St. 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.