Philokalia
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EssentialCouncils and Their CanonsFirst Ecumenical Council: Nicaea I (325)The first council of the whole Church, called by Constantine to Nicaea in 325 when the quarrel over Arius had split the East. The Church remembers the three hundred and eighteen Fathers, the number of Abraham’s household in Genesis; historians count somewhat fewer. It condemned Arius, wrote the first part of the Creed with the word homoousios at its centre, and settled that all the churches should keep Pascha on the same Sunday, apart from the Jewish Passover reckoning. Its twenty canons regulate the rights of the great sees, the readmission of the lapsed, and why no one kneels on Sundays. The council did not end the controversy; it took fifty years for the Church to receive what it had said, and that reception, more than the gathering itself, is what made it ecumenical.EssentialCouncils and Their CanonsFourth Ecumenical Council: Chalcedon (451)Defined the two natures of Christ, divine and human, in one Person, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." Condemned the one-nature teaching of Eutyches. Canon 28 gave the see of Constantinople privileges equal to those of older Rome while ranking it second in order after her; Rome refused to ratify that canon, though it received the definition of faith. 630 bishops attended, the largest of the ancient councils.EssentialHoly Mysteries (Sacraments)Holy Eucharist (Communion)The Mystery of Christ’s Body and Blood, the centre of the Church’s life, and in the Orthodox understanding not a symbol of Christ but Christ: the bread and wine offered are changed by the Holy Spirit at the epiclesis into His true Body and Blood. The Church has generally declined to define how; the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672 used the word metousiosis, and the older and commoner word is simply change. The bread is leavened, as it always has been in the East, and warm water is poured into the chalice before communion. The faithful, infants included, receive the Body and Blood together from a spoon, having fasted from the night before and prepared by prayer and, according to local practice, confession. How often to receive has been argued in every age, and the saints have usually argued for more often.EssentialTheology & DogmaNicene-Constantinopolitan CreedThe Symbol of Faith: the confession the whole Church says, written at the First Council in 325 and completed at the Second in 381, which added the articles on the Holy Spirit, the Church, baptism, the resurrection and the life of the age to come. Chalcedon received it as the creed of the hundred and fifty Fathers, and Ephesus forbade any other. It is said at every Divine Liturgy, after the deacon cries the doors, the doors, and by every candidate for baptism. The council wrote we believe; the Church at prayer says I believe, each person confessing for themselves the faith of all. The text the Orthodox Church says has no Filioque, because nothing was ever added to it here, and it is given below in the Greek of the councils.EssentialLiturgical Calendar & FeastsPascha (Easter)The Resurrection of Christ, the feast of feasts, and the day every Sunday of the year repeats. At Nicaea the Fathers asked that the whole Church keep it on one Sunday, reckoned independently of the Jewish calendar; the Orthodox Church still finds that Sunday by the Julian calendar and the old Alexandrian tables, which is why it usually falls later than Easter in the West and sometimes on the same day. In the dark before midnight the light is brought out from the altar and passed from candle to candle, the people go out in procession, and outside the church the troparion is sung for the first time. For forty days the greeting is Christ is risen, and the answer Truly He is risen, and the troparion takes the place of O Heavenly King at the opening of every service. The week that follows is kept as a single day, with the royal doors left open, and St John Chrysostom’s homily, read that night, calls everyone to the feast, those who fasted and those who did not.EssentialLiturgy & WorshipThe Divine LiturgyThe Eucharist of the Orthodox Church, and the service every other service leads toward. Its first part gathers the people around the Word: the antiphons, the Little Entrance with the Gospel book, the Trisagion, the Epistle and the Gospel. The second belongs to the baptised: the Great Entrance with the gifts, the Creed, the anaphora with its epiclesis, the Lord’s Prayer, and communion. St Nicholas Cabasilas read every part of it as a moment in the work of Christ, set out in order from the Incarnation onward, and the envoys of Prince Vladimir, who stood through it in the Great Church at Constantinople, said they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth. Three liturgies are served in the course of the year: St John Chrysostom’s on most days, St Basil the Great’s ten times, and the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts on weekdays of Great Lent, chiefly Wednesdays and Fridays, and on the first three days of Holy Week. The Liturgy of St James, the ancient liturgy of Jerusalem, is served in some places on his feast.EssentialTheology & DogmaThe Holy TrinityOne God in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: not three gods, and not one person wearing three masks. The three share one essence, one will and one activity, and are distinguished only by how each is from the Father: the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding. The Father is the source and cause of the other two, and that is why the Church confesses one God: its unity is a Person, not an abstraction behind the three. The doctrine was not invented and then defended; it was forced into words by the Church’s own worship, which from the beginning baptised in the one name of the three, and it was fixed at Nicaea and Constantinople against those who would have made the Son or the Spirit a creature. Every group of psalms in the services ends in the doxology to the three, and every Orthodox prayer is addressed within it. The Church is meant to be its icon: many persons, one life.EssentialTheology & DogmaThe IncarnationThe Word who was with God and was God became flesh: the eternal Son took from the Virgin a complete human nature, body and rational soul, and lived a human life from conception to death without ceasing to be God. He did not merely look human, as the Docetists said, nor borrow a human body as a vehicle for a divine mind, as Apollinarius said, and the Fathers’ reason for insisting is St Gregory’s: what has not been assumed has not been healed. So it is one Person, the Son, who is born, weeps, hungers, dies and rises, which is why His mother is the Theotokos and why God can be painted. The feasts from the Annunciation to the Ascension keep it in order, and the whole of salvation rests on it: God came where we are, so that we might go where He is.EssentialSpiritual Life & PracticesThe Jesus Prayer'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' The central prayer of the hesychast tradition, said again and again until it says itself, counted on the prayer rope. Shorter forms are used: 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.' The Fathers also describe a bodily method, the words joined to the breath and the mind brought down into the heart, and they never describe it without warning that it is not to be attempted alone. Taken up without a spiritual father it leads to prelest, self-deception mistaken for grace. The words themselves need no permission and no technique.EssentialPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe PhilokaliaAn anthology of texts on watchfulness and prayer, written between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries by some thirty-six Fathers, from the desert of Egypt to St Gregory Palamas and the hesychasts of his generation, gathered by St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth and printed at Venice in 1782. Its full title says what it is for: the Philokalia of the neptic Fathers, in which, through the philosophy of practice and contemplation, the intellect is purified, illumined and made perfect. It teaches the guarding of the heart, the war with the passions and the Jesus Prayer, and it assumes a reader who has a spiritual father. The name is older than the book: Sts Basil and Gregory the Theologian had given it to their anthology of Origen. St Paisius Velichkovsky’s Slavonic version, the Dobrotolubiye, reached Russia in 1793 and is the book the pilgrim of The Way of a Pilgrim carries, and St Theophan the Recluse made a larger Russian one. The English translation from the Greek came out in four volumes between 1979 and 1995, and the fifth in 2023.EssentialTheology & DogmaTheosis (Deification)The purpose of a human life, in the Orthodox understanding: to become by grace what God is by nature. Scripture calls it becoming partakers of the divine nature, and Christ quotes the psalm that says you are gods; the Fathers put it in the sentence St Athanasius made famous, God became man so that man might become god. It is not absorption, and it is not a change of essence: a person stays a person and a creature, and is filled with God as iron in a fire is filled with fire without ceasing to be iron. It is participation in God’s uncreated energies, which are God Himself given, and not in His essence, which no creature shares. It begins in baptism and chrismation, is fed in the Eucharist, and is worked out in keeping the commandments, prayer and love; the Transfiguration is its picture. St Maximus says God and man are paradigms of each other.EssentialTheology & DogmaChristologyWho Christ is, as the councils defined it over four hundred years: one Person, the eternal Son, in two complete natures, divine and human, united without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. Every clause of that sentence answers someone. Nestorius divided Christ into God and a man joined to Him, and Ephesus in 431 answered that the one born of the Virgin is God, so she is Theotokos. Eutyches let the humanity dissolve into the divinity, and Chalcedon in 451 answered with the four adverbs. The monothelites gave Christ one will, and the Sixth Council in 681, following St Maximus, answered that each nature has its own will and activity, the human freely obeying the divine. Because the Person is one, what belongs to either nature can be said of Him: God was crucified, and a man is worshipped. The Oriental churches that did not receive Chalcedon remain apart, and the dialogue with them has not ended in reunion.EssentialTheology & DogmaEssence-Energies DistinctionGod is wholly unknowable in what He is, and wholly present in what He does. His essence no creature will ever grasp or share, in this life or the next; His energies - His life, grace, light, power and love - are God Himself acting and given, uncreated, and in them God is truly known and truly shared. St Basil had said we know God from His energies and do not claim to approach His essence. When Barlaam argued that the light the hesychasts saw must be created or else God had been divided, St Gregory Palamas answered that the energies are not a part of God but God, as the rays are the sun, and the councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351 confirmed him. The distinction is what lets the Orthodox Church say both that God is beyond everything and that a human being can be deified, and it is why grace in Orthodox theology is uncreated.EssentialLiturgical Calendar & FeastsGreat LentThe forty days of preparation for Pascha, which a hymn of the Triodion calls the springtime of the fast. It is approached over four Sundays, the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, the Last Judgement and Forgiveness Sunday, whose Vespers ends with everyone asking and giving forgiveness, one by one. Clean Monday follows, and in the first week the Great Canon of St Andrew is read in four parts at Great Compline. The Sundays keep the restoration of the icons, St Gregory Palamas, the Cross, St John Climacus and St Mary of Egypt. On weekdays there is no full Liturgy: on Wednesdays and Fridays the faithful receive the Presanctified Gifts in the evening, the Salutations of the Theotokos are sung on the Fridays, and the Prayer of St Ephraim is said at every service with prostrations. Its fast is the strictest of the year, kept with prayer and almsgiving. The forty days end on the Friday before Lazarus Saturday, and Holy Week begins.EssentialChurch HistoryGreat Schism (1054)The division between the Church of Rome and the Orthodox Churches of the East, dated to 1054 but made over centuries. In July of that year Cardinal Humbert laid a bull excommunicating Patriarch Michael Cerularius on the altar of Hagia Sophia, and a synod in Constantinople anathematised the legates in turn. The quarrel beneath was older: the Filioque added to the Creed in the West, the claim of the Roman see to jurisdiction over the whole Church rather than a primacy of honour among the patriarchs, and differences of practice such as the unleavened bread. What made the schism real in the lives of the faithful was the Fourth Crusade, which sacked Constantinople in 1204 and set a Latin patriarch in it. The unions proclaimed at Lyons in 1274 and at Florence in 1439 were refused by the Orthodox people, and St Mark of Ephesus would not sign. In 1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras removed the anathemas of 1054 from memory; communion was not restored, because the questions that caused it remain.EssentialSpiritual Life & PracticesHesychasmThe tradition of stillness, hesychia, in which the monk guards the intellect against every thought, brings it down into the heart and prays there without ceasing, above all with the Jesus Prayer. Its roots are in the desert and in St John Climacus, who wrote that the hesychast strives to confine the bodiless within the house of the body. Late Byzantine writers, St Gregory of Sinai among them, taught a bodily discipline to go with it: sitting low, the head bowed, the breath slowed with the words of the prayer. They called it a help and never the thing itself. When Barlaam of Calabria mocked the monks as men with their souls in their navels, and denied that the light they saw could be God’s own, St Gregory Palamas answered in the Triads, and the councils of Constantinople between 1341 and 1351 upheld him: the light of Tabor is the uncreated glory of God, and those who are purified may see it. The tradition went north with the disciples of St Gregory of Sinai and came back to life in the eighteenth century through St Paisius Velichkovsky and, after him, Optina.EssentialHoly Mysteries (Sacraments)Holy BaptismBurial with Christ and rising with Him, in water: the Mystery by which a person is born into the Church. The Orthodox rite begins with exorcisms; the candidate, or the godparent for a child, faces west to renounce Satan and blows and spits against him, then faces east to unite with Christ and says the Creed. The water is blessed, the candidate anointed with oil, and immersed three times in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. There follow at once the white garment, the cross, chrismation, and first communion, and a few locks of hair are cut as a first offering. Infants are baptised and communed as members of the Church in full. The Creed confesses one baptism for the remission of sins, and converts from other churches are received by baptism or, by economy, by chrismation, as local practice decides.EssentialHoly ScriptureHoly ScriptureThe Church’s own book, received and canonised by her and read within her. Orthodoxy uses the Septuagint for the Old Testament, where the Latin West follows the Hebrew text, and holds the same twenty-seven books of the New. Scripture is not set over against Tradition but is its written heart: it is proclaimed liturgically before it is studied privately, and it is read with the Fathers rather than against them.EssentialTheology & DogmaHoly TraditionWhat has been handed on: the faith received from the Apostles and kept alive in the Church by the Holy Spirit. St Paul tells the Thessalonians to hold the traditions they were taught, whether by word or by letter, and the Orthodox Church has never set Scripture against Tradition: Scripture is the heart of Tradition, written down within it, and read rightly within it. Around it stand the Creed, the definitions of the councils, the writings of the Fathers, the liturgy, the icons, the canons and the lives of the saints. St Basil lists things nobody doubts that are written nowhere: the sign of the cross, facing east to pray, the words of the epiclesis. Tradition is not the same as custom. A custom can be old and wrong; Tradition is the life of the Spirit in the Church, and the test of it is the Church’s common mind over time, not antiquity alone.EssentialLiturgical Calendar & FeastsHoly WeekThe last week before Pascha, served day by day in the order of the Passion. On the first three evenings the Bridegroom service is sung, behold the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and on Holy Wednesday many parishes serve Holy Unction for all. Holy Thursday keeps the Mystical Supper with the Liturgy of St Basil, and that evening the Twelve Passion Gospels are read, and in the Greek use the Crucifix is carried out after the fifth. On Holy Friday, with no Liturgy at all, the Royal Hours are read, and at Vespers the body of Christ is taken down from the Cross and laid in the tomb in the Epitaphios; at Matins that night the Lamentations are sung around it and it is carried in procession. Holy Saturday morning brings the Liturgy of St Basil with fifteen readings from the Old Testament, until the vestments are changed from dark to white and the choir sings Arise, O God, judge the earth. The Descent into Hades is kept that day, in stillness, before the midnight of Pascha.EssentialLiturgy & WorshipLiturgy of St. John ChrysostomThe Liturgy most Orthodox Christians have stood through week after week, served whenever the Liturgy is celebrated through the year, except on the ten days that belong to St Basil and the weekdays of Great Lent. Its anaphora, the great eucharistic prayer, is the tradition of Antioch and Constantinople, and its core has a good claim to be the prayer of St John Chrysostom himself; the rest grew around it over centuries, with the Cherubic Hymn and the Creed added in the sixth. It opens with the preparation of the gifts at the table of oblation, then gathers the people around the Word with the antiphons, the Little Entrance, the Epistle and the Gospel, and then offers the gifts: the Great Entrance, the kiss of peace, the Creed, the anaphora with its epiclesis, the Lord’s Prayer and communion. Before communion the prayer is said, I believe, O Lord, and I confess, that Thou art truly the Christ, which names each communicant as the first of sinners.EssentialMonasticismMount Athos (Holy Mountain)The peninsula in northern Greece that has been given over to monks for more than a thousand years, and the heart of Orthodox monasticism. Hermits lived there before the tenth century, but its history as the Holy Mountain begins with St Athanasius the Athonite, who founded the Great Lavra in 963. Twenty ruling monasteries share it, seventeen Greek, one Russian, one Serbian and one Bulgarian, with sketes, cells and hermitages among them. They govern themselves through the Holy Community at Karyes, under the spiritual authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the sovereignty of the Greek state; they keep the Julian calendar and Byzantine time, and admit no women, for the mountain is held to be the Garden of the Theotokos, who by tradition landed there on her way to Cyprus. St Gregory Palamas prayed there and St Nikodemos edited the Philokalia there, and after a long decline the late twentieth century brought it young monks again, many of them spiritual children of St Joseph the Hesychast. Men come as pilgrims with a permit, the diamonitirion, and stay as guests of the monks.EssentialPatristic & Ascetical TextsOn the Holy Spirit (St Basil)Written about 375 for Amphilochius of Iconium, and provoked by a quarrel over a preposition. St Basil had given glory to the Father with the Son together with the Holy Spirit, and was attacked for it, since the customary form put the Spirit lower. His answer is that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son because He is God, and the treatise assembles the evidence for it from Scripture and from what the Church does. The twenty-seventh chapter is the classic Orthodox statement about unwritten tradition: the sign of the cross, turning east to pray, the words of the epiclesis and the blessing of the water are nowhere in Scripture and no one doubts them. Six years later the Second Council put his teaching into the Creed.EssentialPatristic & Ascetical TextsOn the Incarnation (St. Athanasius)St Athanasius’ short treatise on why the Word became flesh, the second half of a single work whose first is Against the Heathen. It was written in his youth, before the Arian controversy by the traditional reckoning, or in his first exile in the 330s by a later one. Its argument begins with the Fall as a slide back toward the nothing from which humanity was made: God could not let His image perish, and He could not take back His word that death would follow the transgression. So the Word took a body capable of death, gave it up for all, and raised it, and death was undone from within. A portrait that has been defaced, he says, is not thrown away: the one it depicts comes again, so that the likeness can be renewed on the same wood. Near its end stands its most quoted sentence, He was made man that we might be made god. C.S. Lewis introduced its English translation of 1944, and used the occasion to urge readers to take an old book for every new one.EssentialLiturgical Calendar & FeastsPentecost (Feast of the Holy Trinity)The feast of the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the fiftieth day after Pascha, kept as the feast of the Holy Trinity, Troitsa in the Russian tradition, where Rublev’s Trinity is its icon. Churches and homes are filled with green branches, grass and flowers, because the Spirit is the Giver of life. At Vespers that follows the Liturgy the faithful kneel for the first time since Pascha, which the First Council forbade on the Lord’s days and throughout the fifty days, while the priest reads three long kneeling prayers, one of them for those who have fallen asleep. The prayer O Heavenly King, silent since Pascha, returns to the beginning of every service. The next day is the Monday of the Holy Spirit; the Sunday after is All Saints, and the Apostles’ Fast begins the day after that. St Gregory the Theologian’s sermon for the day is still the one the Typikon of St Sabbas appoints for Matins.EssentialChurch HistoryPentecost & the Birth of the ChurchFifty days after the Resurrection, on the Jewish feast of Weeks, the Holy Spirit came down on the apostles in Jerusalem as a rushing wind and tongues of fire, and they spoke so that pilgrims from every nation heard them in their own language. The Church reads it as Babel undone: when the Most High confused the tongues He divided the nations, sings the kontakion of the feast, but when He distributed the tongues of fire He called all to unity. St Peter preached the prophecy of Joel fulfilled, and about three thousand were baptised that day. Acts describes the community that followed in one sentence the Church has never stopped quoting: they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers. In the icon the apostles sit in a half-circle, St Paul among them though he was not yet called, and beneath them in a dark arch sits an old king holding twelve scrolls: the world, waiting to be told.EssentialTheology & DogmaPneumatology (Holy Spirit)The Holy Spirit is the third Person of the Trinity, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son. The Creed says this in the words of 381, and St Basil’s treatise had prepared them. The Spirit is sent into the world through the Son, which is His mission in time; He proceeds from the Father alone, which is His eternal origin, and the Filioque confused the two. He spoke by the prophets, overshadowed the Virgin, descended at the Jordan and at Pentecost, and is given to each Christian in chrismation as the seal of the gift. He changes the gifts at the epiclesis. St Seraphim of Sarov said the acquisition of the Spirit is the whole aim of the Christian life, and almost every Orthodox service begins by asking Him to come.EssentialSpiritual Life & PracticesRepentance (Metanoia)Metanoia means a change of mind, and the change is a turning round of the whole person rather than a feeling of regret. It is the first word of the Forerunner's preaching and of Christ's, and the fathers treat it not as a single act but as the ordinary condition of a Christian life: St Isaac the Syrian says it is fitting for all at every hour. Orthodoxy holds that no sin is beyond it while there is breath, and that despair of forgiveness is a graver thing than the sin despaired of. Repentance is therapeutic rather than penal: the Mystery of Confession heals, and the canons a confessor gives are medicine, not punishment.EssentialCouncils and Their CanonsSecond Ecumenical Council: Constantinople I (381)The council of a hundred and fifty bishops that met at Constantinople in 381 under Theodosius, after the Arian emperors were gone. St Gregory the Theologian presided for part of it and resigned during it. It confessed the divinity of the Holy Spirit against those who made Him a creature, and gave the Creed the form the Church says now: the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, and the articles on the Church, baptism, the resurrection and the life of the age to come. Its third canon gave the bishop of Constantinople the first place after Rome, because it was the new Rome, which is the beginning of the order of the churches. It was a council of the East alone, and became ecumenical when Chalcedon received it.EssentialCouncils and Their CanonsSeventh Ecumenical Council: Nicaea II (787)The seventh and last Ecumenical Council, which met at Nicaea in 787 under the Empress Irene and the Patriarch Tarasius, after a first attempt the year before was broken up by soldiers loyal to the iconoclasts. It defined that holy images of Christ, the Mother of God, the angels and the saints are to be set up and venerated, and drew the distinction the whole argument turned on: veneration, proskynesis, may be given to an icon, while worship, latreia, belongs to God alone; and the honour paid to the image passes to the one it shows, in St Basil’s words. Its reason is the Incarnation: God made Himself visible, and to refuse to paint Him is to deny that He was seen. Iconoclasm returned in 815 and was ended for good in 843, which the Church keeps as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.EssentialTheology & DogmaSoteriology (Salvation)Salvation in the Orthodox understanding is healing and deliverance before it is acquittal. Sin is a sickness and death a captivity, and Christ is the physician who takes on the disease and the victor who breaks the prison: by death He trampled down death, as the Paschal hymn says every day for forty days. The cross is the fullest act of love and the defeat of the devil, and the Resurrection is its meaning. The Fathers use the language of ransom and sacrifice freely, but St Gregory the Theologian asks to whom the ransom was paid and answers: not to the devil, and not to a Father who demanded it. The Orthodox tradition has never made the satisfaction of divine justice the centre of the account, as the Latin West did after Anselm. The end of salvation is not a changed verdict but a changed person: theosis.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSs. Peter & Paul, ApostlesThe two foremost Apostles, kept together on 29 June. St Peter confessed Christ as 'the Son of the living God', and the Fathers read the rock of Matthew 16:18 as the faith of that confession rather than as an office lodged in one man: so St John Chrysostom, and after him the Greek tradition. Peter is first in order among the Twelve and is counted founder of Antioch and of Rome. St Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, wrote fourteen epistles and carried the Gospel across the empire. Both were martyred at Rome under Nero, about 64 to 67. Feast: June 29.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Anthony the Great (c. 251-356)The father of monks. A young Egyptian landowner who heard the Gospel read in church - go, sell what you have and give it to the poor - and did exactly that, around the year 270. He lived near his village, then in a tomb, then twenty years sealed in an abandoned fort on the Nile, and walked out of it, by the account of those who were there, neither wasted nor wild but whole. He went on into the inner desert near the Red Sea, where the monastery that bears his name still stands. His Life, written by St Athanasius who knew him, crossed the empire within a generation and made monasticism a way of life for thousands. The Sayings keep him plain and humane: he saw the snares of the enemy spread over the whole earth, and asked who could get through them, and heard: humility. Feast: January 17.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Athanasius the Great (c. 296-373)Patriarch of Alexandria for forty-five years, of which seventeen were spent in five exiles under four emperors, and the man more than any other who held the Church to Nicaea when the empire had decided otherwise. As a young deacon he was at the council; as a bishop he refused to readmit Arius, and was deposed, banished to Trier, hidden by monks in the Egyptian desert, and restored, again and again. His On the Incarnation, written while still young, gives the reason the whole fight mattered: God became man so that man might become god. A Saviour who was a creature could not give us what He did not have. His Life of Antony spread monasticism through the empire, and his thirty-ninth Festal Letter is the first list of the New Testament that matches the one in use now. The phrase Athanasius against the world was meant as praise. Feast: January 18.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Basil the Great (330-379)Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia and one of the Three Holy Hierarchs. He studied at Athens with Gregory the Theologian, came home a celebrated rhetor, and was turned by his sister Macrina toward the monastic life, for which he wrote the Rules that Orthodox monasteries still keep. As bishop he defended the divinity of the Holy Spirit in a treatise that prepared the Creed of 381, and he built outside Caesarea a whole new town of hospitals, hospices and workshops for the poor that people called the Basiliad. His preaching on wealth is the hardest the Church has: the bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry, the cloak in your chest to the naked. The Liturgy that carries his name is served ten times a year and holds the longest and oldest anaphora in use. He died at forty-nine. Feast: January 1.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Cyril of AlexandriaArchbishop of Alexandria and the measure by which the Church judged Chalcedon. He presided at Ephesus in 431, and his Twelve Chapters against Nestorius forced the question the council answered: whether the one born of the Virgin is God, so that she is Theotokos and not merely Christotokos. Two years later he signed the Formula of Reunion with the Antiochenes, which is the part of him most often forgotten, and it shows a man who fought for a truth rather than for a victory. When Chalcedon met seven years after his death, the test applied to every phrase was whether Cyril would have owned it, and the Fifth Council later read Chalcedon through him on purpose. Feast: June 9.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359)Athonite monk, then Archbishop of Thessalonica, and the theologian of the uncreated light. When Barlaam the Calabrian mocked the hesychasts and denied that anyone could see the light of Tabor, Gregory answered in the Triads: God is unknowable in His essence and truly given in His energies, which are God and not a creature, so the saints who see that light see God. Councils at Constantinople in 1341, 1347 and 1351 upheld him, and the Synodikon of Orthodoxy has read his teaching out every year since. He spent a year as a captive of the Turks, and his letters from captivity are gentle about his captors. The Church keeps him twice: on the day of his repose, and on the Second Sunday of Great Lent, where his victory is set beside the victory of the icons. Feast: November 14.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory the Theologian (329-390)Archbishop of Constantinople and one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, and one of only three saints the Church calls the Theologian, with St John the Evangelist and St Symeon. In 380, preaching in a small chapel in a city whose churches were all held by the Arians, he gave the five Theological Orations that settled how the Church speaks of the Trinity: one God because one Father, the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding, three Persons in one nature. Against those who gave Christ a divine mind in place of a human one he answered with the principle every later Christology depends on: what has not been assumed has not been healed. He presided for a time over the Second Ecumenical Council and resigned his see rather than be the cause of a quarrel, went home to Nazianzus and wrote poetry. Feast: January 25.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. John Chrysostom (c. 349-407)Archbishop of Constantinople and one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, called Golden Mouth for his preaching. At Antioch he preached through whole books of Scripture, verse by verse, and his homilies on Matthew, John and the letters of Paul remain the Church’s great commentary on them. Made archbishop of the capital against his will, he cut the palace’s luxuries, sold the episcopal furniture for the poor, and preached against the empress in terms she took personally. He was deposed, exiled twice, and died on a forced march to the Black Sea in 407, saying glory to God for all things. His Paschal Homily is read at every Paschal Matins in the world, and the Liturgy that bears his name is the one served on most Sundays. His relics were brought back to the city in 438. Feast: November 13.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. John the Forerunner (the Baptist)The last of the prophets and the first to point at Christ: behold the Lamb of God. Son of the priest Zechariah and of Elizabeth in their old age, he leapt in the womb when the Theotokos came to his mother, grew up in the wilderness, and preached repentance at the Jordan to crowds that came out from all Judaea. He baptised Christ, saw the Spirit descend and heard the Father’s voice, which is why Theophany is also his feast. Christ called him the greatest of those born of women. He rebuked Herod Antipas for taking his brother’s wife, and was beheaded at her daughter’s request. The Church keeps his conception, his birth, his beheading as a strict fast, and the finding of his head, remembers him every Tuesday, and paints him with wings as the angel sent before the Lord’s face. Feast: June 24.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. John the Theologian (the Evangelist)Son of Zebedee, brother of James, a fisherman of Galilee and the disciple whom Jesus loved, who leaned on His breast at the Supper, stood at the cross when the others had gone, and was given the Theotokos to take into his home. He wrote the fourth Gospel, which opens with the Word who was with God and was God and became flesh, and three letters whose whole argument is that God is love; the Church also receives the Revelation under his name. He was exiled to Patmos and died in great old age at Ephesus, where by the account St Jerome gives he had himself carried into the church and said only: little children, love one another. He is the first of the three the Church calls Theologian. Feast: September 26.EssentialSaints & Church FathersSt. Sergius of RadonezhThe great monastic founder of Russia and, by common consent, the man who held the country together in the century of Mongol overlordship. He went into the forest north of Moscow with his brother, built a wooden church to the Holy Trinity, and a monastery grew around him that he never intended and repeatedly tried to leave. He refused the metropolitan’s throne when it was offered. He blessed Grand Prince Dmitry before Kulikovo in 1380 and sent two monks with him. The spirituality he left is Trinitarian and plain: his disciples founded scores of houses across the north, and St Andrei Rublev painted the Trinity in his memory for the church over his grave. Feast: September 25.EssentialChurch HistoryThe Baptism of Rus (988)Prince Vladimir of Kiev, a pagan with a reputation the chronicles do not soften, sent men to examine the faiths. The account they brought back from the Great Church at Constantinople is the one everyone remembers: they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth, for on earth there is no such beauty, and they could not describe it, they only knew that God dwells there among men. He was baptised at Cherson, married the emperor’s sister, threw the idols into the Dnieper and had Kiev baptised in it. What followed was not a Greek colony: Slavonic letters were already made, so the Church there read and sang in its own tongue from the beginning, which is why Orthodoxy took root in Rus as something native.EssentialTheology & DogmaThe Cross & CrucifixionThe Cross is the central symbol of Orthodoxy: not merely an instrument of death but the means of victory over death, sin, and the devil. Christ's death was voluntary, an act of supreme love. On the Cross, Christ descended into the depths of human suffering and Hades itself, destroying death 'by death.' The Cross is venerated, signed on oneself, and placed in every Orthodox home and church.EssentialTheology & DogmaThe Descent into HadesBetween the cross and the rising, Christ goes down to the dead. The Orthodox icon of the Resurrection does not show Him stepping out of a tomb: it shows Him in Hades, standing on its broken gates, pulling Adam and Eve up by the wrist so that the grip is His and not theirs. This is why the Paschal troparion says He trampled down death by death, and why the oldest Paschal preaching addresses Hades directly and mocks it. Holy Saturday keeps the day itself, and its hymns are the strangest in the year: the tomb is called the source of life, and the Church sings a funeral service over God.EssentialLiturgy & WorshipThe Epiclesis (Calling Down the Spirit)The prayer in which the priest asks the Father to send the Holy Spirit upon the people and upon the gifts, and to make the bread the Body of Christ and the cup His Blood. This is where the Orthodox Church says the change happens. The Latin West came to locate it at the words of institution, "This is my Body", spoken by the priest in the person of Christ, and the difference is not a detail of timing: it is a difference about who acts. In the Orthodox rite the celebrant does not pronounce a formula that effects anything. He begs, and the Spirit does it, and the deacon answers Amen three times because the consecration is the Church asking rather than the priest performing. St Nicholas Cabasilas wrote a whole chapter defending this against the Latins, and St Cyril of Jerusalem was teaching it to the newly baptised in the fourth century, long before there was a dispute to take sides in.EssentialHoly ScriptureThe Four GospelsThe four accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Christ that the Church received from the apostles: Matthew and John by two of the Twelve, Mark by the companion of St Peter, whose preaching Papias says he wrote down, and Luke by the physician who travelled with St Paul. St Irenaeus argued in the second century that there could be neither more nor fewer, as there are four winds and four living creatures before the throne, and the living creatures became their emblems in every church. The Gospel book is not only read: it lies on the altar, is carried out at the Little Entrance, and is kissed. Through the year the reading moves from one Gospel to another, John from Pascha to Pentecost, then Matthew, then Luke from the weeks after the Elevation of the Cross, and Mark chiefly at the weekends of Great Lent, so that the whole Church hears them in the same order at the same time.EssentialTheology & DogmaThe Monarchy of the FatherThe Father alone is the source. The Son is begotten of Him and the Spirit proceeds from Him, and neither is begotten or proceeds from the divine essence as such, or from the Son. This is what the Greek Fathers mean by saying the Church confesses one God because it confesses one Father: the unity of the Trinity is secured by a Person, not by a shared substance standing behind the three. St Gregory the Theologian says the three are one in nature and that the union is the Father, from whom and to whom the others are referred. Without this the argument against the Filioque is only half made, because the objection is not that the Spirit has too many sources but that giving Him two destroys the one He has.EssentialHoly ScriptureThe New TestamentThe twenty-seven books of the new covenant: the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the fourteen epistles of St Paul, the seven Catholic epistles and the Revelation to St John. The first list to name exactly these is St Athanasius’ Festal Letter of 367, and the Council in Trullo of 692 received the canons of the earlier councils and Fathers that set out the books, though the East long hesitated over Revelation, which St Cyril of Jerusalem left out of his list. It remains the one book of the New Testament never read aloud in the Orthodox services. In church the New Testament is not a single volume: the Gospels are read from the Gospel book on the altar, and Acts and the epistles from the Apostolos, each passage appointed for its day. The Church reads it in Greek in the Byzantine text, printed by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1904, and reads it as its own book, written within the Church and interpreted by it.EssentialPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Triads (In Defence of the Holy Hesychasts)St Gregory Palamas wrote these nine treatises, in three sets of three, between 1338 and 1341, to answer Barlaam the Calabrian, who had mocked the Athonite monks as navel-gazers and denied that anyone could see the light of God. The argument runs on two legs. The body is not a prison and prayer is not disembodied, so a bodily method is not absurd. And God is genuinely unknowable in His essence and genuinely participable in His energies, which are not a creature and not a part of Him, so what the saints see on Tabor and in the cell is God Himself. Every formula the councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351 used is already here.EssentialIconography & Sacred ArtTheology of IconsIcons are not mere religious art: they are 'theology in color,' windows into the heavenly reality. The veneration of icons is grounded in the Incarnation: because God became visible in Christ, it is possible and proper to depict Him. 'He who has seen Me has seen the Father' (John 14:9). The honor paid to the image (eikon) passes to the prototype (protypon).EssentialTheology & DogmaTheotokos (Mother of God)The Mother of God, the title the Third Ecumenical Council confirmed at Ephesus in 431: the One she bore is God, and to call her less is to divide her Son. The Church calls her ever-virgin, and in the litanies of almost every service our most holy, most pure, most blessed and glorious Lady, and asks her prayers more often than those of anyone else. The Fathers from Justin and Irenaeus on called her the new Eve, whose obedience undid the first Eve’s disobedience, and St Nicholas Cabasilas wrote that the Incarnation was the work not only of the Father, the Son and the Spirit but of the will and faith of the Virgin. The Church keeps her Dormition as a true death followed by her translation into heaven, body and soul, sung in the hymns of the feast without being defined as a dogma; it does not receive the Latin dogma of her Immaculate Conception, because it never taught the inherited guilt from which that dogma exempts her. Her icon stands to the left of the royal doors, and in the apse above the altar she is often painted as the Platytera, wider than the heavens, holding Christ.EssentialCouncils and Their CanonsThird Ecumenical Council: Ephesus (431)The council of 431, called to settle whether the one born of the Virgin is God. Nestorius of Constantinople preferred to call her Christotokos, mother of Christ, and St Cyril of Alexandria answered that to refuse her the title Theotokos was to divide her Son into two. Cyril opened the council before the bishops from Antioch arrived and condemned Nestorius; the Antiochenes held a rival council when they came and condemned Cyril; the emperor arrested both. It took the Formula of Reunion in 433 to bring the two sides together on one confession of the one Christ. The people of Ephesus met the verdict with torches in the street. Its seventh canon forbids any other creed than Nicaea’s, and its eighth upheld the independence of the Church of Cyprus.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsAnnunciation: March 25The Archangel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive the Son of God by the Holy Spirit. Mary's response: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word' (Luke 1:38), is the supreme act of human free will cooperating with divine grace. Celebrated exactly 9 months before Nativity. Fasting is relaxed (fish permitted).ImportantChurch HistoryApostolic Age (30-100 AD)The first Christian generation, from Pentecost to the death of St John, the last of the Twelve, around the end of the first century. In it the Gospel went from Jerusalem to Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians, and to Rome; the Council of Jerusalem decided around 49 that Gentiles need not be circumcised; St Paul made his journeys and wrote his letters; St James the son of Zebedee, St James the brother of the Lord, St Peter and St Paul were martyred; and in 70 the Temple was destroyed. By the end of it the New Testament had been written, the Eucharist was kept on the first day of the week, and the Church was ordered as it still is. St Clement of Rome, writing around 96, says the apostles appointed bishops and deacons and provided that others should succeed them, and a decade later St Ignatius of Antioch writes of the bishop, the presbyters and the deacons in every church, and of nothing done without the bishop.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsApostolic SuccessionThe unbroken handing on of the apostolic ministry by the laying on of hands, bishop from bishop, from the Apostles to the present. Orthodoxy does not treat it as a mechanical pedigree: succession in the office is inseparable from succession in the faith, and a bishop who abandons the apostolic teaching is not held together with the Church by the validity of his consecration. So the succession that matters is of ordination and confession at once, which is why the Church has deposed bishops whose orders nobody doubted.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsAscension of ChristForty days after Pascha, on a Thursday, Christ led His disciples out to the Mount of Olives, blessed them, and was taken up in the body until a cloud received Him out of their sight, and two men in white told them He would come again in the same way. The feast follows the Leavetaking of Pascha on the day before. The Church sees in it human nature, our own nature, taken into the life of God and seated at the right hand of the Father, and it does not read it as a departure: its kontakion has Him ascend not being parted from those who love Him, but remaining with them, and crying, I am with you, and no one will be against you. In the icon the Theotokos stands at the centre beneath Him, among the apostles and the angels, for she is the image of the Church He leaves on earth. Ten days later He sends the Spirit.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsAscetical Homilies of St. Isaac the SyrianSt. Isaac of Nineveh (7th century), a Syriac-speaking bishop who became a hermit. His Ascetical Homilies are among the most profound mystical texts in Christian literature: on humility, solitude, tears, prayer, the love of God for all creation, and the mystery of divine compassion. Widely read in Orthodox monasteries. His vision of God's love as an all-consuming fire has challenged readers for centuries.ImportantPsalmody & HymnographyByzantine ChantThe psaltic art, the singing of the Greek Church, and the root of every Orthodox chant tradition. It is a single melody, without harmony or instruments, sung over a held note, the ison, and it moves in the eight modes of the Octoechos, four authentic and four plagal, each with its own scale and character. Its notation, the neumes, marks the steps of the voice rather than fixed pitches, and was simplified into the New Method by Chrysanthos of Madytos and his colleagues in 1814, the form cantors still read. There are three ways of singing: the quick syllabic heirmologic style of the canons, the fuller sticheraric style of the Vespers hymns, and the slow, ornamented papadic style of the Cherubic Hymn and the communion verses, whose great master was St John Koukouzelis, called the angel-voiced. The Slavic chants grew from it. In 2019 UNESCO listed it as part of the world’s heritage, which is a fair description of how the Church has always treated it.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtChrist Pantocrator (Icon Type)The most important and widespread icon of Christ: depicted as ruler and judge of all (Pantocrator = 'Almighty'). Christ is shown frontally, holding the Gospel in His left hand and blessing with His right. In the Sinai icon His face is asymmetric, often read as one side merciful, the other judging. Usually placed in the central dome of the church and on the iconostasis. The Sinai Pantocrator (6th c.) is the oldest known example.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsDormition of the Theotokos: August 15The falling asleep of the Theotokos, kept on 15 August. The Church holds that she died as all die, was buried by the Apostles, and on the third day was raised and taken up in the body, her tomb found empty. Orthodoxy confesses this in its hymns rather than defining it as dogma, which is where it differs from Rome, and it holds no doctrine of an immaculate conception: she was mortal like us, and her glory is the fruit of her free obedience. Preceded by a strict fortnight of fasting.ImportantTheology & DogmaEcclesiology (Doctrine of the Church)The Orthodox teaching on the Church, which is less a doctrine about an institution than a confession of what the Church is: the Body of Christ and the temple of the Spirit, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, as the Creed says. It is found whole in each Eucharist gathered around its bishop. Wherever the bishop appears, wrote St Ignatius, let the people be, as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church. The local Churches are not branches of a larger organisation but the one Church in each place, held together by one faith, one Eucharist and the councils, with no bishop above the council. The Orthodox Church confesses itself to be that one Church, not one part of it. How to speak of Christians outside it is debated among Orthodox theologians themselves: some, following Fr Georges Florovsky, have said the Church’s canonical boundaries are not the limit of the Spirit’s work, and others hold to a stricter reading. The Church itself has not settled the question by council.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsEcumenical Patriarchate of ConstantinopleThe Church of Constantinople, the New Rome, whose archbishop has held the first place of honour among the Orthodox since Rome fell away, following the canons of the Second and Fourth Councils that gave the capital a place second only to Old Rome. From the Phanar in Istanbul the Patriarch leads a small flock in Turkey and a wide one abroad, with Mount Athos, Crete, the Dodecanese and many dioceses of the diaspora. What that first place includes is not agreed. Constantinople holds that it may convene the Churches, receive appeals from clergy of other Churches, and grant autocephaly by its own act. Moscow and others answer that primacy of honour gives no jurisdiction outside its territory, and that autocephaly needs the consent of all. The disagreement became a break in 2018, when Constantinople moved to grant autocephaly in Ukraine and Moscow ended communion with it. Patriarch Bartholomew has led it since 1991.ImportantChurch HistoryEdict of Milan (313 AD)The agreement reached at Milan in 313 between Constantine, emperor in the West, and Licinius, in the East, to grant Christians and everyone else the freedom to worship as they chose, and to give back the churches, cemeteries and property that had been seized. It was not strictly an edict, and it was not issued at Milan: the text survives as a letter Licinius sent to the governors from Nicomedia, preserved by Lactantius and by Eusebius. Galerius had called off the persecution by an edict of toleration in 311, grudgingly, on his deathbed, and Maximinus Daia took it up again in the East. What was new in 313 was that freedom was given not grudgingly but as policy, and to everyone. Within a lifetime the Church went from the arena to the councils of the empire, with all that the change brought, for good and for ill.ImportantChurch HistoryEmperor Constantine the GreatThe first Roman emperor to be a Christian, and honoured by the Church with his mother Helen as Equal-to-the-Apostles on 21 May. Proclaimed at York in 306, he defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312 after the sign of the cross was shown to him with the words, in this sign conquer, as Eusebius heard it from his own lips. In 313 he and Licinius gave the Church its freedom, in 325 he summoned the bishops to Nicaea, and in 330 he dedicated Constantinople, the New Rome, which would be the heart of Orthodox Christianity for eleven centuries. The Church does not hide what else is true: in 326 he had his son Crispus and his wife Fausta put to death, and he was baptised only as he was dying, in 337, by Eusebius of Nicomedia, a friend of Arius. Deathbed baptism was common then, and the Church honours him for the baptism that washed away what came before and for what he did for the Church, not as a model of private life.ImportantHoly ScriptureEpistles of St. PaulFourteen epistles received by the Church as St Paul's: Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1-2 Thessalonians, 1-2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon and Hebrews. The Fathers read them for Christ as the new Adam, for life in the Spirit, for the Church as His Body, and for the shape of a Christian life; justification is among their themes and is not the key that unlocks them. At every Divine Liturgy an epistle is read before the Gospel, most often from these, and the reading, like the book it is read from, is called the Apostle.ImportantChurch HistoryEra of Persecutions (64-313 AD)The two and a half centuries between Nero and Constantine in which to be a Christian was a crime that could cost a life. It came in waves rather than without pause: under Nero, who blamed the Christians for the fire of Rome in 64 and under whom Sts Peter and Paul died; under Trajan, who ruled that Christians were not to be hunted but were to die if accused and unwilling to sacrifice; under Decius in 250, who demanded a certificate of sacrifice from everyone; and last and worst under Diocletian, from 303, whose persecution lasted in the East until 313. Most of the great martyrs of the calendar are from these years. The Church learned then what it has kept: that a martyr’s death is his birthday, kept as a feast; that his bones are, as the Smyrnaeans wrote of St Polycarp’s, more precious than jewels; and that the Eucharist is offered over them, which is why every altar still holds relics. The blood of the Christians is seed, wrote Tertullian, and the growth of the Church under the sword bore him out.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsExact Exposition of the Orthodox FaithThe third and largest part of St John of Damascus’ Fount of Knowledge, written at the Lavra of St Sabbas in the eighth century, after a book of philosophical definitions and a catalogue of heresies. It sets out in a hundred chapters what the Greek Fathers had taught: the one God and the Trinity, creation, angels and man, providence, the incarnate Christ with His two natures and two wills, the Theotokos, and then baptism, the Eucharist, the veneration of icons and the resurrection. Its method is announced at the start of the whole work: to say nothing of his own, but to gather what the most eminent teachers had worked out. It was the Church’s textbook for centuries. Burgundio of Pisa translated it into Latin in the 1150s, divided into four books, and Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas both drew on it, so it is the channel through which much of the Greek Fathers’ theology reached the medieval West.ImportantChurch HistoryFall of Constantinople (1453)The capture of the city by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II on Tuesday 29 May 1453, after a siege of seven weeks, which ended the Roman empire in the East. The last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting at the walls, and his body was never identified. On the night before, Greeks and Latins prayed together in Hagia Sophia, which most of the people had shunned since the union of Florence was proclaimed there the December before. The city was sacked, and the Great Church became a mosque. Mehmed then made St Mark of Ephesus’ disciple Gennadios Scholarios, an opponent of the union, patriarch in 1454 and head of all the Orthodox of the empire, so the Patriarchate survived as the Church of a subject people for nearly five centuries. Greeks still count Tuesday an unlucky day. Hagia Sophia became a museum in 1934 and a mosque again in 2020.ImportantSpiritual Life & PracticesFastingOrthodox Christians keep a fast on something like half the days of the year: every Wednesday and Friday, for the betrayal and the Crucifixion, and four seasons, Great Lent with Holy Week, the Nativity Fast, the Apostles’ Fast and the Dormition Fast, with a few single days such as the Beheading of the Forerunner and the Elevation of the Cross. The Typikon sets the rule in degrees: meat is given up first, then dairy and eggs, then fish, and on the strictest days wine and oil as well. It is not a diet. St Basil wrote that the true fast is estrangement from evil: restraint of the tongue, abstinence from anger, separation from lusts, slander, lying and perjury. It is never kept alone, but with prayer and almsgiving, and it is shaped to the one who keeps it: the sick, the old, children and women with child are given economy, and the measure is settled with a spiritual father. Some weeks are kept free, Bright Week above all, because a feast is not a time to fast.ImportantTheology & DogmaFilioque ControversyThe words and the Son, added in the Latin West to the Creed’s statement that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. They appear first in Spain, at Toledo in 589, and spread through the Frankish church; Charlemagne’s theologians pressed for them, and Pope Leo III refused and had the Creed engraved without them on silver shields in St Peter’s. Rome itself began singing them only around 1014. The Orthodox objection is double. On the canonical side, the Creed of an Ecumenical Council was changed by one part of the Church alone, when Ephesus had forbidden any other creed. On the theological side, making the Son a second source of the Spirit undoes the monarchy of the Father and blurs the Persons into their shared essence. St Photius, the council of 879-880 and St Mark of Ephesus each held the line, and it remains one of the questions between the churches.ImportantTheology & DogmaGrace Is UncreatedIn Orthodoxy grace is not a created gift that God makes and hands over. It is God Himself, in His uncreated energies, given to His creatures: the light on Tabor, the fire at Pentecost and the grace of the Mysteries are God communicating Himself, not a substance produced for the purpose. This follows from the essence-energies distinction, and it is the point on which Orthodox and scholastic theology divide most sharply, since a created grace can only ever be a thing between God and the soul. Theosis depends on it entirely: a creature cannot be made a partaker of the divine nature by receiving something created.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtHagia SophiaThe Great Church of Constantinople, dedicated to the Holy Wisdom of God, which is Christ. Justinian built it in five years and dedicated it in 537, after the church before it burned in the Nika riots; its architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, raised a dome that Procopius said seemed to hang from heaven on a golden chain. The dome fell in 558 and was raised again higher. For nine centuries it was the cathedral of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the model of Orthodox worship: its rite became the rite of the whole Church, and in it the envoys of Prince Vladimir did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth. The Crusaders plundered it in 1204. On 29 May 1453 it became a mosque, and in time its mosaics were plastered over; it was made a museum in 1934, when many were uncovered, and a mosque again in 2020, over the protests of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and of Orthodox Churches everywhere.ImportantChurch HistoryHesychast Controversy (14th c.)The dispute of the 1330s to the 1350s over the prayer of the monks of Athos and the light they said they saw. Barlaam of Calabria, a learned Greek from Italy, mocked their bodily method and argued that no created eye could see God, so the light must be a created thing. St Gregory Palamas answered in the Triads with the distinction the Fathers had assumed and he made explicit: God is unknowable in His essence and truly known in His uncreated energies, and the light of Tabor was the glory of God Himself. The monks of Athos signed the Hagiorite Tome in his support. A council in 1341 condemned Barlaam, who left for Italy and became a Latin bishop; the quarrel then became entangled with a civil war, and Palamas spent years in prison before the councils of 1347 and 1351 vindicated him and condemned Akindynos and Gregoras. The decisions entered the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, and the Church keeps St Gregory on the Second Sunday of Lent.ImportantHoly Mysteries (Sacraments)Holy Chrismation (Confirmation)The anointing that follows baptism at once, with the words the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit, on the forehead, eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, breast, hands and feet: the personal Pentecost of every Christian. The West separated it from baptism and delayed it to adolescence as confirmation; the East has kept it one rite with baptism, so an infant is baptised, chrismated and communed on the same day. The chrism itself, the myron, is consecrated by the patriarch of a church - in Constantinople on Holy Thursday, and sent from there to many of the churches - from oil and dozens of aromatics, so that every Christian is anointed with oil that binds them to the whole Church. Chrismation is also how many converts are received.ImportantHoly Mysteries (Sacraments)Holy Confession (Repentance)The Mystery of repentance, in which sins committed after baptism are confessed and forgiven. The penitent stands before an icon of Christ, often with the priest beside rather than facing them, and the Slavonic rite makes the priest say plainly that Christ stands here invisibly receiving the confession and that he is only a witness. At the end the priest lays his stole over the penitent’s head and reads the prayer of absolution. The Orthodox understanding is medical rather than judicial: the priest is a physician and confession is treatment, which is why it is so often joined to the counsel of a spiritual father. In the early Church sins were confessed publicly; private confession grew out of the monasteries.ImportantTheology & DogmaHomoousios (Consubstantial)Of one essence: the word the First Ecumenical Council put into the Creed to say that the Son is God in exactly the sense the Father is, not a lesser god and not the first of creatures. It was a hard word to choose. It is not in Scripture, and it had been used in a sense condemned at Antioch in 268, and for half a century after Nicaea bishops who were not Arians preferred homoiousios, of like essence, a single letter away. St Athanasius held that nothing less would do, and the Cappadocians won over those who had hesitated by showing that one essence need not mean one person. The Second Council confirmed it in 381. Chalcedon then used the same word twice: Christ is of one essence with the Father in His divinity and of one essence with us in His humanity.ImportantTheology & DogmaHypostasis (Person)A Person: one of the three in the Trinity, or the one Person of the incarnate Son. Until the fourth century the word was nearly a synonym of ousia, essence, and the Nicene anathemas themselves use the two together, which is why the East suspected the West of making the three one person and the West suspected the East of making them three gods. The Cappadocian Fathers fixed the distinction the Church has kept: ousia is what is common, hypostasis what is particular, as humanity is common to Peter and Paul and each is someone. Father, Son and Spirit are one ousia and three hypostases, distinct only by origin. Chalcedon then applied the word to Christ: one hypostasis in two natures. Much modern Orthodox thought about what a person is starts here.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtIconoclasmThe century and more in which Byzantine emperors made war on the icons. Leo III began it in the 720s, Constantine V drove it further and had it confirmed by the council of Hieria in 754, and monks suffered most: St Stephen the New was killed in 765. The Seventh Ecumenical Council, meeting at Nicaea in 787 under the Empress Irene and St Tarasius, restored the icons, but Leo V banned them again in 815, and St Theodore the Studite led the resistance from exile. The Empress Theodora and St Methodios restored them for good in 843, the Triumph of Orthodoxy still kept on the first Sunday of Lent. The argument was about Christ: if the Word became flesh, He can be depicted, and to refuse the image is to doubt the Incarnation. St John of Damascus put it plainly: I do not venerate matter, I venerate the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake. The honour given to the image, the council taught with St Basil, passes to the one it shows, and worship belongs to God alone.ImportantTheology & DogmaImage & Likeness of GodLet us make man in our image, after our likeness, says Genesis, and the Fathers made much of the two words. From St Irenaeus on, many read the image as what every human being has by creation, reason, freedom, the capacity for communion with God, and the likeness as what the image is for, becoming like God, which is theosis. We possess the one by creation, one of them wrote, and acquire the other by free choice. Not all the Fathers divided the words so, but all taught that the image is darkened by sin and never destroyed, and that Christ, the true Image of the Father, came to restore it. The image is not a part of the person but the whole person, body and soul, and the Church acts on it: at the Liturgy the deacon censes the icons and then the people, because they are icons too.ImportantTheology & DogmaKenosis (The Self-Emptying)He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant. The Orthodox reading of that verse is careful about what the emptying is: the Son does not lay aside His divinity or suspend any of it, because a divinity that can be put down is not one. The emptying is the assuming. What He takes on is the whole of our condition, including hunger, weariness, ignorance as man, fear in the garden and death, and He takes it without ceasing for an instant to fill all things as God. The modern kenotic theories that have the Word divest Himself of omniscience or omnipotence to become man are therefore not a deeper humility but the old error of making the Incarnation a subtraction.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsMeeting of the Lord (Hypapante): February 2Forty days after the Nativity the Theotokos brings the Child to the Temple, and the elder Symeon, to whom it had been promised that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ, takes God into his arms. The Greek name is Hypapante, the Meeting: the Law meets its Giver, the Temple receives the One it was built for, and the age that had been waiting is free to depart in peace. Symeon’s words at that moment are not kept for this day alone. They close Vespers every evening of the year, so the whole Church says them nightly. Anna the prophetess, a widow of eighty-four in the Temple, is the second witness. The Latin name for the day, the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, puts the weight on a purification the all-pure Theotokos had no need of; the Orthodox name keeps it on the Meeting itself, and the feast is reckoned among the feasts of the Lord. Kept on 2 February, with its leavetaking on 9 February, and the last of the Twelve Great Feasts of the Church year to be given a page here.ImportantMonasticismMonasticismThe monastic life: withdrawal from the world for unceasing prayer and repentance. It began in the Egyptian desert in the late third century with St. Anthony the Great, and received communal form from St. Pachomius and St. Basil the Great. Orthodoxy has no separate religious orders - there is a single monastic state in three forms: the hermit’s solitude, the coenobitic community, and the skete between them. Entry is by tonsure, and the vows are for life.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsNativity of Christ (Christmas)The birth of Christ, kept on 25 December, which on the Old Calendar falls on 7 January. The East kept it with the Theophany until the end of the fourth century; St John Chrysostom was preaching the separate feast at Antioch in 386 as recently arrived. It is prepared for by forty days of fasting from 15 November, and on the eve, strictly kept, the Royal Hours are read and the Liturgy of St Basil is served with Vespers. Its kontakion, St Romanos’, says what the feast is: today the Virgin gives birth to Him who is above all being, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable. The icon holds the whole mystery. The Child lies in a manger shaped like a tomb and wrapped like the dead; the ox and the ass of Isaiah know their Master’s crib; the Theotokos rests beside Him; and in a corner St Joseph sits troubled, while an old man tempts him to doubt.ImportantTheology & DogmaOusia (Essence/Nature)Essence: what something is, and in God what is common to the Father, the Son and the Spirit, so that each is wholly God and there are not three gods. Eunomius claimed that the divine essence could be known and named - that God simply is unbegottenness - and so that the begotten Son could not be God. St Basil and St Gregory of Nyssa answered that we do not know the essence even of an ant, still less of God, and that every name we give God names something about Him, never what He is. That refusal is the root of the apophatic tradition and of the distinction between the unknowable essence and the energies in which God gives Himself. In the language of the councils about Christ, ousia and nature mean the same: He has two, divine and human.ImportantHoly ScripturePatristic TypologyThe Fathers read the Old Testament as a set of figures that find their meaning in Christ, and they did not invent the method: St Paul says the rock in the wilderness was Christ and calls Adam a type of the one to come. So the passage through the Red Sea is baptism, the manna is the Eucharist, the three days of Jonah are the tomb, the bush that burns without being consumed is the Virgin bearing God, and the ladder Jacob saw is the same. This is not allegory in the loose sense: a type is a real event that really happened and that means more than it knew. The hymnography of the Church is built almost entirely out of it, which is why a reader who does not know the types cannot follow the services.ImportantTheology & DogmaPerichoresis (Mutual Indwelling)Each Person of the Trinity dwells wholly in the others without mixture and without ceasing to be Himself. St John of Damascus gives the word its settled theological use: the three have their being in one another, so that where one is all three are, and the works of God outside Himself are never divided between them. The same word does a second job in Christology, where the two natures of Christ interpenetrate without confusion, which is how the Church can say that God was crucified and that a man is worshipped while refusing both the mixture of Eutyches and the division of Nestorius.ImportantSpiritual Life & PracticesPrelest (Spiritual Delusion)Plani in Greek, prelest in Russian: the state of a soul that has mistaken its own imagination, or the suggestion of a demon, for the grace of God. The fathers treat it as the characteristic danger of the spiritual life, and they consider it more dangerous than open sin, because the deluded believe themselves to be advancing. Its marks are a taste for visions, certainty about one's own progress, contempt for others, and an unwillingness to be corrected. Its remedies are the same everywhere in the tradition: obedience to a spiritual father, the refusal to accept any vision or sensation whatever, and self-reproach. This is why the bodily method of the Jesus Prayer is never taught alone, and why a beginner is told to attend to the words and nothing else.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsPrimacy and the Papal ClaimsOrthodoxy holds a primacy of honour: the first see presides, convenes, and is appealed to, and it does not govern the other churches. Every bishop is fully a bishop and the Church is whole in each local eucharistic assembly, so authority is conciliar, and the Ecumenical Councils were received by the whole Church rather than ratified by one bishop. What Orthodoxy does not accept is universal immediate jurisdiction and personal infallibility, defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870. The Fathers read the rock of Matthew 16:18 as Peter's confession, an Ecumenical Council condemned a pope for heresy, and the canons that give Rome its rank give it for the honour of the city, which is an argument about order and not about office.ImportantTheology & DogmaRecapitulation (Anakephalaiosis)Christ gathers up the whole of human life in Himself and lives it again rightly. St Irenaeus works it out in detail against the Gnostics: where Adam was disobedient at a tree, Christ is obedient on a tree; where Eve believed a messenger and bound herself, the Virgin believed a messenger and loosed the knot; and He passed through every age of life, infancy and childhood and youth and manhood, sanctifying each by being in it. Salvation on this reading is not a transaction conducted over our heads but a second running of the whole human course, done correctly, by one who is ours.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsSixth Ecumenical Council: Constantinople III (680-681)Convened by the Emperor Constantine IV and held in the domed hall of the imperial palace. It condemned Monothelitism and the single operation that went with it, and defined that Christ has two natural wills and two natural operations, without division, without change, without separation and without confusion, His human will following the divine not as resisting or reluctant but as subject to it. The argument is St. Maximus the Confessor's: a will belongs to a nature and not to a person, so a Christ with no human will would not be a man, and what He did not assume He did not heal. Gethsemane is the text it rests on, where the Lord prays that not His will but the Father's be done, and prays it with a human will that wants to live. It condemned Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter of Constantinople, Cyrus of Alexandria, Theodore of Pharan and Pope Honorius of Rome, whose condemnation Pope Leo II then confirmed; an Ecumenical Council judging a pope for heresy is among the plainest Orthodox answers to the later claim of personal infallibility. St. Maximus and Pope St. Martin I had both died in exile for this confession and neither lived to see it received. It issued no canons of its own, and the Quinisext Council supplied them eleven years later.ImportantChurch HistorySoviet Persecution of the ChurchThe seventy years in which the Soviet state set out to end religion in Russia, and came close. From 1918 the Church lost its property and legal existence; in 1922 the confiscation of church valuables, under the pretext of famine relief, brought the first mass trials and executions, beginning at Shuya; Patriarch Tikhon was imprisoned and the state backed the Renovationist schism against him. In 1927 Metropolitan Sergius declared the Church loyal to the Soviet state, a step that divided the faithful then and is argued over still. The Great Terror of 1937 and 1938 was the worst of it: of some fifty-four thousand parish churches open in 1917, a few hundred were open by 1939. Tens of thousands of clergy, monks and nuns were shot or died in the camps, and the Russian Church has glorified more than a thousand of them by name as the New Martyrs and Confessors. Stalin allowed a revival in wartime, in 1943, Khrushchev closed half the churches again, and only the millennium of 1988 brought freedom.ImportantSpiritual Life & PracticesSpiritual Fatherhood (Geronta/Starets)The guidance of a soul by an elder, a geron in Greek and a starets in Russian, which is as old as the desert, where a young monk came to an abba and said, give me a word. The disciple reveals his thoughts, even the ones he is ashamed of, and obeys; the elder prays for him and gives him the word he needs rather than the one he wants. What makes an elder is not an office but a gift, discernment, and some have been given more: St Seraphim of Sarov and St Paisios of the Holy Mountain were remembered for answering questions before they were asked. An elder need not be a priest, since many were simple monks, though absolution in confession belongs to the priest. The tradition came back to Russia through the disciples of St Paisius Velichkovsky and reached its height at Optina, where St Ambrose received visitors from the whole of Russia, and where Dostoevsky found much of his Elder Zosima.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSs. Cyril & Methodius (9th c.)Two brothers from Thessalonica who grew up speaking the Slavonic of the villages around the city. Constantine, a scholar, and Methodius, a former governor turned monk, were sent in 863 by the Emperor and the Patriarch Photius to Great Moravia at its prince’s request for teachers who could preach in the people’s own tongue. Constantine made an alphabet, the Glagolitic, and they translated the Gospels and the services. German clergy objected that God could be worshipped only in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and the brothers took the argument to Rome and won it. Constantine died there in 869, having taken the name Cyril as a monk; Methodius, imprisoned for years by Bavarian bishops, finished the work. Their disciples, driven out, carried it to Bulgaria, where the Cyrillic alphabet was made in his memory. Feast: May 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSs. Joachim and Anna, the Ancestors of GodThe parents of the Theotokos, remembered at the end of every service, where the priest names the holy and righteous ancestors of God. Scripture does not name them. The tradition the Church sings, from the ancient book called the Protevangelium of James, tells of a couple shamed for their childlessness, of Joachim’s offering refused at the Temple, of Anna praying in her garden beside a nest of sparrows, and of an angel sent to both. The Church keeps the conception of their daughter on 9 December, her birth on 8 September and them on the day after. She was conceived as every child is, in the Orthodox teaching: the Latin dogma that she was preserved from the inheritance of Adam is not received. Feast: September 9.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Andrew the First-CalledA fisherman of Bethsaida and a disciple of John the Baptist, who heard him point to Christ, followed, and was the first of the Twelve to be called; then he went and found his brother Simon Peter and brought him. Tradition sends him north and west to preach around the Black Sea, among the Scythians and in Greece, and has him crucified at Patras on a cross shaped like an X. The Church of Constantinople traces its beginning to him, which is why the Ecumenical Patriarch keeps his day with the see’s full solemnity; Rome keeps his brother Peter on 29 June, and each year the two sees send delegations to each other’s feast. He is the patron of Russia and of Romania, and his head was returned to Patras in 1964. Feast: November 30.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Barnabas the ApostleJoseph, a Levite of Cyprus, whom the Apostles called Barnabas, son of encouragement. He sold a field and laid the money at their feet, and when Paul came to Jerusalem a convert no one trusted, it was Barnabas who took him by the hand to the Apostles. He fetched Paul to Antioch, and the two of them sailed to Cyprus on the first journey, where the proconsul believed. They parted over John Mark, and Barnabas took Mark home to Cyprus. By tradition he was stoned at Salamis. In 478 his tomb was found with a copy of Matthew’s Gospel on his breast, and on the strength of it the emperor confirmed that the Church of Cyprus, founded by an Apostle, owed nothing to Antioch: its autocephaly rests on this grave. Feast: June 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Cyril of JerusalemBishop of Jerusalem in the middle of the fourth century, exiled three times by emperors of the Arian party and restored three times, who took part in the Second Ecumenical Council at the end of his life. His Catechetical Lectures, given in the church of the Holy Sepulchre to those preparing for baptism in Lent around 350, are the fullest picture there is of how the ancient Church taught the Creed. The five Mystagogical Catecheses that follow them, explaining baptism, chrismation and the Eucharist to the newly baptised in Easter week, are the oldest account of the eucharistic change by the calling down of the Spirit; some scholars give them to his successor John. Feast: March 18.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Demetrios of ThessalonicaA young officer of Thessalonica, martyred around 306 under Maximian, and the patron the city has claimed ever since. By the account the Church reads, he was imprisoned for teaching Christ, and blessed the young Nestor, who went into the arena and killed the emperor’s champion gladiator; the soldiers were sent to the prison and ran Demetrios through with spears. A great basilica rose over his grave in the fifth century and still stands. The Miracles of St Demetrios, written in the seventh century, credit him with defending the city in the sieges by the Slavs and Avars. A fragrant oil that gathered at his tomb gave him the name Myrrh-streaming. His feast is a holiday in the city. Feast: October 26.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Dionysius the AreopagiteThe judge of the Areopagus who believed when St Paul preached in Athens, and by tradition the first bishop of that city and a martyr. The writings that carry his name, on the divine names, the mystical theology, and the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, shaped the whole apophatic tradition of the East and much of the West besides. Modern scholarship dates them to around the year 500, four centuries after the man in Acts, and the Church has not found that a reason to set them aside: The scholia of John of Scythopolis, handed down under the name of St Maximus the Confessor, and Maximus’s own interpretation secured their Orthodox reading, and it is in that reading that they are received. The saint is kept on his own day, and the corpus stands on its own authority. Feast: October 3.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Ephraim the SyrianA deacon of Nisibis and then Edessa, in the Syriac-speaking Church at the eastern edge of the empire, who wrote his theology as hymns and gave them to choirs of women to sing, so that the faith was taught in the streets the way the heretics were teaching theirs. He is called the Harp of the Spirit. His poems on faith, Paradise, the Nativity and the Church refuse to define God and are full of the wonder that God has let Himself be named at all. When Nisibis was handed to Persia he went with the refugees to Edessa, and he died there in 373 organising relief in a famine. The Greek Church knows him through works translated under his name, and above all through the short prayer every Orthodox Christian says with prostrations at the services of Great Lent. Feast: January 28.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395)Bishop of Nyssa, younger brother of St Basil, and the most daring mind among the Cappadocians. He was a married rhetor before he was a bishop, was deposed once by the Arian party, and at the Second Council of 381 was named one of the bishops whose communion defined Orthodoxy. His Life of Moses reads the ascent of Sinai as the soul’s ascent into the darkness where God is, and his teaching of epektasis - that the soul goes on stretching toward God forever, because God is infinite and so is the journey - is his gift to the Church. His language about the restoration of all things is the one place the Church reads him with care rather than as he wrote it, and it says so. His Catechetical Oration and On the Making of Man remain foundational. Feast: January 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 35-108)Bishop of Antioch after the Apostles, arrested under Trajan and taken under guard across Asia Minor to be thrown to the beasts in Rome. On the way he wrote seven letters to the churches, and they are the clearest window there is onto the Church in the generation after the Apostles: a bishop, presbyters and deacons in every city; a Eucharist that is the flesh of Christ, the medicine of immortality; and a Church he was the first to call catholic, in a sentence usually misquoted: wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church. He begged the Romans not to save him. I am the wheat of God, he wrote, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Feast: December 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130-202)Bishop of Lyon in Gaul, born in Asia Minor, who as a boy heard St Polycarp speak of what he had heard from the Apostle John: two links from the Apostles, and he said so. Against the Gnostics, who taught a secret knowledge above the Church’s faith and a creator god beneath the true one, he wrote the five books Against Heresies, the first great work of Christian theology after the New Testament. His answers are the ones the Church still gives: there is one God who made the world and saved it; the faith is public and handed down through the bishops of the churches the Apostles founded; and Christ recapitulates Adam, living our life again rightly from its start. The glory of God is a living man, he wrote, and the life of man is the vision of God. Feast: August 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Isaac the SyrianA monk of the seventh century from Beth Qatraye on the Persian Gulf, consecrated bishop of Nineveh and gone again after five months, to live in silence in the mountains and write. He was a bishop of the Church of the East, which did not accept Ephesus, and the Orthodox Church has venerated him for over a thousand years anyway, through the Greek translation of his Ascetical Homilies made at the Lavra of St Sabbas, because it recognised in them its own faith and its own prayer. He is the teacher of the merciful heart, which he describes as a heart that burns for the whole of creation, for people, birds, animals and even the demons, and cannot bear to see the least harm done to anything. Feast: January 28.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. James, the Brother of the LordThe first bishop of Jerusalem and the voice that settled the Apostolic Council, when the Church had to decide whether Gentiles must keep the Law: his judgement was that they should not be troubled. He wrote the letter that says faith without works is dead. The Orthodox tradition understands brother of the Lord as the Church always has, a son of Joseph by an earlier marriage, because the Mother of God remained a virgin. Josephus records that the high priest had him stoned in 62, and the account preserved by Eusebius has him thrown from the Temple and clubbed while he prayed for his killers. The oldest liturgy still served bears his name, and is celebrated on his day. Feast: October 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John Climacus (of the Ladder)Abbot of the monastery at Sinai in the seventh century and author of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, thirty steps for thirty hidden years of Christ. He came to Sinai at sixteen, spent forty years in silence at Tholas before being made abbot, and wrote the book at the request of another abbot who wanted a rule for his monks. The Church reads him twice over in Lent: his memory falls on 30 March and the Fourth Sunday of Great Lent is given to him, so that the Ladder is put in front of every parish and not only every monastery. Feast: March 30.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John of Damascus (c. 676-749)Son of a Christian family that served the Caliph in Damascus, and himself a financial official at the Umayyad court before he became a monk at the Lavra of St Sabbas near Jerusalem. From there, safely outside the emperor’s reach, he wrote the Three Treatises against those who destroyed the icons, with the argument the Seventh Council made its own: the invisible God became visible, so what is seen may be painted, and the honour given to an image passes to the one it shows. His Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith gathered the Fathers into the first systematic statement of the faith. He was also a hymnographer of the first rank: the Paschal Canon and much of the Octoechos are his. Tradition keeps the story of his severed hand restored by the Theotokos, which is why one of her icons is painted with three. Feast: December 4.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John of Shanghai and San FranciscoMichael Maximovitch, a refugee from the Russian Revolution who became a monk in Serbia and was sent in 1934 as bishop to Shanghai. He slept, when he slept, sitting up, served the Liturgy every day, walked barefoot, and took in orphans from the streets: some three thousand five hundred passed through his home. When the communists came in 1949 he got his whole flock out to a camp on the Philippine island of Tubabao and went to Washington himself to persuade Congress to admit them. He was then archbishop in Western Europe, where he restored the veneration of Western saints from before the Schism, and from 1962 in San Francisco. He died in 1966 in Seattle. Glorified by the Church Abroad in 1994. Feast: June 19 (on the Old Calendar, 2 July).ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Luke the EvangelistThe beloved physician, a Gentile and a companion of St Paul on his journeys, who stayed with him when the others had left. He wrote the Gospel that begins with the Annunciation and the story of the Nativity as the Theotokos kept it in her heart, and its continuation, the Acts of the Apostles, in which his "we" marks the stretches of the journey he shared. Its parables of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan are his alone. Tradition makes him the first iconographer, painting the Mother of God from life, which the Church understands as a claim that the icon goes back to the Apostles. He died, by tradition, in Boeotia. Feast: October 18.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Mark the EvangelistJohn Mark, in whose mother’s house in Jerusalem the Church met to pray, a cousin of Barnabas who went with Paul on the first journey and turned back, and whom Paul later asked for because he was useful. Papias records that he became Peter’s interpreter and wrote down Peter’s preaching, which is why his Gospel is short, urgent and full of the things an eyewitness remembers. The Church of Alexandria calls itself the see of St Mark: by its tradition he founded it and was dragged to his death through its streets around 68. His relics were taken to Venice in 828. Feast: April 25.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Mary of EgyptA girl who ran away to Alexandria at twelve and lived seventeen years there in dissolution, and who joined a pilgrim ship to Jerusalem for the feast of the Cross out of nothing better to do. At the door of the church an invisible force held her back while everyone else went in, and in that moment she saw her life. She prayed to the icon of the Mother of God in the porch, was let in to venerate the Cross, and went out across the Jordan into the desert, where she lived alone forty-seven years. The monk Zosimas found her there, heard her story and brought her communion, and a year later found her body. St Sophronius wrote the Life, and the Church reads it in Lent with the Great Canon and gives her a Sunday. Feast: April 1, and the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662)A court official who became a monk, and the theologian who held the Church to the full humanity of Christ when the emperor, the patriarchs of three sees and very nearly everyone else had agreed to teach one will in Him. Maximus answered that a nature without its own will is not a nature, so a Christ without a human will has not saved the human will, which is the thing that needed saving: in the garden He willed as man what He willed as God. For refusing to be silent he was tried in Constantinople, his tongue cut out and his right hand cut off, and he died in exile in Lazica in 662. The Sixth Ecumenical Council vindicated him eighteen years later. His Ambigua and his writings on the logoi of creation are among the deepest things in Orthodox theology. Feast: January 21.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nektarios of Aegina (1846-1920)Anastasios Kephalas, born in Thrace in 1846, who worked as a shop boy in Constantinople and wrote verses from Scripture on the wrappings of the goods he sold. He became a monk on Chios, studied in Athens, and was consecrated Metropolitan of Pentapolis in Egypt, where slander at the patriarchal court had him removed without a hearing in 1890. He never defended himself. He preached in Greek villages as a travelling preacher, ran the Rizarios seminary in Athens for fourteen years, and in 1904 founded the convent of the Holy Trinity on Aegina, where he lived as its confessor and gardener. He died in a paupers’ ward in Athens in 1920. He is among the most loved saints of modern Greece, and his tomb on Aegina is visited daily. Glorified in 1961. Feast: November 9.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nicholas of Myra (c. 270-343)Bishop of Myra in Lycia in the fourth century, imprisoned under Diocletian and freed under Constantine, and after the Mother of God perhaps the most widely loved saint in the Christian world. The stories told of him are about justice before they are about miracles: the gold thrown by night through the window of a ruined man so that his three daughters would not be sold, and the three innocent men he took down from the executioner’s block by seizing the sword. Tradition places him at Nicaea and has him strike Arius; the oldest lists of the bishops there do not name him, and the Church sings it anyway, as a story about what the truth is worth. His relics were carried off to Bari in 1087, and the day is kept. The western Santa Claus is his distant descendant. Feast: December 6.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain (1749-1809)Nicholas Kallivourtsis from Naxos, who came to the Holy Mountain at twenty-six and spent the rest of his life there editing, and did more than anyone of his century to put the Fathers back into Greek hands. With St Makarios of Corinth he published the Philokalia in Venice in 1782; with the monk Agapios, the Rudder, the canons with a commentary still used; and he edited the Evergetinos and wrote the Exomologetarion for confessors. He was a leader of the Kollyvades, who defended frequent communion and the keeping of memorials on Saturday rather than Sunday, and were persecuted for it. His Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises are adaptations of Western Catholic devotional books, reworked for Orthodox readers, a fact his critics raise and his admirers do not hide. Glorified in 1955. Feast: July 14.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Paisios of Mount Athos (1924-1994)Born Arsenios Eznepidis in Farasa in Cappadocia in 1924, baptised by the saint of the village, St Arsenios, and carried to Greece as a baby in the exchange of populations. He was a carpenter and a wireless operator in the civil war before he became a monk, and lived at Stomion near Konitsa, at Sinai, and from 1979 in the cell called Panagouda on the Holy Mountain, where for fifteen years thousands came to him. His counsel is practical, funny and searching, always turning the visitor from blaming others to the one thing they could change, and it is written down in the six volumes of Spiritual Counsels. He died of cancer on 12 July 1994 at the monastery of Souroti near Thessaloniki, where he is buried, and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2015. Feast: July 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Panteleimon the HealerA physician of Nicomedia, the son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, taught the faith by the priest Hermolaus, who healed in the name of Christ and took no fee: the Church counts him first among the Unmercenaries, the doctor saints who would not be paid. Denounced by colleagues whose patients had gone to him, he was martyred around 305 under Maximian. His name was Pantoleon, all a lion, and a voice from heaven changed it to Panteleimon, all-merciful. He is remembered at the blessing of water, the anointing of the sick and many services for the sick, and the Russian monastery on the Holy Mountain bears his name and keeps his head. Feast: July 27.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia (1906-1991)A shepherd boy from Euboea with one year of school who ran away to the Holy Mountain at twelve, to the skete of Kavsokalyvia, and received there a gift of discernment that his elders told him to guard by obedience. Illness sent him back into the world, and for thirty-three years he was chaplain at the Polyclinic in the middle of Athens, hearing confessions in a city he loved. His teaching turns away from fighting evil head on: fill the soul with the love of Christ, he said, and there is no room left for anything else, so the Christian life is joy before it is struggle. His words were gathered after his death as Wounded by Love. He went back to Kavsokalyvia to die, in 1991, and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2013. Feast: December 2.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Sabbas the SanctifiedA Cappadocian who went to Palestine at eighteen, became a disciple of St Euthymius, and in 483 founded in the gorge of the Kidron the Great Lavra that still carries his name and has been inhabited almost without a break for fifteen centuries. At its height it held some hundred and fifty monks in cells cut into the cliff. He defended Chalcedon against emperors who favoured its opponents and travelled to Constantinople at ninety on behalf of the people of Palestine. The rule of prayer kept at his Lavra became the Typikon of Jerusalem, which is the order of services the whole Orthodox Church follows. He died in 532. Feast: December 5.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Sava of SerbiaRastko, the youngest son of the Serbian ruler Stefan Nemanja, who ran away at seventeen to the Holy Mountain and was tonsured there; his father followed him and became the monk Simeon, and together they founded the Serbian monastery of Hilandar in 1198. In 1219 Sava obtained from the Patriarch at Nicaea the independence of the Serbian Church and was consecrated its first archbishop. He organised its dioceses, compiled its book of canon law and wrote its first literature, and reconciled his quarrelling brothers. He died in 1236 at Tarnovo. In 1594 the Ottomans burned his relics in Belgrade to break the people’s spirit; the great church of St Sava stands on the place. Feast: January 14.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Seraphim of Sarov (1754-1833)A merchant’s son from Kursk who entered the monastery of Sarov at twenty-four and spent most of the next fifty years alone: in a hut in the forest, on a rock where by his own account he prayed a thousand nights, and in a sealed cell. Robbers who beat him nearly to death were forgiven, and he asked that they not be punished. From 1825 he opened the door, and crowds came to a man who greeted each of them with my joy, Christ is risen, whatever the season. His conversation with the landowner Motovilov is the plainest statement in Russian spirituality of what the Christian life is for: the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, which Motovilov saw shining from his face in the snow. Acquire the spirit of peace, he said, and thousands around you will be saved. Glorified in 1903. Feast: January 2.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938)Simeon Antonov, a strong young peasant from Tambov province who came to the Russian monastery of St Panteleimon on Athos in 1892 and stayed forty-six years, most of them as steward of the mill and the workshops. After months of struggle so dark he thought himself abandoned, he saw Christ in the church, and later heard the word that became his whole teaching: keep thy mind in hell, and despair not. What he wrote in the notebooks found after his death is simple and very hard: the love of enemies is the test of whether anyone knows God at all, and a monk’s work is to pray for the whole world, for all Adam, as for himself. His disciple St Sophrony published them. He died in 1938 and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1987. Feast: September 24.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Spyridon of TrimythousA shepherd of Cyprus, married, with a daughter, who was made bishop of Trimythous and went on keeping sheep. He suffered in the last persecution and by tradition came to Nicaea, where he is said to have answered a philosopher with a single potsherd that burst into fire, ran with water and left clay in his hand: three and one. The Church sings him as simple and unlearned and a match for the learned, and a wonderworker whose gifts were for the poor. His body, incorrupt, was carried out of Constantinople when the city fell and came to Corfu in 1456, and Corfu has kept him since, carrying him through the streets four times a year. Feast: December 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Stephen the ProtomartyrOne of the seven men appointed by the Apostles to serve the tables so that they could give themselves to prayer and the word, the first deacons, and the first to die for Christ. Accused before the Sanhedrin, he answered with a speech that runs from Abraham to the Temple and ends by accusing his judges, saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, and was stoned outside the city, praying Lord, do not hold this sin against them. The young man holding the coats was Saul. The Church calls him archdeacon and keeps him on the third day of the Nativity, so that the feast of the birth is followed at once by the first birth into heaven. His relics were found in 415. Feast: December 27.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022)The third of the three the Church calls Theologian, and the one whose theology is almost entirely an account of what he saw. A young courtier in Constantinople, he was taught by the monk Symeon the Pious, saw the uncreated light as a layman, and became a monk at Stoudios and then abbot of St Mamas for twenty-five years. He taught that anyone who has not consciously received the Holy Spirit has not yet become a Christian in the full sense, and that the vision of God is not for the saints of old alone but for anyone now; the church authorities heard in that a challenge, and he was exiled across the Bosphorus in 1009. His Hymns of Divine Love are among the great mystical poetry of the Church. He died in 1022. Feast: March 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Vladimir, Equal-to-the-ApostlesGrand Prince of Kiev, a pagan who by the chronicle’s own account had set up new idols, killed a brother and kept hundreds of concubines, and who sent envoys to examine the faiths and was told of the Great Church at Constantinople that they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth. He was baptised at Cherson in 988, married the emperor’s sister Anna, and had the people of Kiev baptised in the Dnieper. The chronicle notices the change in the man: he fed the poor from his own table, and hesitated to execute even robbers, for fear of sin. He founded schools and churches and died in 1015. Feast: July 15.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipThe Anaphora (The Offering)The great eucharistic prayer, from "Let us lift up our hearts" to the Amen that closes the commemorations after the calling down of the Spirit. It is one prayer, not a series of them, and it holds the whole argument of the faith in order: thanksgiving to the Father, the angelic hymn, the account of creation and of the fall, the Incarnation, the supper, the cross, the tomb, the rising, the ascension and the second coming, all spoken in the past tense including the coming, because the Church remembers forward. Then the offering, then the epiclesis, then the remembrance of the saints and of the living and the dead. The Liturgy of St Basil keeps a far longer and older form of it than the one used on most Sundays.ImportantChurch HistoryThe Byzantine Empire & OrthodoxyThe Roman empire in the East, from the dedication of Constantinople in 330 to its fall in 1453, whose people never called themselves anything but Romans. It was the world in which Orthodoxy took its shape: the emperors summoned the Ecumenical Councils, Justinian built Hagia Sophia and set out in his sixth Novel the ideal of a symphony between the priesthood and the empire, two gifts of God from one source, each with its own work. The ideal was often betrayed, by iconoclast emperors and by emperors who forced unions on the Church, and the Church more than once resisted the throne. The empire sent Sts Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs, and the rite of its Great Church became the rite of the whole Orthodox world. Its end did not end its Church: under the Ottomans and in the Slavic lands, it lived on in what has been called Byzantium after Byzantium.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Corpus AreopagiticumFour treatises and ten letters under the name of the Athenian converted by St Paul: On the Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. The Mystical Theology is eleven pages long and is the source of the whole apophatic vocabulary of the East, ending in a series of denials that deny even the denials. The Celestial Hierarchy is where the nine ranks of angels come from. The authorship was questioned as early as the sixth century and is now dated around 500, which the Orthodox tradition has absorbed without difficulty: what carried it was St Maximus the Confessor, whose Ambigua, with the scholia that went under his name, read it in a way no Origenist or Monophysite could use.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtThe Cross (Symbol & Object)The primary symbol of Orthodox Christianity. Several forms: Byzantine cross (with slanted footrest), Russian cross (three-bar), Greek cross (equal arms), and processional cross. Present in every Orthodox church, home, and worn by the faithful. The sign of the cross (right to left, three fingers joined for Trinity, two folded for Christ's two natures) is made constantly in prayer and worship.ImportantMonasticismThe Desert Fathers and MothersThe men and women who went out into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine and Syria from the late third century to live for God alone, and made, as St Athanasius wrote, the desert a city. St Antony went furthest and stayed longest, and the Life of him that Athanasius wrote around 360 carried the ideal across the whole Christian world. Around them grew the three ways of life that the Church still keeps: the hermit alone, as Antony; the small group around an elder, as at Scetis under St Macarius; and the community under a rule, as St Pachomius founded it in the Thebaid. There were Mothers as well as Fathers, Syncletica, Sarah and Theodora among them. What they taught was handed down as sayings, short and blunt, gathered in the fifth century into the Apophthegmata; Palladius wrote down what he saw among them, and St John Cassian carried their teaching to the West. Almost every later word of Orthodox spirituality, on the passions, on watchfulness, on humility, starts from theirs.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Great Canon of St Andrew of CreteTwo hundred and fifty troparia that take the whole of Scripture, from Adam to the thief on the cross, and turn every figure in it into an accusation against the one singing. The singer has outdone Cain, murdering his own conscience, and fallen short of Abel; Leah and Rachel are action and contemplation; the man who fell among thieves on the way to Jericho is the singer again. Before almost every troparion comes the same refrain: have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me. It is read in four parts in the first week of Great Lent and whole, with the Life of St Mary of Egypt, on the Thursday of the fifth week, standing, with prostrations.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Ladder of Divine AscentSt John Climacus’ book on the monastic life, written at Sinai in the seventh century at the request of the abbot of Raithu, and the reason he is called Climacus, from klimax, a ladder. It has thirty steps, one for each hidden year of Christ before His baptism, and they climb from renunciation of the world through obedience, mourning, the war with each passion in turn and the long battle with pride, to discernment, stillness, prayer and dispassion, and at the top to faith, hope and love, the greatest of which is love. It is written in short, hard sayings that are easy to remember and hard to forget. Monasteries read it through every Great Lent, and the Fourth Sunday of Lent keeps his memory. The twelfth-century Sinai icon of the Ladder shows what the book warns of: monks climbing toward Christ, and some of them pulled off the rungs by demons.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Lenten TriodionThe service book of the ten weeks before Pascha, from the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee to Great Saturday. Its name comes from the three-ode canons it uses on weekdays. It carries the pre-Lenten Sundays that set up the fast, the whole of Great Lent, the Saturdays of the Souls, Lazarus Saturday, Palm Sunday and the services of Holy Week including the twelve Passion Gospels and the Lamentations at the tomb. Most of the finest hymnography in the Byzantine rite is in this book, and a good deal of the Church’s actual teaching on repentance is in it rather than in any treatise.ImportantTheology & DogmaThe Logos and the logoiEvery created thing has a logos, a word or principle by which God intends it, and all of these are held together in the one Logos who became flesh. St Maximus works this out in the seventh Ambiguum: the logoi are not the things themselves and not a separate world of ideas, they are God’s wills concerning each thing, uncreated in Him and the reason each thing is the thing it is. To know a creature truly is therefore to read it back to its maker, and sin is refusing to. This is the Orthodox answer to the Platonic forms, and it is why contemplation of nature stands as a stage of the spiritual life between the keeping of the commandments and the knowledge of God.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Mystical Theology of the Eastern ChurchVladimir Lossky’s book, published in French in Paris in 1944 and in English in 1957, and for many readers in the West the first account of Orthodox theology in its own terms. Its opening claim governs the rest: there is no Christian mysticism without theology, and above all no theology without mysticism. From there it moves through the apophatic way of the Areopagite, the Trinity as the ground of everything, the distinction between God’s essence and His energies, the person set against the nature, the work of the Son and the work of the Spirit, and deification as the goal of the whole. Lossky wrote as a son of the Russian emigration and a critic of Fr Sergius Bulgakov’s sophiology, and with Fr Georges Florovsky he shaped the return to the Fathers that marked Orthodox theology in the twentieth century. Later Orthodox scholars have found his contrast between East and West drawn too sharply in places, and have said so without ceasing to read him.ImportantChurch HistoryThe New Martyrs and Confessors of RussiaThe Russian Church lost more people to the twentieth century than the whole Roman Empire took in three hundred years. Bishops, priests, monastics and laity were shot or worked to death from 1918 onward, with the peaks in 1922, 1929 and above all 1937, when more than a hundred thousand were arrested on religious charges and tens of thousands shot; at Butovo outside Moscow alone the firing lists name over a thousand killed for the faith. In 2000 the Council of Bishops in Moscow glorified the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, naming over a thousand and leaving the rest known to God. The imperial family was glorified in the same act as passion-bearers, a distinct Russian category for those killed without resistance, having been glorified as martyrs by the Church Abroad in 1981.ImportantSpiritual Life & PracticesThe Nous and the HeartThe nous is the eye of the soul, the faculty by which a person knows God directly, and it is not the same thing as reason. Orthodox ascetical writing describes it as darkened by the passions and scattered among things, so that the work of the spiritual life is to gather it and bring it down into the heart, which in this tradition means the centre of the whole person and not the seat of emotion. A nous in the heart, attentive and unwandering, is what the fathers call prayer of the heart. The distinction matters because it is what separates Orthodox contemplation from thinking hard about God.ImportantHoly ScriptureThe Old TestamentThe Church reads the Old Testament in the Septuagint, the Greek text the Apostles quote and the Fathers expound. Alongside the books shared with the Hebrew canon it receives the anagignoskomena, "those that are read": Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Sirach, Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, the additions to Daniel and to Esther, 1 Esdras, 1 to 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151. Four of those stand in the Greek and Slavonic Bibles and not in the Roman canon. The Orthodox Church has never issued a closed list in the manner of Trent: these books are Scripture by the use the Church makes of them, read in the services and cited by the Fathers.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsThe Palamite Councils (1341-1351)A series of councils at Constantinople, principally in 1341, 1347 and 1351, which judged the hesychast controversy in favour of St Gregory Palamas against Barlaam of Calabria and his successors. The council of 1351, at Blachernae, issued the Synodal Tomos that states the doctrine: there is in God a real distinction between the unknowable essence and the uncreated energies, both are truly God, and the light seen by the hesychasts is that uncreated energy and not a created sign. A further council in 1368 numbered Palamas among the saints. Orthodox writers commonly treat these councils as carrying ecumenical authority, without a settled number.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsThe PentarchyThe ordering of the ancient Church around five sees: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, in that order of honour. It is not a constitution handed down from the Apostles but a settlement arrived at by councils, and the canons that fix it say so plainly: Constantinople was given its place because it is the city of the emperor and the senate, not because an Apostle founded it. Honour in this scheme is precedence, not jurisdiction. No see in it governs another, and the order was never a ladder of authority, which is the whole of the Orthodox case against the later Roman reading of it. Since 1054 the East has continued with four.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe PentecostarionThe book of the fifty days from Pascha to Pentecost and the Sunday of All Saints after it. It holds the Paschal service itself, Bright Week, the Sundays of Thomas, the Myrrhbearers, the Paralytic, the Samaritan Woman and the Blind Man, then Mid-Pentecost, the Ascension, the Fathers of the First Council and Pentecost with its kneeling prayers. The tone of the book is unmixed: for fifty days there is no kneeling, no fasting on Wednesday or Friday during Bright Week, and Christ is risen replaces almost every opening prayer.ImportantSaints & Church FathersThe Prophet ElijahThe Tishbite, who shut the sky for three years against the idolatry of Ahab and Jezebel, was fed by ravens at the brook and by a widow at Zarephath whose son he raised, and called down fire on Carmel before the prophets of Baal. Fleeing for his life, he went forty days to Horeb and found God not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire but in a still small voice. He did not die: a chariot of fire took him up, and he appeared again with Moses on Tabor, speaking with Christ of His departure. The monks of Carmel and of every desert took him as their father, and in Greece and Cyprus his chapels stand on the tops of hills, as near the sky as he went. Feast: July 20.ImportantHoly ScriptureThe Psalter (Book of Psalms)The 150 (151 in LXX) Psalms are the prayer book of the Church, recited or chanted daily. Divided into 20 Kathismata for reading over one week (twice in Lent). The Psalter is the backbone of the Liturgy of the Hours. St Basil calls the Psalter a book that heals what it touches, and it carries every human affection up to God.ImportantChurch HistoryThe Russian Church: A Thousand YearsA thousand years in outline. The Church of Rus was born at Kiev in 988 under a metropolitan sent from Constantinople, and survived the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century; in the fourteenth, St Sergius of Radonezh and his disciples filled the northern forests with monasteries. When the Greeks accepted union with Rome at Florence, Moscow refused it and in 1448 chose its own metropolitan, and in 1589 the Eastern patriarchs made Moscow a patriarchate. Patriarch Nikon’s reform of the books to the Greek model split off the Old Believers in the 1660s; in 1721 Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate and put the Church under a Holy Synod and a lay procurator. The great council of 1917 restored the patriarchate and elected St Tikhon in the same weeks the Bolsheviks took power, and the Church then went through the worst persecution in its history. Freed in 1988, it rebuilt at a speed no one foresaw, and it is by far the largest of the Orthodox Churches.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Sayings of the Desert FathersA collection of what the monks of Egypt actually said, written down after they were dead by people who had heard it from people who had heard it. Nothing in it is systematic. A brother asks a word and an old man gives him one sentence, and the sentence is usually about not judging anyone, or about staying in the cell, or about what to do when you have failed again. It survives in two great arrangements, one alphabetical by the father who spoke and one by subject, and it is the raw material behind almost all later Orthodox ascetic writing. Read straight through it is also very funny, which is not an accident.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipThe Trisagion and the Trisagion PrayersHoly God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us. It is sung three times at almost every service and stands at the head of the short sequence of prayers that begins nearly every Orthodox office, so it is the first thing a child learns and the last thing said over a grave. The tradition records it as given during an earthquake at Constantinople in the fifth century, when a child was caught up and heard the angels singing it. It is addressed to the Holy Trinity, not to the Son alone, and that is why the Quinisext Council forbade the addition "who was crucified for us": the phrase is not false of Christ, and attached to this hymn it says the Trinity was crucified.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Way of a PilgrimAn anonymous Russian account, first published at Kazan in 1881 and enlarged in 1884, of a wanderer who heard the words pray without ceasing read at the Liturgy and could find no one to tell him how. A starets finally does: he gives him the Philokalia and the Jesus Prayer, and sets him to say it three thousand times a day, then six thousand, then twelve, until the prayer moves from his lips into his heart and begins to say itself. The pilgrim then walks across Russia toward Siberia with dried bread, a Bible and the Philokalia in his knapsack, and tells what the prayer did to him and to the people he met. The book’s own starets insists that the prayer is learned under obedience, and Orthodox writers since have warned against reading it as a technique to be tried alone. Its author has never been securely named. In English it became the best-known book on the Jesus Prayer, helped by J. D. Salinger, whose Franny carries it in her handbag.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsTheophany (Epiphany): January 6The baptism of Christ in the Jordan on 6 January, and the first open showing of the Trinity: the Father speaks from heaven, the Son stands in the water, and the Spirit comes down as a dove, as the troparion sings, When Thou, O Lord, wast baptised in the Jordan, the worship of the Trinity was made manifest. Christ needed no cleansing; He went down into the water to cleanse it, and the Church reads the feast as the sanctification of the whole creation. The Great Blessing of Waters is served on the eve and on the day, often out of doors at the sea or a river, where a cross is thrown into the water and, in the north, lowered through the ice. The faithful drink the water and take it home, and in the weeks that follow the priest blesses their houses with it. The eve is kept as a strict fast. St Gregory the Theologian called it the feast of lights.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsTransfiguration of Christ: August 6On Mount Tabor Christ took Peter, James and John apart, and was transfigured before them: His face shone like the sun and His garments became white as light, and Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets, the dead and the living, spoke with Him of His departure. The Church keeps it on 6 August, forty days before the Elevation of the Cross, and its kontakion explains why it was shown when it was: the disciples beheld Thy glory as far as they could bear it, so that when they saw Thee crucified they would understand that Thy suffering was voluntary. For the Orthodox Church the light of Tabor is the uncreated light of God, as St Gregory Palamas taught against Barlaam: not a created sign of glory, but the glory itself, which the saints see. In the icon the rays reach down to the three apostles, thrown to the ground. Grapes and the first fruits are blessed on the day, which falls in the Dormition Fast.ImportantHoly ScriptureWhy Not Scripture AloneScripture is the Church's own book: she recognised which writings were hers, reads them in her services before anyone reads them privately, and interprets them by the mind of the Fathers. So the Reformation principle of Scripture alone is not rejected for lowering Scripture but for detaching it from the body that produced and preserved it, which in practice replaces the consensus of the Fathers with the judgement of the reader. Nor does Orthodoxy set Tradition beside Scripture as a second source: Scripture is the written heart of Tradition, and the Liturgy, the Councils, the canons and the icons are the same faith in other forms.ImportantHoly ScriptureActs of the ApostlesWritten by the Evangelist Luke as a continuation of his Gospel. Records the spread of the Church from Jerusalem to Rome after the Ascension. Key events: Pentecost, martyrdom of Stephen, conversion of Paul, Council of Jerusalem, Paul's missionary journeys. Read continuously from Pascha through Pentecost in the Orthodox lectionary.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsAgainst Heresies (St. Irenaeus)The most important early Christian anti-Gnostic work (c. 180 AD). Exposes Gnostic systems and refutes them using Scripture, Tradition, and apostolic succession. Develops the theology of 'recapitulation': Christ sums up all of humanity in Himself, reversing Adam's fall. Foundational for Orthodox understanding of Tradition and ecclesiology.ImportantTheology & DogmaAncestral Sin (vs. Original Sin)What humanity inherits from Adam, in the Orthodox understanding, is a condition, not a guilt: mortality, corruption, the passions and a will bent toward sin, into which every person is born and in which each then sins for himself. The Greek of Romans 5:12 says death spread to all men because all sinned; the Latin read the same words as in whom all sinned, meaning in Adam, and St Augustine built on that reading a doctrine of guilt transmitted to every child. The East did not follow him. The image of God is obscured, not destroyed, and freedom remains. This is why the Orthodox Church does not need, and does not receive, the Latin dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which exists to exempt the Virgin from a guilt the East never taught. Baptism is for the remission of sins and for new birth into Christ’s life.ImportantEschatology & AfterlifeApocatastasis (Universal Restoration)The teaching that in the end all rational creatures, including the demons, will be restored and punishment will come to an end. It is associated above all with Origen, and in that form it was condemned: the anathemas issued at Constantinople under Justinian and carried into the Fifth Ecumenical Council name the pre-existence of souls and the restoration together, because in Origen they belong together. The complication the Church has never hidden is that St Gregory of Nyssa uses language of universal restoration and is a saint and a Father of the Second Council. The Orthodox way through is neither to edit him nor to follow him here: what is condemned is the Origenist system, and the Church prays for all while refusing to promise what it has not been told.ImportantTheology & DogmaApophatic TheologySpeaking of God by saying what He is not, because anything a human mind can grasp is less than God. Moses went up into the thick darkness where God was, and St Gregory of Nyssa reads that darkness as the place where knowing stops and meeting begins. The Mystical Theology of the Areopagite climbs by denials until it denies even the denials. This is not agnosticism or silence for its own sake: it keeps the mind from making an idol out of its own concepts, and it is the way to union rather than a wall. The Liturgy prays it: Thou art God ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible. Positive, cataphatic theology is not abolished by it - God is truly good and truly Father - but it is always said knowing that the reality is more than the word.ImportantTheology & DogmaArianismThe teaching of Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, that the Son of God is the first and greatest of creatures, through whom God made the world, but a creature: there was when He was not. He set it to popular songs, and sailors and millers sang them. The First Council condemned it in 325 and wrote homoousios into the Creed, and for half a century afterwards it looked as if Nicaea had lost: emperors favoured the Arian and half-Arian parties, St Athanasius was exiled five times, and after the councils of 359 St Jerome wrote that the whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian. The Goths were converted by an Arian missionary, so the kingdoms that followed Rome in the West began Arian. The Second Council in 381 ended it within the empire.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsAutocephaly & Church OrganizationThe standing of a Church that is its own head: it elects its own primate and bishops through its own synod and answers to no other Church, while holding the one faith and the one Eucharist with all the rest. The ancient canon behind it tells the bishops of each nation to know who is first among them and to do nothing weighty without him, and he nothing without them. The Churches are listed in the diptychs, in an order of honour that they do not entirely agree on: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem first, then Moscow, and after it, in the order Constantinople keeps, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Albania, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Below autocephaly stands autonomy, as at Sinai, Finland and Japan. How a Church becomes autocephalous is not agreed: Constantinople holds that it may grant it, others that the consent of all is needed, which is why the Churches of America, Ukraine and North Macedonia are counted differently by different Churches.ImportantHoly ScriptureBook of Revelation (Apocalypse)The Apocalypse of St John the Theologian, the last book of the New Testament: a prophetic vision of the end, of the struggle between good and evil, and of the final victory of Christ. It is the one book of the New Testament never appointed to be read in the services of the Byzantine rite, an absence that goes back to the long dispute in the East over its canonicity. It is canonical nonetheless, and the Church reads it through St Andrew of Caesarea, whose sixth-century commentary settled its interpretation for the Greek tradition. Orthodox reading is symbolic and refuses millennialism, the expectation of a thousand-year earthly kingdom.ImportantPsalmody & HymnographyByzantine NeumesByzantine chant is not written on a stave. Its signs record intervals and movement rather than pitches: each neume says how far to go from where you are and how, so the notation is relative and a melody can be sung from any starting note. Older layers of it, from the tenth century onward, also carry great signs governing tempo, expression and whole formulae. The system in use now is the New Method devised by the Three Teachers, Chrysanthos, Gregory and Chourmouzios, around 1814, which simplified the signs and made the older repertory transcribable without replacing the principle.ImportantOrthodox Philosophy & EthicsCanon LawThe body of ecclesiastical law governing the Church: Apostolic Canons, canons of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, canons of local councils and individual Fathers. Canons are applied with 'oikonomia' (pastoral flexibility) or 'akribia' (strict adherence) depending on circumstances. The Rudder (Pedalion) by St. Nikodemos is the standard Greek collection.ImportantChurch HistoryCouncil of Florence (1438-1439)A failed attempt at reunifying Eastern and Western Christianity. Under pressure from the Ottoman threat, the Byzantine Emperor and most Eastern bishops signed a decree of union accepting papal primacy and the Filioque. Only St. Mark of Ephesus refused to sign. The union was rejected by the Orthodox faithful and most Eastern clergy upon returning home.ImportantTheology & DogmaCreation & CosmologyGod created the world ex nihilo (from nothing) as a free act of love, not necessity. Creation is inherently good (Genesis 1:31) but not divine: it is distinct from God, yet sustained by His uncreated energies. The material world is not evil (contra Gnosticism). The whole cosmos is destined for transfiguration, not destruction.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsDobrotolubiye (Slavonic Philokalia)The Slavonic Philokalia, the Love of the Good, translated by St Paisius Velichkovsky and his monks at Neamt in Moldavia from the Greek collection of St Nikodemos and St Makarios, and printed at Moscow in 1793. It carried the tradition of watchfulness and the Jesus Prayer from Athos into the Russian monasteries, and through Paisius’ disciples into Optina, where it gave the elders their teaching. It is the book the pilgrim of The Way of a Pilgrim carries in his knapsack and reads by the roadside. St Theophan the Recluse later made a larger Russian version in five volumes, still called by the same name, which put the texts in the language the whole of Russia could read.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsElevation of the Holy Cross: Sept 14Commemorates the finding of the True Cross by Empress Helena (326 AD) and its later recovery from the Persians by Emperor Heraclius (628). A strict fast day (no meat, dairy, or fish). The Cross is brought out in procession and elevated before the faithful. One of the 12 Great Feasts.ImportantEschatology & AfterlifeEschatology (The Last Things)What the Church confesses about the end. The Creed holds that Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and of his kingdom there shall be no end, and that we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. Orthodoxy teaches a particular judgment at death and a general resurrection and last judgment at the Second Coming, and is deliberately reticent about the detail of what lies between them.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsFifth Ecumenical Council: Constantinople II (553)Convened by the Emperor Justinian and presided over by Eutychius of Constantinople, with 165 bishops signing its acts. Its work was to settle how Chalcedon is to be read: it condemned the Three Chapters, the person and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the writings of Theodoret of Cyrus against St. Cyril, and the letter of Ibas of Edessa to Mari, so that the two natures could never be taken to mean two subjects. It confessed that One of the Holy Trinity suffered in the flesh, received the twelve anathemas of St. Cyril as the measure of Chalcedon, and named the Theotokos ever-virgin. It condemned Origen by name alongside Arius, Nestorius and Eutyches, and the fifteen anathemas against Origenism are received with the council in the tradition, though whether the council itself issued them or a synod shortly before it is disputed. Pope Vigilius was in the city and would not attend, wrote in defence of the Three Chapters, and assented only afterwards, and northern Italy went into the Three Chapters schism, Aquileia for more than a century. It did not win back those who had refused Chalcedon, which was the thing Justinian wanted from it most.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsFor the Life of the World (Fr. Schmemann)By Fr. Alexander Schmemann (1963), a sacramental theology classic. Presents the Orthodox vision of all of life as sacrament: creation as God's gift, the Eucharist as the center of Christian life, and Christianity as joy and thanksgiving rather than mere morality or ritual. Perhaps the best 20th-century book on Orthodox faith for the non-specialist.ImportantChurch HistoryFourth Crusade & Sack of Constantinople (1204)Western Crusaders diverted to Constantinople and sacked the Christian capital for three days: looting churches, desecrating altars, melting sacred vessels, and establishing a Latin Empire (1204-1261). This devastation deepened the East-West schism irreparably. Many Orthodox consider 1204 more historically decisive than 1054. Countless relics and artworks were stolen.ImportantEschatology & AfterlifeGeneral ResurrectionAt the Second Coming, all the dead will be raised bodily, not merely spiritually. The resurrection body will be transformed and incorruptible (1 Corinthians 15). The whole person, body and soul, participates in either eternal communion with God (paradise) or separation from God (hell). This is why Orthodoxy insists on burial rather than cremation.ImportantHoly Mysteries (Sacraments)Holy Matrimony (Marriage)The Mystery of a man and a woman made one in Christ, whose centre is not an exchange of vows - the Orthodox rite has none - but the crowning. The priest sets crowns on the heads of the bride and groom, crowns of a small kingdom and crowns of martyrs, because a marriage is a life laid down for another. They drink from a common cup and are led three times round the table while the Church sings the hymns of the martyrs. St Paul calls marriage a great mystery concerning Christ and the Church. The Orthodox Church allows a second and a third marriage by economy, after a divorce or a death, with a service of a penitential character, and forbids a fourth. Mixed marriages with other Christians are permitted; marriage outside Christianity is not blessed.ImportantHoly Mysteries (Sacraments)Holy Orders (Ordination)The Mystery by which the Church sets apart its deacons, priests and bishops, by the laying on of hands of a bishop during the Divine Liturgy, each at the point of the service that belongs to his order. A bishop is ordained by several bishops, which is what apostolic succession means in practice: not a private line of descent but the recognition of a whole college. Readers and subdeacons are appointed outside the altar. Married men may be ordained deacon or priest, but a man may not marry after ordination, and since the Quinisext Council bishops have been chosen from the celibate, in practice monks. At each ordination the people are asked to consent and answer Axios, he is worthy. The ancient order of deaconesses, to which St Olympias belonged, fell out of use in the Middle Ages.ImportantSpiritual Life & PracticesHoly RelicsThe bodies of the saints are venerated because grace does not abandon what it has sanctified: the body is not a shell the soul discards but part of the person, destined for resurrection. Scripture already reports the dead man raised by touching the bones of Elisha, and handkerchiefs carried from St Paul. An Orthodox altar is consecrated with relics set within it, and the antimension on every altar table contains them, so that the Liturgy is still served over the martyrs as it was in the catacombs. The veneration given is proskynesis, honour, never the latreia due to God alone, and the honour passes to the One who glorified them.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipLiturgy of St. Basil the GreatThe longer of the two Liturgies, served ten times a year: the first five Sundays of Great Lent, Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday, the eves of the Nativity and the Theophany, and St Basil’s own feast on 1 January. It differs from St John Chrysostom’s almost only in the priest’s prayers, and above all in its anaphora, which recites the whole history of salvation, from creation through the Law and the prophets to the Incarnation and the Cross, before it calls down the Spirit to show the bread to be the body of Christ. It is very probably the prayer St Basil himself prayed at Caesarea in the fourth century, or grew from it. On its days the hymn to the Theotokos is not It is truly meet but All of creation rejoices in thee, O full of grace, whose icon shows the whole creation gathered round her.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipLiturgy of the Presanctified GiftsThe Liturgy of Great Lent’s weekdays, when no full Liturgy is served: Vespers, with communion from gifts consecrated at the Liturgy of the Sunday before. The Council in Trullo appointed it for the weekdays of Lent; parishes keep it chiefly on Wednesdays and Fridays and on the first three days of Holy Week, and it was meant to be served in the evening, so that the faithful came to communion at the end of a day of fasting. Its most remembered moments are its own: the priest lifting a candle to the people with the words, the Light of Christ illumines all; the psalm let my prayer be set forth as incense, sung with prostrations; and the silent Great Entrance, while the choir sings now the powers of heaven serve invisibly with us. The Greek tradition attributes it to St Gregory the Dialogist; scholars place its shape in the Church of Constantinople in the centuries around him.ImportantSpiritual Life & PracticesNepsis (Watchfulness)Spiritual vigilance: the practice of guarding the mind and heart against sinful thoughts (logismoi). Central to Orthodox ascetical theology. The nous (spiritual intellect) must be kept free from distractions and directed toward God. 'Attention is the calling of the soul back to itself' (St. Nikephoros the Monk).ImportantMonasticismOptina PustynFamous Russian monastery in the Kaluga region, renowned for its tradition of spiritual eldership (startchestvo) in the 19th century. Elders like Leonid, Macarius, Ambrose, and Nektary attracted pilgrims from all walks of life: Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy all visited. Fr. Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov is based on Elder Ambrose. Reopened at the end of the Soviet era.ImportantOrthodox Philosophy & EthicsOrthodox Understanding of PersonhoodDrawing from Trinitarian theology, Orthodoxy understands the human person as relational, free, and unique: made in the image of the Trinitarian God. Personhood (hypostasis) is not reducible to nature, individuality, or social role. The Cappadocian distinction between person and nature has profound implications for anthropology, ethics, and social theory.ImportantChurch HistoryOrthodoxy Under Ottoman RuleThe four centuries and more in which most Orthodox Christians lived under the Ottoman Sultans, from the fall of Constantinople until the Balkan nations won their freedom one by one, through the nineteenth century and the Balkan wars of 1912. The Sultan made the Ecumenical Patriarch head of all the Orthodox of the empire, the Rum millet, answerable for them in civil matters as well as spiritual, which gave the Church both a protected place and a political burden: patriarchs were deposed at will, and Gregory V was hanged in 1821. Christians paid heavier taxes, could not bear arms, and in the Balkans gave up boys to the child levy. Those who were killed for refusing Islam, or for returning to Christ after denying Him, are the Neomartyrs. The Church kept the faith, the language and the schools, and at its end the Kollyvades, St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth among them, gave it the Philokalia.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipOrthros / Matins (Morning Service)The morning service, Orthros, meant for the hours before dawn. In Greek parishes it usually comes on the morning itself, just before the Liturgy; in Russian use it is joined to Vespers the evening before as the All-Night Vigil. After its opening prayers come the Six Psalms, read with the lights lowered, then the psalter in its portion for the day, and at its heart is the canon: nine odes built on the nine biblical canticles, carrying the poetry of the feast or the saint of the day. Before the ninth ode the deacon censes the whole church while the Song of the Theotokos is sung, on most days with More honourable than the cherubim after every verse. Then come the Praises, Psalms 148 to 150, and on Sundays and feasts the priest’s cry Glory to Thee who hast shown us the light, answered by the Great Doxology, Glory to God in the highest. On Sundays one of the eleven Resurrection Gospels is read at the altar, and the book is brought out for the people to venerate.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsPalm Sunday (Entry into Jerusalem)Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, greeted by crowds waving palm branches and crying 'Hosanna!' Celebrated the Sunday before Pascha. The faithful carry palm or willow branches blessed at the service. One of the 12 Great Feasts. Marks the beginning of Holy Week.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsPatriarchate of JerusalemOne of the four ancient patriarchates, guardian of the Holy Places. The Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre (Greek monks) has maintained custody of the holiest Christian sites, among them the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity and the Tomb of the Theotokos, for centuries. The smallest patriarchate by population but immense in spiritual significance.ImportantEschatology & AfterlifePrayer for the DepartedThe Church prays for her dead, and has from the beginning: the departed are commemorated at every Liturgy, particles are lifted for them at the Proskomedia, and the memorial services, the Panikhida and the Trisagion for the dead, are served on the third, ninth and fortieth days and at the year's turning. Boiled wheat, kollyva, is blessed and eaten, because the grain must fall into the ground and die. Orthodoxy affirms that these prayers help the departed and does not explain how: it declines to describe a mechanism, a place of purgation, or a tariff of satisfaction, and holds that the state of the departed is not finally fixed until the Last Judgment.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtRublev's Trinity IconThe most famous Orthodox icon, painted by St. Andrei Rublev (c. 1411-1427) for the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. Depicts the three angels who visited Abraham (Genesis 18) as an image of the Holy Trinity. Remarkable for its circular composition suggesting the mutual love (perichoresis) of the Three Persons. A theological masterpiece.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsRussian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate)The Church of Moscow and all Rus, by far the largest of the Orthodox Churches. It chose its own metropolitan in 1448, after Constantinople accepted union with Rome at Florence, and became a patriarchate in 1589; Peter the Great put it under a Synod in 1721, and the council of 1917 restored the patriarchate in the same weeks the Bolsheviks took power. Under Soviet rule tens of thousands of its clergy, monks and nuns were shot or died in the camps, and it has glorified more than a thousand of them by name as New Martyrs and Confessors. The Church Outside Russia, formed by emigré bishops, was reconciled with it in 2007. Patriarch Kirill has led it since 2009. In 2018 it broke communion with Constantinople over Ukraine. Its heart is still the Lavra of St Sergius at Sergiev Posad, and its saints, from Seraphim of Sarov to Matrona of Moscow, are loved across the whole Orthodox world.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSs. Boris and Gleb, the Passion-bearersTwo young sons of St Vladimir, killed in 1015 on the orders of their elder brother Sviatopolk in the struggle for Kiev. Boris had his father’s army with him and would not lead it against his brother; he sent it away and waited, praying, for the men who came to kill him, and Gleb was killed soon after. They were not martyred for confessing the faith, and the Russian Church made them the first of its saints anyway, as passion-bearers: those who accept an unjust death without resisting it, in the likeness of Christ. The category is the Russian Church’s own and begins with them. Feast: July 24.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSs. Constantine & HelenThe emperor who ended the persecution and the mother who went looking for the places of the Gospel, kept together on one day as Equal-to-the-Apostles. Constantine saw the sign of the cross before the battle at the Milvian Bridge in 312, gave the Church its freedom the next year, called the bishops to Nicaea in 325, and founded Constantinople. He was baptised only on his deathbed in 337, by a bishop of Arian sympathies, and the Church has not pretended otherwise. Helena, in her seventies, travelled to the Holy Land around 326, where the Cross was found at Golgotha, and her son built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the place and churches at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. The Exaltation of the Cross keeps what she found. Feast: May 21.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Alexander NevskyPrince of Novgorod and then Grand Prince of Vladimir in the century of the Mongol conquest. He beat the Swedes on the Neva in 1240, which gave him his name, and the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus in 1242, and he turned down the Pope’s offer of alliance against the Mongols on the condition of submitting to Rome. To the Mongols he made himself a tributary and went to the Horde four times to plead for his people, choosing, as the Church remembers it, to save Rus by humility where he could not save it by arms. He took the monastic schema on his deathbed and died in 1263. Feast: November 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Ambrose of MilanThe Roman governor of northern Italy who went into the cathedral of Milan in 374 to keep order at a disputed election and heard the crowd shout for him to be bishop; he was not yet baptised, and was baptised and consecrated within a week. He held the city for the Creed of Nicaea against the Arian empress, occupying a church with his people and teaching them hymns to sing through the siege, which is how the West learned to sing hymns in church. When the emperor Theodosius had thousands massacred at Thessalonica in 390, Ambrose kept him from communion until he did public penance, and he did. He baptised Augustine. Feast: December 7.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Ambrose of OptinaAlexander Grenkov, a seminary teacher who became a monk of the Optina hermitage and, from 1860, its elder, receiving from dawn to night the stream of people who came to him from every class: peasants with a sick cow, students losing their faith, and writers, Dostoevsky after the death of his son and Tolstoy more than once. His counsel was short, homely and often funny, and he was almost always ill. He founded the women’s monastery at Shamordino and died there in 1891. The eldership that Optina made famous, handed down from St Paisius Velichkovsky, reached its height in him. Glorified in 1988. Feast: October 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Amphilochius of Iconium (c. 340-394)Born at Caesarea in Cappadocia, the son of another Amphilochius, brother of Nonna, which made him cousin to Gregory the Theologian. He studied rhetoric under Libanius at Antioch and practised law in Constantinople, then left it for three years of prayer at Ozizala in Cappadocia, writing to Gregory and to Basil. In 374, at Basil’s urging, he became bishop of Iconium, and it was at his asking that Basil wrote On the Holy Spirit, which is addressed to him. He held a synod at Iconium on the divinity of the Spirit, sat at the Second Ecumenical Council in 381, and his verses to Seleucus, which list the books of Scripture, stand among the canons of the Church. Feast: November 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Andrew of CreteArchbishop of Gortyna in Crete and the hymnographer who gave the Church the canon as a form. His Great Canon, two hundred and fifty troparia walking through the whole of Scripture and turning every figure in it back on the singer, is read in four parts in the first week of Great Lent and entire on the Thursday of the fifth week. He was born mute by tradition and spoke first at the age of seven after receiving communion, which the Church has never tired of pointing out about the man who then wrote more hymns than almost anyone. Feast: July 4.