Leavetaking of Pascha / Forefeast of Ascension

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Justin the Philosopher

  Justin the Philosopher (c. 100 – c. 165) is the first great apologist of the Church and the earliest Christian writer whose substantial works survive entire. Born of pagan Greek parents at Flavia Neapolis in Samaria — the ancient Shechem — he passed through Stoicism, the Peripatetics, Pythagoreanism and Platonism before an unnamed old man met by the sea turned him from the philosophers to the prophets and to Christ. Wearing still the philosopher's cloak, he taught Christianity as the one true philosophy, opened a school at Rome, and addressed to the emperors and Senate the two Apologies and to a learned Jew the Dialogue with Trypho. Denounced by the Cynic Crescens, he was scourged and beheaded with six companions under the urban prefect Rusticus, and the authentic Acts of that trial survive. His description of baptism, of the Sunday assembly and of the Eucharist is the earliest detailed account of Christian worship in existence.

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• Our Holy Father Agapitus of the Kiev Caves (1095)

  Agapitus of the Kiev Caves (†1095) is the first physician of the Russian land whose name is remembered, and the first Russian saint to bear the title of the unmercenary healers — ἀνάργυροι, those who take no silver. A disciple of St Anthony of the Caves in the first generation of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, he healed the sick of the monastery and the city by prayer and by herbs he boiled himself, refusing all payment and all thanks, and healed among others the future Great Prince Vladimir Monomakh, whom he would not so much as let look at him. His story is told at length in the Kiev Caves Paterikon, chiefly for the sake of its counterpoint: a learned Armenian physician of Kiev, who diagnosed by inspection and predicted the day of death, and who was confounded first by Agapitus's cures and at last by the saint's foreknowledge of his own repose — after which the Armenian became an Orthodox monk. Agapitus's relics rest in the Near Caves, and he is commemorated on June 1.

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• Dionysius of Glushitsa

  Dionysius of Glushitsa (1363–1437) was one of the great founders of the Northern Thebaid, the monastic wilderness of the Russian north. Born near Vologda and baptised Dimitry, he was tonsured in 1382 at the island monastery of the Saviour on the Stone (Spaso-Kamenny) on Lake Kubenskoye, and after nine years went out with a single disciple into the forest, where — hearing, the tradition says, the sound of bells on the empty banks of the river Glushitsa — he founded the Monastery of the Protection of the Theotokos, and later the hermitage of Sosnovets for those who sought greater solitude, a women's monastery under the Athonite typikon, and other houses besides. He was a painter of icons as well as a builder of monasteries, and one of the earliest Russian iconographers whose name and hand can be tied to surviving work. Renowned for extreme austerity, for open-handed almsgiving in famine, and for miracles, he reposed at Sosnovets on 1 June 1437 in his seventy-fourth year, and was canonised by the Council of Moscow in 1547.

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• Justus, Justin and their Companions

  Under this title the Greek Menaion and the Slavic synaxaria keep, on June 1, the little company of Christians who were tried and beheaded at Rome about the year 165 together with Justin the Philosopher: Chariton, the virgin Charito, Euelpistus — a slave of the emperor's household, Cappadocian by birth — Hierax from Iconium in Phrygia, Paeon, and Liberian (whom the Slavic books call Valerian), with a Justin and a Justus who are almost certainly the philosopher himself, doubled in transmission. Their interrogation before the urban prefect Q. Junius Rusticus survives in the Acts of Justin, one of the earliest and soberest of all martyr-acts; each in turn confessed Christ, and to the command that they sacrifice they answered together: "Do what you will, for we are Christians, and we do not sacrifice to idols." They were scourged and beheaded.

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• Shio the New and the Martyrs of Gareji

  At the end of the seventeenth century a band of Dagestani raiders fell upon the cave-monastery of David-Gareji in the semi-desert of Kakheti while the abbot was absent, plundered the church, burned or broke the icons and vestments, and put to the sword the hieromonk left in charge and three of his brethren: Shio the New, David, Gabriel and Paul. Shio was of the Kartlian nobility, from the village of Vedzisi, one of eight children of parents named Papuna and Tamar, and had come to Gareji after a murderous quarrel over the family inheritance drove him out of the world. He was known in the wilderness for humility and for the gift of counsel, and the abbot Onopre entrusted him with the governance of the house. Their mutilated relics were buried by order of the Catholicos and the king in the courtyard of the lavra, south of the tomb of St David of Gareji, and the Georgian Church keeps them on June 1.

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• Thespesius of Cappadocia

  Thespesius — a Greek name meaning "divinely-uttered," and so apt to a martyr that the synaxaria remark on it — was a Christian of Cappadocia who suffered under the emperor Alexander Severus, about the year 222. Arrested by the provincial governor Simplicius for confessing Christ and brought to a temple to sacrifice, he mocked the idols to the governor's face. He was hung up and his flesh torn, plunged into boiling water, and shut for two days in a cauldron of seething oil, pitch and fat, from all of which he came out unhurt; and many pagans, the account says, were converted by the sight. He was at last beheaded outside the city, and is commemorated on June 1.

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British Isles and Ireland

• St. Ronan the Silent
• Holy martyr Wistan of Evesham (850)
• Holy martyr Wite (Candida) of Dorset

Readings

Troparia & kontakia