Apostle Philip of the Seventy

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Apostle Philip of the Seventy

  Philip the Deacon (first century), counted among the Seventy Apostles, was one of the Seven chosen by the apostles to serve tables in Jerusalem (Acts 6). When persecution scattered the Church he became its first great missionary: he evangelised Samaria, where even Simon Magus believed and was baptised, and on the Gaza road he baptised the Ethiopian eunuch — the first Gentile fruit of Africa. Settled at Caesarea, he was called "the evangelist" and had four virgin daughters who prophesied, among them Hermione of Ephesus. The tradition makes him at last bishop of Tralles in Asia Minor, where he reposed in old age. He is not to be confused with Philip the Apostle, of the Twelve (November 14).

• Synaxis of the Holy Startsi of Optina Monastery

• Saint Theophanes the Hymnographer (the Branded) (847)

  Theophanes the Branded (Graptos, c. 778–845) was a Palestinian monk of the Lavra of St. Sabbas, hymnographer, and confessor of the holy icons under the second iconoclasm. With his elder brother Theodore he carried the protest of the Church of Jerusalem to Constantinople, and under three iconoclast emperors endured imprisonment, exile, and torture; the emperor Theophilus had twelve mocking iambic verses branded onto the brothers' faces with hot irons, whence their surname "the Branded." Theodore died of his sufferings in prison; Theophanes lived to see Orthodoxy restored in 843 and was made Metropolitan of Nicaea, dying in 845. The Church sings his own words back to him: he wrote some 150 canons, which fill the service books to this day.

• Our Holy Father Philotheos Kokkinos,Patriarch of Constantinople (1379)

• Anthony of Optina

  Anthony (in the world Alexander Ivanovich Putilov) was born at Romanov on the Volga in 1795, the younger brother of Moses of Optina, and followed him into the Roslavl forests as a novice in 1816. In 1821 the two brothers came at the bishop's invitation to Optina and cut out of the pine wood the skete of Saint John the Forerunner, the cell-and-garden hermitage that would become the seedbed of the whole Optina eldership. Anthony was its superior for fourteen years (1825–1839), then for fourteen more the abbot of the monastery of Saint Nicholas at Maloyaroslavets; and through all of it he bore an ulcerated affliction of the legs so severe that he stood through services in agony and told almost no one. He was released from the abbacy in 1853, returned to Optina, took the great schema in March 1865, and died on 7 August of that year. He was glorified locally with the Optina elders in 1996 and for general veneration in 2000.

• Zenaida and Philonilla

  Zenaida (Zenais) and Philonilla (first century) were sisters of Tarsus in Cilicia, kinswomen of the Apostle Paul and among the earliest women physicians the Church remembers. Leaving home and property, they settled in a cave near Demetrias and practised medicine without payment, healing bodies freely and bringing souls to Christ — the pattern the Church would later name "unmercenary." The traditions of their end diverge: the Russian and OCA account has pagans stone them to death in their cave by night, while the Greek synaxarion's verse says the two "friends of peace fell asleep in peace." They are commemorated together on October 11.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Ethelburga, abbess of Barking (c.676)
• St. Kenneth (Cainnech), abbot of Aghaboe (7th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings