Ven. Anthony and Theodosius of Kiev Caves

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Ven. Anthony and Theodosius of Kiev Caves

  Antony of the Kiev Caves (983–1073) is the father of monasticism in the land of Rus'. Born at Liubech near Chernigov and baptised Antipas, he went as a young man to Mount Athos, was tonsured there, and was sent back by his abbot with the word that he should carry the Holy Mountain's way of life to his own people. Settling in a cave dug in the wooded hill above the Dnieper at Berestovo, he lived on bread and water and drew disciples he had not sought; from that hole in the earth grew the Monastery of the Caves, the mother-house of Russian and Ukrainian monasticism, whose second founder and organiser was his disciple Theodosius. Antony himself never governed it: he appointed abbots and withdrew again into seclusion, and to the end preferred the cave to the church he had caused to be built. He reposed in 1073, and by a providence the tradition has never tried to explain away, his relics have never been uncovered.

• Martyr Mamas of Caesarea in Cappadocia (275), and his parents, Martyrs Theodotus and Rufina

  Mamas of Caesarea (c. 260–c. 275) is one of the great-martyrs of the early Church: born in prison to the martyred confessors Theodotus and Rufina, raised in Caesarea of Cappadocia by the pious widow Ammia, and put to death as a youth of about fifteen in the reign of Aurelian, pierced with a trident after fire, the sea and the wild beasts had failed to harm him. The tradition remembers him as a shepherd-hermit of the mountain near Caesarea who milked the wild deer and fed the poor with their cheese; Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian preached in his honour. Venerated from Cappadocia to Cyprus, Lebanon, Georgia and Gaul, he is a patron of shepherds and their flocks.

• St John IV, Patriarch of Constantinople, known as John the Faster (595)

  John IV the Faster (†595) was Patriarch of Constantinople from 582 to 595: a goldsmith of the capital who rose through the diaconate of Hagia Sophia to the patriarchal throne, and whose fasting, vigil and almsgiving earned him the surname Nesteutes, "the Faster." Under him the title "Ecumenical Patriarch" came into formal synodal use, provoking the celebrated protest of Gregory the Great; yet when John died he was found to own nothing but a wooden bed, a linen shirt and a worn cloak. The penitential canons that shaped later Orthodox confessional practice are transmitted under his name. He is commemorated on September 2.

• Righteous Eleazar, son of Aaron and second High Priest of Israel

• Repose of Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose) of Platina (1982). (August 20 OC)

• 3,628 Martyrs of Nicomedia

  The 3,628 Martyrs of Nicomedia were Christians of Alexandria — men together with their wives and children — who, according to the account transmitted in the menologia, came to faith through the witness and martyrdom of Peter, Archbishop of Alexandria, in the last great persecution, and travelled to Nicomedia, the imperial residence, to confess Christ openly before the persecutors; the whole company was put to the sword. They are commemorated together on September 2.

• Hieu of Tadcaster

  Hieu (Bede's Heiu, †657 in the received Orthodox calendars) is remembered as the first woman in Northumbria to take the vows and habit of a nun, consecrated by Aidan of Lindisfarne himself. She founded the monastery of Heruteu — Hartlepool — the house in which Hilda of Whitby would afterwards begin her rule, and then withdrew to the city of Calcaria, called Kaelcacaestir by the English, identified since antiquarian times with Tadcaster in Yorkshire, where she fixed her dwelling. That single notice of Bede is the whole of her ancient record; the rest — her Irish origin, the year of her death — belongs to later and modern tradition, and is marked as such below.

• Lolan of Kincardine

  Lolan (Lolanus, †c. 1034 in the calendar tradition) is a saint of Scotland honoured at Kincardine-in-Menteith, near Stirling, where the old parish church bears his name and where the Aberdeen Martyrology says he was buried. The pre-Reformation Scottish books commemorate him on September 22 as a bishop and confessor; his bell and pastoral staff survived as heritable relics attached to lands there into the seventeenth century. His written legend, preserved only in the Aberdeen Breviary of 1510, is late and extravagant — a nephew of St Serf, born in Galilee, keeper of the keys of St Peter's in Rome — and stands in flat contradiction with the calendar notices that place him under King Duncan I (†1040). The contradiction is recorded here, not resolved.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Lolanus (c.1034)

Troparia & kontakia

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