St Martha Kills a Dragon

At that time, there was in a certain grove by the Rhone, between Arles and Avignon, a dragon, half beast and half fish, bigger than a cow, longer than a horse, having teeth like swords that were as sharp as horns, and fortified, as it were, with two shields on either side; and it would lay low in the river, and destroy all those who passed along it, and sink the ships. … Besought by the people, Martha came to it, and found it in the grove as it was eating a man. She threw holy water on it, and showed it a cross, and so it was immediately beaten, and stood still like a sheep. Martha tied it up with her belt, and the people at once destroyed it with spears and stone. The dragon was called by the inhabitants “Tarasconus”; wherefore in memory of this, that place is still called “Tarascon”… (From the Golden Legend)

St Martha and the Tarascon, from the Hours of Louis de Laval, 1470-85; Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms Latin 920, folio 317v 

This story from the Golden Legend was included in the Roman Breviary even so late as 1529, in one of the last editions before the Tridientine reform. All trace of it was removed in the revision of Pope St Pius V, but it survives to this day in the folk traditions of southern France. The monster, also called “Tarasque” in French, appears on the shield of the city of Tarascon, where the legend is commemorated in a folk festival held every year, and an effigy of the creature is carried through the city in a parade.

(Image from Wikipedia by Gérard Marin)

He also appears in some of the Corpus Christi festivals in Spain, as seen here in Valencia.

(Image from Wikipedia by Chosovi)

The Legend of St Denis

October 9 has traditionally been kept as the feast of Ss Denis (“Dionysius” in Latin) and Companions, who were martyred at Paris in the 3rd century. St John Leonardi, the founder of a small congregation of clerks regular, died on this day in 1609; when he was added to the general calendar in 1940, his feast was placed on top of that of the martyrs, who were thus reduced to a commemoration. In the post-Conciliar reform, however, both feasts have been made optional memorials, which means that the martyrs may now be celebrated more freely in the Novus Ordo than in the Roman Rite. That they should be present at all in the modern liturgy is very surprising, since St Denis is the subject of one of the most famous hagiographical confusions, of exactly the sort that led to the suppression or downgrading of so many other feasts.

A statue of St Denis, from the treasury of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Paris. One legend tells that St Denis was beheaded on the hill of Montmartre which overlooks Paris, after which he picked up his head and walked about 4 miles to the site where he is buried, the future location of the abbey which bears his name. (Photo courtesy of the Schola Sainte-Cécile.)

In his History of the Franks (I.30), St Gregory of Tours (538-94) lists Denis as one of seven men sent to Gaul as bishops to evangelize various cities during the reign of the Emperor Decius (249-51), and says that sometime after, he was “afflicted with various sufferings for the name of Christ, and ended the present life at the blow of a sword.” In the Martyrology incorrectly attributed to St Jerome, Denis is named on October 9th together with a priest and a deacon, Rusticus and Eleutherius, who are also mentioned in the prayer of their collective feast day. Their bodies were buried at a site a few miles to the north of Paris, and a church built over it, which Gregory of Tours mentions twice, once in connection with a miracle, and again when describing its profanation. Not long after his time, King Dagobert I (603-39) established a monastery under royal patronage at the site, and completely rebuilt the church; it was rebuilt again in the days of Pepin the Short and his son Charlemagne, the latter of whom attended its consecration in 775.

According to the revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints, even before the Carolingian period, St Denis of Paris had already been confused in some quarters with the Biblical figure of the same name (i.e. Dionysius), who was converted by the preaching of St Paul in Athens (Acts 17, 22-34). This preaching took place at the “Areopagus – the hill of Ares”, a large outcropping of the Athenian acropolis which was used as a place of judgment for serious crimes like murder; St Luke calls Dionysius “the Areopagite”, i.e., one of the judges who sat on the court held there. The Church historian Eusebius reports (3.4.11), on the witness of another Dionysius (a very common name in antiquity), bishop of Corinth in the later 2nd century, that the Areopagite was the first bishop of Athens; by the turn of the seventh century, he was believed to have died as a martyr, being burnt alive by the Emperor Domitian.

The Preaching of St Paul at Athens; a preparatory cartoon made by Raphael in the 1510s as part of a series of designs intended to be woven into tapestries; now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Sometime in the later 5th or early 6th century, an unknown Greek-speaking theologian produced a series of four treatises and ten letters, purporting to be works of Dionysius the Areopagite. This is not a case like those of Ss John Chrysostom or Augustine, among many others, to whom writings were very often mistakenly ascribed in later generations; the author clearly and deliberately intended to pass himself off as the contemporary of St Paul. To this end, he claims to have been present, along with Ss Peter and James, for the Dormition of the Virgin Mary (Div. Nom. 3, 2), and addresses letters to Ss John the Evangelist, Timothy and Polycarp. Scholars generally suppose him to have been a Syrian; the dating of his works depends in part on the obvious influence upon them of the neo-Platonic philosopher Proclus, who died in 485. Further attempts to glean information about the author from his writings remain speculative.

By the first decades of the sixth century, these writings were cited by authors on both sides of the debate over the Monophysite heresy, which the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon had condemned in 451. Most notably, at a council held in Constantinople in 533, the Monophysites cited them in support of their teaching, to which the leader of the Catholic party replied that they were forgeries. Nevertheless, as the controversy continued, and as the heresy evolved into Monotheletism in the 7th century, they came to be gradually accepted as both genuine and orthodox by several important figures, the most significant being St Maximus the Confessor, who cited them at a council held in the Lateran Basilica in Rome in 649, under Pope St Martin I. They were further defended and cited to the same effect at the next two ecumenical councils, Third Constantinople in 680, and Second Nicea in 787. To this day, the Byzantine Rite’s liturgical texts for St Dionysius, “the Holy Martyr and Areopagite”, bishop of Athens, are filled with references to the writings, as for example, this hymn at Vespers: “Having made thy mind equal in honor to that of the Angels through virtue, o all-wise father Dionysius, thou didst write an account in (thy) holy books of the heavenly order of their hierarchy, and according to it, didst organize the orders of the Church’s government, likening them to the ranks of heaven.” (He is also the titular Saint of the Roman Catholic cathedral of Athens.)

An early 11th-century mosaic of St Dionysios the Areopagite, in the monastery of St Luke in Boeotia, Greece. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

In the year 827, the Byzantine Emperor Michael II (820-29) sent a copy of the writings to Charlemagne’s son, King Louis the Pious, along with several other gifts. By coincidence, they happened to reach the king on the evening of October 8th, when he was at the royal abbey of St Denis for the vigil of the titular Saint’s feast day. The abbot, Hilduin, who was very close to the king, had them translated into Latin, although this translation was not very well done, and was replaced by another about 30 years later. At the king’s behest, he also wrote a life of St Denis, which definitively conflated the bishop of Paris with the Areopagite, ascribed his mission in Gaul to Pope St Clement I towards the end of the 1st century, and acknowledged the writings as his. This conflation was henceforth accepted, and remained the common legend of St Denis in western Europe for the next 700 years. The writings became extremely influential in the High Middle Ages; Hugh of St Victor, St Albert the Great, and yet another Denis, the great Carthusian theologian, wrote commentaries on them, and they are cited well over 2000 times in the works of St Thomas Aquinas.

In the Renaissance, when many of the certainties of the medieval tradition were being called into question, the authenticity of the writings, and the identification of the two Denises as the same person, were challenged by two of the most prominent among the great humanist scholars, Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), who also unmasked the forgery known as the Donation of Constantine, and later Erasmus. The question was the subject of much controversy and debate over the following centuries, with learned men, Catholic and Protestant, offering their opinions as both defenders and detractors of the tradition. The neo-Gallican revision of the Parisian liturgical books sided with the detractors by separating Denis into two persons, one of Athens, kept on his Byzantine date, October 3rd, and the other of Paris on the traditional date, without the title “Areopagite”, a change which was later harshly condemned by Dom Prosper Guéranger.

A leaf of a 15th century Missal according to the Use of Paris, with the Epistle of the Mass of St Denis, Acts 17, 22-34. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 859A)

However, this diffidence towards the traditional legend of St Denis was not a novelty of the neo-Gallicans. The pre-Tridentine Roman Breviary devotes only a single lesson of less than 70 words to St Denis and his companions, which makes no mention of the theological treatises. It also says that he was sent to Gaul “by the Roman Pontiff”, without specifying which one, a clear sign of doubt about the legend that it was St Clement.

Much more tellingly, the pre-Tridentine Parisian Breviary also pointedly does not refer to Denis as the author of the Areopagitic corpus, although it does accept him as the Athenian disciple of St Paul and the contemporary of St Clement. The Matins lessons for the feast day and the days of its octave are taken directly from Hilduin’s life of the Saint, but omit the chapters (9-17) which describe the theological writings, nor is there any reference to them in any of the proper antiphons or responsories of the Office, or in the Sequence of the Mass. (The Epistle of the latter is the passage from Acts 17 cited above.)

In point of fact, it was only with the Tridentine revision that the Roman Breviary accepted Hilduin’s conflation of the Athenian and Parisian Denis as the same person. Furthermore, a sentence is added to the effect that “He wrote wondrous and indeed heavenly books, on the divine names, on the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, on mystical theology, and certain others.” This is perhaps the only case in the Breviary of St Pius V in which the legend of a Saint moves further away from the more skeptical view, almost certainly due to the influence of Cardinal Baronius, who defended the traditional legend in his notes on the revision of the Martyrology.

As late as 1857, when the Abbé Migne put together his great corpus of Patristic writings, the Patrologia Graeca, which is arranged in chronological order, he put the Areopagitic corpus and associated writings, including several defenses of its authenticity, between the works of St Clement I and those of St Ignatius of Antioch. However, in 1895, two Catholic scholars, Hugo Koch and Josef Stiglmayer, working quite separately from each other, demonstrated the dependence of the writings on the works of Proclus, and the question is now universally regarded as settled in the negative. This also explains what was, of course, the strongest objection to their authenticity all along, namely, the complete absence of any reference to them in the writings of earlier Church Fathers.

Part of the choir of the abbey of St Denys. Around the year 1135, the abbot Suger began the process of enlarging the Carolingian church, during which the choir was rebuilt from 1140-44. Inspired by the Areopagite’s theology of light as an expression and manifestation of God’s presence, Suger created the idea of having huge walls of windows which flood the church’s interior with light; this is the foundation of the architecture style which we now call Gothic, and this choir is the first example of it. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Guilhem Vellut, CC BY 2.0)

As with the many controversies over the authorship of the books of the Bible, the assumption behind this debate was to a large degree that if a work is not genuinely by the author to whom it is attributed, it is therefore a forgery, and hence worthless. And likewise, as with the many controversies over the authorship of the books of the Bible, this assumption has more recently been to a large degree subsumed by an understanding that authenticity is principally an historical question, and one that need not always impinge on the value of a writing as a work of theology. In his series of Wednesday audiences on the Church Fathers, Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the author of these writings (May 14, 2008), and explicitly rejected the idea that he passed himself off as the Areopagite in order to vest his work with the authority of one close to the Apostles, but rather, did so “to make an act of humility; he did not want to glorify his own name, he did not want to build a monument to himself with his work but rather truly to serve the Gospel, to create an ecclesial theology, neither individual nor based on himself.”

The Martyrs of the Theban Legion

Today is the feast day of St Thomas of Villanova (1488-1555), an Augustinian friar who became Archbishop of Valencia in Spain in 1516, and served in that office until his death, which happened on the feast of Our Lady’s Nativity. When he was canonized in 1658, Pope Alexander VII took the unusual step of assigning him to a date already occupied by another feast, that of Ss Maurice and Companions, also known as the Martyrs of the Theban Legion, who were thus reduced to a commemoration. This is unusual for two reasons.

The Martyrdom of Ss Maurice and Companions, by El Greco, 1580-2 (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

First, at the time, there was a date closer to that of his death, September 18th, which was free of any general observance; indeed, the Saint who would later occupy it, Joseph of Cupertino, was still alive in this world. Second, even though the feast of these martyrs was kept at the lowest rank, it was still very uncommon to place one feast on top of another where it was possible to avoid doing so, and this remained a general principle for centuries. [1] Even so late as 1954, the feast of Pope St Pius X was assigned to a date two weeks after that of his death, rather than place it where it would impede either of the lowest-ranked feasts in the area (Aug. 26 and Sept. 1).

This decision most likely reflects a certain diffidence about the historical details of the martyrs in question, whose feast was previously reduced in the Tridentine reform from an Office of nine proper historical readings to only one.

They are called “the Theban Legion” from the place where they were recruited, Thebes [2], which in very ancient times had been the capital of the Kingdom of Upper Egypt. The traditional story recounts that they were all Christians, and sent to Gaul in the year 287 AD, specifically, the area around Lake Geneva, where they were placed under the command of the Emperor Maximian. The first account of their passion was written by St Eucherius, bishop of Lyon, who was born about a century after their time, and died ca. 450; he represents Maximian as a ferocious persecutor of the Christians, one who, “beset by greed, lust, cruelty and the other vices … had armed his impiety to extinguish the name of Christianity.”

The emperor therefore ordered the Theban legion to participate in the persecution of their coreligionists, which they refused absolutely to do, withdrawing to the town of Agaunum, a short distance from the main encampment. For this, they were then “decimated”, a traditional disciplinary practice of the Roman army by which every tenth man of a refractory military unit was killed. Encouraged particularly by three of their officers, Mauritius, Exsuperius and Candidus, the soldiers remained wholly unintimidated. Eucherius’ account includes the text of their written statement sent to the Emperor, expressing their continued refusal to obey him, which begins as follows.

“We are thy soldiers, o emperor, but yet servants of God, which we freely confess. To thee we owe our military service, but to Him our innocence. (i.e., the duty to remain free from sin.) From thee we have receive the wage of our work, but from Him, the very beginning of our life. In this, we can in no wise follow the emperor, that we should deny God, who is indeed our maker and Lord, and thy maker too, will thou or no. If we are not forced so grievously to offend Him, we will obey as we have hitherto; otherwise we will obey him rather than thee.”

A 12th century reliquary bust of the skull of St Candidus, from the treasury of the Abbey of St Maurice, which is located on the site of their martyrdom in ancient Agaunum, now known as Saint Maurice. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Lothar Spurzem, CC BY-SA 2.0 DE)

The legion, numbering 6000, was then massacred without offering any resistance. Eucherius also reports that a veteran named Victor happened to pass by as the soldiers who had perpetrated the massacre were dining off the spoils of their victims, and was invited to join them. On learning the cause of the party, he refused to participate; when asked whether he too was a Christian, he replied that he was and always would be, for which he was immediately killed. “And as he was joined to the other martyrs in that same place in death, so also he is joined to them in honor. Of that company of martyrs, only these names are known to us, those of the most blessed Maurice, Exsuperius, Candidus and Victor; the rest are unknown to us, but are written in the book of life.”

The historical difficulty here lies in the reported cause of the martyrs’ death, which requires a bit of background to understand.

The 3rd century was an era of prolonged crisis for the Roman Empire, often described as a “military anarchy”, with one general after another contending for the imperial throne, and most meeting a violent death at the hands of their successor after only a few years. The man who, after almost 50 years of this, finally began to restore stability was Diocletian, who became emperor in 284, and is now infamous as the last major persecutor of the Christians. Recognizing that the empire was too large for a single man to rule, he divided it into two parts, East and West, [3] each ruled by an “Augustus” and a “Caesar”, i.e., an emperor and a vice-emperor. He also instituted an orderly succession, by which an Augustus would resign after 20 years and be succeeded by his Caesar. [4] Within this system, known as the Tetrarchy, the Maximian named above was the first Augustus of the West, as Diocletian was of the East. And in due course, they both resigned in 305 in favor of their respective Caesars, Galerius and Constantius Chlorus, the latter of whom was the father of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine.

A sculptural group representing the Tetrarchs, made ca. 300 AD out of Egyptian porphyry, an extremely durable material, the color of which was long considered a sign of royalty by the Romans. It was originally located in a public square in Constantinople called the Philadelphion; the piece missing at the lower right was found near there in 1965, and is now in the Istanbul Archeological Museum. During the sack of Constantinople in 1204, it was stolen by the Venetians, brought to their city, and installed in a corner of the façade of St Mark’s Basilica. A Venetian legend claims that they were four thieves (unusually well-dressed!) who attempted to steal some of the basilica’s treasures, and were petrified by St Mark as a warning to other miscreants. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Rino Porrovecchio, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Now the historical problem. First of all, it is a well-established fact that Maximian was in the region of Lake Geneva in 287 not to institute or enforce a general persecution of Christians, but to put down a rebellion that had broken out against the Romans among several Gallic tribes in the area.

Second, it is true that as the Tetrarchy approached its first (and last) peaceful transition of power, the hostility which its eastern half, Diocletian and his Caesar Galerius, had long shown to the Christians broke out into open persecution. This was enforced with great severity and violence in the East, marginally less so in the provinces governed by Maximian, hardly at all in those governed by Chlorus. [5] However, persecution of this sort was hardly even possible in 287, when Diocletian and Maximian were literally pulling the empire back from the brink of collapse. It seems possible, therefore, that Eucherius assumed too much about the events of Maximian’s earlier career on the basis of his actions during the great persecution.

Third, the story of the Theban legion was embellished considerably over time, which is always a red flag to the hagiographical skeptics. Like the veteran Victor mentioned by Eucherius, several other Saints from different regions have been made honorary members of the legion, and by the 6th century, St Gregory of Tours had transplanted them and their martyrdom to Cologne. According to the version of their story in Bl. Jacopo of Voragine’s Golden Legend, they were ordered by Diocletian and Maximian to sacrifice to the idols, which was a feature of many ancient persecutions, but which is nowhere hinted at by Eucherius. In the Breviary of St Pius V, this is made the sole cause of their conflict with Maximian.

As one might guess from all this, their legend has been the subject of a great deal of scholarly discussion; the broad consensus now seems to be that Eucherius exaggerated or misunderstood their numbers, but that the martyrdom of a substantial company of Egyptian soldiers in the area of Lake Geneva really did take place. In the post-Conciliar reform, their feast was removed from the general calendar. According to the official account of the reform, this was done, not in function of the almost total suppression of commemorations, since St Thomas of Villanova was also suppressed, but because “not a few difficulties are found in regard to their history”, and because their feast, which was adopted at Rome only in the 11th century, “does not belong to the Roman tradition.” This latter alleged reason is difficult to square with the suppression of any number of other feasts which are thoroughly Roman and much older than the 11th century.

As to the difficulties in their history, Prof. Donald O’Reilly, in an article published in Vigiliae Christianae in 1978, makes some very interesting observations. A papyrus dated to the year 282, and found at Panopolis, which is not far from Thebes, records the requisition of a quantity of bread large enough to support a legion-sized unit for three months, roughly the time needed to travel at a military march from Egypt to Gaul. In the same period, coins were minted in Egypt of a type specific to the commemoration of the founding of a legion.

A page of the Notitia Dignitatum, with the shields of military units under the “magister peditum – master of the footsoldiers”; the “Thebans” are in the middle of the 4th rank. All of the surviving copies of this document depend on a single Carolingian manuscript which was in the capitular library of Speyer Cathedral, and lost sometime before 1672. The copy from which this page (folio 110v, image cropped) is taken was made directly from the Speyer manuscript in 1436 at Basel in Switzerland, for one of the bishops participating in the Ecumenical Council then being held there, which was later transferred first to Ferrara, and then to Florence. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Latin 9661)

Prof. O’Reilly then argues that one of the principal objections to the legend, the massacre of an entire legion of over 6000 men, is also the result of a misunderstanding. Diocletian effected a major reorganization of the Roman army, in which many legions were brought down to only 1000 members. By 293, a document called the Notitia Dignitatum, an explanation of the Roman imperial administration which includes the names of many military offices and titles, lists four such units as the bodyguard corps of the four Tetrarchs, each named after one of them (e.g. “Legio Diocletiana”), and qualified with the words “Thebaeorum – of Thebans.” Thinking of their last sixty years’ worth of predecessors, most of whom were murdered by their own troops, what better guards could the Tetrarchs find than men who believed, as a matter of strongly held religious conviction, that such an act would be a grave offense against God? The original Theban legion, therefore, would not have been massacred to a man, but rather, after suffering a decimation, and that, very possibly for some matter having to do with their religion, simply organized out of existence as a unit, and its former members assigned to the newly created corps of imperial bodyguards.

[1] Particularly in the 19th century, the calendars of many dioceses, individual churches and religious orders came to be filled with so many Saints that this principle could no longer be maintained.

[2] There were several ancient cities called “Θῆβαι” in Greek, “Thebae” in Latin, whence the English “Thebes”. The most important of these, in the region of Greece called Boeotia, was known as “the city of seven gates”, and figured prominently in both myth and history; the Egyptian Thebes was known as “the city of 100 gates.”

[3] The division effected by Diocletian would be undone and redone a few times over the course of the 4th century, and become definitive only in 395 with the death of Theodosius I.

[4] If a Caesar were to die before his term ended, his Augustus would appoint a new one; if an Augustus died, his Caesar would complete his term, and appoint a new Caesar as his own eventual successor.

[5] In his book On the Deaths of the Persecutors (cap. xv in fine), Lactantius reports that Chlorus permitted the demolition of some churches, but inflicted no violence on the Christians themselves.

Interesting Saints on June 16

There are three Saints in the Martyrology for today who are particularly interesting cases in the annals of Catholic hagiography. Two of these are Ss Quiricus and Julitta, a three-year old boy and his mother who were martyred during the persecution of Diocletian. Julitta was a wealthy noblewoman from Iconium in central Asia Minor, who fled from persecution in her native city to Tarsus in Seleucia, only to have the persecution break out there on her arrival. She was tried, condemned as a Christian, and sentenced to be racked. Quiricus was then separated from his mother, but in a place where he could see what was happening to her. As she cried out in the midst of her sufferings “I am a Christian!”, Quiricus cried out “I am a Christian too!”, and proceeded to have what modern parents would call an epic toddler meltdown. As the governor who presided over the trial tried to calm him down, but still keep him from his mother, and lead him to deny the Faith, Quiricus kicked him and scratched him in the face, at which the governor picked him up and dashed him against the floor, killing him instantly. Mother and son were widely venerated as martyrs together after the persecutions ended; there is a church dedicated to them in Rome at the edge of the Monti region, very close to the Imperial Fora.

This episode is famously represented in one of the side chapels of the church of Santa Maria Antiqua, built into a part of the imperial palace in the Roman Forum in the 5th century. The frescoes are from the mid-8th century.

The church of Ss Quiricus and Julitta in Rome.

The edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints revised by Fr Herbert Thurston, S.J. and Donald Attwater is often highly critical of the legends of the Saints, frequently describing them with terms like “worthless” or “fabulous” in the sense of “a fable.” But even they say that “(i)t is distressing to have to discard a story so piously credited… in the East and West.” This is partly because there so are many different versions of their passion; already in the early 6th century, the document known as the Gelasian Decree mentions them twice as Saints whose apocryphal acts are not read by the Roman church, “lest even a slight occasion for mockery arise.” The term “apocryphal” in the context of this decree simply means that the books were not approved to be read in church, which is to say, to be read in the liturgy; nevertheless, it is significant that only one other “passio”, that of St George, is so noted.

(While it may seem incredible to some that a child so young confessed the Faith with such tenacity, there have been several reports of children, some of them just as young, refusing to renounce their Christian Faith in the midst of the horrific persecutions currently going on in the Middle East and Africa.)

Today is also the feast of St Benno, who was bishop of the German city of Meissen for 40 years, from 1066 to 1106. Very little is known of him historically, but popular legend makes him a model bishop in the age of the great reforms championed by his contemporaries such as Ss Peter Damian and Pope Gregory VII; to him is attributed, among other things, assiduous attendance at and care for the proper singing of the Divine Office. According to one story, when summoned to attend a council called by the Emperor Henry IV in order to depose the Pope, St Benno gave the keys to the cathedral to his canons, and ordered them to drop the keys in the river as soon as they should hear that Henry had been excommunicated. (The purpose of this would be to keep the supporters of the Emperor from taking possession of the church.) When the controversies between the Pope and Emperor had die down, St Benno returned to Meissen, and the keys were recovered by a fisherman who found them tangled in the gills of a catch, and brought them back to the Saint.

A reliquary of St Benno in one of the side-chapels of Munich Cathedral; click to enlarge and see the fish in his left hand with the keys in its mouth.

St Benno was canonized in 1523, just as the Reformation was getting into its first full-swing; Meissen and Luther’s city of Wittenberg are both in Saxony, and both on the river Elbe, which kept Benno’s cathedral keys safe for him. The canonization was seen by Luther as a purely political move designed to halt the Reformation in Saxony, and he responded to it with a more-than-typically nasty polemical treatise “Against the New Idol and the Old Devil About to be Set Up in Meissen,” in which he brutally calumniates both St Gregory VII, and the contemporary Pope, Hadrian VI. In 1539, when Meissen turned Protestant, Benno’s relics were rescued from a mob that would have destroyed them, and about 40 years later brought to Munich, where they were installed in the Cathedral. He is therefore venerated as the Patron Saint of Munich, and, as of 1921, also of the re-established Catholic See of Dresden-Meissen.

Another representation of St Benno in Munich, in the church of St Peter.

The Legend of Pope Marcellinus

Marcellinus ruled the Roman Church for nine years and four months (really 296-304). By the order of Diocletian and Maximian (during the last and greatest Roman persecution, 303-6), he was seized and brought to sacrifice, and when he did not agree, and for this had to undergo torments of various kinds, out of fear of suffering he offered two grains of incense in sacrifice. This was a cause of great rejoicing for the unfaithful, but great sadness struck the faithful. However, when the head is weak, the members arise strong and take little account of the threats of princes. Then the faithful came to meet the supreme pontiff, and reproved him very greatly, and he, seeing this, submitted himself to be judged in a council of bishops. They said to him, “God forbid that the supreme pontiff be judged by anyone, but undertake your own case, and judge yourself from your own mouth.”

And he, repenting, groaned very much and deposed himself. but nevertheless, all the crowd reelected him . And when the emperors heard this, they had him seized again, and since he would not sacrifice for any reason, they ordered him to be decapitated; and again the wrath of the enemy grew, so that within one month, 17,000 Christians were killed.

An illustration of the story recounted here, from a French translation of the Golden Legend of Bl. Jacopo da Voragine, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Français 244. The confusion that surrounds this legend is amply demonstrated by the fact that Pope Marcellus is shown in the foreground as he is about to be beheaded, even though this is not how he died, as the Golden Legend itself states very clearly.

Now when Marcellinus was going to be beheaded, he declared himself unworthy of Christian burial, and therefore he excommunicated all those who should presume to bury him; for which reason, his body remained unburied for thirty-five days. After this, the blessed Apostle Peter appeared to his successor Marcellus, saying, “My brother Marcellus, why do you not bury me?” To whom he answered, “Were you not buried long ago, my lord?” But the Apostle replied, “I consider myself as unburied, so long as I shall see Marcellinus unburied.” To this, Marcellus answered, “Do you not know, my lord, that he anathematized any who might bury him?” To which Peter answered, “Is it not written, ‘he who humbles himself shall be exalted’? Go then, and bury him at my feet.” And he immediately went and praiseworthily fulfilled these orders.

Thus far the Golden Legend, which although it was not an official liturgical book, was very often read in the Divine Office in the Middle Ages. And indeed, whatever version of the story was read, it was widely believed and accepted for many centuries that Pope Marcellinus had in fact offered incense to the Roman gods under persecution, but then repented and suffered martyrdom, for the sake of which he is venerated as a Saint, and his feast kept today. The story is told in similar terms in the breviary according to the Use of the Roman Curia, the version of the Divine Office used by the Popes themselves before the council of Trent, which states flat out that “Marcellinus was led forth to offer incense, and did this.”

The legend of St Marcellinus in a Roman breviary printed at Venice in 1481; the statement about his yielding to the persecutors and offering incense is in the middle of the second lesson, in the lower part of the left-hand column.

Moreover, when the Roman Office was revised after the Council of Trent, and published by Pope St Pius V in 1568, the story was revised to include material first popularized by the Donatist heretics in Africa, who believed that if a cleric yielded to the persecutors, his orders were effectively nullified, along with his ability to legitimately impart the sacraments. This version claims to identify the specific location of the council before which Marcellinus had appeared, a town called Sinuessa (about 93 miles to the south-east of Rome). It is now recognized that no such council ever happened, and the story in the breviary was later revised to its current form, which says that Marcellinus was a victim of calumny.

The Feast of St George

St George has the distinction of being one of the earliest examples of a Saint whose biography was recognized to be historically doubtful. A document of the early 6th century known as the Gelasian Decree mentions him twice, once to say that his acts are not read by the Roman church, “lest even a slight occasion for mockery arise,” and again on a long list of “apocryphal” books. The term “apocryphal” in the context of this decree simply means that the books were not approved to be read in church, which is to say, to be read in the liturgy; nevertheless, it is significant that only one other “passio”, that of Ss Quiricus and Julitta, is so noted. (Ironically, the Gelasian Decree as we have it today postdates the reign of the Pope to whom it is attributed, St Gelasius I (492-96), and is therefore itself technically “apocryphal.”)

St George Slaying the Dragon, by Paris Bordone, 1525; now in the Painting Gallery of the Vatican Museums. 

For this reason, in the pre-Tridentine editions of the Roman Breviary, the single historical lesson of his feast consists of only two brief statements. “In the Persian city of Diospolis, the passion of St George the Martyr. Although the deeds of his passion are counted among the apocryphal writings, nevertheless, the Church honors his most illustrious martyrdom with veneration among the crowns of the martyrs.” Diospolis, also called Lydda, was actually in the Roman province of Syrian Palestine in George’s time; renamed Georgiopolis in the early Byzantine period, it is now in the state of Israel, and called by its Hebrew name Lod. Nothing is said about the era of his martyrdom, which took place in the persecution of Diocletian, from 303 to 306.

In the Breviary of St Pius V, not even this brief notice was retained, and generic lessons from the common of Martyrs in Eastertide are read instead. The feast itself, however, remained as a semidouble, even though many other Saints with dubious passions were either removed from the calendar, or reduced to commemorations. (In 1568, when the first edition was published, semidouble was the second of three grades of feasts.) This would seem to be an act of recognition that the skepticism of the hagiographers, however long-standing or well-founded it may be, must yield to popular devotion; a principle also recognized, for example, when the feast of St Catherine of Alexandria was restored to the general Calendar in 2002.

The Western Church’s reserve towards St George’s history does not seem to have impeded that devotion in the least, as witnessed among other things by the popularity of his name, which derives from the Greek word “geōrgos – a farmer.” He is honored as the Patron Saint of many places, including over 150 cities and towns in Italy, and most famously, of England, although it is not clear how exactly the latter came about.

In art, St George is traditionally shown as a knight on horseback in the act of killing a dragon, which in a particular region (the Golden Legend says a city in Libya, but there are many versions of the story), was about to eat the local king’s daughter. Surprisingly, this is not the legend to which the Gelasian Decree refers as a possible occasion for mockery, as it was unknown before the 12th century. This fact this has not stopped some of the more cynical hagiographers (perhaps “credulous” would be a better way to describe them,) from describing St George as a Christianized version of the Greek mythological character Perseus, who slew a different and much larger monster as it was about to eat a king’s daughter.

The Byzantine Rite has no such reservations about St George, as is often the case with some of the best loved legends and traditions about the Saints. He is honored with the titles “Great Martyr”, meaning one who suffered many and various torments during his martyrdom, and “Bearer of the Standard of Victory”; in the preparation rite of the Divine Liturgy, he is named in the company of martyrs second only to St Stephen. His feast always occurs in Eastertide, unless it be impeded by Holy Week or Easter week; one of the texts for Vespers of his feast refers to this in a very clever way.

Thou didst suffer along with the Savior, and having willingly imitated His death by death (thanato ton thanaton … mimesamenos), o glorious one, thou reignest with Him, clothed in bright splendor, adorned with thy blood, decorated with the scepter of thy prizes, outstanding with the crown of victory, for endless ages, o Great-Martyr George.

The phrase “having willingly imitated His death by death” makes an obvious reference to words of the well-known Paschal troparion, “Christ is risen from the dead, by death he conquered death (thanato ton thanaton … patesas), and gave life to those in the tomb.”

A famous icon of the Virgin and Child with Ss George (left) and Theodore, from the monastery of St Catherine on Mt Sinai, ca. 600 A.D. (public domain image from Wikipedia.)

An Excellent Article on St Brigid

After St Ignatius of Antioch, the Saint most commonly celebrated on February 1st is Brigid of Kildare, and not only in her native Ireland; the Usuarium catalog of medieval liturgical books documents the celebration of her in every major nation that uses the Roman Rite.

St Brigid praying before Christ, depicted in a Book of Hours made at Paris in the 16th century. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The written accounts of her life that have come down to us all date from at least a century after her death, some, a good deal more than that. Scholars have long recognized that many of the stories given by them are at best difficult to accept as historically reliable, and in some ways, impossible to reconcile with each other, but that is a story for another time. Today, I simply wish to bring to our readers’ attention a superb article on the blog Unam Sanctum Catholicam, by Mr Phillip Campbell, which responds to the foolish but all too common notion that St Brigid is somehow a Christianized version of a pagan goddess once worshipped by the Celts.

https://unamsanctamcatholicam.com/2023/01/28/brigid-of-kildare-pagan-goddess/

This notion is, like almost every similar claim (Saturnalia as the origin of Christmas, the word Easter coming from the name of a pagan goddess called Eostre, etc.), based on the shabby pseudo-scholarship of the Victorian era, an era when “this seems like a good idea to me” was often treated as the equivalent of “this is true, I don’t need any actual proof.” Mr Campbell does a fine job of explaining point by point where the idea comes from, and why it is wrong. I make bold only to add that the article is useful not only for the specific case of St Brigid, but also as a general explanation of the bad procedures by which scholars of previous eras foisted these ideas on the world, ideas which have, alas, been all too influential in forming people’s understanding of Christian history. Bene scripsisti de ea, optime! 

The Feast of St Polycarp

Among the group of early Christian writers known as the Apostolic Fathers, St Polycarp, whose feast is kept today on the traditional Roman calendar, is the one about whom we know the most. He was a disciple of St John the Evangelist, who appointed him bishop of Smyrna in Asia Minor, and the teacher of St Irenaeus of Lyon, who wrote the following about him to the Gnostic heretic Florinus.

“I remember the events of those days more clearly than those which happened recently, for what we learn as children grows up with the soul and is united to it, so that I can speak even of the place in which the blessed Polycarp sat and disputed, how he came in and went out, the character of his life, the appearance of his body, the discourses which he made to people, how he reported his intercourse with John and with the others who had seen the Lord, how he remembered their words, and what were the things concerning the Lord which he had heard from them, and about their miracles, and about their teaching, and how Polycarp had received them from the eyewitnesses of the word of life, and reported all things in agreement with the Scriptures.”

Ss Polycarp, Vincent of Saragossa, Pancratius and Chrysogonus; from the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, 6th century. (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

Then, in regard to the absurd teachings of the Gnostics, he says “I can bear witness before God that if that blessed and apostolic presbyter had heard anything of this kind, he would have cried out, and shut his ears, and said according to his custom, ‘O good God, to what time hast thou preserved me that I should endure this?’ He would have fled even from the place in which he was seated or standing when he heard such words.” (This continues the tradition of St John, who fled from a public bath when he saw the heretic Cerinthus inside, lest the building fall upon them.) Likewise, while in Rome to discuss the dating of Easter with Pope St Anicetus, St Polycarp met the heretic Marcion, who asked him if he knew him, to which the Saint replied “I know the first-born of the devil.”

In addition to these stories preserved in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea (5, 20 & 24; 4, 14), there also exist a letter of St Ignatius of Antioch written to Polycarp, whom he also mentions in two of his other letters, and Polycarp’s own letter to the church of Philippi, which St Jerome records was still read in the churches of Asia in his own time. This letter begins with a commendation of the Philippians for their devotion to the martyrs.

“I have greatly rejoiced with you in our Lord Jesus Christ, because you have followed the example of true love [as displayed by God], and have accompanied, as became you, those who were bound in chains, the fitting ornaments of saints, and which are indeed the diadems of the true elect of God and our Lord.”

Of Polycarp himself, it is also recorded that he met St Ignatius as the latter passed though Smyrna on his way to martyrdom in Rome, and kissed his chains.

The martyrdom of Polycarp is recorded in a letter sent by the church of Smyrna to that of Philomelium and “to all the congregations of the Holy and Catholic Church in every place.” This letter is the first authentic account of an early Christian martyrdom after that of St Stephen’s in the Acts of the Apostles. The Saint was very elderly at the time of his arrest and condemnation, for he himself says when ordered to reproach Christ, “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?”

When he was sentenced to be burned alive, the soldiers were going to nail him to the pyre, at which he said, “Leave me as I am; for He that gives me strength to endure the fire, will also enable me, without your securing me by nails, to remain without moving in the pile.” He was therefore only bound with ropes, “like a distinguished ram [taken] out of a great flock for sacrifice, and prepared to be an acceptable burnt-offering unto God.” The letter also records his prayer spoken before the pyre was lit.

“O Lord God Almighty, the Father of your beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ, by whom we have received the knowledge of You, the God of angels and powers, and of every creature, and of the whole race of the righteous who live before you, I give You thanks that You have counted me, worthy of this day and this hour, that I should have a part in the number of Your martyrs, in the cup of your Christ, to the resurrection of eternal life, both of soul and body, through the incorruption [imparted] by the Holy Ghost. Among whom may I be accepted this day before You as a fat and acceptable sacrifice, according as You, the ever-truthful God, have foreordained, have revealed beforehand to me, and now have fulfilled. Wherefore also I praise You for all things, I bless You, I glorify You, along with the everlasting and heavenly Jesus Christ, Your beloved Son, with whom, to You, and the Holy Ghost, be glory both now and to all coming ages. Amen.”

However, once the fire was set, it billowed out around Polycarp “in the form of a sail” and although he seemed “like gold or silver glowing in a furnace,” would not consume him. This is one of many famous examples of the refusal by Nature itself to cooperate with the persecutors of God’s Saints, forcing them to take the matter into their own hands, and accept responsibility for the evil which they do. At this, his side was pierced with a dagger, and the flow of blood that came forth was so great that the flames were extinguished.

The official in charge refused to allow the Christians to take the body for burial, but rather had it cremated, the standard pagan practice; this was certainly done in despite of the doctrine of the bodily resurrection. Nevertheless, the Christians of Smyrna “took up his bones, as being more precious than the most exquisite jewels, and more purified than gold, and deposited them in a fitting place, whither, being gathered together, as opportunity is allowed us, with joy and rejoicing, the Lord shall grant us to celebrate the anniversary of his martyrdom, both in memory of those who have already finished their course, and for the exercising and preparation of those yet to walk in their steps.” (Fr Hunwicke has rightly that “the current post-conciliar Roman regulations do not permit the use within altars of such relics as the tiny fragments gathered up by those who loved S Polycarp,” as described in this beautiful passage, a particularly grotesque example of the betrayal of ‘ressourcement.’)

It is an oddity of hagiography that although St Polycarp and his martyrdom are so early and so well-documented, his feast is not an ancient one in the West. It is attested at Rome in the mid-13th century, but missing from printed editions of the Roman Missal and Breviary as late as the 1520s. His place on the calendar was only solidified in the Tridentine liturgical books, which were very much concerned to assert the continuity of Catholic tradition (such as the veneration of relics) with the most ancient days of the Christian faith.

In the post-Conciliar reform, his feast was moved to the day of his death, February 23rd, on which it is also kept in the Eastern Rites. The notes of the Consilium ad exsequendam on the reform of the calendar say that his feast was originally assigned to January 26 in the West by confusion with another saint of the same name, Polycarp of Nicea. I assume that this is stated in good faith and for a good reason, but I can find no evidence for this; no such person is mentioned in the Roman Martyrology or its Byzantine equivalent, the Synaxarion, on any day. (The Bollandists state more cautiously that the reason for the discrepancy is not clear.)

The Feast of St Thomas the Apostle

In the three synoptic Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, St Thomas is mentioned when the list of the Apostles’ names is given, but nothing else is said about him. St John, on the other hand, mentions him in three different places. The first is in chapter 11, 16, when, before Christ goes to Bethania to raise Lazarus from the dead, Thomas says “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” The second is during the long discourse at the Last Supper, when Thomas says to Christ, “Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?”, to whom Jesus answers, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me.” (14, 5-6)

The third occurrence is, of course, one of the most famous episodes in all the Gospels, which is read on his feast day in both the old and new rites, and which has been depicted in innumerable artworks.

The Incredulity of St Thomas, represented on a capital in the cloister of the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, near Burgos in northern Spain; last quarter of the 11th century. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by GFreihalter, CC BY-SA 3.0.) The Saint to whom this abbey is dedicated, and for whom the founder of the Dominicans was named, has his feast day one day before St Thomas.

“Thomas, one of the twelve, who is called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said to him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.’ And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them. Jesus cometh, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, ‘Peace be to you.’ Then he saith to Thomas, ‘Put in thy finger hither, and see my hands; and bring hither thy hand, and put it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing.’ Thomas answered, and said to him, ‘My Lord, and my God.’ Jesus saith to him, ‘Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed.’ ” (John 20, 24-29)

The Breviary homily for his feast is by St Gregory the Great, originally preached on Low Sunday (Hom. 26 in Evang.); the passage was clearly chosen because of the feast’s proximity to Christmas. “Thomas’ lack of faith has benefited our faith more than the faith of all the disciples that believed, for while he is brought back to faith by touching, our minds are strengthened in faith, every doubt being laid aside. Indeed, the Lord permitted His disciple to doubt after His resurrection, just as He willed before His birth that Mary have a spouse, who nevertheless did not consummate their marriage. For thus did the disciple doubt, and touch, and so become a witness of the truth of the Resurrection, just as His Mother’s spouse was the keeper of Her untouched virginity.” Thomas is thus a witness to the truth of the Resurrection, and also of the Incarnation. “Therefore, he saw a man, and confessed Him to be God, saying ‘My Lord and my God.’ Therefore, by seeing, he believed, who, on seeing a true man, acclaimed Him to be God, whom he could not see.”

As with the other Apostles, a number of apocryphal writings are associated with St Thomas. In the early sixth century, the Gelasian Decree, a catalog of books approved and rejected for ecclesiastical use by the church of Rome, lists three apocryphal works under his name: an account of his acts, a Gospel written in his name “which the Manicheans use”, and an apocalypse. The term “Manicheans” may here not mean the actual Manicheans, but rather represent a vague memory of the early groups of heretics collectively known as the Gnostics. These latter wrote a large number of fictitious Gospels, many of which have been rediscovered in modern times; one of the earliest of these, a work about which an incalculable amount of nonsense has been written, is named for St Thomas.

However, the Gnostics eclipsed very rapidly after St Irenaeus’ withering attack on them in the later 2nd century, and it is unlikely that the authors of the Gelasian decree really knew much about them. The Manicheans, on the other hand, were known from St Augustine’s writings against them, and were still active in the mid-5th century, when Pope St Leo I (444-61) discovered a group of them within the church in Rome, about 60 years before the Gelasian Decree. In Augustine’s book against the Manichean bishop Faustus (22.79), he reproves the sect for their acceptance of a story in which Thomas behaves in a manner wholly inappropriate for a disciple of the real Jesus Christ, one which clearly came from an apocryphal Acts, and not a Gospel.

Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1, the oldest manuscript of the Gospel of Thomas, now at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. (Public domain image from Wikimedia.)

Although these Acts of Thomas are not historically authentic, some aspects of them concerning his deeds after the Ascension are attested early on and very consistently: namely, that he preached the Gospel in India, and died there, and that his relics were later translated to the Syrian city of Edessa (now called Homs), which was once a very important center of Christianity in the Middle East. For this reason, even some of the more skeptical scholars of hagiography, including the revisers of Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Fr Herbert Thurston SJ and Donald Attwater, grant their likelihood. The Roman Breviary states that before coming to India, he preached the Gospel to various peoples in the lands east of Mesopotamia, and gives the name of the place where he died as “Calamina”, the location of which is unknown. The Martyrology adds that his relics were further translated from Edessa to Ortona (via Crete), a town on the Adriatic coast of Italy, where they were brought in the mid-13th century, and are still venerated to this day.

The Byzantine tradition, which keeps his feast on October 6th, also attests to his evangelization of India, which is mentioned several times in the proper texts of his Office. “As a servant of the Word, and of His ineffable Incarnation, you drew from the well of wisdom, o Thomas the Apostle; for with the rod of the Cross you saved souls, searching them out from the depths of deceit. Thus with the net of thy teaching, you enlightened the whole world; and with the light of knowledge, you made splendid the darkened minds of the Indians. Wherefore, delighting in the far-shining glory of Christ, beseech Him to have mercy on our souls.”

The church of Rome always remained very cautious about the more legendary lives of the Saints, and the pre-Tridentine Roman Breviary says little more about Thomas than does that of St Pius V. Many other churches, however, read one version or another of a story contained in Bl. Jacopo de Voragine’s Golden Legend, that St Thomas was an architect, and was sent to India by a revelation of Christ in person, to build a palace “in the Roman style” for a King named Gundifor; this is what accounts for the common representation of him with an architect’s measure in his hands. Apart from this, however, the story has little to differentiate it from the apocryphal Acts of the other Apostles. Thomas performs various miracles, especially healings, along the way, converts a number of people among the Indian royalty, and destroys an idol. This provokes the wrath of a local king, who attempts to kill him in a variety of creative ways, none of which succeed; finally, he is pierced by lances, his body is buried by those whom he has converted, and many miracles take place at the tomb.

St Thomas the Apostle, by Nicholaes Maes, 1656

St Thomas’ feast was adopted in the West in the 9th century, and assigned to December 21st; the reason for this choice of date is unknown, but it is unlikely to be a mere coincidence that nine other months have the feast of an Apostle or Evangelist within their last ten days, thus distributing them more or less evenly through the year. He was also kept on this date in Milan, but in the post-Tridentine editions of the Ambrosian Missal, the following rubric was inserted before his feast. “The Mass of this Apostle… is always transferred to a feria of the preceding week… except in a church titled to him.” This was done to protect the special series of ferias at the end of Advent, called the “feriae de Exceptato” (the precise meaning of which is not clear), the equivalent of the Roman ferias of the O antiphons. The feast day was later moved first to June 27th, and then to July 3rd, the date on which the Syrian church commemorates the translation of his relics to Edessa. The post-Conciliar reform of the Roman Rite followed suit in moving him to July 3rd; the official account of the changes made to the calendar, published by the Vatican Polyglot Press in 1969, states that this was done “so that the series of major ferias of Advent not be interrupted.”

