Day of the Holy Spirit

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Aquilina of Byblos

  Aquilina of Byblos (c. 281–293) is the girl-martyr of Phoenicia: a Christian child of Byblos, the ancient coastal city that is the modern Jbeil in Lebanon, who at the age of twelve was denounced for having persuaded a pagan schoolfellow to believe in Christ. Brought before the governor Volusian, she refused every flattery and every threat, answering that the more she suffered the more strength the Lord invisibly gave her; she was beaten and had heated iron rods driven through her ears, and was cast out of the city for dead. Raised by an angel and returning to confess Christ a second time before the same tribunal, she was sentenced to beheading and gave up her soul in prayer before the sword could fall, in the year 293. Her tomb outside Byblos became a place of healings, and her relics were afterwards carried to Constantinople.

• Saint Triphyllius, bishop of Leucosia (Nicosia) in Cyprus (370)

  Triphyllius (†c. 370) was Bishop of Leucosia — ancient Ledra, the modern Nicosia — in Cyprus, and the best-known disciple of Spyridon of Trimythous. Born at Constantinople and trained in law and rhetoric at Berytus (Beirut), he was by St Jerome's reckoning the most eloquent writer of his generation and the author of a commentary on the Song of Songs, now lost; yet he attached himself for a master not to a scholar but to the unlettered shepherd-bishop Spyridon, and the two stories the tradition tells best about him are both stories of Spyridon correcting his learning — the healing of the sick emperor, at which Triphyllius was recognised together with his teacher, and the rebuke in synod when he improved the Gospel's plain word for a sick man's bed. He founded a monastery at Leucosia out of his mother's inheritance, is counted among the Cypriot bishops at the Council of Sardica, and reposed in old age about the year 370.

• St Anna and her son John (5h c.)

  Anna and her son John were ninth-century ascetics of Constantinople and Bithynia. Anna was the daughter of a deacon of the church of the Blachernae in the capital; widowed young, she cut her hair, put on a man's habit, took the name Euthymianus, and went with her son to live the monastic life in one of the monasteries on Mount Olympus in Bithynia, where the two of them were received as father and son. She belongs to the small and much-loved company of Byzantine holy women who lived hidden in men's monasteries under a man's name. She returned at length to Constantinople, and there reposed in the year 826. Her memory — and her son's with hers — is kept twice in the year, principally on June 13 and again on October 29.

• Andronicus of Moscow

  Andronicus (†1404) was a native of Rostov, a disciple of Sergius of Radonezh, and the first abbot of the Monastery of the Saviour on the Yauza at Moscow — the house that took his own name and is known to this day as the Andronikov Monastery. It was founded by St Alexis, Metropolitan of Moscow, in fulfilment of a vow made when he was delivered from a storm at sea on the voyage home from Constantinople, and completed about 1361; Alexis set Andronicus over it, and Sergius came to see his disciple there. Under Andronicus the monastery became a place of severe fasting and of unusual humility, and — as it proved — the nursery of the greatest school of icon-painting in Russia: his own disciples Sabbas and Alexander were remembered a century later for their skill, and it was in this house that Andrei Rublev and Daniel the Black were monks. In extreme old age Andronicus resigned the abbacy to Sabbas and withdrew into silence, and he reposed in 1404 and was buried in the monastery church, where his relics were identified again in 1993. The Church keeps him on June 13.

• Antipater of Bostra

  Antipater was Bishop — properly Metropolitan — of Bostra, the capital of the Roman province of Arabia and one of the great metropolitan sees of the Patriarchate of Antioch, in the second half of the fifth century. He is one of the very few saints of the calendar who is remembered for a book: his Refutation of the Apology for Origen answered the defence of Origen composed by Pamphilus and Eusebius of Caesarea, and set out against the Origenist system — the pre-existence of souls, the final restoration of all things, the allegorising away of the Genesis creation — with a precision that later generations found useful. The work was ordered to be read in the Eastern churches during the Origenist crisis of Justinian's reign, and the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 cited him as an authority; it is now lost apart from the fragments preserved in those conciliar acts. He also wrote against the Apollinarians, and a small body of his homilies survives. His life is not recounted in the Synaxaristes: what the Church keeps of him on June 13 is a name, a see, and a body of teaching.

• Antonina of Nicaea

  Antonina of Nicaea (†c. 302) was a Christian woman of Nicaea in Bithynia who suffered martyrdom in the persecutions of the late third and early fourth centuries. Arrested for her confession of Christ and brought before the governor, she refused every inducement and threat to sacrifice to the idols; she was subjected to a succession of savage tortures — the rack, fire, and imprisonment — which she endured with unshaken constancy, and at last was put to death. The Church honours her among the martyrs of Nicaea and keeps her memory on March 1.

• Sabbas of Moscow

  Sabbas (†1410) was the disciple of Andronicus of Moscow and the second abbot of the Monastery of the Saviour on the Yauza — the Andronikov monastery — succeeding his teacher in 1395, when Andronicus in extreme old age laid down the government of the house and withdrew into silence. He is one of the two disciples named by St Joseph of Volokolamsk — Sabbas and Alexander — for the virtue and the skill in icon-painting for which that monastery became famous, and he governed it through the years in which Andrei Rublev and Daniel the Black were its monks. He reposed in 1410 and was buried in the monastery church beside Andronicus; the two burials were identified together in the excavations of 1993. The Church keeps him on June 13, with his teacher.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Damhnade of Cavan

Troparia & kontakia

Readings