Ven. Maximus the Confessor

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Maximus the Confessor

  Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 662) is the supreme theologian of the seventh century and one of the greatest fathers of the Church. A high official at the court of the emperor Heraclius who left the world for the monastic life, he became the tireless defender of the full humanity of Christ against Monotheletism — the imperial doctrine that the incarnate Word had but one (divine) will and one operation — insisting that because Christ is truly God and truly man he possesses two natural wills and two natural energies, human and divine, the human freely and always conformed to the divine. In the Ambigua, the Questions to Thalassius, and the Mystagogy he drew the Chalcedonian and Cyrilline inheritance into a single cosmic vision of creation, incarnation, and deification. For refusing communion with the heresy — and for the Lateran Council of 649, which condemned it — he and his disciples were tried at Constantinople, and, when he would not yield, his tongue and right hand were cut off so that he could neither speak nor write the truth; he was exiled to Lazica in the Caucasus, where he died on 13 August 662. Twenty years later the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680–81) vindicated his theology as the faith of the Church. His principal feast is January 21; August 13 keeps his repose and the translation of his relics.

• Saint of the day

  Maximus the Greek

  Maximus the Greek (c. 1470 – 1556) was an Athonite scholar-monk sent from Vatopedi to Muscovite Russia as a translator, who became one of the most learned men of his age and a confessor imprisoned for decades. Born Michael Trivolis at Arta in Epirus and educated in Renaissance Italy — Florence, Venice, Padua — he returned to Orthodoxy and became a monk on Mount Athos. Summoned to Moscow in 1516 to translate and correct the Slavonic service-books and Scriptures, he laid the foundations of Russian humanist learning; but his rebukes of injustice and avarice, his links to the "non-possessor" party, and errors seized upon from his corrections brought him, at councils of 1525 and 1531, condemnation on charges of heresy, sorcery, and treason. He was imprisoned in the monasteries of Volokolamsk and Tver for more than twenty years, cut off for long stretches from the sacraments, yet never ceased to write. Released at the last to the Trinity–St Sergius Lavra, he reposed there on January 21, 1556, and was glorified by the Russian Church in 1988.

• Holy Martyr Agnes of Rome (ca. 304)

  Agnes of Rome (c. 291 – c. 304) is one of the most celebrated virgin-martyrs of the undivided Church, a girl of about twelve or thirteen who gave her life at Rome in the Great Persecution rather than betray her consecrated virginity or deny Christ. Born of a noble Christian family and sought in marriage by the son of the city prefect, she answered that she had already a Bridegroom, Christ, whom she would not forsake; denounced as a Christian, she was subjected to shame and threat — exposed, the tradition says, in a house of ill fame, where her hair grew to veil her and an angelic light shielded her, and where those who assailed her were struck down. Neither seduction, nor terror, nor fire could move her; she was at last slain by the sword. Venerated at once at her tomb on the Via Nomentana, over which a basilica rose, she is kept on January 21, and her name — near the Latin agnus, a lamb — made her the very emblem of innocence.

• Our Holy Father Maximos the Greek (1556)

• Anastasius the Monk and Anastasius the Apocrisiarius

  Anastasius the Monk (†662) and Anastasius the Apocrisiarius (†666) were the two disciples of Maximus the Confessor who shared his struggle against Monotheletism, his trials at Constantinople, and his sufferings. Anastasius the Monk was Maximus's longtime cell-attendant and companion; Anastasius the Apocrisiarius was a Roman, the apocrisiarius (legate) of the Church of Rome. With their master, both refused communion with the one-will heresy; both had their tongues cut out and their right hands cut off, and both were exiled to the barbarous land of Lazica in the Caucasus, where they died confessors — the Monk soon after Maximus in 662, the Apocrisiarius, longest-lived of the three, in the fortress of exile in 666. They are commemorated together with Maximus on January 21.

• Eugene, Candidus, Valerian and Aquila

  Eugene, Candidus, Valerian and Aquila were four Christians of Trebizond on the Black Sea coast of Pontus, martyred in the persecution of Diocletian about the year 303–305. Hiding from the persecutors in the hills near the city, Candidus, Valerian and Aquila were seized first and, after cruel scourging, imprisoned; Eugene, coming forward to confess Christ and — the tradition says — overthrowing the idol of Mithras that the pagans of Trebizond revered, was arrested and joined to them, and all four were tortured and at last beheaded. Of the four, Eugene became the great patron saint of Trebizond, honoured by the city and, in later centuries, by the emperors of the Grand Komnenoi, whose coins bore his image; a church was raised over his relics, and his memory is kept on January 21.

• Neophytus of Nicaea

  Neophytus of Nicaea (†c. 303–305) was a boy-martyr of Bithynia whom the tradition remembers for the gift of wonderworking bestowed on him while he was still a child. Born at Nicaea of devout Christian parents, he was said to have worked miracles from his earliest years — the tradition tells of a dove that spoke to him, of water drawn from a rock, and of his foreknowledge of his mother's death. Withdrawing while still a boy to a cave on Mount Olympus in Bithynia, from which he first drove and then tamed a lion, he came down at the outbreak of the Great Persecution to confess Christ before the persecutors. Though barely fifteen, he endured scourging, fire, and the beasts unharmed, and was at last slain by the sword (or the spear). He is kept on January 21.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Brigid of Kilbride (6th C)
• St. Wynnin, bishop and abbot of Holywood (6th C)
• St. Lawdog of Wales (6th C)
• St. Macallan, hermit and abbot (978)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings