Relics of Apostle Bartholomew

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Relics of Apostle Bartholomew

  Bartholomew is one of the Twelve, named in every apostolic list of the New Testament and in every one of them beside Philip, and yet given no word and no deed in the Gospels — his whole scriptural biography is a patronymic, bar-Tolmai, "son of Tolmai." What the tradition supplies is one of the widest missions ascribed to any apostle: with Philip and his sister Mariamne in Asia Minor and at Hierapolis in Phrygia; then in India, where Eusebius and Jerome report that a copy of the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew letters was found still surviving in the second century, left there by Bartholomew; and finally in Greater Armenia, where he and Jude Thaddaeus are honoured as the first enlighteners of the nation. At Albanopolis he was, by the Byzantine account, flayed alive, crucified head-downward and beheaded. His relics travelled further than he did — Dara in Mesopotamia, the island of Lipari, Benevento, and the church on the Tiber island at Rome — and his second feast on August 25 keeps their return. Whether he is the same man as Nathanael of the Fourth Gospel the liturgical books of the Orthodox Church do not agree, and this entry does not settle it.

• Holy Apostle Titus of the Seventy

  Titus is the Greek — the uncircumcised Gentile whom Paul took up to Jerusalem as a living argument, the disciple he trusted with the hardest errand of his ministry, and the man he left behind on Crete "to set in order the things that are wanting, and to ordain elders in every city" (Titus 1:5). He is numbered among the Seventy, is the addressee of one of the three Pastoral Epistles, and is honoured as the first bishop of Gortyna and the founder and patron of the Church of Crete. Born on the island of a distinguished pagan family, schooled in Greek philosophy and the poets, he came to Palestine, saw the Lord, was baptised by Paul and became his most trusted companion — carrying the severe letter to Corinth, gathering the collection for the saints of Jerusalem, going out to Dalmatia — and came home at last to Crete, where he reposed in peace at a great age and was buried at Gortyna. His feast is August 25, the day the Byzantine books keep together with the return of the relics of Bartholomew.

• Barses, Eulogius and Protogenes

  Three bishops of the Syrian Mesopotamian frontier, kept together on one day because they suffered together in one persecution: the Arian repression under the Emperor Valens in the years after 370. Barses, bishop of Edessa, an aged wonderworker whom the whole East venerated, was driven from his city and sent from exile to exile — the island of Aradus, then Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, then a desert fort on the barbarian frontier — until he died of it. Eulogius, a presbyter of Edessa, and Protogenes, a presbyter of the same church, were among eighty clergy deported for refusing communion with the imperial nominee, and were sent in chains to Antinoöpolis in the Thebaid; there Protogenes opened a school, taught the pagan children their letters and the Psalms with them, and baptised so many that the two exiles converted the town that had been their prison. When Valens died and Theodosius restored the orthodox, Eulogius came back to be bishop of Edessa and Protogenes bishop of Carrhae. Their memory is kept on August 25.

• Constantia of Paphos

  Constantia is remembered for a single grief. She was a devout woman of the district of Paphos in Cyprus whose daughter and son-in-law had been snatched from death by Hilarion the Great — the founder of Palestinian monasticism, who spent the last years of his life hidden in the Cypriot hills — and after his repose she would not leave his grave. She kept night-long vigils at the tomb and spoke to the saint as to one present, using the conversation to rouse herself to prayer; miracles were reported of her. When Hesychius, Hilarion's disciple, secretly took up the body and carried it back to Palestine, Constantia was told that the tomb was empty — and, according to Jerome, who records the whole of it within a few years of the event, she died on the spot. The Church of Cyprus keeps her as a saint with a full office, and her troparion names her the protectress of Paphos. Her memory is on August 25.

• Epiphanius of Constantinople

  Epiphanius governed the Church of Constantinople for fifteen years and three months, from 25 February 520 to 5 June 535 — the long, quiet patriarchate in which the reunion with Rome that his predecessor had signed was made to hold. He had been the overseer of the catechumens in the capital, and had gone in 519 on the mission into Macedonia and Illyricum to collect the subscriptions of the provincial bishops to the papal formula, so that he came to the throne knowing the settlement from the inside. As patriarch he ratified the peace in a synod, confirmed Chalcedon, corresponded with Pope Hormisdas in four surviving letters, sent gifts of gold and silver plate to the Roman church, and urged leniency toward bishops returning from schism and firmness only toward the obstinate. He received Pope John I at Constantinople in 525 and gave him the first place at the Liturgy. He died in peace in 535, and is commemorated on August 25.

• John the Cappadocian

  John II, called the Cappadocian, was patriarch of Constantinople for less than two years — 17 April 518 to 19 February 520 — and in that time presided over the end of the Acacian schism, the thirty-five-year rupture between Constantinople and Rome. Chancellor and presbyter of the Great Church before his election, he was raised to the throne under the Monophysite emperor Anastasius; three months later Anastasius died, Justin I succeeded, and on the following Sunday the people of Constantinople stood in Hagia Sophia and shouted the patriarch down until he proclaimed the Council of Chalcedon from the ambo and anathematised Severus of Antioch. He entered the four councils and the name of Pope Leo into the diptychs, received the legates of Pope Hormisdas in 519, signed the pope's formula in his own hand, and so restored communion between the Churches. He died a few months later. Photius called him "a dwelling-place of the virtues." He is commemorated on August 25.

• Menas of Constantinople

  Menas, an Alexandrian by birth, was priest and warden of the great hospital of St Sampson at Constantinople — the poorhouse and hospice between the two cathedrals — when Justinian raised him, on 13 March 536, to the patriarchal throne left vacant by the deposition of the Monophysite Anthimus. He was consecrated by Pope Agapetus I of Rome in person: the only occasion in history on which a pope laid hands on a patriarch of Constantinople. His sixteen years were the sixteen busiest years of the sixth-century Church. He presided over the home synod of 536 that condemned Anthimus, Severus of Antioch and their party; the Great Church of the Holy Wisdom was consecrated in his patriarchate; and he was drawn, unwilling and then compliant, into the two doctrinal storms Justinian raised — the condemnation of Origen and the affair of the Three Chapters, in which he was twice excommunicated by Pope Vigilius and twice reconciled. He reposed in peace on 25 August 552. The synaxarion remembers him chiefly for the miracle of the glassblower's son.

British Isles and Ireland

• Translation of the relics of St. Hilda of Whitby (680)
• St. Ebba (Æbbe) the Elder, abbess of Coldingham (683)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings