Holy Confessors Eugenios and Makarios of Antioch

Saints Eugenios and Makarios of Antioch

The nineteenth of February in the Orthodox Church is the feast-day of the holy Antiochian confessors Eugenios and Makarios of Antioch. Saints Eugenios and Makarios were Christian priests who were tortured and exiled for their faith under the reign of Emperor Julian the Apostate of Rome.

By the year 361, Julian had begun using a threefold strategy to persecute Christians: legal disenfranchisement of Christians; active institutional support and structuring of the old Græco-Roman religion; and the promulgation of anti-Christian apologetics. This was after a brief period of religious liberalism that actually had the effect of fomenting and inflaming doctrinal conflicts within Christendom. Also, as mentioned before, during his wars with Persia Julian used Antioch and its environs as something of a ‘proving ground’ for his anti-Christian politics.

Saints Eugenios [Gk. Ευγένιος, Ar. ’Îjîn إيجين] and Makarios [Gk. Μακάριος, Ar. Maqâr مقار] were among the first victims of these policies. As Christian priests, they were arrested and brought before Julian in 361, and they were instructed to sacrifice incense to the idols of the Græco-Roman gods. However, Eugenios and Makarios steadfastly refused to renounce Christ or to acknowledge the old gods, and they further reprimanded the Emperor for his having abandoned the Christian faith of his youth in order to worship lifeless idols. Julian, incensed, gave the order for the two confessors of Christ to be tortured.

Eugenios and Makarios were bound fast with thin leather straps and hung upside down over a burning heap of dung. After having been subjected to this torture for many hours, they were taken down and made to lie naked on a red-hot cast-iron grate. Eugenios and Makarios did not flinch from these tortures, but keeping their gaze on Heaven were strengthened in soul. They did not complain or beg for mercy, but continued to rebuke the Roman Emperor for his betrayal of the Christians.

At this point Julian did not make martyrs of the two confessors, but instead pronounced upon them the doom of banishment and exile under guard, to the province of Mauretania Tingitana – in what is now Morocco. The two confessors of Christ rejoiced at having been found worthy to be exiled for Christ, and went on their way singing from the Psalter: ‘Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the LORD’. When they came into Mauretania, they began at once to preach to the Berbers who lived in that area.

The Berbers who lived in the mountains warned Saints Eugenios and Makarios that a horrible dragon lived in a cave nearby, which destroyed with fire and consumed the wealth of the people that lived in the region. Eugenios and Makarios asked their informants where they might find this cave, and they were told. They went thither with their priestly garments and their rags underneath as their armour, and with prayer as their weapon. They knelt on their knees at the mouth of the dragon’s cave and began to pray, when of a sudden the dragon swooped out of his cave into the air. A bolt of lightning from heaven drawn by their prayers struck the dragon, which fell out of the sky and burnt to foul-smelling ashes. As is common in hagiographies with such draconic appearances, the tale is a type indicating the saints’ victory over pagan gods and cult centres, and it is so here as well, for the hagiographer informs us that the pagans began to trust in Christ after the word of the saints’ triumph over the dragon spread.

Eugenios and Makarios went into the dragon’s cave to live as hermits, struggling against the passions with prayer and fasting. For thirty days they took no food and drank no drink, not even water, and for all that time they prayed continuously. At the end of their thirty days of total fasting, they heard a voice issue from heaven, bidding the servants of the true God and Lord Jesus Christ to go to the rock nearest them. As they faced the rock and touched it, a light began to pour forth from it, and the rock split in two. From the rock there gushed a holy spring of purest water, from which they drank and were sated in body and in spirit. They spent eight days further in the cave before they reposed together, and the Lord received their souls into the kingdom. Holy confessors, priests Eugenios and Makarios, who did spiritual battle with the idols both west and east, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!