medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (5. July) is the feast day of:
1) Cyprilla (d. ca. 304, supposedly). Prior to its revision of 2001 the RM mistakenly called C. Cyrilla. As Cyprilla she is widely recorded in Eastern calendars and synaxaries, where her feast is given variously as occurring either yesterday or today. C. has a legendary Passio (BHG 2093) whose sole witness is of the eleventh century. This makes her a widow of Cyrene in the Libyan Pentapolis who along with two other Christian women, Aroa and Lucia (not known to have received a cult and perhaps entirely fictional), assists yesterday's St. Theodore of Cyrene during the Great Persecution, is arrested, refuses to abjure her faith, and undergoes gruesome torments ending in a very bloody death. When and how she really suffered are unknown.
2) Athanasius of Jerusalem (d. 451 or 452). We learn about A. from Nicephorus Callistus, _Historia ecclesaistica_, 15. 9. He was a deacon of the church of the Resurrection who opposed the monastic revolt in 451-453 against Jerusalem's bishop Juvenal after the latter had changed sides at the Council of Chalcedon and had accepted the Tome of Leo. A. was murdered by, or on the order of, the monks' leader, Theodosius. He has never had a formal cult. Cardinal Baronio entered him in the RM as a martyr for Chalcedonian orthodoxy.
3. Dometius the Healer (d. later 4th or 5th cent.). D. (in Latin also Domitius) is originally a saint of the Syriac-language church whose celebration on this day is at least as old as the sixth century. He has a legendary Vita in that tongue (BHO 263) that makes him a pagan of Cappadocian origin who during the reign of Valens (364-378) experiences an angelically assisted conversion to Christianity and withdraws to a cave on mount Quros (in today's southern Turkey, not very far from the site of the ancient Syrian city of Cyrus/Cyrrhus). There he is miraculously cured of sciatica, lives very ascetically, operates miraculous cures on other humans and on a lame camel, escapes an attempt by jealous physicians to kill him, and dies in his cave with an angel at his side. Later a monastery named for him (Mor Dimet) arises on that very spot.
In the later sixth century St. Gregory of Tours, who had at least one Syrian informant, purveys a miracle story about D. (_In gloria confessorum_, 99) in which he is called a martyr, perhaps because in G.'s version D. was never cured of his own illness and suffered from it for as long as he lived. Just possibly, though, this characterization of D. as a martyr derives from a belief circulating in the East that this saint had actually died for his faith. Earlier in the same century the Byzantine chronicler John Malalas, himself a Syrian, records under 6. July 363 that a speleote named D. of Assyrian (i.e. Persian) origin and not said to have been a healer was on the orders of Julian the Apostate stoned to death in the general vicinity of Cyrus/Cyrrhus. Despite the differences in their characterization, the prevailing view now is that this D. and D. the Healer are in origin one and the same saint.
There are good reasons for disbelieving Malalas' account. Martyrdoms personally ordered by Julian ordinarily are fictional; the story does not occur in the fifth-century church historian Theodoret, who as bishop of Cyrus/Cyrrhus would be expected to have known of it; a similar martyrdom not specifically associated with D. is recounted early in the sixth century by Severus of Antioch (_Homiliae cathedrales_, 51). But once the story did attach itself to D. it stuck. He has a relatively late Greek-language Passio (BHG 560) that though based on Malalas' account or on one very like it includes traditional stories of D.'s healing. In this persona of a martyr who died for his faith he is known as D. the Persian.
D. is entered for today in the ninth-century martyrologies of Florus, Ado, and Usuard. In the late sixteenth century cardinal Baronio, thinking that he could distinguish between the two, entered both D. the Healer and D. the Persian in the RM, assigning D. the Healer to today and D. the Persian to 7. July. Today's RM dispenses entirely with D. the Persian. Treating the healing accounts as legendary, it says of D. called the Healer (_cognomento Medico_) merely that he was a hermit on Mt. Quros.
4) Martha the mother of St. Simeon Stylites the Younger (d. later 6th cent.). Simeon Stylites the Younger was venerated late in life and for centuries afterward at a monastery named for him and extending around his final pillar on a mountain near Antioch on the Orontes in what until the earlier twentieth century was part of Syria (like Antioch/Antakya itself, it's now in Turkey's Hatay province). At some time between the writing of S.'s earliest, very late sixth- or early seventh-century Bios and the late ninth century a brief Bios of M. (BHG 1174) was written at the monastery to accompany her veneration there.
M.'s Bios presents her as a native of Antioch and a pious widow who carefully raises S. in the faith and who after he has left home operates miracles and repeatedly is graced with apparitions of St. John the Baptist and of angels. When one of these angels tells her that she has but one more year to live S. receives a similar vision. When M. has but three months to live she goes to the monastery and asks S. what his plans are for her burial. S.'s answer is that he has none but that he and the monks are constantly discussing this. Peeved at this response, M. announces that the common grave for foreigners in the Antiochian suburb of Daphne will be good enough for her.
When M. does die she is buried at Daphne. S. is informed angelically and makes arrangements to have his mother's body brought to the monastery. But this plan is forestalled by the pious action of someone from a village near Antioch who discovers M.'s body in a trench in the cemetery in Daphne and who, thinking that M. deserves better, sends it on to the monastery. The party conveying M.'s body meets the party sent out by by S. and together they fulfil his wish. M. at first is interred in the monastery's church of the Holy Trinity next to S.'s column. Soon, though, she appears in a vision and requests a separate chapel, which is constructed for her next to the aforementioned church. M. is translated thither with great solemnity; miracles occur at her tomb. Thus far M.'s Bios.
An illustrated, English-language page on the remains of S.'s monastery, now the Aziz Simon Manastırı on Samandağ (Simeon's Mountain) in Hatay province is here:
http://www.anadolukatolikkilisesi.org/antakya/en/stilita.asp
In the plan, the triconch building next to the central church is M.'s chapel.
Two views of the remains of S.'s pillar in the center of the monastery:
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/6634520.jpg
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/6634520.jpg
More views of the monastery are here:
http://tinyurl.com/pdxoze
http://www.flickr.com/photos/necademic/
http://www.pbase.com/carol202/samandag_turkey_feb_08
5) Athanasius the Athonite (d. ca. 1001). Our knowledge of the founder of the Great Lavra (despite its name, a cenobitic monastery) on Mt. Athos comes from two early Bioi (A: BHG 187; B: BHG 188) that may both derive from an even earlier Bios, now lost. He was a native of Trebizond and his baptismal name was Abraamios ('Abraham'). Orphaned at an early age, he moved to Constantinople after the deaths of his adoptive parents. There he studied rhetoric and began a teaching career. Always very ascetic, he soon moved to a monastery in Bithynia where he lived for several years under the direction of St. Michael Maleinos and became good friends with the latter's nephew, the future emperor Nicephoras Phocas (r., 963-969). In 962/63 with Nicephoras' help A. founded the monastery for which he is known; in the years that followed he enriched it through grants from members of other great families.
A. died along with several other monks when the upper part of a roof they were building for a church fell in on them. Here's a view of his tomb in the Great Lavra:
http://tinyurl.com/op52sa
Here's A. in the fourteenth-century frescoes of the Visoki Decani monastery near Pec in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/okkxn7
http://tinyurl.com/pj74lz
6) Anthony Zaccaria (d. 1539). A. (in Italian, Antonio Maria Zaccaria) was born in Cremona. After early study there he took a degree in medicine at Padua in 1524. With Dominicans as his spiritual directors he began a lay apostolate to the poor in his native city. After being ordained priest there in 1528 he moved, with aristocratic patronage, in Milan, where in the early 1530s he was the leading spirit in the establishment of a new order of ascetic priests, the Clerks Regular of St. Paul, approved by Clement VII in 1533 and focusing on preaching and on encouraging popular devotion to the Eucharist. (Members of this order are called Barnabites from their use, negotiated by A., of Milan's church of St. Barnabas.) A. was canonized in 1897; since 1893 his relics have reposed in the chiesa di San Barnaba in Milan.
Best,
John Dillon
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