Ven. Macarius the Great

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Macarius the Great

  Macarius of Alexandria (c. 295 – c. 395), called "the Younger" and "of the City" to distinguish him from his elder friend and namesake Macarius the Great, was, with him, one of the two supreme monastic fathers commemorated on this day. A confectioner of Alexandria until his baptism in middle age, he withdrew to the desert and became priest and superior of the monks of the Cells (Kellia), between Nitria and Scetis, where some five thousand solitaries were gathered. He is remembered above all for ascetic feats of astonishing severity — recorded by his own disciple Palladius — undertaken in a holy contest to outdo every rigour he heard of: seven years on raw food, standing motionless for weeks, six months naked in the marsh in penance for killing a gnat in anger. Exiled with Macarius the Great under the Arian emperor Valens, he returned to the Cells and reposed at a great age. He is kept on January 19, together with Macarius the Great.

• Saint of the day

  Macarius the Faster of the Kiev Caves

  Macarius the Faster (twelfth century) was a monk and deacon of the Kiev Caves Lavra, whose relics rest in the Near (Anthony's) Caves. He is surnamed "the Faster" (Postnik) for the extreme abstinence of his life, and the tradition holds that he was granted the gift of wonders from his early years. Little is recorded of him beyond his name, his order, and his ascetic renown; he is honoured among the fathers of the Near Caves and commemorated on January 19.

• Saint of the day Antiochian commemoration

  Macarius the Great

  Macarius the Great (c. 300 – c. 391), called "the Egyptian" and "the Elder" to distinguish him from his younger namesake Macarius of Alexandria, is among the supreme fathers of the Egyptian desert and the founder of monastic life in the wilderness of Scetis (Wadi al-Natrun). A camel-driver and carrier of nitre in his youth, falsely accused of fathering a child and vindicated when the true father was named, he withdrew about the age of thirty into the desert, where he was formed in the example of Anthony the Great, whose disciple the tradition makes him. Ordained priest and gathering a great colony of monks around him, he was granted such gifts of prayer, discernment, and wonderworking that he was called "the boy-elder," an old man's wisdom in a young man's years, and "the god-bearing." Exiled for a time under the Arian emperor Valens, he returned to his cell and reposed at about ninety, having spent some sixty years in the desert. He is one of the most quoted fathers of the Apophthegmata (the Sayings of the Desert Fathers), and the Fifty Spiritual Homilies on the life of prayer are traditionally ascribed to him. He is kept on January 19.

• Saint of the day

  Macarius the Roman of Novgorod

  Macarius the Roman was a Westerner — by the tradition a young man of a wealthy Roman family, born towards the end of the fifteenth century — who left Italy in search of the Orthodox faith, made his way north into Russia, was received into the Church and tonsured in the land of Novgorod, and spent the rest of his life as a hermit in the marshes at the head of the river Lezna, some seventy kilometres east of the city. Disciples gathered to him against his intention, and about 1540 they raised a wooden church of the Dormition of the Mother of God, from which the community took its life; he was made its abbot by the metropolitan of Novgorod. He reposed on 15 August 1550 — the feast of the Dormition, and therefore the patronal feast of his own church — and was buried beside it. The hermitage that grew round his grave, the Makaryevskaya Pustyn, survived Swedish sack, Catherine II's suppression and a nineteenth-century revival before it was closed by the Soviet authorities in 1932 and destroyed in the war; it is being rebuilt.

• Our Holy Father Mark Eugenikos, Metropolitan of Ephesus and Confessor of the Orthodox Faith (1443)

  Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444), Mark Eugenikos, Metropolitan of Ephesus, is honoured by the Orthodox Church as the Pillar of Orthodoxy — the one bishop of the Eastern delegation who, at the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–1439), refused to sign the decree of union with the Church of Rome, and so preserved the Orthodox confession at the moment of its gravest political pressure. A brilliant teacher of Constantinople in its last decades, tonsured a monk and unwillingly made a metropolitan, he was the chief theological spokesman of the Orthodox at the council, opposing the Latin doctrines of the Filioque, purgatory, the azymes, and papal supremacy. When emperor and the greater part of the delegation signed the union out of fear and hope of Western aid against the Turk, Mark alone withheld his name — and Pope Eugenius IV, learning it, is said to have answered, "then we have accomplished nothing." Imprisoned and exiled for his refusal, he never ceased to teach and write against the union until his death, entrusting the cause to his disciple Gennadios Scholarios, who would be the first patriarch after the fall of the City. The union collapsed; Mark's confession stood. He is commemorated on January 19.

• Arsenius of Corfu

  Arsenius (c. 876 – c. 953) was the first Archbishop of Corfu (Kerkyra) and one of the patron saints of the island. Of Palestinian birth and formed as a monk in the East, he came by way of Constantinople to the see of Corfu, whose Church he governed and whose people he served — undertaking, in his old age, a journey to the imperial capital to intercede for his flock and win the emperor's clemency for the island. A learned man and a hymnographer, he is credited with liturgical compositions and a homily on the mystery of the day. He reposed at Corinth on the way home about the year 953; his relics were brought to Corfu, where they are venerated to this day beside those of Saint Spyridon. He is commemorated on January 19.

• Euphrasia of Nicomedia

  Euphrasia (†c. 303) was a Christian virgin of noble birth at Nicomedia, martyred in the great persecution under the emperor Maximian. Arrested for her confession of Christ and refusing to sacrifice to the idols, she was tortured; and when the judge, unable to break her, handed her over to a barbarian soldier to be violated and her virginity destroyed, she preserved her chastity by a stratagem — telling the man she knew of a herb that would make him invulnerable in battle, and offering to prove it upon herself, she bade him strike her neck with his sword. He struck, and so she died by the sword with her virginity intact, gaining the crown of martyrdom and outwitting the shame prepared for her. She is commemorated on January 19.

• Meletios Galesiotes

  Meletios the Confessor (c. 1209 – c. 1283), called "the Galesiote" from Mount Galesion near Ephesus where he was a monk, was one of the great confessors of Orthodoxy against the false Union of Lyons (1274) imposed by the emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos. A monk first on Sinai and then at the Monastery of Saint Lazarus on Galesion, renowned for extreme asceticism, he stood at the head of the resistance to the union with Rome — rebuking the emperor to his face as a "second Julian the Apostate" — and for it was imprisoned, exiled, and had his tongue cut out, yet (the tradition holds) continued to speak in defence of the faith. In his exile he composed the vast didactic poem the Alphabetalphabetos, setting out the whole of the Orthodox faith and life. He reposed about 1283, his relics venerated at Galesion. He is commemorated on January 19.

• Sabbas of Storozhevsk

  Sabbas of Storozhevsk (Savva of Zvenigorod, †1406) was one of the first and closest disciples of Sergius of Radonezh, tonsured by him in his youth at the Trinity Lavra, where he later served as father confessor to the whole brotherhood and, for a time, as Sergius's successor in the abbacy. At the request of Prince Yuri of Zvenigorod, whose spiritual father he was, he withdrew about 1398 to a wooded hill called Storozhi above the Moskva river and there founded the Savvino-Storozhevsky monastery, which became one of the great houses of Muscovite Russia. A man of extreme silence, simplicity, and humility, he was glorified as a wonderworker; his incorrupt relics were uncovered in 1652. He is commemorated on December 3.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Branwalader (Breward) bishop of Jersey (6th C)
• St. Nathalan, bishop of Tullicht (c.678)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings