Ven. Isidore, Fool-for-Christ of Rostov

Saints commemorated

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  Ven. Isidore, Fool-for-Christ of Rostov

  Isidore of Rostov (†1474), surnamed Tverdislov, "firm of word," is the German-born fool-for-Christ of the Russian north: a rich man's son from the Latin West who gave away his inheritance, embraced Orthodoxy, and walked east as a beggar until he settled in Rostov, where he built himself a brushwood hut on marshy ground and lived in it "in filth and snow and rain and cold," enduring every insult the town could offer. He stood at prayer through the nights and played the fool through the days, and was granted the gift of wonderworking while he lived. He reposed unnoticed in 1474; the townspeople learned of it only when they passed his hut and smelled the fragrance coming from it. Over his grave rose the church of the Ascension, still called by his name, where his relics remain.

• Martyr Isidore of Chios (251)

  Isidore of Chios (†251) was an Egyptian of Alexandria serving as an officer of the imperial fleet when his squadron put in at Chios in the persecution of Decius. Denounced to his admiral Numerius by the centurion Julius, he confessed Christ, refused to sacrifice, and was scourged, dragged over rock, and had his tongue cut out — yet, the acts relate, he kept speaking, while the admiral who had ordered it was struck dumb. His own father came from Alexandria not to save him but to press for his death. Beheaded and thrown into a well to be devoured, his body was rescued and buried by the virgin Myrope, who paid for it with her own martyrdom. Isidore is the patron of Chios and, across the Mediterranean, of sailors; his well became a healing shrine attested by Gregory of Tours, and local tradition binds his memory to the weeping mastic trees of the island.

• Our Holy Father Serapion the Sindonite (5th c.)

  Serapion the Sindonite is the Egyptian ascetic who owned nothing at all but a single coarse linen cloth — the sindōn that gave him his name — and who twice sold himself into slavery in order to convert his masters. Known from the Lausiac History of Palladius, he lived without roof or possessions "like the birds of the air," gave away even his cloth and his Gospel-book, walked from Egypt to Rome, and made of destitution an instrument of mission rather than a private discipline. Because his freedom from property extended to his own body and his own reputation, he stands at the head of a line that runs to the fools-for-Christ; and his few recorded sayings — above all his rebuke to a Roman recluse who thought herself dead to the world — are among the sharpest words in the desert literature.

• Alexander, Barbarus and Acolythus

  Alexander, Barbarus and Acolythus are three martyrs of whom the Synaxarion of Constantinople preserves almost nothing beyond the essentials: that they lived holy lives, that they brought many idolaters to the Christian faith, and that they were martyred together by beheading. Their synaxis — the station at which their memory was kept in the capital — was held in the church of Hagia Eirene by the Sea, which is the one concrete fact anchoring them to a place. The synaxarion couplet plays on their number: "For the severed heads of three fellow-strugglers, the Trinity sets three worthy crowns."

• John of Shumen

  John — called Raiko in Bulgarian, his lay name — was an eighteen-year-old goldsmith of Shumen in northern Bulgaria who was martyred on 14 May 1802. A Turkish girl from the household opposite his workshop tried to draw him into a liaison; failing, she accused him of attempting to force her. The court gave him the choice that broke or crowned so many of the Balkan new-martyrs: apostatise to Islam and marry the girl, or be beaten to death. He answered that he would rather die than deny Christ, and after prolonged and savage torture was beheaded. His martyrdom was written down by the hieromonk Nikephoros of Chios, the great recorder of the neomartyrs.

• Leontius of Jerusalem

  Leontios of Jerusalem was a Phrygian monk who became abbot of the great monastery of Saint John the Theologian on Patmos and then, unwillingly, Patriarch of Jerusalem — called to the mother see at the worst moment in its medieval history, when the Holy City was in Latin hands and its Orthodox patriarch could not securely reside there. He had refused a bishopric in Russia and another in Cyprus from the hand of the emperor Manuel Komnenos, and accepted Jerusalem only because he judged that it could not be refused. He governed a church in exile, travelled into Palestine at real risk, fell foul of the tyranny of Andronikos Komnenos and was banished, and reposed in great old age on the fourteenth of May. Patmos, which formed him, and Jerusalem, which he served, keep his memory on that day.

