Ven. Poemen the Great

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Poemen the Great

  Pimen the Faster (twelfth century) was a monk — and, by the Russian calendar's styling, an abbot — of the Kiev Caves Lavra, remembered for one thing only, but that a great one: the severity of his fasting, from which he took his surname Postnik. His incorrupt relics rest in the Far (Theodosius's) Caves of the Lavra, and he is commemorated on May 8 and among the fathers of the Far Caves on August 28.

• Saint of the day

  Poemen of Palestine

  Poemen of Palestine is a solitary of the Rouba, the wilderness east of Jerusalem, known from a single chapter of the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos. He had been a shepherd in the world — his name means shepherd — and his dogs had once torn a man to pieces while he stood by and did not intervene; it was revealed to him that he would die in the same way. He lived out his years in a cave, so free of the flesh that a lion came in and lay beside him in winter to keep him warm; and about three years after he told the story, at the end of the sixth century, he was killed by wild beasts as he had foreseen.

• Saint of the day

  Poemen the Great

  Poemen — the name means "shepherd" — is the greatest of the Egyptian desert fathers by sheer weight of transmitted teaching: more sayings stand under his name in the Apophthegmata Patrum than under any other abba, close on 187 in the Greek alphabetical collection, nearly a quarter of the whole. He was one of a family of brothers who all took the monastic habit at Scetis, fled the sack of the desert by the Mazices about 407 with his elder brother Anoub, and passed the rest of a very long life as the reluctant father of a great company of monks. He would not see the governor, would not see his own mother, and would not speak of lofty things; what he taught instead was discretion, the refusal to judge another, and the hidden life — "bear your own sins, and do not busy yourself with anyone else's." He reposed about 450, and the Church calls him the Great.

• Great-martyr Phanurius the Newly Appeared of Rhodes

  Phanourius is the saint whom the Church learned about from his own icon. Nothing of his life was transmitted: a panel bearing the name ΦΑΝΟΥΡΙΟΣ and twelve scenes of a martyrdom was found in the ruins of a church on Rhodes in the later Middle Ages, undamaged among damaged icons, and from the pictures alone the bishop of the island concluded that here was a martyr whom God had chosen to make known. His name means the revealer (from φανερόω, to bring to light), and his patronage followed the name: he is invoked for lost objects, lost people, and lost causes, and honoured with the Phanouropita, a plain sweet loaf baked and blessed at his feast. His office and his cult are frankly late; the icon is the whole of the evidence, and the Church has never pretended otherwise.

• Anthusa the Younger

  Anthusa "the Younger" or "the New" is a martyr of whom the calendars preserve one fact: she was drowned in a well for the faith of Christ, having been sewn up (the western martyrologies add) in a sack. Neither her country nor her century is recorded with any certainty; a Persian origin is asserted in the western tradition and nowhere in the Greek. She is called the Younger to distinguish her from the third-century Anthusa of Seleucia, and she is commemorated on August 27.

• Caesarius of Arles

  Caesarius, bishop of Arles for forty years (502–542), is the last great figure of Latin Gaul before it becomes Frankish: a monk of Lérins turned metropolitan, presiding bishop of council after council, papal vicar for Gaul and Spain, author of the first western monastic rule written for women, and above all a preacher — some two hundred and fifty of his sermons survive, the largest surviving body of Latin preaching after Augustine, written in a deliberately plain style for congregations that were still half pagan. He twice fell under suspicion of treason and was twice exiled by barbarian kings; he twice stripped his church of its silver to ransom captives. He presided at the Council of Orange in 529, which settled the western doctrine of grace. He reposed on 27 August 542, the day on which he is commemorated.

• Djan Darada the Ethiopian Eunuch

  The Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8 — the treasurer of Queen Candace, reading the prophet Isaiah in his chariot on the road down from Jerusalem to Gaza, who asked Philip the Deacon of whom the prophet spoke, and was baptised in the first water they came to — is commemorated by name in the Slavic calendars as Djan Darada. Scripture leaves him going on his way rejoicing; the tradition of the Church makes him the first-fruits of Africa and, in some accounts, the preacher of the Gospel in his own country. His commemoration falls on August 27.

• Hosius of Cordoba

  Hosius, bishop of Cordoba in Roman Spain for something over sixty years, is the western confessor whose hand lies on almost every decisive act of the Church in the age of Constantine. He had already confessed Christ under the persecution before he became the emperor's ecclesiastical counsellor; he carried Constantine's letters into the Arian quarrel at Alexandria, presided at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 and signed its acts first; he presided again at Serdica in 343; and he stood for the homoousion and for Athanasius of Alexandria against the emperor Constantius, who exiled him to Sirmium as a centenarian and there wrung from him a signature he immediately repented. He is remembered in the East as Hosius the Confessor, and reposed at Cordoba in 359.

• Kuksha of the Kiev Caves

  Kuksha was a monk-priest of the Kiev Caves monastery in the early twelfth century who went out to the Vyatichi — the last openly pagan Slavic tribe of the Rus' lands, settled along the upper Oka — baptised them, and was killed there with his disciple Nikon after many tortures, some time after 1114. His death was known at Kiev the same day because Pimen the Faster, standing in the monastery church, cried out that their brother Kuksha had been slain that morning for the Gospel, and then died himself. Kuksha is the chief missionary martyr of the Caves monastery, and his relics lie in the Near Caves.

• Liberius of Rome

  Liberius was bishop of Rome from 352 to 366, through the worst years of the Arian pressure, and the Orthodox Church commemorates him as a confessor for what he endured under the emperor Constantius II: refusing the imperial bribe, refusing to sign the condemnation of Athanasius of Alexandria, and going into exile at Beroea in Thrace while an intruded rival, Felix, sat in his city. The Roman people would not accept the substitute, and Constantius was obliged to send him back; but the sources say that before his return he was made to subscribe a formula of Sirmium, which he afterwards repented and spent the rest of his life undoing. He is the earliest bishop of Rome whom the Roman Church does not number among the saints — and the Orthodox Church does, on August 27.

• Praylius of Jerusalem

  Praylius held the see of Jerusalem for five years, from 417 to 422, between the long episcopate of John II and the still longer one of Juvenal, in the years when the Pelagian controversy was being fought out on Palestinian ground and when Jerusalem was beginning to press the claims that would make it a patriarchate a generation later. Theodoret says of him that his character matched his name, which in Greek means meek. He is commemorated on August 27.

• Sabbas of Benephali

  Sabbas of Benephali is a monastic saint who survives in the calendars as a name and a place and nothing else. He stands in the Greek synaxaria and in the Slavic and OCA calendars for August 27 as "the venerable Sabbas, monk, of Benephali"; no life, no century, no country and no act is transmitted, and the place-name itself is not securely identified.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Decuman (Dagan), hermit and martyr (706)
• St. Malrubius of Merns, Kincardineshire, hermit and martyr (c.1040)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings