St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan; Ven. Nilus of Stolobensk

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan

  Ambrose of Milan (c. 339–397) was one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Western Church and, with Augustine, Jerome and Gregory the Great, a pillar of Latin Christianity — yet he is venerated equally in the East as one of the universal teachers of the faith. A Roman provincial governor acclaimed bishop by the people of Milan while still an unbaptised catechumen, he became the foremost champion of Nicene orthodoxy against Arianism in the West, the spiritual father who baptised Augustine, a pioneer of Latin hymnody and antiphonal chant, and the bishop who compelled the emperor Theodosius the Great to do public penance for the massacre at Thessalonica — asserting that the emperor stands within the Church, not above it. His feast is December 7, the day of his consecration.

• Saint of the day

  Ven. Nilus of Stolobensk

• The Martyrs of Africa, who suffered during the Vandal persecution (429 and following)

• Our Venerable Father Antony of Siya (1556)

  Anthony of Siya (c. 1477–1556) was a monastic founder of the Russian far north, the abbot who established the monastery of the Holy Trinity on the River Siya (Sija), in the wilderness of the North Dvina, and made it a centre of prayer, learning and iconography in the Archangelsk borderlands. Trained in his youth as an icon-painter and himself remembered as an iconographer, he sought solitude even as his foundation grew famous, twice withdrawing to remoter hermitages before the brethren recalled him. He guided the Siya monastery until his death at the age of seventy-nine, and is venerated among the wonderworkers of the Russian North. His feast is December 7.

• Athenodorus of Mesopotamia

  Athenodorus was a martyr of Syrian Mesopotamia who suffered in the last great persecution of Diocletian, about the year 304. Having embraced the monastic life from his youth, he was denounced as a Christian, arrested, and subjected to severe tortures by the governor Eleusius; the miracles that attended his sufferings converted many of the pagan onlookers to Christ. He was beheaded, and is commemorated in the Byzantine synaxaria on December 7.

• Gregory of Grigoriou

  Gregory of Grigoriou was the founder and first builder of the monastery of Grigoriou on Mount Athos, one of the twenty great houses of the Holy Mountain. A Serbian by birth, he pursued the ascetic life on Athos and raised a monastery dedicated to St Nicholas, which was afterward renamed Grigoriou in his honour. His signature is preserved in an Athonite document of 1405, fixing him to the close of the fourteenth and the opening of the fifteenth century; the tradition holds that his relics were later carried off from the Mountain by Serbian monks. He is commemorated on December 7.

• Nilus of Stolobny

  Nilus of Stolobny (died 1554) was one of the great hermit-ascetics of northern Russia, who spent twenty-six years in absolute solitude on a wooded island in Lake Seliger, in the Tver borderlands, and there founded — after his death — one of the most famous monasteries of the Russian Church, the Nilov Hermitage (Nilova Pustyn). Renowned for extremes of self-denial, above all his vow never to lie down but to sleep upright, leaning on two wooden hooks set into the wall of his cell, he became after his repose a wonderworker venerated across Russia, his image reproduced in countless carved wooden figures. His feast is December 7; the uncovering of his relics is kept on May 27.

• Paul the Obedient

  Paul the Obedient is a monastic saint known only from a short synaxarion notice, which gives neither his dates nor his country. Born of wealthy parents, he renounced the world on reaching maturity and received his surname "the Obedient" for the depth of his humility and the complete renunciation of his own will. Marvels attended his ascetic life, and after journeys to Jerusalem and Cyprus he ended his days as a solitary on Mount Paregoros ("the mountain of Solace"). He is commemorated on December 7.

• Philothea of Argeș

  Philothea of Argeș (c. 1206 – c. 1218) is a child virgin-martyr of the Balkans whose incorrupt relics, enshrined at the monastery of Curtea de Argeș, made her one of the great protecting saints of Romania. Born near Trnovo in Bulgaria to a poor family, she was killed at about twelve years of age by her own father, who struck her in fury when he discovered that she was giving his food to the poor. Her body could not be lifted until the monastery of Curtea de Argeș was named as its resting place, and there she has been venerated for centuries with an annual festal pilgrimage on her feast, December 7.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Buithe, missionary (521)
• St. Diuma, bishop and missionary (658)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings