10th Sunday after Pentecost

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Eusignius of Antioch

  Eusignius was a soldier of Antioch who served sixty years in the Roman armies, saw with his own eyes the appearance of the Cross in the sky to Constantine, and lived on into extreme old age in his native city as a man of prayer and of the church. When Julian the Apostate wintered at Antioch in 362 and set himself to restore the old gods, Eusignius — denounced by a neighbour — was brought before the emperor and, at more than a hundred years of age, rebuked him to his face for abandoning the faith of his own kinsman Constantine, whose victory under the sign of the Cross he had personally witnessed. Julian had him beheaded. He is the last and eldest of the martyrs of the brief pagan reaction, and he belongs peculiarly to Antioch, which was both the city of his birth and the city of Julian's failure.

• Holy Hieromartyr Fabian, Pope of Rome (250)

  Fabian was bishop of Rome for fourteen years, from 236 to 250 — the longest and one of the most consequential episcopates of the pre-Constantinian Church. He was elected, the oldest account says, by an unmistakable sign: a countryman with no ambition and no party, standing at the edge of the assembly, on whose head a dove descended, whereupon the whole people acclaimed him. He organised the Roman church into seven districts under seven deacons, set notaries to record the acts of the martyrs, brought home from the mines of Sardinia the bodies of his exiled predecessor Pontian and of Hippolytus, sent bishops into Gaul, and governed through a long peace which he used to build. When the emperor Decius issued the first general edict of sacrifice, Fabian was the first man in Rome to die under it, on 20 January 250. His epitaph, ΦΑΒΙΑΝΟC ΕΠΙ ΜΡ, still exists in the crypt of the popes.

• Righteous Nonna (374), Mother of St Gregory the Theologian

  Nonna was the mother of Gregory the Theologian, and the head — under God, and by her own praying — of the most extraordinary household of saints in Christian history: she converted her pagan husband, who became bishop of Nazianzus; she bore three children, and all three are numbered among the saints; and she served the church of Nazianzus as a deaconess into extreme old age. Her son, who was the finest writer of his century, spent a great part of his verse on her, so that she is one of the very few laywomen of the fourth century whose character is known to us in detail and from the inside. She died at about a hundred years old, at prayer, in the church, before the holy table, on August 5 in the year 374, a few months after her husband.

• Anterus of Rome

  Anterus was bishop of Rome for about forty days, from November 235 to January 236 — one of the shortest reigns in the history of that see, and one of the least documented. He was elected in the middle of the persecution of Maximinus Thrax, when his predecessor Pontian had been deported to the mines of Sardinia; the tradition remembers him chiefly for a single characteristic act, the collection and preservation of the acts of the martyrs from the public registers, and holds that it cost him his life. He was buried in the papal crypt of the cemetery of Callixtus on the Appian Way, where his Greek epitaph — the oldest of the papal epitaphs recovered there — was found in the nineteenth century. The East keeps him on August 5, with his successor Fabian.

• Cantidius, Cantidian and Sibel

  Three martyrs of Egypt, commemorated together on August 5 and known only from the bare notice of the synaxaria. Cantidius and Cantidian were brothers, put to death by stoning; Sibel — the Greek books call him Σόλεβ, Solev the Egyptian, and the Slavonic tradition Sibelius or Sobel — was shot with arrows. Nothing further is transmitted: no city, no magistrate, no year, no dialogue. They are placed in the fourth century, and they stand in the calendar as what the great majority of the martyrs in fact were — Christians of no distinction who would not deny Christ, whose names survived and whose stories did not.

• Eugenios the Aetolian

  Eugenios was a monk, priest and above all a teacher, who spent the middle of the seventeenth century founding schools in the poorest and most inaccessible mountains of Greece. Born in Aetolia in 1595 and trained under the best masters the Greek world then had — Theophilos Korydalleus and Meletios Syrigos — he refused the careers those studies opened and went back into the Agrapha, the "unwritten" highlands of the Pindus that the Ottoman registers had never properly reached, to teach Greek letters and the faith to mountain children. He founded the school at Karpenisi and, in 1661, the Hellenomouseion at the monastery of Agia Paraskevi at Vrangiana, which became the most famous school of the Greek interior. He died there on 5 August 1682 and was buried in the tomb he had prepared for himself in the narthex. The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints on 1 July 1982.

• Euthymius I of Constantinople

  Euthymius was a monk of great age and greater obstinacy who was made Patriarch of Constantinople in 907, at the worst moment in the Church's relations with the imperial house, and who managed the impossible task set him with a scrupulousness that satisfied nobody and cost him everything. The emperor Leo VI the Wise had married a fourth wife — a thing the canons forbade absolutely — and had deposed the patriarch Nicholas Mystikos for refusing to accept it. Euthymius, Leo's own spiritual father, took the see: he acknowledged the legitimacy of the child Constantine VII, and he refused to the end to call the marriage lawful or the empress an Augusta, and deposed the priest who had blessed it. When Leo died, the new regime threw him out — with violence, at a synod in the Magnaura — and he lived his last five years in exile, dying on 5 August 917. The Church keeps him as a confessor.

• Job of Ushchelsk

  Job was a hieromonk of Solovki sent in 1614 into the wilderness of the Mezen, in the far north of Russia, to plant a monastery among a scattered and half-heathen population. He built his chapel at the meeting of the rivers, kept his brotherhood alive through years of destitution until the tsar endowed them, and on 5 August 1628, while the monks were out at the hay, was seized by a band of robbers who supposed a monastery must have money. They tortured him to make him show the treasury, and when he would not, they cut off his head. There was nothing to find; they went away empty-handed. The north venerated him almost at once — fifty miracles were recorded in the seventeenth century, his icon was painted in 1658 and his life written in the 1660s — and his relics were formally examined and his services authorised in 1739.

• John Jacob the Chozebite

  John Jacob was a Romanian hermit of the Judaean desert, one of the last representatives of the ancient anchoritic life of Palestine and the most widely loved Romanian saint of the twentieth century. Orphaned as an infant and raised by his grandmother, he entered the great monastery of Neamț at twenty, went to the Holy Land in 1936, served for years as librarian at the Lavra of St Sabbas, and finally withdrew, about 1952, into a cave in the cliff above the wadi of Chozeba near Jericho — the cave in which, tradition says, St Anna had prayed for a child. He died there on 5 August 1960, aged forty-seven. When the tomb was opened on 8 August 1980 his body was found incorrupt, and it lies today, visible, in the monastery of St George the Chozebite. The Romanian Church numbered him among the saints in 1992.

• Oswald of Northumbria

  Oswald was king of Northumbria from 634 to 642, and the man through whom the north of England became Christian. Baptised in exile among the Irish of Iona, he returned to a kingdom that had collapsed into apostasy, set up a wooden cross with his own hands before the battle of Heavenfield and knelt his army down to pray before it, and won. He then sent to Iona for a bishop, received Aidan, gave him Lindisfarne, and stood beside him interpreting his Irish to the Northumbrian nobles — a king acting as his missionary's translator. His almsgiving was proverbial, and the hand that gave the alms was said never to have decayed. On 5 August 642 he was killed at Maserfield by the pagan Penda of Mercia, at thirty-eight, praying for the souls of his own men as he fell. His cult became one of the most widespread in medieval Europe.

• Pontius of Cimiez

  Pontius was a young Roman of senatorial family, the spiritual son of Pope Fabian, who spent his inheritance on the poor of the city and whose preaching, according to the passion, drew the emperor Philip the Arab and his son to baptism. When Decius seized the empire and the persecution began, Pontius left Rome for Cimiez (Cemenelum), the Roman town on the hill above what is now Nice, and there, under Valerian, was arrested by the prefects Claudius and Anubius, tortured, delivered unhurt from beasts and from fire, and at last beheaded, about the year 257. He is the patron of Nice and of the whole Provençal coast, where the abbey of Saint-Pons kept his relics; the Eastern books commemorate him on August 5 with Fabian.

• Theoctistus of Chernigov

  Theoctistus was a monk of the Kiev Caves, its igumen from 1103, and from 1113 the bishop of Chernigov — a career that spans the two decades in which the Caves monastery became the mother of the Russian episcopate. As abbot he built the monastery's stone refectory and secured the entry of Theodosius into the Synodikon, so that his name should be sung in every church of the land; the Caves Paterikon credits his prayers with the deliverance of the deluded recluse Nikita, who afterwards became the holy bishop of Novgorod. As bishop he stood close to Vladimir Monomakh, worked among the still-pagan Vyatichi, and built churches to the passion-bearers Boris and Gleb. He died on 6 August 1123, and because that day is the Transfiguration, the Church keeps his memory on the fifth.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Gormcal, abbot of Ardoilen (1016)
• St. Abel of Rheims (c.747)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings