Sash of the Theotokos

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Sash of the Theotokos

• Saint of the day

  The Placing of the Sash of the Most Holy Theotokos (395-408? 886- 912?)

• Antiochian commemoration

  St Gennadius, Patriarch of Constantinople (471)

  Gennadius was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 458 to 471, in the reign of Leo I the Great, in the difficult generation after Chalcedon when the settlement of 451 was being contested across the East. A learned exegete before he was a bishop — a commentator on Daniel, on Genesis and on the Pauline epistles, of the Antiochene school — he is remembered chiefly as a pastor and a disciplinarian of extraordinary mildness and extraordinary firmness together: he held a synod at Constantinople that condemned simony, refused to ordain any man who did not know the Psalter by heart, and left a reputation for gentleness that survives in the anecdotes John Moschus gathered a century and a half later. He received the Robe of the Theotokos into the shrine at Blachernae, climbed the ladder of Daniel the Stylite to ordain him priest on top of his pillar, and died in 471 having warned that the Church would be troubled after him — as, under his successor Acacius, it was.

• Hieromartyr Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (258)

  Cyprian, bishop of Carthage from 248/249 until his beheading on 14 September 258, is the greatest Latin churchman of the age before Constantine and the first bishop of the West to die a martyr with his acts recorded. A rich pagan rhetorician converted in middle life, he governed the African church through the Decian persecution, the plague of 252 and the schisms that followed both, and he thought out, under that pressure, the doctrine of the Church that the Latin world would carry ever afterwards: one Church, one episcopate held undivided by all bishops together, and outside it no salvation. His treatise On the Unity of the Catholic Church and his eighty-odd surviving letters are the earliest large body of Latin Christian correspondence. He quarrelled famously with Stephen of Rome over the baptism of heretics and was not reconciled; and when Valerian's edict came he refused exile a second time, came back to his city to die among his own people, and answered the sentence of death with two words — "Thanks be to God." The Byzantine calendar keeps him on August 31, the last day of the church year.

• Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne (651)

  Aidan was an Irish monk of Iona sent in 635 at the request of King Oswald of Northumbria to convert the English of the north, who made his see on the tidal island of Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast and governed it for sixteen years until his death on 31 August 651. He is the founder of the Northumbrian Church and, through the disciples he trained, of a good deal of the Christianity of England. Our knowledge of him comes almost entirely from Bede, who disapproved of his Easter reckoning and admired everything else about him without reserve: that he travelled on foot so as to be able to speak with everyone he met, that he gave away whatever the rich gave him, that he bought slaves out of slavery and educated some of them for the priesthood, and that he told a king to his face that a poor man mattered more than a horse. On the night he died, a shepherd boy on the hills saw a soul carried up by angels, and went and became a monk: that boy was Cuthbert.

• Eanswythe of Folkestone

  Eanswythe was a princess of Kent, granddaughter of Æthelberht, the first Christian king of the English, and daughter of King Eadbald; and she is remembered as the founder, about the year 630, of the community at Folkestone on the Kentish coast — by long tradition the first monastic house for women in England, and Eanswythe as the first English abbess. She refused a marriage offered her by a pagan Northumbrian prince, took the veil with her father's support, and died young. Almost nothing is transmitted of her life beyond that outline: she is a saint known from a cultus rather than from a biography. But in 1885 a leaden reliquary containing the bones of a young woman was found walled up in the parish church that bears her name, and in 2020 those bones were radiocarbon-dated to the middle of the seventh century and identified as those of a woman who died between about seventeen and twenty-two years of age — which makes Eanswythe one of the very few Anglo-Saxon saints whose relics can be shown to be plausibly her own.

British Isles and Ireland

• SS Cuthburgh (c.725) and Cwenburgh (c.735), abbesses of Wimborne

Troparia & kontakia

Readings