoniko, Kalogrea and Trypimeni, keep him as their own, and Melanarga in the Karpas has his church. Feast: October 7.Saints & Church FathersSt. Tabitha of JoppaA disciple of Joppa, the port of Judea, "full of good works and almsdeeds"; her Aramaic name, Tabitha, is Dorcas in Greek, a gazelle (Acts 9:36). When she fell sick and died, the disciples sent to nearby Lydda for Peter, and the widows met him weeping, showing him the tunics and cloaks she had made for them. He put them all out, knelt and prayed, and said, "Tabitha, arise"; she opened her eyes and sat up, and many in Joppa believed (Acts 9:36-42). The Church remembers that she lived many years more in the same service. In Jaffa the Russian church of St Peter, consecrated in 1894, stands on the same estate as the burial cave tradition calls hers. Feast: October 25.Saints & Church FathersThe Prophet MalachiThe last of the Twelve Prophets, whose name means "my messenger". He spoke to Jerusalem after the return from exile, rebuking priests who brought the blind and the lame to the altar and a people grown weary of God, and foretold that from the rising of the sun to its going down a pure offering would be made to God among the nations (Malachi 1:11), which the Fathers from the Didache on read of the Eucharist. He foretold the messenger sent to prepare the way of the Lord (3:1), whom the Gospels find in John the Forerunner (Mark 1:2), and Elijah, sent before the great and glorious day of the Lord. Feast: January 3.