Ven. Isaac, Dalmatius, Faustus; Ven. Anthony the Roman of Novgorod

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Ven. Isaac, Dalmatius, Faustus

  Isaac (died c. 383) was a Syrian ascetic who left the desert for the capital in the crisis year 378 in order to stand in the road before the Arian emperor Valens as he rode out against the Goths, and to demand of him three times that the churches be given back to the Orthodox — foretelling, when he was refused, that the emperor would not come back but would perish by fire. Valens had him flung into a thorny ravine and then held under guard; within weeks he was dead in a burning farmhouse after the catastrophe at Adrianople, and the monk who had prophesied it was released a vindicated man. Under Theodosius the Great Isaac became the conscience and the spiritual father of Constantinople, and the monastery raised for him outside the walls by the officer Saturninus was the first great monastic house of the city — known ever after by the name of Isaac's successor Dalmatus, whence Isaac's own epithet "of Dalmatia". He is honoured as venerable and confessor on May 30, and again on August 3 with the fathers of his monastery.

• Saint of the day

  

  Ven. Anthony the Roman of Novgorod

  Anthony (c. 1067 – 3 August 1147) is the saint who came to Novgorod on a stone. The Life has him born at Rome of Orthodox parents, orphaned at seventeen, giving away his inheritance and sealing the rest in a barrel which he threw into the sea; driven from his monastery by the Latin persecution, he stood praying for a year on a rock at the sea's edge until a storm tore the rock away and carried him — over the Mediterranean, round Europe, up the Neva, across Ladoga and up the Volkhov — to the bank above Novgorod on the eve of the Nativity of the Theotokos, 1106. There he founded the monastery of the Nativity, and there the fishermen's net brought up his barrel, whose contents he described before the judges and with which he bought the monastery its land. He built the stone church that still stands, was made abbot in 1131 by St Niphon, and reposed on 3 August 1147. The chronicles confirm the monastery, the church, the abbacy and the death; the Roman origin and the voyage on the stone appear only four centuries later, and the entry records both the tradition and the problem.

• Holy Myrrh-bearer Salome

  Salome is the wife of Zebedee and the mother of the apostles James and John, and one of the myrrhbearing women who followed Christ from Galilee, stood at the Cross when the disciples had fled, and came to the sepulchre before dawn with spices to anoint a body that was not there. The Gospels name her twice by name (Mark 15:40; 16:1) and twice more by description — the mother of the sons of Zebedee who asked for the two thrones (Matthew 20:20–21), and one of the women watching the crucifixion from afar (Matthew 27:56). The tradition makes her a kinswoman of the Theotokos, though it has never agreed on the degree. She lived to see her elder son become the first of the Twelve to be killed for Christ, and reposed in peace. She is commemorated on August 3, and with all the myrrhbearers on the movable Sunday of the Myrrhbearers.

• Cosmas the Hermit of Palestine

  Cosmas the eunuch was a hermit of the Lavra of Pharan, the oldest of the monastic settlements of the Judaean desert, in the sixth century. He is known almost entirely from the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschus, who had the account of him from Abba Basil, a presbyter — and what that book preserves is the portrait of a reader: a monk of severe fasting who stood through the whole night from Saturday to Sunday at prayer, and who had gone through the Scriptures and the Fathers so thoroughly, and loved Athanasius the Great so particularly, that he told his hearers that if they came upon a saying of Athanasius and had no paper, they should write it on their clothing. He was an uncompromising opponent of the heresies of his day. He died at Antioch and was buried by the patriarch in a monastery there, and a beggar paralysed for twelve years was healed at his tomb.

• Dalmatus of Constantinople

  Dalmatus (died about 440) was an officer of the imperial guard under Theodosius the Great who left the palace for the cell, entered the monastery that Isaac had founded outside the walls of Constantinople, and brought his son Faustus with him. He succeeded Isaac as abbot and gave the house the name it kept for five centuries — τὰ Δαλμάτου, "the monastery of Dalmatus." He is the first man recorded at Constantinople under the title archimandrite, the head of all the monasteries of the capital; and in 431, having not passed his own gate for forty-eight years, he broke his enclosure and led the monks of the city in procession to the palace of Theodosius II to demand that the emperor receive the verdict of the Council of Ephesus against Nestorius. He is commemorated on August 3 with Isaac and Faustus as one of the three fathers of the Dalmatian monastery.

• Faustus of Constantinople

  Faustus was the son of Dalmatus, the guardsman of Theodosius the Great who left the palace for the monastic life. Father and son entered the monastery that Isaac had founded outside the walls of Constantinople between 381 and 383, and were tonsured together by Isaac's own hand. Faustus grew old in that house, was famed for fasting, and on his father's death succeeded him as its abbot. He is the third of the three fathers of the Dalmatian monastery commemorated on August 3, and — the synaxarion says so in as many words — the details of his ascetic life are not known.

• Nine Kherkheulidze Brothers and the Martyrs of Marabda

  On 1 July 1625, on the field of Marabda in Kvemo Kartli, a Georgian army of some twenty thousand under King Teimuraz I and Giorgi Saakadze met a Persian force more than twice its size sent by Shah Abbas I to punish the Georgian rising. The Georgians had communicated before dawn. The royal standard — the banner that Georgian tradition traces back to Didgori and Basiani — was carried that day by the nine brothers of the Kherkheulidze house; and as each fell it was taken up by the next, until all nine were dead, and then by their sister, and when she fell by their mother, who held it until she was killed. About nine thousand Georgians died on the field. The Georgian Church keeps them all on August 3 as martyrs: men who went to a battle they knew they would not survive, for a faith the Shah had come to take from them.

• Razhden the Persian

  Razhden was a Persian nobleman who came to Kartli (eastern Georgia) in the retinue of the Persian princess Balenduxt when she was given in marriage to King Vakhtang Gorgasali, was converted there and baptised, and received lands and a military command in his adopted country. When the Persians invaded, he fought against his own nation for the kingdom that had made him a Christian; taken prisoner, and known to the Persian king as an apostate of noble blood, he was beaten, had his teeth drawn out, was dragged over rocks and kept in chains. Ransomed by the Georgian nobles, he went back of his own accord rather than buy his life with a denial, and was crucified and shot to death with arrows at Tsromi about the year 457. He is honoured as the protomartyr of Georgia, the first of that nation to die for Christ, and his relics were laid by King Vakhtang at Nikozi.

• Theoclete the Wonderworker

  Theoclete lived in the ninth century, in the reign of the iconoclast emperor Theophilos (829–842), in the theme of the Optimatoi on the Asian shore opposite Constantinople. The Greek synaxarion gives her a life without a single dramatic event in it: pious and wealthy parents, Constantine and Anastasia, who brought her up in the Scriptures; a marriage to a merciful man named Zacharias; a household kept open to whoever came; and a reputation for holiness in the ordinary state of a wife in the world, which after her death was confirmed by miracles — so that the calendars style her, of all things, ἡ Θαυματουργός, the Wonderworker.

• Theodora of Thessalonica

  Theodora (812–892) was a married woman of Aegina who came as a refugee to Thessalonica from the Arab raids on the Aegean, was widowed there, and spent fifty-five years as a nun in the convent of the Protomartyr Stephen alongside her own daughter — who entered before her, and eventually became her abbess. She performed no spectacular austerities and worked no miracles in her lifetime; the long Life written of her soon after her death praises exactly the virtues that do not make a story: obedience, silence, industry, and the acceptance of being ruled by her own child. After her repose her relics were translated to a separate sarcophagus and were found to stream a fragrant myrrh, and Thessalonica has venerated her ever since as one of its own, beside Demetrius and Gregory Palamas. Her day is August 29, the day of her repose; because that day belongs wholly to the Beheading of the Forerunner, her celebration is in practice kept on August 3.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Trea the Recluse of Ardtree (5th C)
• St. Senach, disciple of St. Finian (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings