Our father among the saints Grēgorios III, Pope of Rome

Saint Grēgorios of Rome

The twenty-eighth of November is the feast-day in the Orthodox Church of Saint Grēgorios of Rome, also known as Pope Gregory III. I have already presented on this blog a hagiography of Pope Gregory I, or Grēgorios o Dialogos, who did so much to promote the spread of Christianity in England. Like the first Gregory, the third Gregory in the Roman See did much to help spread the light of Christ into the northern reaches of Europe. A native of Syria, the third Gregory was instrumental in the fight against iconoclasm from the West.

Saint Grēgorios [Gk. Γρηγόριος, L. Gregorius, Syr. Grigorios ܓܪܝܓܘܪܝܘܣ, Ar. Ġrîġûriyûs غريغوريوس] was born in Syria around the year 669 to a father named Yûhannâ. He spent much of his early life there, though historians are not aware of many of the details of his early life. We know that he became a priest, and we also know that he had lived in Rome for some time before his election to the Papacy. It is likely that, like his predecessor Saint Sergios, he and his family were refugees from the Islâmic conquests and persecutions of Christians in the Levant, though we cannot be sure based on the sources we have.

We do know, however, that he had a high reputation as a priest in Rome for virtuous conduct and diligent pastoral care. He loved the people of Rome, and in turn he was beloved by them. Upon the repose of his illustrious Italian prædecessor, Pope Gregory II, Grēgorios was proclaimed Pope by popular acclaim in the city of Rome. Even so, Grēgorios waited for about a month to receive consecration, which indicates that he sought the confirmation and blessing of the Byzantine exarch of Ravenna, Eutychios, before taking office. Grēgorios did indeed love the people, but he had no desire to owe his office to a mob, and we can see that he sought the legitimacy of Constantinople as well as of the people of Rome.

But once in his office, Grēgorios did not bow to Constantinople – only to God. Though he had previously been involved in the arguments over the veneration of icons, and had appealed to the Emperor Lēon III the Isaurian to exercise moderation in his religious policies. But once he became Pope, Saint Grēgorios came forth at once with blunt condemnations of iconoclasm, sending legates and letters to Lēon urging him to desist from the destruction of holy images. Lēon responded with brute force, sending forces across the Mediterranean and seizing Papal properties which were under his jurisdiction, in Calabria and Sicily. However, the Emperor lost many of his men at sea and proved unable to control the Papacy directly, and Grēgorios was not cowed, but continued speaking out in favour of the veneration of icons. Most regional rulers ended up siding with the Pope over the Emperor in this case.

Similarly to his prædecessors of the same name, Grēgorios took a close and paternal interest in the well-being and good order of the Church in the northern reaches of Europe, among the Germanic tribes. In faithful England, Grēgorios affirmed the rights of the Bishopric of York in the election of Ecgberht to the office. He also blessed Saints Tatwine and Nóðhelm, in succession, as primates of Canterbury. He continued the support of Gregory II for the mission of Saint Boniface among the heathen in Frisia and northern Germany, naming him an archbishop and blessing him to establish two Benedictine cloisters – one in Fritzlar and one in Amöneburg. He met with Boniface in person at least once, in 738, having received him with great hospitality in Rome and conversed with him for a long time on spiritual topics. Saint Boniface asked the holy Pope of Rome to send with him back to Germany a helper, in the person of his nephew Willibald. At once Grēgorios sent for the monk and was at once impressed with him. In particular, we may imagine, Pope Grēgorios was happy to discuss with Willibald his travels as a pilgrim in Syria and the Holy Land. Saint Grēgorios sent Willibald with his uncle back into Germany to serve as an aid and support in his missionary efforts. Later Willibald himself would be made a bishop at Saint Boniface’s hands in Eichstätt.

Saint Grēgorios’s relations with other Teutonic nations were not nearly as cordial as those he enjoyed with the English. Much of his ten-year papacy was spent in power struggles with the Lombardic king Liutprant – who, although he was a pious Christian, generous and hospitable to the likes of Saint Boniface, was nonetheless politically ambitious and had territorial designs on the Italian Peninsula. Grēgorios managed to fortify the ancient walls of Rome in the hopes that it would ward off a Lombard attack, and in addition met in person with Liutprant to attempt to use moral suasion to ward him away from Rome. This worked for awhile, but with Liutprant continuing to make violent manœuvres on the frontier – and capturing four cities in the Duchy of Rome – he was compelled to seek aid from the Frankish king Charles Martel. Long story short: Martel promised help, but that help never came. It was in the midst of these political troubles that Saint Grēgorios reposed in the Lord, on the twenty-eighth of November, 741. A few days later, the cardinals of Rome chose Saint Zacharias, a Greek, as Grēgorios’s successor in office.

I have remarked on several occasions about the special link which præ-Schismatic Old England seems to have enjoyed with Antioch, and with the Christian East in general. Though this link was often (but not always) mediated, gæographically and administratively, by Rome, it still arguably goes back to the Princes of the Apostles themselves. The most prominent and most profound impact of Antiochian spirituality upon the English nation comes through the literal tutelage England enjoyed under the rule of Saint Theodore of Tarsos. Saint Theodore’s contemporary Saint Sergios provides another link between Syria and England. The cultus of Saint Ia in Cornwall, which shares some intriguing parallels with the Mesopotamian martyress under the Persians of the same name, provides another possible link, as does the patronage of that great Levantine Saint George of Lydda and the mediæval body of legend surrounding Saint Joseph of Arimathæa. To all these we must add the relationship that our Saint Grēgorios enjoyed with Saint Willibald, who had sojourned in that land for a significant portion of his life, and with his uncle Saint Boniface.

It is to their great credit that Syrians like Saint Grēgorios III did not take advantage of the old Anglo-Saxon talent for civilisational humility, borne perhaps in part out of a realisation that they lived at the ‘bottom’ of the world, but instead took the opportunity to guide, to nurture, to foster an Old English spirituality. That spirituality today exists as merely a shadow, an echo. The overbearing arrogance of the Normans, the expropriation of Church lands, the misguided zeal of centralising church ‘reformers’, the sustained repression of the English peasantry and the shift toward an œconomy of greed all contributed to the suppression of this native spirituality. Mercantilism, colonialism, capitalism, industrialisation and high finance have all taken a great toll upon the English people. The massive death toll and material deprivation that the British ruling class has unleashed upon the world – including upon Syria and the Arab world, a deprivation which continues to this day – often overshadows the much quieter impoverishment of English spiritual life by that same class.

Yet this echo of spiritual Old English reverence for the Eastern end of the Mediterranean can still be heard in English literature and art: in figures like the Syriac-versant Lancelot Andrewes, for example. Our good Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote Rasselas, may be counted here with distinction; John Ruskin and William Morris, also. To this we may also add the more contemporary travel literature and journalistic work of Patrick Seale, of William Dalrymple, of the late, lamented Robert Fisk and the blessedly very much alive Jonathan Cook. For these things we must still thank our saints like the holy Pope Grēgorios III. Holy hierarch Grēgorios, beloved archpastor and gentle tutor of the Christian north, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Holy Martyrs Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos of Edessa

Saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos of Edessa
القديسين الشهداء غوريا وصامونا وحبيب

The fifteenth of November is the feast-day of Saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos, confessors and martyrs of Edessa. Gourias and Samōnas and Abibos suffered for Christ at the end of the third century and at the beginning of the fourth century, respectively. According to Patriarch Makarios III (Zaym), all three were Syriac in origin, and hailed from villages near Aleppo. Gourias hailed from the village of Qaṭma north of ‘Afrîn; Samōnas from ‘Anadân 12 kilometres north of Aleppo; and Abibos from Tal ‘Adâ in Salamîya. Unlike a lot of the other early martyrs of the East, the cultus of these three saints still seems to be fairly localised to the Christian East: the Orthodox Church (and Antioch in particular), as well as the churches in the Assyrian tradition, whether in communion with the Latins or not. However, all three martyrs are quite important in the Orthodox tradition, and Abibos in particular is revered among the great martyrs of the Antiochian Church.

Saints Gourias [Gk. Γουρίας, L. Gurias, Ar. Ġûryâ غوريا] and Samōnas [Gk. Σαμωυάς, L. Samon, Ar. Ṣâmûnâ صامونا] were friends, priests and ‘preachers of the Word of God’. During the reign of Diocletian, the two friends played a significant rôle in strengthening the faith of the local Christians. They were arrested and brought to trial, where they were ordered to give sacrifices to the idols of the pagan gods. They refused and instead boldly confessed their faith in Christ before the præfect, Antoninos. As punishment, the two martyrs were beaten and hung up each by one wrist for five hours straight while heavy weights were suspended from their ankles. Then they were cast into an oubliette for three and a half months, with no food and little water. However, Gourias and Samōnas endured everything with patience. One of their fellow-prisoners overheard the prayer spoken by Samōnas, from whose eyewitness it was later transcribed:

O Lord my God, against Whose will not a single sparrow falls into the snare. It was You Who made room for David in his sorrow (Ps 4:1), Who proved the Prophet David stronger than lions (Dan 6), and granted a child of Abraham to be victor over torture and flames (Dan 3). You know also, Lord, the infirmity of our nature, You see the struggle set before us. Our foe strives to snatch us, the work of Your right hand, away from You and to deprive us of the glory which is in You. With Your compassionate eye watching over us, preserve in us the inextinguishable light of Your Commandments. Guide our steps by Your light, and make us worthy of Your Kingdom, for You are blessed unto ages of ages.

That night the guards took Gourias and Samōnas out of the prison, led them out of the city gates and had them beheaded. The faithful of Edessa went out to retrieve their bodies, and even the soil which had borne their precious blood, and brought them back into Edessa with incense and psalms praising God, to be tended and buried reverently.

About three decades after this, during the persecution under the reign of the last pagan emperor Licinius, a hue and cry went up on the orders of the governor Lucian for a deacon of Edessa named Abibos [Gk. Άβιβος, L. Habibus, Ar. Ḥabîb حبيب], who had been truly assiduous in promoting the true Faith, reading the Holy Scriptures to the people in the outlying villages around Edessa. Rather than be hunted down and run to earth, and rather than endangering his mother in whose house he lived, Abibos surrendered himself willingly to his persecutors, who brought him to the trial. Abibos freely and willingly confessed Christ there.

The governor ordered Abibos to be flogged and flayed, and then scourged with iron hooks. After these tortures Lucian, who was infuriated by the ineffectiveness of the torture upon the martyr, sentenced him not to be beheaded but rather burned alive. The executioners prepared the fire, and Abibos willingly went into the fire himself. Praying to the Lord the whole while, he surrendered his soul and achieved the victory. When the fire died down, his mother and his relations came to retrieve his body, which they discovered had been unharmed by the flames. They sought permission, and were given it, to bury his body next to those of Gourias and Samōnas, that they together might be honoured as martyrs for Christ. Later, a church was built on the site in honour of the martyrs.

A number of miracles attended the graves of the three holy martyrs. One of these is related in their hagiography. A certain fœderatus, a Goth, was sent to serve in Edessa. He saw and wanted a certain pretty and pious local young woman named Euphemia, and sought to take her to wife. He went to her mother, a widow of Edessa named Sophia, and asked permission to marry her, but the girl’s mother was understandably reticent. Before she gave him permission to marry Euphemia, she took him to the graves of Saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos and made him swear that he would never do her any harm, or insult her, but always love and cherish her.

After his term of service in Edessa was over, the Goth took Euphemia back to his homeland. As it turned out, he had deceived the poor girl: he was already married to a woman of his own tribe, and as per the tribal laws Euphemia was made to serve as the Goth’s bed-thrall, subservient to the Goth’s first wife in all things. The Goth threatened Euphemia with death, if she ever made known that they had married; and the Goth’s wife treated the girl horribly. Euphemia bore the Goth a son, but the jealous wife had the boy poisoned in the cradle. Moreover, before the evil woman died, she demanded that her husband bury Euphemia alive with her. The hagiography states that this appears to have been customary among the Goths who were still heathen. Thus threatened with death, and sealed in with the earth around her, Euphemia cried out to the three holy martyrs for protection.

The Lord preserved Euphemia from death. She was wondrously transported out of her grave and back to Edessa, indeed into the very church of the three holy martyrs, where her mother received her with joy. Euphemia told her mother what had befallen her, and when the Goth came to serve again in Edessa Sophia denounced him before the whole city. He was placed under arrest by the præfect and executed for his crimes. For this reason the akathist proclaims Saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos to be the ‘heavenly patrons of honourable marriage’. Their intercession is sought among those in troubled marriages and family turmoil. Holy saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos of Edessa, Tone 5:

Christ our God, You have granted us the miracles of Your holy martyrs
Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos,
As a stronghold and protection.
Through their prayers, strengthen those in authority in every good deed,
For You alone are merciful and the Lover of Mankind!

Holy Hierarchs Barsēs and Eulogios of Edessa, and Prōtogenēs of Carrhæ

Edessa, now ar-Ruhâ in Turkey

The twenty-fifth of August is the feast-day of three holy confessing bishops of Mesopotamia, Saints Barsēs and Eulogios of Edessa, and Saint Prōtogenēs of Carrhæ. These bishops suffered under the unwise rule of the haughty and overconfident Arian Emperor Valens, who fell in battle against the Goths under Fritigern at Hadrianople in 378. Of these three, Saint Barsēs, similarly to Saint John Chrysostom, died in exile. The other two were returned to their sees under the saintly Emperor Theodosius and finished the course of their earthly lives in peace. However, the Church has never forgotten their sacrifices for the Incarnate truth of Christ’s full manhood and full Godhood.

Saint Barsēs [Gk. Βάρσης] and Saint Eulogios [Gk. Εὐλόγιος] were Syriac monks of extraordinary virtue and holiness in Edessa. According to the Church historian Sōzomenos, both men were given the honourable title of bishop in their monastery, not so that they could rule over a see, but rather in recognition of their many merits.

During the reign of Valens, there was a fierce persecution of the Christians who accepted the Nicene Creed. Because Saint Barsēs was among the most vocal supporters of the Council of Nicæa and, thus, opponents of the doctrines of Arius, the Roman authorities under Valens evicted him from his monastery in Edessa and had him exiled to the island of ‘Arâd (now al-Muḥarraq in Bahrain), which at that time was settled by Orthodox Christians of Syro-Phœnician and Arabic descent. The holy monk and bishop was greeted with great enthusiasm by the Christians of the island and treated with great honour. The authorities then had him banished further still, to the city of Pemdje (now an archæological site near al-Bahnasa) in Ægypt. Here too the Christians of the city greeted him with great warmth and hospitality. The exasperated Valens had Barsēs exiled still further away, to the remote location of Thenon. Saint Barsēs, physically exhausted by this succession of exiles, reposed in the Lord en route to this place.

Valens appointed an Arian named Lukos to the bishopric of Edessa. Lukos turned out to be a ruthless oppressor and persecutor of the Nicene Christians. He dismissed all the parish priests and replaced them with Arians, such that all the church buildings were under his control. This being the case, there was little for the Nicene Christians to do but to gather together in the open air outside the city of Edessa to celebrate the Divine Liturgy. When word of this reached Valens, he cruelly ordered the præfect of Edessa, a man named Modestos, to seize anyone found gathering for worship outside the city and have them put to death at once by beheading.

Modestos, who was in truth a kind-hearted and sensible man, baulked at this order. He met in secret with the leaders of the Nicene Orthodox Christians in Edessa, informed them of his orders, and besought them not to leave the city for worship. But this had the opposite effect of the one he intended. Desirous of martyrdom, the Christians of Edessa came out of the city on the appointed day and met in their accustomed place. Modestos brought the Roman soldiery there and grimly prepared to attack the Christian assembly. However, when he saw a woman running to the place with her infant son so as not to deprive the infant the opportunity for a martyr’s salvation, Modestos had a change of heart and called off his soldiers. He begged the Emperor to spare the laity and instead only make an example from among the clergy.

Modestos brought the monk Eulogios – who was trusted by all of the assembly at Edessa – along with eighty other clergy of the city before Valens. The Emperor ordered them to enter into communion with Lukos and submit themselves to his spiritual authority, but none of them would do so. Then Valens had them chained, paraded through the streets in disgrace, and then cast into a nearby Thracian prison. But as they were led through the streets, the faithful of Thrace took pity upon the imprisoned clergy, succoured them, gave them food and bandaged their wounds. Seeing this, Valens became infuriated, and ordered them to be sent two-by-two into exile.

Bishop Saint Eulogios was sent into exile together with Saint Prōtogenēs [Gk. Πρωτογενής], a cleric from Carrhæ (modern Ḥarrân in Turkey), who had suffered a similar fate to the confessors of Edessa. The two of them were sent into exile in Ægypt: the city of Antinoöpolis (modern aš-Šayḵ ‘Ibâda), which was then still a bastion of paganism. Here it was hoped that they would suffer ignominy and death among the hostile non-Christians, but the two holy men instead lived humbly among the pagans, taught them about Christ and patiently converted them to Christ in the fulness of time. When Valens fell in battle against Fritigern, and was succeeded by Theodosios, both Eulogios and Prōtogenēs were found alive and well, and were restored to Edessa. Here they lived out the rest of their natural lives, and departed to the Lord in peace. Holy hierarchs Barsēs, Eulogios and Prōtogenēs, confessors who suffered for the truth of Christ’s Godhood, pray unto the only lover of mankind that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saints Barsēs, Eulogios and Prōtogenēs, Tone 8:

Champions of Orthodoxy, teachers of purity and of true worship,
The enlighteners of the universe and the adornment of hierarchs:
All-wise fathers Barsēs and Eulogios,
Your teachings have gleamed with light upon all things.
Intercede before Christ God to save our souls.

Skif: a Eurasian tribute to eighties Hollywood

Kunitsa (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) and Lyutobor (Aleksei Faddeev) in Skif

Rustam Mosafir – the director of 2015’s Begletsy – returned in 2018 with the big-budget action movie Skif (literally, The Scythian, but released in English under the title of The Last Warrior). This is a film that places itself readily in the sweet-spot ambit of reviewers like RedLetterMedia. It readily approaches the Tarantino threshold for æstheticisation of violence to the point where it becomes campy – but it skirts the line with enough adroit self-awareness that it never quite crosses it. Ostensibly set in the vicinity of Krasnodar during the Kievan Rus’ period (and shot on location in Crimea), though in such a way that it skirts the blurry line between historical fiction and sword-and-sorcery low fantasy, it is a grim, brutal, cynical depiction of the age that nonetheless carries itself with a suitably compelling degree of swagger.

As my brief description may suggest, Mosafir’s most recent film is in many ways an entirely deliberate throwback to Hollywood thrillers and action movies of the eighties and nineties: the Mad Max trilogy, the Lethal Weapon films, Conan the Barbarian, Rob Roy and the Death Wish movies, to name a few. (Mosafir directly credits as his inspirations in this film Mel Gibson, George Miller, Robert Howard and Charles Bronson.) As such there are strong thematic preoccupations with honour, power and its dangers, trust and betrayal, fate and destiny. The characters inhabit a universe of blood oaths and kingly intrigues, of human sacrifice and inhuman rage, where tribal clashes between East and West end messily and with gruesome results. There are also some bitterly cynical intimations, particularly toward the end of the film, about the very nature of political power.

The last band of Scythians – a warlike nomadic people who have all but faded entirely from history – make their living as hired killers for lords and khans who can pay their price in gold. They call themselves the ‘Wolves of Ares’, and they are led by a red-bearded man named Yar (Vitalii Kravchenko) and by a spiritual elder named Anagast (Viktor Solov’ev). The Wolves of Ares kidnap the wife, Tatyana (Vasilisa Izmailova) and newborn son of a loyal Rus’ warrior named Lyutobor (Aleksei Faddeev), with a ransom demand knifed to the door-jamb of his house. The demand is that Lyutobor poison his liege, the knyaz Oleg of T’mutarakan (Yurii Tsurilo). Lyutobor dutifully reports this to his lord, and Oleg subsequently frames Lyutobor for poisoning him – the idea being that he would use the opportunity to get his wife and son back, and also find out who in the T’mutarakan court tried to suborn Lyutobor to assassinate Oleg. Lyutobor’s only hope to find his family rests in a Scythian captive that his people took when they raided his home: a young fighter named Kunitsa (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) who hopes to challenge Yar for control of the Wolves when he grows strong enough.

The film’s primary relationship – the one that sets forth the thematic problems of trust, honour, betrayal and vengeance – is the tense relationship between Lyutobor and Kunitsa. At first, neither of them likes or trusts the other in the slightest. As far as Lyutobor is concerned, Kunitsa is just an animal. On the other hand, Kunitsa thinks Lyutobor’s Christianity makes him weak and that his scruples make him naïve. However, despite in the beginning Lyutobor forcing Kunitsa to swear an oath to Ares on his blood-stained sword, Kunitsa proves over and over again that he is willing to honour his word – and so he gains Lyutobor’s grudging respect. On the other hand, Kunitsa comes to admire Lyutobor for his tenacity as well as for his prowess in battle. It wouldn’t be quite right to call this a ‘buddy’ film, despite the subtle hat-tips to Lethal Weapon in this relationship. Lyutobor and Kunitsa gain respect for each other through a number of encounters and survival scenarios, and the natural flow of these events effectively builds audience sympathy and investment in that friendship. But at the same time, the two of them stand on either side of a religious and cultural divide that, even toward the end of the film, is never quite bridged. The film seems to intimate that the only force that can bridge it is bloodshed, even political mass murder.

In fact, what the film has to say about honour and trust is that both of these things are fragile, and built on a landscape of power-struggle and intrigue that can roll over and crush them at any time. With the notable exceptions of Kunitsa and Anagast – both of them Scythians! – and Lyutobor’s loyal wife Tatyana, all of the major characters go back on their word or violate a relationship of trust in some way, and they do it for gain, in power or in wealth. At the beginning of the film, a Qypchaq warrior named Qumai (played by Rustam Mosafir himself) challenges Lyutobor to a wrestling-match, but when Lyutobor beats him fair and square, the humiliated and enraged Qumai draws a knife and tries to stab Lyutobor in the back. This sets the tone for a number of encounters and relationships in the film. Although kinship, friendship and religious obligation are expressed by most of the characters in Skif, the only ones ever shown to 100% hold up their end of a bargain are Scythian. And in the end they suffer a dreadful, tragic price for this honesty.

Scythian lore exercises a powerful grip on the Russian imagination. The obvious point of reference is the Aleksandr Blok poem Skify, which ties the character of the Russian nation to the ancient Asiatic steppe nomads. But it goes back further than that. As religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev highlights, the great Slavophil cultural critic Aleksei Khomyakov in Semiramis spoke of the civilisational principle of iranstvo: the principle of fire and sunlight and the sacredness of the spoken word, which is opposed to the animistic principle of kushitstvo with its emphasis on power, monuments and necessity. In Khomyakov’s ethnographic imagination, the Scythians embodied the ‘Iranian’ principles of sacred truth, hatred of the lie, and the idea that true freedom consists in keeping one’s word – and then passed on these traits to the Russians. This same imagination seems to fuel Mosafir’s low-fantasy vision of whom the Scythians were and what they believed, though if Oleg is any indication, he expresses a strong doubt that the Russians inherited it except indirectly.

The logic of Skif appears, at first, to be ‘Cushitic’. The gods that go unseen are false. Power is invested – even by supposedly ‘Christian’ characters like Oleg – in magic totems of wood and stone, which must be sated by blood. Necessity overrules any conception of the sacredness of one’s word. Sons betray fathers; fathers kill sons. Lords and servants cheat each other. Men betray other men to their deaths for purses full of gold. Alliances are broken; tribes are massacred. The world we get to view through the eyes of Lyutobor is bleak and brutal. But it seems like Mosafir is in ultimate agreement with Berdyaev and Khomyakov, given that the few fleeting glimpses we get of any sort of spiritual freedom – including a particularly poignant and bittersweet one at the very end of the film – come through the perspective of the Scythians themselves.

This political angle on the amoral nature of acquiring and keeping political power, and the options available for a person of integrity under it, prompts a contrast with another genre film, but not a Hollywood one. Despite several echoing similarities in theme and in plot beats between Skif and Zhang Yimou’s Hero – with Jet Li’s Wuming sharing certain qualities and temperament with both Lyutobor and Kunitsa and with Yurii Tsurilo’s Oleg displaying a similar outlook to Chen Daoming’s Qin Shihuang – the final tragic choice of Wuming to uphold the state order without regard for his own life at the end of Hero, stands in stark contrast to Lyutobor’s penultimate choice to defy the state order without regard for his own life.

The Scythians left their archaeological traces across a good quarter of the Eurasian continent, from the Balkans across Crimea and the Caucasus to Kazakhstan. They also left their genetic traces among human progeny in a broad swathe of the same. In the modern day, the Ossetian people of the Caucasus, who are descended from the Sauromatai tribe of Late Antiquity and the Alan people of the Middle Ages, still speak a language which is descended from Scythian. I do have to wonder a bit if Mosafir consulted at all with these Ossetian neighbours while they were filming this in (relatively) nearby Crimea.

The production values and cinematography in Skif are every bit as polished and lavish as one would come to expect from a modern action flim, though again Mosafir appears to be quite fond of stylistic throwbacks to the silver era of eighties and nineties genre films, action movies and crime thrillers. The palette is washed out with the exceptions of the blood effects, which are always a vivid red. Certain scenes – like the one in which Lyutobor imbibes a psychoactive drink after being captured by a forest tribe and goes berserk – rely on fish-eye lens first-person camerawork and filters to capture the violent psychedelia of the practice: actually, no Western film, but instead the Kazakh films Otyrardyń kúıreýi (with which Skif shares similar thematic material) and Igla come the closest in my experience to these effects. In fact, Mosafir’s portrayal of Lyutobor’s berserkergang – including both the indiscriminate bestial rage during the episode and the extreme physical and emotional weakness of the warrior in dénouement – appears to be remarkably accurate from what historical knowledge of the practice we have.

The action scenes are nicely choreographed, and Mosafir takes delight in favouring us with numerous mobile first person takes to provide a sense of disorientation in combat. The elaborate and outlandish costumes – leather and metal spikes and face-masques galore – and ubiquitous face-paint further entrench the inevitable comparisons with Mad Max, as Mosafir no doubt intended. I will say, however, that some of the CGI blood effects, particularly in Lyutobor’s last confrontation with Qumai and even during the berserkergang, were unintentionally hilarious and came close to having the opposite of the intended effect: this is why I say earlier that Mosafir is playing on the ragged edge of the Tarantino threshold. The musical score is eclectic: a mixture of traditional symphonic accompaniment, ethnic drumming and instrumentation including some khöömi throat-singing, and a bit of modern darkwave dance music (during the end credits). The soundtrack is excellent in that it is suitably subdued, and supports the action rather than distracts from it.

This film is entirely watchable and entertaining as a popcorn action thriller. It’s well-paced, is visually lush, has solid dramatic tension and a decent emotional core. At the same time, I note with some dismay, many of these new movies from modern Russian directors – both in the ‘mainstream’ like this one and in the art-house circuit like Fedorchenko’s ethnofuturist dramas – are soused in a double faith, a dvoeverie, that self-alienates them from the native strength of the Orthodox Christian belief. I’m not entirely sure what is driving this. In Mosafir’s case, I wonder – both from Begletsy and from this film – if he feels that Orthodoxy in Russia has something opportunistic about it, something too close to the amoral logic of princely power.

Holy Hieromartyr Misail, Archbishop of Ryazan

Saint Misail of Ryazan

The tenth of April is the feast-day of a somewhat controversial missionary-martyr of the Russian Church, who reposed in the middle of the seventeenth century, but who was glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate only on the twelfth of January, 1987, in the middle of Soviet glasnost’. Saint Misail of Aglomazovo was possessed of an indefatigable zeal for the faith and was a stickler for public morality, criticising lax discipline and especially drunkenness among the Russian clergy. Although this led him to take stands that might be considered politically progressive or even left-wing for this day, it also unfortunately earned him a number of enemies: one of whom shot him in the middle of a sermon on the first of April in 1656.

Saint Misail was born in a small village, Gruzino, in the Chudovskii region north of Veliki Novgorod. The estate on which he was born was owned by the Resurrection Monastery of Derevyatinsk, and he chose in his youth to join the holy ascetics there as a brother-monk. He was marked in his monastic life with a particular zeal for the holy offices that attracted the notice of a certain Metropolitan of Veliki Novgorod named Nikon.

Then-Metropolitan Nikon, with the approval of Tsar Aleksei and together with his friend and associate, the philanthropic boyar Fyodor Rtishchev, led an informal party within the Church called the Bogolyubtsy. The Bogolyubtsy were a social-justice movement, that essentially wanted to return the Church to the common masses and decrease the influence of wealthy and powerful boyars on the Church. They insisted on stricter standards for priestly comportment: no drunkenness, and no second marriages for widower priests. They also encouraged priests to give homilies in vernacular Russian during the Liturgy, so that ordinary people without learning in Church Slavonic could understand what was being done and said. And they sought to use the Church as an instrument of social welfare: Rtishchev personally funded two monasteries, a free public hospital, and a college for religious education.

Metropolitan Nikon saw at once a kindred spirit in the monk Misail, who had a clever and attentive mind, but was also simple and sincere in soul. Seeing his ability, he elevated him to serve in the vestry. When Nikon was promoted to the Patriarchate of Moscow, he recommended that the faithful monk be tonsured and anointed as Bishop of Ryazan and sent to minister to Nikon’s ancestral people, the Finnic Mordvins. This turned out to be no sinecure for the new bishop: he had his work cut out for him.

The new position made every possible demand on Saint Misail’s energy and patience. The situation he found in Ryazan when he first came there was, to put it mildly, discouraging. He found the clergy there to be unlearned and lax in discipline. And among the laity, he found mass indifference to the Liturgy, and found popular Orthodox devotions to be mingled with the pagan superstitions of the præ-Christian Mordvin religion. He went about at once attempting to correct the situation using a broad variety of means.

Bishop Misail could be both remarkably warm and kindly, or stern and severe as the situation warranted. He was apparently quite hospitable, particularly on feast-days, and opened his home to his parish priests and to the common people who came to him with their problems. He offered his advice and support – including monetary support – to priests who were willing to reform their lives and give up excessive drinking. However, with those who were not willing, or who backslid, he could be ferocious in his remedies. When he heard of widower priests who sought to marry again, Misail would have them dragged into the church, forcibly tonsured as monks, and sent packing to distant monasteries. He also threatened to excommunicate and bar from burial within the church pale, those among the laity who cheated their neighbours, who gambled and who engaged in profligate drunkenness.

He was also merciless toward the korchemniki, the (often boyar-appointed) tavern-keepers in rural Russia. Though there was probably something of a puritanical streak in Saint Misail’s crusade against public drunkenness, it is also true that the korchemniki were highly corrupt and often abused their positions to the detriment of poor people. It was their job not only to serve drink and serve a lot of it, but also to serve as the eyes and ears of the boyars who kept them stocked with mead. They were ideally placed to do so because their taverns were often the centres of gossip. Thus, the tavern-keepers were usually the ones to also do the boyars’ dirty work: hand over runaway serfs, or run down debtors in default. Saint Misail objected to these abuses as much as the public drunkenness, when he had the korchemniki banned from his diocæse.

However, his first impulse was always to mercy. When the Tatars attacked and ransacked Tambov, driving out the people from their homes, the bishop again opened his doors, his storerooms and his kitchens to the displaced residents of Tambov, and took the priests there under his care. He made no inquisitorial demands upon those priests, but instead did all he could to support them for the whole time until the Tatars had been driven back and they could return home.

These two contrasting tendencies in Misail – gentleness and ferocity, indulgence and strictness – seem indicative of his spiritual life as well. He was both a punctilious stickler with parish priests for keeping and pronouncing the Liturgy, and he spent much effort on bringing that same Liturgy into alignment with contemporary practice in Constantinople at Patriarch Nikon’s behest, for the ease of those same parish priests. He beat the korchemniki and flung them from the doors of his church, but he also held the doors of his home wide open to refugees from Tambov, without asking any questions of them. He was not averse to wearing exquisite robes to glorify God in outward splendour, while at the same time he kept a harsh asceticism upon himself in private. His was the sort of spirituality that Chesterton referred to, when speaking of saints like Éadg‎ýð of Wilton or Thomas à Becket:

in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart.

Saint Misail soon began taking consideration of the spiritual well-being of the unbaptised Mordvin and Tatar peoples who lived in his diocæse. He had heard of several cases of the Mordvins having been cheated and tricked by religious charlatans pretending to be priests: he had these Mordvins rebaptised by legitimate clergy. In 1651, he sent a monk named Artemii to preach to the Mordvins – at the time, he was involved in aiding Nikon to reform the Church Liturgical books. Artemii managed to baptise several families, but his progress among the Mordvins was slow. The proud Finnic people were not easily persuaded of the truths of Orthodoxy.

Misail sought from Patriarch Nikon, and was given, leave to go and preach among the Mordvins himself. His first trip was in the winter of 1654, and he went to the Shatskii district, taking with him a monk named Vasilii, a clerk named Savva Zverev, and several other clergy. The zeal of the archbishop was impressive to the Mordvins there, 316 of whom agreed to be baptised. Bishop Misail then sent messengers to the villages around Shatskii, inviting the people there to come hear him preach – only these did not come. This being so, the archbishop went among them himself. However, a great throng of Mordvins came out to meet him and told him they did not want to be baptised. They were not Russians, did not speak Russian, and did not know to do in a church where Slavonic was spoken. They told Misail that they would be baptised only if the Tsar commanded it.

This missionary trip therefore met with only limited success. The second one he undertook was to Tambov, where he was much more successful. He claims to have baptised 4,015 souls on this journey to Tambov, and we have no reason to doubt him – although the means he seemed to have used were rather dubious. We have seen in his dealings with widower priests and korchemniki that he was not averse to using ‘sticks’ to get what he wanted as well as ‘carrots’, and this was one reason why his glorification came so late. Writing in 1986, one year before that glorification, Orthodox missiologist James Stamoolis writes:

Some missionaries did not take the trouble to learn the language of those among whom they were to labour. Others were content to use the power of the state to aid in the ‘conversion’ of unbelievers. One such worker was Bishop Misail of Ryazan, who did not hesitate to use the sword to win allegiance to the Gospel. Fulfilling the words of Jesus as recorded in Matthew 26:52, the bishop himself was slain. That his actions were not held in high esteem by the Church is evidenced by its reluctance to canonise him in spite of his martyrdom.

In February the following year, Bishop Misail brought what the stubborn Mordvins in his care had requested: a letter from the Tsar commanding them to be baptised. He read this proclamation in several villages that had previously rejected baptism, hoping that this would sway hearts and minds. It did not. Misail was warned by his monk Vasilii and the boyar’s son Akindin Baholdin, that if he kept proceeding this way among the Mordvins it would be dangerous to his life. Saint Misail did not listen. He stayed in the Mordvin village of Berezovka with no retinue, and proceeded to the villages of Konobeevo and Yambirnaya with only a minimal detachment for his protection.

Outside Yambirnaya, on the calends of April, the heathen Mordvins set up an ambush on the road and lay in wait for the Archbishop and his small party. As they saw him approach, they surrounded him, bearing all manner of weapons and hurling abuse at him. Saint Misail, clad only in a mantle and bearing only a cross and his crozier, attempted to speak reason to them, and hold them to their promise to convert on the word of the Tsar. Here, ironically, he did not use weapons or threats. But the Mordvins began to brandish spears and scythes, nock arrows and fire guns. The archimandrite Vasilii was killed on the spot, and some of the deacons and other helpers fled. Misail stood his ground, with Akindin Boholdin interposing his body between the archbishop and his attackers.

One Mordvin attempted to strike Archbishop Misail with a spear, but Akindin turned the point away from delivering the mortal blow. Another Mordvin in the rear ranks, by the name of Garichushka, shot at Misail with bow and arrow. The arrow pierced the left hand of the saint and pinned it to his breast just over his heart. He crumpled to the ground. As Akindin Boholdin recounts, he ran from the Mordvin with the spear and went to help his master – and, helped by the deacon Varlaam, he managed to take Misail away from the fighting. Unable to mount a horse, the two men lay Saint Misail in a sleigh and bore him back along the road to Aglamazovo.

Once there, Misail asked that the icon of Christ the Saviour be brought to him and set before his bed. He began to weep and give thanks to the Lord for the wound he had suffered. He took confession and was administered the Gifts. He clung onto life for another nine days, however, in extreme pain from his wound. He had been shot on Holy Tuesday of that year, and had witnessed the Lord’s Pascha from his deathbed. On Bright Thursday, the tenth of April, he departed to the Lord.

Saint Misail was much-mourned by the people of Ryazan. Even the people he had baptised by means not altogether voluntary turned out for his funeral: Mordvins and Tatars. Some of them who were yet unbaptised, upon seeing his body, turned to the Church of their own will. The confessor’s body was interred in Pereyaslavl at the Archangel Cathedral. There it remained until the Russian Revolution, when the saint’s blood-stained mantle was taken to a local museum for display. It was returned to the Church only in 1994. The incorrupt body of Saint Misail currently rests in the Holy Trinity Monastery in Ryazan.

Saint Misail of Ryazan is not a particularly commendable model of Orthodox missiology, having been too reliant on the arms of the boyars and the blandishments and threats of the Tsar. It is better to rely for this on saints like Trifon of Pechenga or Innocent of Irkutsk, whose methods of mission tended to be less forceful, more patient, more lenient, more understanding of local customs and sensibilities. However, Saint Misail’s asceticism, his hospitality to refugees, his care for the poor, his zeal for the Liturgy and the Christlike way in which he met his death all speak to his presence among the saints of the Lord. Such he was, that the Orthodox Tatars of Ryazan remember his life with particular fondness and greeted his glorification in the glasnost’ period with gratitude. Holy hierarch and martyr Misail, formidable and righteous archpastor in Ryazan, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion to Saint Misail, Tone 5:

Богомудре Святителю, Архиереев слава и сирых защитниче;
Ревностный проповедниче Христова Евангелия.
Утвердил еси верою сердца неутвержденная.
Священную одежду омочив в крови,
Яко мученик и пастырь прославился еси.
Священномучениче Мисаиле, молися прилежно Владыце Христу
О всех нас, почитающих святую память твою,
Да вышняго Причастия сподобимся и Света невечерняго.

Translation:

O divinely wise saint, glory of bishops and defender of orphans,
Zealous preacher of the Gospel of Christ!
Affirmed in the faith by hearts unaffirmed,
Your holy garments were soaked in blood,
Glorifying you as a martyr and shepherd.
O holy martyr Misail, praying diligently to Christ our Lord
For all of us here who revere your holy memory,
Let us likewise worthily partake of the Holy Eucharist and the Light Unfading!

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!

Our mother among the saints Brigid, Abbess of Kildare

Saint Brigid of Kildare

One of the greatest – if not the greatest – of the holy mothers of the præ-Schismatic Western Church, is the late fifth- and early sixth-century Saint Brigid, Abbess of Kildare. In Ireland, devotion to Saint Brigid is matched only by that to Saint Padrig, who baptised and taught both her and her mother. The Life of Brigid amply demonstrates the spirited independence of Gælic holy women.

First, a note of caution. It is currently fashionable in some quarters to suggest that Saint Brigid is not a historical person, but instead the euhemerism of a heathen goddess, Brigantia. The evidence for this appears to consist of the fact that her feast-day, the first of February, coincides with the heathen winter festival of Imbolc (or Candlemas). It’s also true that the name Brigid [Scots Gælic Brìde, Welsh Ffraid, English Bridget] does indeed share the same root as the name (really an epithet) for the goddess, deriving from the unattested proto-Celtic name Brigantī, meaning ‘the High One’. However, apart from such circumstantial suggestions, ‘there is little evidence of a direct connection between the two figures’.

Saint Brigid was born around the year 451 in Faughart, now a ruin on the Northern Irish border six kilometres south of Forkhill and three kilometres north of Dundalk in County Louth. Her father was a chieftain named Dubhthach, and her mother was a Pictish slave named Brocca who had been baptised as a Christian by Saint Padrig. Dubhthach’s jealous wife forced him to put Brocca aside when she grew pregnant, and sell her to a druid nearby. Brocca gave birth in this druid’s household, and the druid attempted to feed her. However, she spat out all the food the heathen priest gave her, and was fed instead by the milk of a white cow with red ears, which was kept in the druid’s yard.

The druid sold Brigid and her mother back to Dubhthach when she was about ten years of age, and she entered her father’s house as a slave alongside her mother. Even at this age she had an incredible degree of generosity. When she was a youth, she was brought to the Liturgy by her mother, where she listened with great attention to the homilies of Saint Padrig, which inspired her to a degree of self-giving unusual for a child of ten. On one occasion she gave away her mother’s entire store of butter to the poor. Afraid of being punished by her angry mother, she prayed fervently to God, and it was later discovered that the stores of butter had been wondrously replenished. In the household of her father, she would ‘donate’ from her father’s clothes and other belongings to any needy person who asked.

This habit of hers infuriated Dubhthach, who at last resolved on selling her off to the king of Leinster. He brought her in his chariot to Leinster, and while he was negotiating with the king on her price, she saw a beggar by the side of the road. She took her father’s jewelled dagger, which had been wrought in Faughart as a gift for the king, from the chariot and gave it to the beggar for him to feed his family. The king of Leinster and her father both observed her as she did this – Dubhthach with outrage and mortification, and Leinster with approval. The king of Leinster would not buy her for himself, but he ultimately convinced her father to set her free, as it was obvious to him that she was a holy youth and well-disposed to a life consecrated to God.

Ultimately, the young Brigid was presented to Saint Mael of Ardagh – a nephew of Saint Padrig and one of his assiduous disciples in converting Ireland. Saint Mael consecrated Brigid as a nun along with seven other young women, and in some accounts even accorded her the honours due to a bishop! She was sent first to live a holy life at Kilbride (in County Offaly on the inlandmost side of Leinster) in 468, and here she spent several years. In 480 the King of Leinster invited Saint Brigid back and granted her a holding at Kildare (from Cill Dara – the ‘Church of the Oak’), on the plains of Curragh. Saint Brigid asked for only as much land as her cloak would cover. The king of Leinster agreed, seeing that her cloak was so small. But when she went to Curragh and spread out her cloak, by a wonder of God it seemed her cloak kept unrolling until it covered several acres. Beholding this wonder of God, the king did not go back on his word but allowed her to build there.

Here she founded an oratory and a monastic cell – the first such cloister for women in Ireland. In earlier times Cill Dara had been consecrated by the druids to the goddess Brigantia (another circumstance which has been drawn on by fans of the euhemerism theory), where virgins constantly tended an ‘æternal flame’ in her honour. However, under the saint who shared her name, tended instead were the flames of charity, hope and faith in Christ.

Not just young women, but even men had been drawn to Kildare by tales of Saint Brigid’s holiness, which when they saw it for themselves led them to desire a life consecrated to Christ. The monastery at Kildare was therefore consecrated as a double monastery – Brigid governed the one for women, while she selected a hermit named Conláed to lead the one for men. Saint Brigid travelled often from Kildare, preached the Gospel and founded other nunneries all around Ireland. She was of great assistance to Saint Padrig, and the two of them held each other in the highest affection and esteem. They were said to have been of one mind and one opinion.

Brigid and Conláed presided over one of the first Irish scriptoria as well. The illuminated Book of Kildare, described in glowing terms as a rival to the Book of Kells by the Welsh deacon Gerald in the twelfth century, was, to a large degree, the work of Saint Brigid herself. Saint Brigid was a sponsor and producer of many beautiful works of holy art including metalworking, and she quickly became a saintly patroness not only of scribes and illuminators but also musicians, poets and smiths.

Crosses made from rushes are associated with Saint Brigid as well. The hagiographies have it that Saint Brigid was called to attend a heathen man, a lord, who was sick and on his deathbed. Being feverish, the man wasn’t entirely in his right mind. Brigid picked up several rushes from the floor – flooring at that time often being made from such material – broke them and wove them together to form a distinctive cross. The sick man asked what she was doing, and patiently Brigid began to explain the Cross and its significance. Her conversation had the effect of soothing the man’s mind, and he came to believe in Christ before his death, through Brigid’s demonstrations and teaching. Since that time, it’s been customary in Ireland to weave crosses from rushes on Saint Brigid’s feast day.

Saint Brigid was a wonderworker, and wrought as many as forty-six wonders of God in her lifetime, with her request to the king of Leinster and the subsequent wonder of her cloak being spread over Kildare often being counted as the first. She cast out devils with the sign of the Cross, and she healed the blind. But many of her miracles involved food – as seen from the above anecdote about her prayer to God filling her mother’s store of butter after she gave it all away. Often these wonders would echo Christ’s feeding of the multitudes. When unexpected travellers came to visit Kildare and she didn’t have enough milk to feed them, Saint Brigid’s cows could be milked three times a day to sate their wants. At one time a large group of pilgrims visited Kildare and Saint Brigid had only a small pat of butter on hand, but this butter satisfied all their hunger. Honey would miraculously appear in Brigid’s refectory for her to give to beggars.

Not only do Brigid’s wonders involving milk and honey carry an obvious echo from the Hebrew Scriptures, but to mediæval Gælic ears they were also indicative of prestige. Milk in particular was associated with nourishment, healing and purity. Thus Saint Brigid’s wonders established her in the eyes of the early Gæls as a powerful patroness – but her choices of beneficiaries were always the poor, the indebted, the rootless, the kinless, the sick and the desperate. In a præ-feudal œconomy based on kinship and patronage, Brigid’s miracles also established her radicalism: she bestowed her wealth and purity on the people who had the least of both.

Saint Brigid reposed in the Lord, in peace among her nuns, in the year 525. She received the Gifts from a certain Ninnidh ‘of the Pure Hand’, but this is probably not the same person as Saint Ninnidh ‘the One-Eyed’ of Inishmacsaint. Her cultus is centred at Kildare, with her shrine having once been located at Kildare Cathedral. Her relics are now located at Down Cathedral alongside those of Saint Padrig and Saint Colum Cille. Saint Brigid is also venerated in Portugal; a skull said to be hers is enshrined at the Church of Saint John the Baptist in Lumiar, having been brought there in the thirteenth century by Irish crusaders. Her veneration is ubiquitous in Ireland and she is revered with Padrig and Colum Cille as one of Ireland’s three national patrons. She has a large number of holy wells throughout Ireland, with the most significant being the one at Kildare. Holy mother Brigid, wonderworker and open-handed friend to the poor, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

O holy Brigid, you became sublime through your humility,
And flew on the wings of your longing for God.
When you arrived in the eternal City and appeared before your Divine Spouse,
Wearing the crown of virginity,
You kept your promise
To remember those who have recourse to you.
You shower grace upon the world, and multiply miracles.
Intercede with Christ our God that He may save our souls.

Cathedral of Saint Brigid, Kildare, Ireland

Holy Father Cyndeyrn Garthwys, Wonderworker and Bishop of Glasgow

Saint Cyndeyrn of Glasgow

Today in the Orthodox Church is the feast-day of Saint Cyndeyrn of Glasgow, a Brythonic saint of Yr Hen Ogledd and one of the great evangelists of the Scottish nation. He is known to Harry Potter fans in particular by his pet-name of Saint Mungo.

Saint Cyndeyrn [also Kentigern and, as mentioned, Mungo] was a child of an act of violence, the offspring of Saint Teneu after she was deceived and raped by Owain mab Urien. His grandfather, King Lot, tried to have him killed in utero along with his mother by having her driven in a chariot off of Traprain Law. When this failed to kill her and her unborn child, and by the power of her prayers to Christ and the Theotokos her chariot landed at the bottom of the cliff as lightly as a bird might light on a branch, she was suspected of being a witch and placed on a hide coracle and cast adrift at sea to die. However, Teneu delivered Cyndeyrn as soon as she cast up on shore in the boat at Culross, where she and her infant were taken into the care and protection of Saint Serbán. Saint Teneu would later leave Culross to enter a much happier union with Dingad ap Nudd, and she would give Cyndeyrn five further legitimate half-brothers by blood, including Saint Eleri of Gwytherin.

Cyndeyrn was raised from a very early age by Saint Serbán, who gave him his nickname of Mungo, which is a Brythonic cognate Mwyn-Gu derived from the Gælic words mo ‘my’, and cóem ‘dear, beloved’. The Life of Cyndeyrn holds that Saint Serbán exclaimed something like this – ‘mo chóhe! mo chóhe!’ – when he first came across Teneu, in her exhaustions of childbirth, and her newborn son who lay on the sand wrapped in swaddling. Seeing early on that the lad had an aptitude for reading and writing, Saint Serbán tutored him in all sorts of sæcular learning. Even as he grew in the knowledge of reading and writing, Cyndeyrn also improved in the natural virtues. He never spoke anything that was not sweet or beautiful or wise, understanding the voice as an instrument for praising God.

Seeing the favour that their master lavished upon the young ‘Mungo’, his other students began to envy him, and secretly plotted against him. Now, Saint Serbán had befriended a wild little red bird, that was wonted to eat out of his hand; this bird in its simple obedience and delight in Saint Serbán was also much coveted by the students. The boys caught this bird and, playing roughly with it, wrung its neck and killed it. They then attempted to place the blame for this deed on Cyndeyrn, who was wholly innocent of their rough games. Saint Serbán was greatly angered on seeing that his pet had been killed, and promised severe punishment on its killer. But Cyndeyrn meekly went and picked up the dead bird, fixed its head in the right place, and made the sign of the Cross on its tiny breast, and breathed upon it with a prayer. The bird at once revived and flew off toward his master, who saw all that took place.

Saint Cyndeyrn as a youth did many other like wonders at Culross. One time, as he was keeping vigil, his jealous schoolmates put out all the lamps and wicks on Culross so that he would have no light; young Cyndeyrn left the place to find growing a hazel branch. This he prayed to God to light with fire, and like the burning bush that was shown to Moses it was lit but gave off no heat, and he brought it back to Culross to the amazement of Saint Serbán and the other youths. On another occasion, Saint Cyndeyrn raised from the dead the abbey cook, whose service was so indispensable to Culross – through tearful and fervent prayers to Christ.

Eventually the envy of the other students became too much for Cyndeyrn to bear, and he left the monastery at Culross. Saint Serbán pursued him, but he was cut off at the bridge by a surge of water in a river that swept the bridge out. Serbán implored his Mungo to return to him, that in his age he might have some comfort in his waning years. Yet Cyndeyrn was steadfast, and gave him to know the reasons for his leaving. When master and pupil departed at last, it was amicably and with mutual blessings, but the bridge would remain impassable ever after that.

Saint Cyndeyrn visited a holy man named Fergus, a one-time companion of Saint Drostan who was suffering from a mortal illness, and attended him in his final pains before his repose. He took Saint Fergus’s body and placed it on a cart behind two oxen, whom he bade go where the Lord willed them to go. The oxen bore the cart all the way to Glasgow, into the yard by the church founded there by Saint Ninian, and there Saint Fergus was laid to rest.

There Cyndeyrn settled, too, living with two brothers named Telleyr and Anguen. These two brothers had very different personalities. One of them, Anguen, was meek and quiet and hospitable, and he waited on Cyndeyrn as though he were an angel. The other, Telleyr, was a hard and proud man who did not like Cyndeyrn one bit, and made no secret of it. The saint took both Anguen’s ministrations and Telleyr’s abuses with equanimity, and treated both men equally. Indeed, he kept a close watch over his tongue such that he dared not speak an ill-tempered word to any. But though Anguen and his children took the saint’s words to heart, Telleyr grew the more perverse. Finally, Telleyr, having upbraided Cyndeyrn in a fit of anger and stormed out of the house, went off to his work. Because his heart was cast into paroxysms of wrath and pride, he saw a large tree in his way and yarked it out of the ground, bearing it on his back. But he didn’t get far, as he tripped over a rock and sprawled to earth – the tree crushed him and he died. When Cyndeyrn heard of this, he chastised himself for not having checked his tongue, and grieved over Telleyr with many tears, and took Telleyr’s burial into his own charge.

Saint Cyndeyrn continued to work wonders among the poor people of Cumbria. It thus fell out that the king in that land, and what few Christians there were, decided to anoint Cyndeyrn as a bishop. Cyndeyrn was not pleased with this decision, and argued against it: that he was too young, that he was incapable, and that he did not want to disturb his inward peace. And yet the Christians of Cumbria all urged the contrary, with repeat urgency, such that Cyndeyrn was forced to acknowledge the workings of the Holy Spirit and assent to be made a bishop, with his seat at Glasgow.

Cyndeyrn adhered to a strict fasting rule, and abstained from meat and intoxicating beverages. He would moderate his fasts when breaking bread with sæcular people, but afterwards he would redouble his efforts to fast as if he were atoning for a crime. When he celebrated the Liturgy, he did so with the greatest and most self-effacing of reverences. It was said of him that a shining spirit in the form of a dove would light upon him when he administered the Gifts. During the Lenten season he would always disappear from the sight and sound of other human beings, and live in a desert solitude for the duration of the fast.

He took care in his clothing, always to wear a hair shirt close to his skin. Outwardly, though, he wore a shimmering white garment and a stole. In this he quite resembled the later Saint Éadgýð of Wilton who mortified herself with humility inwardly but who would not deprive the world of her beauty. Like his fellow Celtic saints Colum Cille and Cóemgen, he made his bed on a hard rock; and he had the practice of reciting the Psalms while submerging himself naked up to the neck in the Clyde, similar to that practiced by Saints Dewi, Pedrog, Cóemgen and Neot.

Saint Cyndeyrn spoke out volubly against hæresies, and was a particular foe of Pelagianism and the practice of simony. He had particular admonitions for those who professed the Christian faith but did not follow its precepts, and he worked with particular zeal in converting the Celtic pagans to Christianity, who still made up the most of the people in Cumbria at the time. Like Saint Aidan, Saint Cyndeyrn refused to ride a horse, but went evangelising on foot – a similar practice in more modern times was followed by Serbian Patriarch Pavle of blessed memory. Like Saint Boniface he was a particular foe of the pagan custom of incest. On the other hand, Saint Cyndeyrn was not averse to blessing unequal unions between newly-baptised men and their concubines or kept women, and turning those (in cases where the man had only one woman) into real marriages on more equal footing. Joscelin of Furness’s hagiography of Saint Cyndeyrn is actually illuminating in several ways with regard to how early Christendom transfigured pagan sexual mores, but a bit more on that later.

Saint Cyndeyrn wrought a number of wonders as bishop. At one time, when there was a shortage of oxen, Cyndeyrn called deer out of the nearby woods. These came out in obedience to the saint in the place of oxen, and pull ploughs as though they were tame beasts. Some time afterward, an opportunistic wolf took advantage of the tame deer and tore the throat out of one of them; Saint Cyndeyrn caught the wolf and bade it take the yoke in place of the deer – and the wolf submitted willingly, as though ashamed. Once the wolf had ploughed across nine acres of field, Cyndeyrn set it free into the woods. At another time, Saint Cyndeyrn had given away all the grain, including the seed corn, to feed the poor in the midst of a drought. So he sowed the fields instead with sand, praying to Christ all the while. And behold: the sand shot forth green shoots, then budded and ripened with corn. This agricultural wonder of Saint Cyndeyrn drew a number of new converts to Christianity.

Cyndeyrn’s successes drew the envy and ire of a local prince, Morcen Mwynfawr. Morcen boasted to Cyndeyrn of his wealth and scorned the teachings of Christ; and thus Cyndeyrn manifested a wonder by which the waters of the Clyde flooded into Morcen’s barns and swept out all of his grain, depositing it dry and whole at a certain desert place where Cyndeyrn was wont to spend time. From there Cyndeyrn took the grain and distributed it all amongst the poor. Morcen’s heart was hardened by this wonder, and he summoned Cyndeyrn to him and proceeded to beat the holy man mercilessly with his shoe. Morcen later died of a tumour which had lodged in his foot. However the long-suffering Cyndeyrn was forced to flee into Wales, to dwell amongst his kinfolk.

While in Wales, he met and befriended Saint Dewi, who greeted him with great hospitality at Mynyw; and there Cyndeyrn was induced to stay for some time, for the theological discourse of Saint Dewi was sweet to his ears and the two of them understood each other in the manner of holy friends. Indeed, Cyndeyrn built a little church not far off from Mynyw – at Llangyndeyrn in Dyfed. Dewi was not at all jealous of his northern friend, however, and word of Cyndeyrn’s holiness spread far. He was soon invited to build a monastery, and Cyndeyrn agreed. Taking leave of his friend, Cyndeyrn ventured into the north country – Gwynedd – after following a wild boar who led him into a suitable desert place on the banks of the Elwy. Despite having the blessing of Cadwallon Llawhir ap Einion, the prince of the north, Cyndeyrn and his disciples were nonetheless harassed at first by Cadwallon’s son Maelgwn Gwynedd (both of whom are Cooper ancestors, if the old genealogies are right), who laid waste to their monastery. It was only when Maelgwn was stricken blind and he went to Cyndeyrn to heal him (which he did) that he left the monks of Llanelwy in peace.

It was around this time that the child Asaph – another scion of Yr Hen Ogledd – was brought to Saint Cyndeyrn. Cyndeyrn cared for Asaph, and indeed valued and venerated him, in much the same way that Saint Serbán had once done for him. Saint Asaph himself performed miracles as a child, indicative of his sanctity and purity of heart – most famously bringing Cyndeyrn, when he asked for light, live embers inside his cotte without being burnt.

Saint Cyndeyrn made several pilgrimages to Rome; and on one of these he met with Saint Gregory Dialogos, who then reigned as the Pope of Rome. It was shortly after he returned that the new king in Yr Hen Ogledd, the great Rhydderch Hael, invited Cyndeyrn to return to Glasgow to resume his former bishopric. Cyndeyrn left Llanelwy in the care of his beloved student Saint Asaph, and returned as he was bidden to Glasgow.

Saint Cyndeyrn returned to Glasgow in triumph, performing wonders along the way. He came to Hoddom where he preached the Gospel to a great multitude of northern Britons. Many of them came to believe, and assented to be baptised, and so Cyndeyrn was employed day and night. Though that land had suffered drought the season before which the idols of the Brythonic heathen could not lift, after Cyndeyrn’s sermon and baptisms the clouds broke open and it began to rain, restoring fertility to the soil. All there gave praise to the risen Christ for His mercies. Rhydderch Hael himself came to meet Cyndeyrn with joy, and even took off his symbols of office and bent his knee to the holy man in token of the awe in which he went of him. He did Cyndeyrn the same honours that Emperor Saint Constantine had once done to Saint Silvester.

Saint Cyndeyrn worked another miracle of fertility – this time for Rhydderch Hael’s hitherto-barren wife Languoreth. It was not long after Cyndeyrn gave her his blessing, that Languoreth found she was able to conceive. Rhydderch Hael begat several daughters by Languoreth – including Gwladys and Angharad – and a son, named for Emperor Constantine. This son would become Saint Custennin of Strathclyde and Gowan.

The Life of Saint Cyndeyrn also notes that he was also close friends with Saint Colum Cille. When the two of them first met, Colum Cille at once identified Cyndeyrn among the men present in the church, and when asked how he had done so, the abbot of Iona replied: ‘I see a fiery column in the manner of a golden crown, interlaced with starry gems, descending from heaven onto his head. And a light of æthereal brightness envelops and surrounds him in the likeness of a veil, which covers him and then again returns to the æther.’ Thereafter the abbot of Iona and the bishop of Glasgow were happy to speak together for hours on holy things, and loved above all else to be in each other’s company. At one time, Cyndeyrn and Colum Cille exchanged croziers as a token of their friendship; one of these found its way into the possession of Saint Wilfrið of Ripon, who kept it in his monastery for a number of generations afterward and allowed it to be publicly venerated as a holy relic of both men.

Saint Cyndeyrn raised, as became a custom for him, a number of stone crosses throughout the Old North, like the one in Aspatria which still stands. These crosses put devils to flight, and thus were used to perform exorcisms and to cure mental illnesses by the people who venerated them. Cyndeyrn is also associated with a holy well in Glasgow Cathedral, which was the site of pilgrimages throughout the High Middle Ages.

St Mungo’s Well, Glasgow Cathedral

Saint Cyndeyrn lived to an ancient old age, and suffered from various infirmities of the joints in his later years such that he ended up having to bind his jaw up with a cloth. He took the Viaticum and exhorted his disciples to keep the true doctrines of the church, the love of Christ, the love of each other and the hospitality and generosity toward strangers that he had tried his best to teach them. He reposed in peace and went to Christ in the company of His saints on the thirteenth of January, 612.

It’s worth considering the Life of Cyndeyrn from the following perspective as well. The neo-pagans who think that European paganism was in any way more permissive than Christianity in pelvic matters are simply deluding themselves. Largely – but not solely – through the likes of Marion Zimmer Bradley (who clearly had her own hang-ups), Christendom has been falsely but popularly imagined as a kind of foreign repression imposed on gender-egalitarian, sexually-liberated nature-loving Northern European pagans.

The people who practised the pre-Christian religions of Europe were in fact even MORE strict about sexual matters than the Christians were, to the point of torturing and executing young people caught in ‘the act’, as they tried to do with Saint Teneu. The reason was precisely patriarchal pride. When your gods are quite literally emblematic of your ancestors, disobedience to the lineage – particularly a disobedience done with your body – becomes one of the most egregious blasphemies.

Early Christianity kept the old sexual taboos largely in place as a means of protecting the dignity of the weak. But it also worked to undermine the social import of these taboos. Under the old pagan strictures applied by King Lot in the case of his daughter Teneu, sexual abstinence is mandated so that one doesn’t shame his or her fathers. Christendom kept the emphasis on abstinence, but not because failing to abstain heaps shame upon one’s forefathers. The more immediate concern is love of neighbour. Christianity’s concern in upholding sexual strictures is the well-being of the other as the image and likeness of God. Thus, even though Christianity will not condone sins of the flesh, at its very best it also does not take the sins of the fathers out on the children!

This is attested in several ways in the Vita of Saint Cyndeyrn. Cyndeyrn does speak out harshly in some ways about sexual sins, including incest and homosexuality. When he arrives in Glasgow Cyndeyrn annuls marriages contracted between close kin among the nobility, while blessing the unions of men and women of unequal social status. In another case, he casts out of the church a priest who had kept male lovers. But consider: an unborn infant who was cast out and sentenced to death by his grandfather for being an unacknowledged bastard, would one day become one of the greatest missionary saints of Scotland, to be venerated by the very people who ran his mother off of Traprain Law. It’s quite difficult to think of a more radical subversion of pagan sexual taboos than that. Holy hierarch Cyndeyrn, dearly beloved one of Scots and Cumbrians and English alike, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Thy name, most radiant ascetic and wonderworker,
All-praised and great Father Cyndeyrn Mungo,
Which means ‘dear friend’,
Is godly sweetness to our wretched ears.
Thus named by thy tutor who foresaw thy missionary service,
Thou wast the truest friend and pastor to the Britons of Strathclyde.
Wherefore, O Saint, befriend us in this hour of need
That we may labour for Christ, as He wills,
And thereby be found worthy of His great mercy!

St Kentigern’s Church, Caldbeck, Cumbria