As I have noted before, some churches added one or more antiphons to the O series for the end of Advent, and one of these was composed for St Thomas. “O Thoma Didyme, per Christum quem meruisti tangere, te precibus rogamus altisonis, succurre nobis miseris, ne damnemur cum impiis in adventu judicis. – O Thomas the Twin, through Christ, Whom thou didst merit to touch, with prayers resounding on high we beseech thee, come to help us in our wretchedness, lest we be damned with the wicked at the Coming of the Judge.” Although the Ambrosian Rite does not have the other O antiphons, before the Tridentine reform, it used this text as the antiphon “after the Gospel” at Mass on his feast day.

The Byzantine Golden Legend

Today is the older feast day of a Byzantine Saint called Simeon the Metaphrast, who is believed to have died on November 28th sometime towards the end of the tenth century, or within roughly the first decade of the eleventh. (He is now commemorated in most places on the ninth of this month.) Very little is known of his life, apart from the fact that he flourished in the days of the emperor Basil II, who reigned from 976-1025, and the patriarch Nicholas II (984-91). He has often been identified with a writer of the same name, Simeon the Logothete (the title of a class of high-level officials of the Byzantine court), who composed an important chronicle of world history, but this identification is now very much disputed. (Seventy years ago, it was more generally accepted, as noted in the revised edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints.)

The entry in the Menologion of Basil II for Christmas Day. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) “Simeon” was a very popular name in the period of Byzantine history known as the Macedonian Renaissance, roughly the mid-9th to mid-11th centuries; the Metaphrast and the Logothete (if they are not the same person) count among their namesakes of that era two of the illustrators of this manuscript, a famous monastic poet and writer known as “the New Theologian”, plus his spiritual father, “the Studite”, and the first emperor of Bulgaria.

Simeon was the author of many liturgical texts in the various Byzantine liturgical genres (of which there are very many indeed), and he compiled an anthology of patristic writings, but he is most famous for his Menologion, a ten-volume compilation of the lives of the Saints, put together to be read in the Divine Office. The Greek verb “metaphrazein” from which his epithet derives means “to paraphrase”, because he would update and improve his sources stylistically, and supplement them with new material. This compilation met with such tremendous success that in many cases, the older versions of the texts were completely displaced, and no version of a Saint’s life older than Simeon’s now survives. Over time, however, the Menologion itself has mostly fallen into disuse as a formal liturgical text, since the Hour at which it is read, Orthros, is already spectacularly long and complex. In monasteries, it is now often read in the refectory instead.

Medieval Christians of the Byzantine world believed in the omnipresence of God, and His constant, benevolent and miraculous intervention, especially in the lives of the Saints, no less than their Latin counterparts did. Simeon’s Menologion is often spoken of as an Eastern Golden Legend, the highly influential collection of Saints’ lives by the Dominican bishop of Genua, Bl. Jacopo da Voragine (1230 ca. – 1298). Like the Golden Legend, it is full of stories of miracles and wonders, many of them very astonishing, many of them stretching credulity to or well past the breaking point. And like Jacopo, Simon has very often, and for the most part very unjustly, been impugned for his uncritical acceptance of such legends. Better and more dispassionate scholarship has in more recent times had the good sense to realize that they looked at the world very differently than modern men do (and that does not always mean for the worse), but also that much of what they recorded was simply received tradition, accepted and loved without skepticism or cynicism.

However, in the Byzantine liturgy as we have it nowadays, today is dedicated to the most prominent martyr of the iconoclast persecution, Stephen, who is given the epithet “the New” to distinguish him from the Protomartyr. He was born in Constantinople in either 713 or 715, and as a teenager, placed by his parents in a monastery on Mt Auxentius, on the eastern outskirts of the city’s Asian side. At the age of thirty, he became abbot, but left this position to live as a recluse in a remote cell twelve years later.

A mosaic of St Stephen in the monastery of St Luke (Hosios Loukas) in the Greek province of Boeotia. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Not long before Stephen entered the monastery, Leo the Isaurian (717-41) had become the latest Byzantine emperor to invent a heresy and try to force it on the Church, the heresy of iconoclasm. And not long before Stephen became abbot, Leo was succeeded by his son Constantine V (741-75), an enthusiastic promoter of his father’s heresy. His traditional epithet, “Copronymus”, means “dung-named” in Greek, a reference to a diaper accident that occurred at his baptism; this was taken by those who honored the sacred images as a presage of his impiety. It occurs several times in the Roman Martyrology, in reference to the many Saints killed or otherwise persecuted by him for the sake of the holy images.

In 754, the emperor held a synod in the imperial palace at Chalcedon, across the strait from the capital, to confirm the iconoclast position, and formally condemn the cult of the sacred images; it is known from the name of the palace as the Synod in Hieria. As long as iconoclasm held sway as an official policy of the Byzantine government, this synod was legally recognized as a legitimate council. With its conclusion, there began a fierce persecution of the iconodules; in The Church in Crisis: A History of the General Councils, Mons. Philip Hughes describes the 22 years from Hieria to Constantine’s death as a “reign of terror.” The stories of the treatment meted out to the orthodox rival those of the English reformation for shame and horror.

Throughout the iconoclast period, monks were the leaders of the opposition to it, and after some years, the emperor was very anxious to have Stephen approve Hieria, thinking, perhaps, that its acceptance by such a prestigious figure would go far towards persuading others of his order. Stephen refused absolutely to comply, and was persecuted in various ways for four long years. Among other things, he was accused of improper relations with a woman named Anna (variously reported as his own mother, or a widow under his spiritual direction, or a nun), who was whipped almost to death for proclaiming his innocence. He was banished for two years, then brought back to the city, where he had an interview with the emperor at which he successfully defended the veneration of images, and was therefore brutally scourged. The emperor, on hearing that he had survived the scourging, cried out (much like a later king would famously do in England), “Will no one rid me of this monk?” Stephen was then dragged out of his prison by a mob, and half-clubbed, half-stoned to death. In the Roman Martyrology, he is commemorated on this day along with three others named specifically, Basil, Peter and Andrew, and a company of 339 other monks.

The martyrdom of Ss Stephen the New, Peter and Andrew, also from the Menologion of Basil II. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The troparion of St Stephen Having struggled aforetime in asceticism upon the mountain, thou didst destroy the spiritual hosts of the enemies with all the arms of the Cross, o all-blessed one; but again, thou didst manfully strip thyself of them for martyrdom, and slayed Copronymus with the sword of the Faith; and for both hast thou been crowned by God, o holy renowned martyr Stephen.

The kontakion From a barren woman didst thou grow forth, the offshoot of a root, o venerable father, namesake of the Protomartyr; and thou wast shown to be a great instructor of monks, unafraid of the wrath of the emperor who did not wish to venerate the image of Christ. Wherefore, in dying thou didst receive the crown of martyrdom, o Stephen.