Hieromartyr Methodius, Bishop of Patar

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Hieromartyr Methodius, Bishop of Patar

• St Kallistos I, Patriarch of Constantinople (1363)

  Callistus I (†August 1363) was an Athonite hesychast who spent some twenty-eight years on the Holy Mountain as a disciple of Gregory of Sinai, and was then drawn out of the desert to govern the Church of Constantinople twice over — from 1350 to 1353 and again from 1355 until his death. He presided at the council of 1351 which set the seal of the Church on the theology of Gregory Palamas; he wrote the Life of his own teacher and the Life of Theodosius of Trnovo; he broke with the Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos rather than crown his son, and laid the Church of Serbia under excommunication for erecting a patriarchate without Constantinople's consent. He died at Serres, on the embassy sent to undo that very quarrel and to build an alliance against the Turks — as, the Athonite tradition says, St Maximos of Kavsokalyvia had foretold he would.

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• Blessed Studios (5th c.)

• Aristocles, Demetrian and Athanasius

  Three clerics of the Church of Cyprus — a presbyter, a deacon and a reader — put to death at Salamis about the year 306, in the last and worst of the persecutions. Aristocles was a priest of Tamassos in the copper country of the interior who fled the persecution into a cave on the mountain, was rebuked there by a vision, and came down again to die; on the road he fell in with the deacon Demetrian and the reader Athanasius at the church of the Apostle Barnabas, told them what he had seen, and the two chose to go with him. All three preached openly against the idols in Salamis, were arrested, and were beheaded together. They are among the small number of named Cypriot martyrs of the great persecution, and their memory is kept at Tamassos to this day.

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• Gleb of Vladimir

  Gleb Andreevich (c. 1155–1174), baptised George, was the younger son of the Grand Prince Andrew Bogolyubsky of Vladimir. He is one of the very few saints of the Russian calendar honoured for nothing but his piety: he held no throne, fought no battle, founded nothing, and died at nineteen. From the age of twelve he lived, in the phrase of his Life, "a solitary spiritual life" in his father's house — fasting, keeping vigil, reading the Scriptures, honouring the clergy and giving away what he had. His body was found incorrupt and lay in the Dormition cathedral of Vladimir, where it survived the burning of the church in the Tatar sack of 1238 untouched by the fire; he was glorified in 1702 and is honoured as a protector of the city of Vladimir.

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• Gurias of Kazan

  Gurias of Kazan (in the world Gregory Rugotin, c. 1500–1563) was the first archbishop of Kazan and the apostle of the newly-conquered Tatar lands of the middle Volga. A courtier's servant who suffered long imprisonment on a false charge, he became a monk and abbot of the Volokolamsk monastery, and in 1555 was chosen by lot to head the new Kazan diocese established after Ivan the Terrible's capture of the city. With his companions Herman and Barsanuphius he built churches, monasteries and schools and won many from Islam and paganism to Christ by gentleness rather than force. He died in 1563; his incorrupt relics, uncovered in 1595, made him one of the most venerated saints of the Russian Volga.

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• Inna, Pinna and Rimma

  Inna, Pinna and Rimma were three men of Scythia Minor — the lands about the lower Danube and the western shore of the Black Sea, in what is now Romania and Bulgaria — who were converted and, the tradition says, ordained by the Apostle Andrew the First-Called in the first age of the Gospel. Preaching Christ among the barbarian tribes of the region and baptising many, they were seized by a pagan chieftain and, refusing to deny the faith, were bound to stakes set upright in the frozen river and lowered into the ice until the freezing water rose to their necks and they gave up their souls — a martyrdom by cold that is almost unique in the calendar. They are among the earliest martyrs of the northern lands, and are venerated as the first martyrs of the Scythian and Slavic world. They are kept on January 20, with a second commemoration on June 20 for the translation of their relics.

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• Leucius of Brindisi

  Leucius the Confessor was an Alexandrian monk, born Eutropius, who was sent — the Life says by a direct command of Christ — from Egypt to the heel of Italy, and became the first bishop of Brindisi (Brundisium), the port at the end of the Appian Way. The Greek and Slavonic books, which call his see by the half-Hellenised name Vruntisiopolis, tell of a drought of two years broken by his prayer, and of the baptism of the governor and of the whole city after it. He is one of the very few saints of southern Italy to have entered the Byzantine synaxaria by the eastern road rather than the Latin one, and he is commemorated on June 20.

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• Menas of Polotsk

  Menas (†1116) was a monk of the Kiev Caves monastery who on 13 December 1105 was consecrated Bishop of Polotsk, and is the first bishop of that ancient see whose name and consecration are securely recorded. He belongs to the first generation of native Russian hierarchs after the Baptism of Rus', when the Caves monastery was supplying bishops to the new dioceses of the north and west, and he governed Polotsk for eleven years in the years of its greatest independence from Kiev. Almost nothing of his episcopate is transmitted beyond the fact of it; his memory is preserved in the Paterikon of the Kiev Caves and in the service of the fathers of the Caves, and he is commemorated on June 20 and in the synaxis of the Saints of Belarus.

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• Methodius of Patara

  Methodius (†c. 311–312) is the bishop, theologian and martyr whom the Church honours as the first great critic of Origen. Called in the Greek books Bishop of Patara and in the older Latin witness Bishop of Olympus in Lycia, he wrote in a polished Platonic Greek that no other Christian of his generation matched: above all the Symposium, or Banquet of the Ten Virgins, the only one of his works to survive whole in the original, in which ten virgins in a garden deliver ten speeches in praise of virginity and end by singing an alphabetical hymn to Christ the Bridegroom. Against Origen he defended the resurrection of this body, the goodness of the material creation, and the beginning of souls in time, refusing the doctrine that souls pre-existed their bodies and fell into them. He was beheaded in the persecution of the early fourth century, and is commemorated on June 20.

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• Naum of Ohrid

  Naum of Ohrid (c. 830–910) was one of the seven Apostles of the Slavs — the Sedmochislenitsi — a direct disciple and co-worker of Cyril and Methodius who, after their mission in Great Moravia was broken up by the Latin clergy, carried the Slavonic letters and liturgy south into Bulgaria. There, with his companion Clement of Ohrid, he became a founder of Slavonic learning: a teacher at Pliska and Preslav under the princes Boris and Symeon, and then head of the school at Ohrid, where he built a monastery on the southern shore of the lake and reposed in 910. Venerated across the Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian lands as an enlightener and wonderworker, he is commemorated on December 23, and his monastery and relics at the springs of Lake Ohrid remain one of the great pilgrimage shrines of the Balkans.

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• Nicholas Cabasilas

  Nicholas Cabasilas (c. 1320–c. 1392) of Thessalonica was a layman, a statesman's counsellor and a man of letters who became one of the greatest theologians the Orthodox Church has produced — and, so far as can be shown, was never ordained and never took the monastic habit. His two masterpieces, the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy and The Life in Christ, together set out a single vision: that the Christian life is not an imitation of Christ from outside but a real sharing in his life, given in baptism, chrismation and the Eucharist, and that the mysteries are therefore not aids to piety but the very substance of salvation. He stood with Gregory Palamas and the hesychasts in the controversies of his day and yet wrote for the ordinary Christian in the world. The Ecumenical Patriarchate glorified him in 1983, and appointed his memory to June 20.

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British Isles and Ireland

• St. Govan of Dyfed (6th C)
• St. Edburgh of Castor, Virgin (7th C)

Readings

Troparia & kontakia