Hieromartyr Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna

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  Hieromartyr Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna

  Polycarp (c. 69 – c. 155) was bishop of Smyrna, a disciple of the Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian, and — with Ignatius of Antioch, whose friend and correspondent he was — one of the Apostolic Fathers, the generation that received the faith directly from the Apostles and carried it into the second century. He was the living link between the Apostles and the great teachers who followed: Irenaeus of Lyons, who heard him preach as a boy, remembered how Polycarp told of his converse with John "and with the others who had seen the Lord." His one surviving writing, the Letter to the Philippians, and above all the Martyrdom of Polycarp — a letter of the church of Smyrna that is the earliest detailed account of a Christian martyrdom outside the New Testament — made his memory imperishable. Brought into the arena at about eighty-six years of age, he answered the proconsul's demand that he curse Christ with the words, "Eighty-six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?" Condemned to the fire, he was not consumed by it, and was dispatched at last with a dagger. He is kept on February 23.

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• Saint Gorgonia (372)

  Gorgonia (c. 325 – c. 372) was the elder sister of Gregory the Theologian and the daughter of the holy parents Gregory the Elder, bishop of Nazianzus, and Nonna. A married laywoman, mother, and mistress of a household, she was honoured by the Church not for martyrdom or monastic withdrawal but as a model of Christian womanhood in the world — chaste, charitable, prayerful, and steadfast — and her memory is kept almost wholly through the funeral oration her brother preached over her, one of the most affecting portraits of a Christian woman to survive from the ancient Church. Gregory tells how she brought her husband and her whole house to baptism, how she was healed of a grievous injury and a mortal sickness by prayer at the holy altar, and how she foresaw her own falling-asleep and died in peace with a verse of the Psalms on her lips. She is commemorated on February 23.

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• Our Venerable Father Alexander the Unsleeping (430)

  Alexander the Sleepless (c. 350 – c. 430) was the founder of the Acoemetae (Greek Ἀκοίμητοι, "the Unsleeping" or "Sleepless Ones"), the monks who kept the praise of God unceasing day and night, dividing themselves into relays of choirs so that the Divine Office was never once silent in their churches — a literal enactment of the Apostle's command to "pray without ceasing." Born in Asia and educated at Constantinople, he abandoned a promising secular career for the Syrian desert, gave away all he had, and after years as a solitary conceived the discipline of perpetual psalmody that would make his name. Restless, uncompromising, and often at odds with the settled authorities of Church and city, he led a wandering band of ascetics through Syria and Mesopotamia before founding his monastery near Constantinople; driven out and persecuted, he died at Gomon on the Bosporus about the year 430. His community became one of the most famous of the Byzantine world and supplied the first monks of the great Monastery of Stoudios. He is commemorated on February 23.

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• Damian of Esphigmenou

  Damian (thirteenth century, † c. 1280) was a hesychast of the Monastery of Esphigmenou on Mount Athos, a disciple of the elder Cosmas who, after his teacher's repose, withdrew to the neighbouring wilderness of Mount Samareia and there passed his life in stillness, prayer, and extreme asceticism. He is honoured among the venerable fathers of the Holy Mountain, and the tradition tells that at his death a sweet fragrance filled the region for many days as a sign of his sanctity. He is commemorated on February 23.

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• The Syrian Desert Ascetics

  On February 23 the Church commemorates a group of ascetics of the Syrian desert of the fifth century — John, Antiochus, Antoninus, Moses, Zebinas, Polychronius, Moses the Second, and Damian — hermits and mountain-dwellers of the region of Antioch and Cyrrhus whose memory is preserved chiefly through the Religious History (the Philotheos Historia) of Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, the great chronicler of Syrian monasticism, who knew several of them himself. They belong to the golden age of the Syrian ascetic movement — the age of the stylites and the mountain solitaries — and are honoured together as labourers in the same desert and the same discipline of prayer, standing vigil, and severe abstinence. Of Antiochian and Syriac note, they are commemorated as a company on February 23.

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British Isles and Ireland

• St. Jurmin of East Anglia, confessor (7th C)
• St. Milburgh, abbess of Wenlock (7th C)
• St. Boswell, abbot of Melrose (c.661)

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