Ven. Simeon the Stylite; Ven. Nikita the Stylite

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Simeon the Stylite

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Nikita the Stylite

  Nicetas of Pereyaslavl (†1186) was a tax-farmer of the newly founded Russian city of Pereyaslavl-Zalessky who grew rich by extortion, was converted by a verse of Isaiah and by a terrible vision in his own kitchen, and became the first and most famous stylite of the Russian land — though his "pillar" was a pit dug in the earth, in which he stood in heavy iron chains and a stone cap, with a covered passage to the monastery church. He was murdered by night on 24 May 1186 by kinsmen who mistook his polished chains for silver. The recovery of the chains from the Volga, the incorrupt relics uncovered under Metropolitan Photius, and the devotion of Ivan the Terrible made the Nikitsky monastery one of the notable shrines of Muscovite Russia.

• St Vincent of Lerins (445)

  Vincent of Lérins (†c. 445) was a Gallic monk and priest of the island monastery of Lérins off the coast of Provence, and the author of the Commonitorium — the short treatise, written about 434 under the pen-name Peregrinus, "the Pilgrim," which laid down the most famous of all rules for distinguishing the apostolic faith from innovation: what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. With it he set out, no less importantly, the principle that the faith may genuinely grow while never changing — profectus, non permutatio. He wrote three years after the Council of Ephesus and in its defence, upholding the title Theotokos against Nestorius. The Orthodox Church commemorates him on May 24.

• Meletius Stratelates and Companions

  Meletius, called Stratelates ("the General"), was by the synaxarial tradition a Christian military commander in Galatia in Asia Minor in the second century, under the emperor Antoninus Pius, who with the soldiers of his command destroyed the idol-temples of the province and was put to death for it by the governor Maximian, together with an immense company — the tribunes Stephen and John, a long roll of named soldiers, the women Marciana, Susanna and Palladia, the infants Kyriakos and Christian, the Egyptian Serapion, and the converted sorcerer Callinicus. The transmitted number of those who suffered with him is 1,218, though some notices give figures as high as eleven thousand. The company is commemorated with the Antiochene stylite on May 24.

• Symeon the Stylite of the Wonderful Mountain

  Symeon of the Wonderful Mountain (521–596), called the Younger to distinguish him from his great namesake, is the supreme ascetic of the Antiochene church in the sixth century: a Syrian who mounted a pillar as a child of seven and stood on one for sixty-eight years, the last of them on the Wonderful Mountain (Θαυμαστὸν Ὄρος, Mons Admirabilis) above the road between Antioch and Seleucia Pieria, where a great monastery and one of the chief pilgrimage shrines of Syria grew up around his column. Orphaned by the earthquake of 526, raised by his mother St Martha (July 4), ordained deacon and then priest on the column itself, he was a wonderworker of vast reputation — healing, reading hearts, foretelling earthquake, plague and Persian invasion — whose blessing-tokens of clay travelled the whole Mediterranean. His enormous Life, written by an eyewitness disciple, is one of the richest documents surviving from sixth-century Syria.

Troparia & kontakia

Readings