• Mark of Crete

  Mark the Cretan is a new martyr of the return: a Cretan boy taken to Smyrna after his mother's death, forced into Islam as a child in consequence of his father's violence, who lived four years as a Muslim under the name Mustafa — and then repented, fled home, was received back through the discipline of the Church, studied at Constantinople under the theologian Meletios Syrigos, and deliberately returned to Smyrna, the city of his apostasy, to preach Christ publicly there. He was arrested, refused with great firmness to betray the faith a second time, was cruelly tortured, and beheaded in 1643. His relics were ransomed by the Christians and buried in the church of Hagia Photini at Smyrna, where they became a source of healings.

• Maximus of Asia

  Maximus was a layman and a merchant who suffered under Decius (249–251). His whole recorded biography turns on two facts: that he used his trade to bring people to Christ, persuading many pagans to believe and to be baptised, and that when he came upon a crowd preparing a human sacrifice to their gods he could not endure the sight, broke in among them, and denounced their impiety aloud, calling their idols the soulless handiwork of men. The crowd, driven to fury, stoned him to death on the spot. He is one of the few martyrs of the synaxarion whose death is a lynching rather than a judicial execution.

• Nikitas of Novgorod

  Nikitas of Novgorod (†1108) was a monk of the Kiev Caves who became one of the most instructive figures in the Russian ascetic tradition: a young hermit who, shutting himself into reclusion against his abbot's warning and before he was ready, fell into spiritual delusion (prelest) — visited by a demon in the guise of an angel, given a false gift of prophecy, and turned wholly to the Old Testament while unable so much as to bear the name of Christ or the Gospels. The elders of the Caves, discerning the deception, drove out the demon by their prayers, and Nikitas was restored — humbled, unlettered again, and set on the sure path of obedience. He rose to sanctity, was made Bishop of Novgorod about 1096, and governed that see for some thirteen years, remembered for the two miracles by which he saved his city: he brought rain in a drought and quenched a great fire by his prayer. He reposed in 1108; his incorrupt relics were uncovered in 1558.

• Therapon of Cyprus

  Therapon of Cyprus is the bishop-martyr of Kition (Larnaca) who was cut down upon the holy table while celebrating the Liturgy by raiders from the sea. A monk before he was a bishop, and by tradition a sojourner in Jerusalem before he came to Cyprus, he is honoured as bearing a double crown — the ascetic's and the martyr's — and the Greek proper of his feast turns upon exactly that. His relics were carried to Constantinople, first to the Theotokos at Blachernae and then to a church of his own name where myrrh flowed from his tomb; portions rest today on Mount Athos at Zographou, in Athens, and on Lesbos, where his cult is especially strong. Andrew of Crete (†740) preached an encomium in his honour, which fixes the latest possible date for his life.

• Tikhon of Zadonsk

  Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724–1783) is the great hierarch and spiritual writer of eighteenth-century Russia, and the one figure of that Westernising age in whom the ascetic tradition of the Fathers and the pastoral scholarship of the new seminaries met without injury to either. Born Timothy, the youngest son of a destitute village cantor of the Novgorod land, so poor that his family nearly gave him away to a coachman for bread, he rose through the seminary to be its teacher, then bishop of Voronezh — and after four and a half years laid down his diocese and spent the last fourteen years of his life as a simple monk at Zadonsk, sleeping on straw under a sheepskin, giving away his whole pension, and writing the two books, On True Christianity and A Spiritual Treasury Gathered from the World, that made him the most widely read Russian spiritual author before the Philokalia. He was glorified in 1861, is called the Russian Chrysostom, and stands behind Dostoevsky's Bishop Tikhon and the elder Zosima.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Dyfan, martyr in Wales (2nd C)
• St. Carthage (Carthach Mochuda) the Younger, abbot of Rathin and Lismore (639)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings