St Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  St Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus

  Epiphanius (c. 310/320 – 403), Bishop of Constantia (ancient Salamis) and metropolitan of Cyprus for some thirty-six years, is the great heresiologist of the early Church and one of the most learned and least comfortable of the Fathers. Formed as a monk in Egypt and Palestine and long abbot of his own monastery near Eleutheropolis, he brought to the episcopate an ascetic's austerity, a prodigious philological learning — Jerome calls him pentaglossos, "five-tongued" — and an implacable hostility to every deviation from the Nicene faith. His Panarion, the "medicine chest" against eighty heresies, and his Ancoratus are irreplaceable: much of what survives of Gnostic, Marcionite, Ebionite and Manichaean literature survives only because Epiphanius quoted it in order to destroy it. In old age his zeal was turned against Origen and, disastrously, exploited by Theophilus of Alexandria against John Chrysostom; he withdrew from that intrigue too late and died at sea on May 12, 403, sailing home. The Seventh Ecumenical Council names him among the Fathers and Teachers of the Church.

• Our Fathers among the Saints Epiphanios, bishop of Cyprus (403) and Germanos, Archbishop of Constantinople (740)

  Germanus (c. 634/640 – c. 740) was Patriarch of Constantinople from 715 to 730 and the first great confessor of the holy icons. Son of a patrician whom the Emperor Constantine IV put to death, castrated as a boy and given to the clergy of the Great Church, he rose to be Metropolitan of Cyzicus and then Ecumenical Patriarch. At a synod in 715 he undid the last vestiges of Monotheletism and restored the honour of the Sixth Council. When Leo III the Isaurian turned against the sacred images, Germanus withstood him for four years — teaching, writing to the iconoclast bishops of Asia Minor, and appealing to Rome — and when the emperor demanded his signature to the decree against the icons in January 730, the old patriarch laid his omophorion on the holy altar and resigned rather than sign, saying that the faith could not be altered without an ecumenical council. He died in retirement at Platanion, some hundred years old. The iconoclast council of 754 anathematised him; the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 read his letters aloud, vindicated him, and entered his name in the diptychs of the saints. He is also one of the notable hymnographers and liturgical commentators of the Greek Church.

• Dionysius of Radonezh

  Dionysius (c. 1570 – 1633), in the world David Zobninovsky, was archimandrite of the Trinity–Saint Sergius Lavra from 1611 and, with Patriarch Hermogenes of Moscow, one of the two churchmen who did most to save Russia in the Time of Troubles. From the Lavra — itself only just delivered from a sixteen-month Polish siege — he turned the monastery into a hospital and refuge for the maimed and homeless of the war, and with the cellarer Abraham Palitsyn sent out the circular letters to Nizhny Novgorod and the Russian towns that helped raise the militia of Minin and Pozharsky and free Moscow. Set in 1616 to correct the printed service-books against the Greek, he was accused of heresy by ignorant opponents, condemned at a council in 1618, imprisoned and put under penance; he was exonerated in 1619 when the Patriarchs Philaret of Moscow and Theophanes of Jerusalem examined the case. He bore it, the accounts insist, without bitterness. He died on May 12, 1633, and is buried at the Lavra.

• Hermogenes of Moscow

  Hermogenes (c. 1530 – 1612) was Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia through the worst years of the Time of Troubles, and a hieromartyr whose steadfastness helped save the Russian state and Church. A priest of Kazan who witnessed and recorded the finding of the wonderworking Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, and afterwards its first metropolitan, he was raised to the patriarchal throne in 1606. When the Polish invaders and their partisans overran Moscow and pressed the Russians to accept a Catholic prince, Władysław, as tsar, Hermogenes refused to bless him unless he became Orthodox, and from his cathedral, and then from prison, sent out letters (gramoty) calling the people to rise in defence of the faith and the fatherland — the summons that kindled the national militia of Minin and Pozharsky. For this the Poles shut him up in the Chudov Monastery in the Kremlin and starved him; he died on February 17, 1612, months before Moscow was freed. He was glorified in 1913, and his relics rest in the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin. Not to be confused with the new hieromartyr Hermogenes (Dolganev), Bishop of Tobolsk (June 16, †1918), drowned in the river Tura by the Bolsheviks — a different man of a different century, with whom the patriarch is often confused because both bear the name and both died in the hands of an occupying power.

• John of Vlachia

  John of Vlachia (Ioan Valahul, 1644 – 1662) is the young martyr of Wallachia who suffered at Constantinople at the age of seventeen. Taken prisoner as a boy when the Ottoman punitive campaign fell upon Wallachia after the revolt of the Voivode Mihnea III, he was bought by a Turkish officer for immoral purposes; resisting, and in extremity defending himself, he killed his captor and was carried to Constantinople and handed over as a slave to the dead man's widow. For two and a half years she pressed him, by flattery and by threat, to deny Christ, accept Islam and marry her. He refused. He was imprisoned, tortured, and at last condemned; the executioners hanged him at Parmak Kapi in Constantinople on May 12, 1662, before he was eighteen years old. His memory was kept by the Greeks of the City and by the Romanians, and the Romanian Orthodox Church canonised him formally in 1950 (the glorification proclaimed in 1955), the first Romanian saint of the modern canonisations; he is honoured as a patron of Romanian youth.

• Pancratius of Rome

  Pancratius — in the West Saint Pancras — was a boy of fourteen martyred at Rome in the persecution of Diocletian, about the year 304. A native of Phrygia in Asia Minor, orphaned of both parents, he was brought to Rome to live with his uncle Dionysius; both heard the preaching of the Bishop of Rome and were baptised. Arrested in the persecution and refusing to sacrifice, the boy was beheaded and buried on the Via Aurelia, where a church rose over his grave. He became one of the most popular of the young Roman martyrs: Gregory the Great preached in his basilica and had a silver reliquary made for his head, oaths were sworn on his relics in the medieval West, and Augustine of Canterbury dedicated to him among the first churches of the English mission — whence Old Saint Pancras in London and the great railway station that bears the name. In the East he is a short notice of May 12, without a proper service; his cult belongs chiefly to the West.

• Polybius of Rinocorura

  Polybius was the travelling companion, biographer and spiritual son of Epiphanius of Cyprus, and it is largely to him that the Church owes the Life of that great hierarch: after the death of the disciple John, who had begun the record, Polybius continued it, writing down the deeds and miracles of his teacher as he witnessed them. When Epiphanius returned from Constantinople in 403, having withdrawn from the intrigue against John Chrysostom, he sent Polybius away to Egypt with the words "Go into Egypt; and after my death I will take thought for you." Polybius obeyed, left before his master's burial, and in Egypt was consecrated Bishop of Rinocorura on the desert frontier between Egypt and Palestine. He was famous there for asceticism and for wonderworking — the tradition remembers that at his prayer rain fell in a drought and the fields yielded abundantly — and reposed in great old age in the fifth century. He is commemorated on May 12 with Epiphanius.

• Sabinus of Cyprus

  Sabinus was the disciple, biographer and successor of Epiphanius of Cyprus. Tonsured by Epiphanius and his companion in the ascetic life for five years in the wilderness, he wrote down the life and deeds of his teacher; when Epiphanius was set over the Church of Cyprus he ordained Sabinus presbyter, and at Epiphanius's death in 403 Sabinus was raised to the see of Constantia as Archbishop of Cyprus. As hierarch he defended his church against the heretics in the years when Cyprus was contending both for the Nicene faith and for its own autocephaly, and he reposed about the middle of the fifth century. He is commemorated on May 12, the day of his master, with whom the synaxaria always name him.

• Theodore of Kythera

  Theodore (c. 870/890 – 922) is the patron saint of the island of Kythera (Cerigo), off the southern tip of the Peloponnese. Born at Koroni in Messenia of a mother long barren, reared in the clergy as a reader, married and the father of two children, and ordained deacon by the Archbishop of Argos, he left family and city for the ascetic life: first in a cell beside the church of the Theotokos at Monemvasia, then, about 921, on Kythera, which the Saracen raids had emptied of its inhabitants. There, alone in the ruined church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, he lived out a single hard year and died on May 12, 922. Sailors putting in at the deserted island found his body incorrupt; in 925 men of Monemvasia buried it with honour, the church was rebuilt under his name, and it became the monastery of Saint Theodore, the mother-shrine of Kythera's Christianity. The island keeps his memory as its first citizen and protector.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Æthelheard, 14th archbishop of Canterbury (805)
• St. Diomna the Teacher (5th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings