Beginning of the Nativity Fast
On this day the Orthodox Church begins the forty days of preparation for the feast of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ in the flesh, a fast appointed by the holy Fathers in imitation of the great fast before Pascha and in remembrance of the long expectation of the patriarchs and prophets for the coming of the Saviour. It is also called the fast of Saint Philip, because it begins on the day after the feast of the holy Apostle Philip, on 14 November in the new calendar. From this day until 24 December the faithful are enjoined to abstain from meat, dairy products and eggs, with fish permitted on most days until 20 December, in order that by self-restraint, increased prayer, almsgiving and the reading of the Scriptures, soul and body may be made ready to receive the incarnate Word in the cave of Bethlehem. The fast was already firmly established by the time of the Council of Constantinople under the patriarch Luke Chrysoberges in 1166, which fixed its present length of forty days for the whole Church.
Holy Martyrs Elpidius, Marcellus and Eustochius
362
Saints Elpidius, Marcellus and Eustochius suffered for Christ during the brief but cruel persecution raised by the apostate emperor Julian in the year 362. Elpidius was a senator of high standing at the imperial court, learned in both the divine Scriptures and the philosophy of the Greeks, and his confession of the faith drew with him many of the noble and the common people to embrace Christ. Brought before Julian and refusing to deny the Lord either by promises or by the threat of torture, he was beaten with rods, suspended from a tree and his sides torn with iron hooks, and at last cast into a great fire together with his companions Marcellus and Eustochius, in which they gave up their souls to God. According to the tradition, the fire was extinguished by a sudden rain and Elpidius emerged unharmed, and on the morrow he and his fellow confessors were beheaded outside the city. Their relics afterwards became famous for healings and were honoured as among the last witnesses of the persecuting paganism of the empire.
Holy Martyrs and Confessors Gurias, Samonas and Habibus of Edessa
Saints Gurias and Samonas were two pious Christians of Edessa in Mesopotamia who, during the persecution of the emperor Diocletian about the year 299, were arrested for refusing to take part in the public sacrifices to idols. After long imprisonment, hunger and torture they were beheaded outside the walls of the city, where the faithful afterwards gathered up their bodies and laid them to rest. Some twenty years later, in the reign of Licinius, the deacon Habibus of the village of Telseha near Edessa, who continued to gather the people for prayer and to read the Scriptures publicly though the churches had been closed, was likewise summoned by the governor and, having confessed Christ, was burned alive. The three martyrs share one common commemoration because their relics were laid together in a single shrine outside Edessa, and their joint protection has been invoked from antiquity in defence of marriage and against the breaking of vows, on account of a celebrated miracle wrought by them for a Christian woman of the city wronged by a Gothic soldier.
Saint Philip the Just, Father of Saint Gregory Palamas
Saint Philip lived at Constantinople in the latter part of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, and was a senator at the court of the emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus, by whom he was held in high esteem on account of his wisdom and piety. Distinguished for almsgiving, prayer and a life of unceasing recollection in the midst of the cares of office, he was the father of a numerous family, of whom the eldest son was Saint Gregory Palamas, archbishop of Thessalonica and great defender of the divine and uncreated energies. Foreseeing his end, Philip received the monastic tonsure under the name of Phocas and reposed in peace about the year 1304, leaving the upbringing of his children to the emperor and to his own holy widow Kalloni, who likewise embraced the monastic life. The remembrance of his piety has been kept in the Church together with that of his celebrated son, on the eve of the Nativity Fast which begins this day.
Our Venerable Father Paisius Velichkovsky
1794
He was born in Ukraine in 1722, one of the many children of a priest. He attended the Ecclesiastical Academy in Kiev, but was disappointed by the worldliness, love of ease and western theological climate that he found there.
After four years he left the school and embarked on a search for a spiritual father and a monastery where he could live in poverty. He eventually found wise spiritual guides in Romania, where many of the Russian monks had fled after Peter the Great’s reforms. From there he traveled to the Holy Mountain. Spiritual life was at a low ebb there also, and Plato (the name he had been given as a novice) became a hermit, devoting his days to prayer and reading the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers. After four years, a visiting Elder from Romania tonsured him a monk under the name Paisius, and advised him to live with other monks to avoid the spiritual dangers of taking up the solitary life too soon. A few brethren from Romania arrived, seeking to make him their spiritual father, but as he felt unworthy to take on this task, all of them lived in poverty and mutual obedience. Others joined them from Romania and the Slavic countries, and in time they took up the cenobitic life, with Paisius as their reluctant abbot.
In 1763 the entire community (grown to sixty-five in number) left the Holy Mountain and returned to Romania. They were given a monastery where they adopted the Athonite rule of life. Abbot Paisius introduced the Jesus Prayer and other aspects of hesychasm to the monastic life there: before this time, they had been used mostly by hermits. The services of the Church were conducted fully, with the choirs chanting alternately in Slavonic and Romanian. The monks confessed to their Elder every evening so as not to let the sun go down on their anger, and a brother who held a grudge against another was forbidden to enter the church, or even to say the Lord’s Prayer, until he had settled it.
The monastic brotherhood eventually grew to more than a thousand, divided into two monasteries. Visitors and pilgrims came from Russia, Greece and other lands to experience its holy example.
St Paisius had learned Greek while on Mt Athos, and undertook to produce accurate Slavonic translations of the writings of many of the Fathers of the Church. The Greek Philokalia had been published not long before, and St Paisius produced a Slavonic version that was read throughout the Slavic Orthodox world. (This is the Philokalia that the pilgrim carries with him in The Way of a Pilgrim).
The Saint reposed in peace in 1794, one year after the publication of his Slavonic Philokalia. The Synaxarion summarizes his influence: “These translations, and the influence of the Saint through the activity of his disciples in Russia, led to a widespread spiritual renewal, and to the restoration of traditional monastic life there which lasted until the Revolution of 1917.”