Celestine the Martyr

The Holy Martyr Celestine

Martyr

Commemorated 25 May — Perfected by having his heels pierced with iron

Celestine is a martyr known to the Church from a single line of the synaxarion. Under May 25, after the notice of the Third Finding of the Precious Head of the Forerunner, the Greek Menaion records that "on the same day the holy martyr Celestine, having had his heels pierced through with iron, is perfected" — and that is the whole of the surviving record: a Latin name, a manner of death, and a date. Later lists place him at Rome, which his name makes likely enough, but no passio survives, no persecution is named, and no century is transmitted. He is one of the many martyrs whose memory the calendar preserves precisely because nothing else about them was preserved.

What the record contains

The one witness is the synaxarial notice of the Menaion for May 25: Ὁ ἅγιος μάρτυς Κελεστῖνος, σιδήρῳ τὰς πτέρνας τρυπηθείς, τελειοῦται — "the holy martyr Celestine, pierced in the heels with iron, is perfected." Every element of it is worth weighing, because there is nothing else to weigh.

The verb τελειοῦται, "is perfected," is the synaxarion's ordinary word for a martyr's death, and carries the theology of the whole calendar: the martyr is not destroyed but completed. The instrument, σίδηρος — iron nails or spikes driven through the heels (πτέρναι) — belongs to a recognisable family of Roman punishments in which the victim was pierced, fixed, and then commonly dragged behind horses or left to die of the wound; it is the same class of torment as that recorded of other martyrs whose bodies were pierced and hauled through the streets. Whether the piercing was itself the cause of death or the prelude to dragging, the notice does not say. That the death was reckoned a martyrdom, and that his name stood in the calendar of Constantinople beside the Forerunner's great relic-feast, is the substance of what the Church remembers.

Name, place and date

Κελεστῖνος is the Greek form of the Latin Caelestinus, "of heaven" — a name current in the Roman West and rare in the Greek East, which is the whole basis of the later specification "in Rome" found in English and Slavonic derivative lists. It is a reasonable inference and no more: the Greek notice gives no place at all. The synaxarion gives no emperor, no governor, and no year, and so this entry carries no century; on the repository's convention that places him among the saints whose era the sources do not fix.

Feast and commemoration

May 25 (church date; New Calendar civil May 25; Old Calendar civil June 7), kept in the Greek synaxarial tradition as one of the minor commemorations of a day given over almost entirely to the Third Finding of the Head of the Forerunner. The Menaion appoints no proper office for him; his memory is carried in the synaxarion notice read at Matins and in the calendar lists, and where he is served at all it is from the common of a martyr. He does not appear in the day-lists of the Orthodox Church in America or of the Russian Church, which for May 25 give the Finding, Therapon of Cyprus and Urban of Rome.

Hymns

Troparion

Thy martyr Celestine, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from thee our God; for possessing thy strength he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble presumption of the demons: by his supplications save our souls.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

No individual iconography of Celestine is known, and none is to be expected of a saint who survives only as a name in a list. Where such martyrs are painted at all it is in the menologion registers — the month-by-month calendar cycles on the walls of Athonite and Balkan katholika, and the painted or printed menaia — in which each day's saints appear in miniature beside the day's principal commemoration; on May 25 the register is dominated by the Finding of the Head, and a small standing martyr figure beside it, if inscribed at all, may be his. The type would be the ordinary one for a martyr: a layman in tunic and mantle, holding the cross of his confession, sometimes with the instrument of his passion at his feet. No pre-1900 image identifiable as this Celestine was located, and none is stored; searches turn up only images of Pope Celestine I, a different saint.

Disputed questions

Not the Pope of Rome. Celestine the martyr of May 25 must not be conflated with Celestine of Rome, the pope (†432) who supported St Cyril of Alexandria against Nestorius and is kept on April 8. The Greek books keep the two apart cleanly — Κελεστῖνος πάπας Ῥώμης on April 8, Κελεστῖνος ὁ μάρτυς on May 25 — and they differ in title, in date, and in manner of death (the pope reposed in peace). The similarity of name and the shared association with Rome make the confusion an easy one, and it occurs in popular lists.
A martyr of the Roman lists? Western martyrologies carry several bearers of the name Caelestinus without secure dates, and it is possible that the Byzantine notice preserves the memory of one of them, transmitted eastward without its acts. No identification can be established, and this entry makes none.
The reading of the notice. A few printed synaxaria give the torment as applied to the feet rather than specifically the heels; the difference is one of translation rather than of tradition, πτέρνα being the heel proper.