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Anthony of the Kiev CavesA man of Liubech who went to the Holy Mountain as a young man, was tonsured there, and was sent back to Rus by his abbot to plant monasticism in it. He dug himself a cave in the bluffs above the Dnieper at Kiev around 1051 and lived there in silence; disciples came and dug their own, and from those caves grew the Lavra of the Caves. He left the building of the community to St Theodosius, who gave it the rule of the Stoudios monastery, and went on living underground. The two of them are the fathers of Russian monasticism, and the saints of the Caves lie in the tunnels they dug. He died in 1073. Feast: July 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Arsenios of CappadociaThe priest and schoolmaster of Farasa, a Greek village in Cappadocia, for more than fifty years, who taught the children their letters and the whole village their faith and was sought by Christians and Muslims alike for healing. He baptised a baby of the village in 1924 and gave him his own name, Arsenios, saying he would leave a monk behind him: the child became St Paisios. That year the exchange of populations uprooted Farasa, and he walked with his people to the sea and brought them to Greece, and died on Corfu forty days after landing, as he had said he would. Glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1986. Feast: November 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Arsenios the GreatA Roman of senatorial rank, by tradition tutor to the sons of the emperor Theodosius, who left the palace secretly around 394 and went to the monks of Scetis. The Sayings keep the voice he heard: Arsenios, flee from men and you will be saved; and again: flee, keep silence, be still, for these are the roots of sinlessness. He lived fifty-five years in the desert, so silent that visitors went away without a word from him, and remembered for the tears he shed at his work all his life. He died around 449 near Memphis, saying that the fear he felt at that hour had been with him since the day he became a monk. Feast: May 8.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Artemius the Great Martyr (d. 362)A general of Constantine the Great, who made him a patrician, and of his son Constantius, under whom he commanded in Egypt: a papyrus of 360 names Flavius Artemius as its dux. In 357 Constantius sent him to Patras for the relics of the Apostle Andrew, and his Passion adds those of Luke and Timothy, all laid in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. When Julian, who had turned back to the gods, persecuted the Church, Artemius went to him at Antioch, confessed Christ to his face and rebuked him, and in 362 he was tortured and beheaded. The deaconess Ariste carried his body to Constantinople, where his shrine became known for healing: a book of forty-five of his miracles, written down late in the seventh century, is chiefly of men cured of hernias, and he is asked for help with them still. Feast: October 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Barbara the Great MartyrBy the account the Church reads, the daughter of a rich pagan who shut her in a tower to keep her from suitors and from the Christians. She became a Christian in secret, and had a third window cut into the bath house he was building for her, for the Trinity. When he found out he handed her over to the governor, and after torture he beheaded her himself, and was killed by lightning on the way home. Because of that death she has long been prayed to by those who fear a sudden end without repentance, and she is loved across the Orthodox world, from the Levant to Russia, where the dish of boiled wheat made on her day in some places carries her name. Feast: December 4.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Catherine of AlexandriaBy the account the Church reads, a young noblewoman of Alexandria of great learning who confronted the emperor at a pagan festival, was set to debate fifty philosophers, and converted them, and they were burned for it. A spiked wheel meant for her broke, and she was beheaded. The tradition holds that angels carried her body to Mount Sinai, and the monastery there has borne her name since the Middle Ages and keeps her relics. Historians cannot find her in the early record, and the Church keeps her anyway as what she has always been in the liturgy: the patron of those who seek wisdom and a witness that learning belongs to Christ. Feast: November 25.ImportantMonasticismSt. Catherine's Monastery (Sinai)The oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world, built at the foot of Mount Sinai by Emperor Justinian (6th century). Contains the world's second-largest collection of ancient manuscripts (after the Vatican), including leaves of the Codex Sinaiticus. Houses irreplaceable icons surviving Iconoclasm because the monastery was in Muslim-held territory. A UNESCO World Heritage site.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Clement of OhridA disciple of Sts Cyril and Methodius who was driven out of Moravia with the others after Methodius died and came to Bulgaria, where Prince Boris sent him to Ohrid to teach. In seven years he trained thousands of Slavic clergy, and he is credited with making the Cyrillic alphabet or bringing it into use, so that the Church of the Slavs could read in letters simpler than his teachers’ Glagolitic. He wrote sermons for the feasts in plain Slavonic for priests to read aloud, and in 893 became the first bishop of Slavic birth. He died in 916 and is one of the Seven Holy Enlighteners of the Bulgarian Church. Feast: July 27.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Clement of Rome (d. c. 101)Clement, of a noble Roman family and learned in Greek, came to the faith through the Apostle Peter and became, by the old lists, the third bishop of Rome after him, from about 92. His letter from the church of Rome to the church of Corinth, written about 96 to heal a quarrel in which its presbyters had been thrown out, is the oldest Christian writing outside the New Testament whose author is known. Tradition says he was exiled to the quarries of the Crimea, where many came to baptism through him, and that he was thrown into the sea with an anchor round his neck. In 861 Constantine, the future St Cyril, found relics held to be his at Chersonesos and carried them to Rome. Feast: November 24.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Dorotheos of GazaA well-educated young man who entered the monastery of Abba Seridos near Gaza in the sixth century under the guidance of the two great elders Barsanuphius and John, whose letters to him survive, and who later founded a monastery of his own. His Discourses to his monks are the most practical book of the ascetic tradition and have been read aloud in monasteries for fourteen hundred years. The most famous page in them draws a circle with God at the centre and people on the lines running in toward Him: the nearer they come to God, the nearer they come to one another, and the nearer to one another, the nearer to God. Feast: August 13.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Elizabeth the New MartyrPrincess Elisabeth of Hesse, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the sister of the last Empress of Russia, married the Grand Duke Sergei and was received into the Orthodox Church of her own choice. When her husband was killed by a revolutionary’s bomb in 1905 she went to the prison and asked his killer to repent. She sold her jewels, founded the Convent of Sts Martha and Mary in Moscow for nursing and the poor, and was its abbess. Arrested in 1918, she was thrown alive down a mine shaft at Alapaevsk with her companions, where they were heard singing. Her body lies in Jerusalem, at the church of St Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives. Glorified by the Church Abroad in 1981 and by Moscow in 1992. Feast: July 5 (on the Old Calendar, 18 July).ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Epiphanius of CyprusA Palestinian monk who knew Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, Coptic and some Latin, and was made bishop of Salamis in Cyprus in 367 and held it thirty-six years. His Panarion, the Medicine Chest, describes eighty heresies and gives the remedy for each, and is for many of them the only record that survives. He fought Origenism with a zeal that took him to Constantinople in extreme old age to oppose St John Chrysostom, whom he had been misled about, and he left the city and died at sea on the way home in 403. Iconoclasts later circulated writings against images under his name, which the Seventh Council did not accept as his. His Ancoratus contains a creed close to the one the Church confesses. Feast: May 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Euthymius the GreatAn Armenian priest from Melitene who went to Palestine in 406 and became the father of the monks of the Judaean desert, founding lavras where hermits lived alone in the week and came together on Saturday and Sunday. He baptised an Arab chieftain and his tribe, who settled beside the lavra and were given a bishop of their own. After Chalcedon, when most of the monks of Palestine rejected it, he held to it almost alone, and it was his counsel that brought the Empress Eudocia back into communion. His disciples included St Sabbas. He died in 473 aged ninety-six. Feast: January 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. George the Great Martyr (c. 275-303)A Roman officer from a Christian family of Cappadocia and Palestine, martyred at Nicomedia in 303 when Diocletian began the last and greatest persecution, and among the first of the martyrs whose cult spread across the whole Church. The Church calls him Great Martyr and Trophy-bearer, and his church at Lydda, where he was buried, was a place of pilgrimage within a century. The dragon on his icons is later than his cult by several hundred years and is read as it is painted: the victory of faith over the enemy, a warrior who belongs to Christ. He is the patron of Georgia and of England, of soldiers and farmers, and his feast in spring is one of the great days of the year in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Feast: April 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Germanus of ConstantinoplePatriarch of Constantinople from 715, who refused the emperor Leo III when he began the war on the icons in 726 and was deposed four years later rather than sign. His defence of the icons is cited by the Seventh Council. His treatise On the Divine Liturgy, explaining each part of the service as a moment in the life of Christ and the worship of heaven, was the standard Byzantine commentary on the Liturgy for centuries, and he wrote hymns the Church still sings on the feasts of the Theotokos. He died in retirement around 740. Feast: May 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory of SinaiA monk of Sinai in the fourteenth century who learned the prayer of the heart from an elder on Crete and came to the Holy Mountain to find almost no one practising it. He taught it there, and then, when raiders made Athos unsafe, moved to Paroria in the mountains between Byzantium and Bulgaria, where he founded a monastery that trained Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek monks together. Through his disciples, St Theodosius of Tarnovo above all, hesychasm passed into the Slavic churches a generation before it reached Russia. His writings on prayer are in the Philokalia. He died in 1346. Feast: August 8.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory the IlluminatorThe apostle of Armenia. Raised a Christian at Caesarea in Cappadocia, he returned to Armenia and was thrown by King Tiridates III into a pit at Khor Virap, where tradition keeps him for thirteen years. When the king fell into madness it was Gregory, brought up out of the pit, who healed him, and around the turn of the fourth century Tiridates was baptised and Armenia became the first kingdom to confess Christ. Gregory was consecrated at Caesarea and organised the Church of his country, and his cathedral at Etchmiadzin still stands. He lived long before Chalcedon divided the Armenian Church from the Orthodox, and both keep him. Feast: September 30.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory the Wonderworker (c. 210-270)Born at Neocaesarea in Pontus about 210, of pagan parents of rank, he set out to study law and found instead the school of Origen at Caesarea in Palestine, where he stayed five years and became a Christian. Made bishop of his own city, he found seventeen Christians there, and it is said that when he died, about 270, seventeen pagans were left. Gregory of Nyssa wrote his Life, which tells how the Theotokos and John the Theologian appeared to him and gave him the confession of the Trinity that bears his name; Basil the Great cites him in On the Holy Spirit as a witness to the faith, which Basil’s grandmother Macrina had learned from his disciples. The wonders he worked in Pontus gave him his name. Feast: November 17.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Gregory V of ConstantinoplePatriarch of Constantinople three times, a builder of schools and printer of books, who was on the patriarchal throne when the Greek War of Independence began in 1821. Pressed by the Sultan, he had pronounced an excommunication of the rising, and it did not save him or his flock. On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1821, after serving the Liturgy, he was hanged in his vestments from the main gate of the Patriarchate, and his body was thrown into the Bosphorus; Greek sailors recovered it and took it to Odessa, and it was brought to Athens in 1871. The gate has been kept shut ever since. Glorified in 1921. Feast: April 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Herman of Alaska (c. 1756-1836)One of the monks of Valaam sent in 1794 with the mission to Kodiak, in what was then Russian America, and the one who stayed. He was never ordained. He defended the Aleut and Alutiiq people against the traders of the Russian-American Company who were abusing them, and was hated by the company for it. He moved to Spruce Island, which he called New Valaam, kept a garden and a school for orphans, and nursed the sick through an epidemic when no one else would. He told the children that from this day, from this hour, from this minute, we should love God above all. He died in 1836 and was the first saint glorified in America, by the Orthodox Church in America in 1970. Feast: August 9.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Innocent of AlaskaA married priest from Irkutsk who volunteered for the Aleutians, sailed with his family to Unalaska in 1824, and stayed in America for most of forty years. He built his own church and his own furniture, learned Unangan, made an alphabet for it, translated the Gospel of Matthew and wrote in it an Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven that is still in print. He became bishop of Kamchatka and the Aleutians after his wife died, and ended as Metropolitan of Moscow. The Orthodox mission in America is his work as much as anyone’s. Glorified in 1977. Feast: March 31.ImportantPsalmody & HymnographySt. John KoukouzelisThe greatest of Byzantine composers, a boy from Dyrrachium taken into the imperial choir at Constantinople for his voice, who fled the court and hid on Athos as a goatherd until someone recognised the singing. He reformed the notation, composed and arranged an enormous repertory, and gave his name to the kalophonic or beautified style, in which a short text is unfolded at very great length with wordless syllables woven into it. The Theotokos is said to have appeared to him in the chapel where he chanted and to have left a gold coin in his hand. Feast: October 1.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John of Kronstadt (1829-1908)A parish priest for fifty-three years in one place: St Andrew’s Cathedral at Kronstadt, the naval base outside Petersburg, where he arrived in 1855 and found a town of dockers, exiles and drunks. He served the Liturgy every day, which was nearly unheard of, and communed his people often, which was rarer. He founded a House of Industry in 1882 with workshops, a school, a shelter and a free dining hall, and gave away nearly everything that was given to him. By the end thousands came to each Liturgy, and he heard their sins in a general confession because no one man could hear them one by one. His diary, My Life in Christ, is still one of the most read books of Russian spirituality. Glorified by the Church Abroad in 1964 and by Moscow in 1990. Feast: December 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John of RilaA Bulgarian who gave away everything as a young man and went into the mountains to live alone, first in a hollow oak and then in a cave in the Rila range, where he lived on plants and prayer for decades. Disciples gathered in spite of him, and the monastery they built became the Rila Monastery, which kept Bulgarian learning and faith alive through the Ottoman centuries. The tsar came to see him and he refused the gifts. His Testament to his disciples warns them against money and against honours. He died in 946 and is the patron of Bulgaria. Feast: October 19.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. John the Merciful (d. 619)John was born at Amathus in Cyprus to a rich family, and was married and widowed before the people of Alexandria asked the emperor Heraclius for him as their patriarch, about 610. He held that whoever is able to give is bound to: he had the city’s poor counted, some seven thousand five hundred of them, fed them every day and called them his masters, and he spent the church’s wealth ransoming captives and sheltering the refugees who fled the Persian conquest of Palestine. When the Persians came against Alexandria he sailed home to Cyprus, and he died at Amathus in 619. His Life was written by a Cypriot bishop, Leontius of Neapolis, and Limassol keeps his feast in his own church. Feast: November 12.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Joseph the HesychastThe man through whom the Jesus Prayer came back to Athos in the twentieth century. He lived in the caves of the Little St Anne skete in real poverty, kept the night vigil and the prayer of the heart with a strictness that alarmed people, and taught a small brotherhood by letter and by example. When he died in 1959 the Holy Mountain was emptying. His disciples and their disciples afterwards took over and refilled Philotheou, Karakallou, Xeropotamou, Konstamonitou and Vatopaidi, and founded houses in Greece, Cyprus and America, so that most of the Athonite revival traces back to that cave. Glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2020. Feast: August 16.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Justin Martyr (c. 100-165)A philosopher from Flavia Neapolis in Samaria who went through the schools - Stoic, Peripatetic, Pythagorean, Platonist - and was brought to Christ by an old man on a beach who told him the prophets had seen what the philosophers were looking for. He kept his philosopher’s cloak, opened a school in Rome, and wrote the first reasoned defences of the faith addressed to the emperors. His teaching that seeds of the Word were scattered among the Greeks, so that whatever anyone said well belongs to Christians, gave the Church a way to receive what was true in philosophy. His First Apology contains the oldest description of a Sunday Eucharist outside the New Testament. Denounced by a rival, he was beheaded in Rome with six of his students around 165. Feast: June 1.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Justin PopovicSerbian monk, theologian and confessor, kept for decades under the communist authorities in the monastery of Celije where he was forbidden to teach and wrote anyway. His Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church runs to three volumes and his Lives of the Saints to twelve, written by hand, month by month, for a Church that had lost the books. His theme is that the Church is the God-man Christ extended through the ages, and that any humanism which stops at man is therefore an amputation. He was a sharp critic of ecumenism as practised in his lifetime and said so in print at some cost. Glorified by the Serbian Church in 2010. Feast: June 1.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Lazarus of the Four DaysThe friend of Christ from Bethany, whose death made Jesus weep and whom He called out of the tomb after four days, still bound in the grave clothes. The chief priests plotted to kill him as well, because many believed on his account. The tradition of the Church of Cyprus is that he fled there, was made bishop of Kition by Barnabas and Paul, and lived thirty more years; his tomb is under the church that bears his name in Larnaca, where bones were found beneath the altar in 1972. The whole Church keeps the Saturday before Palm Sunday as his, Lazarus Saturday, when the Resurrection is announced a week early. Feast: October 17.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Leo the Great, Pope of RomeBishop of Rome from 440 to 461, whom the Orthodox Church keeps among the Fathers. His letter to Flavian of Constantinople, the Tome, set out that Christ is one Person in two natures, each doing what belongs to it, and at Chalcedon it was read aloud and received with the acclamation that Peter had spoken through Leo and that Cyril had taught the same: the bishops accepted it because they had checked it against St Cyril, not because Rome had spoken. He himself refused to accept the council’s twenty-eighth canon, which gave Constantinople the second place. He met Attila by the Mincio in northern Italy in 452 and Rome was spared. Feast: February 18.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Longinus the CenturionThe centurion in charge at the Crucifixion, who, when the earth shook as Christ died, said: "Truly this was the Son of God" (Matthew 27:54). Tradition names him Longinus, a Cappadocian serving under Pilate in the reign of Tiberius, and gives his unit the sealing and the guard of the tomb as well, so that he was a witness of the Resurrection too. He gave up his rank and his wealth and went home to Cappadocia with two of his men to preach it. When soldiers came to Cappadocia to kill him, he received them as his guests and had his grave made ready, and he and his two companions were beheaded. His head was carried to Jerusalem as proof of his death, and a blind widow of Cappadocia, shown in a dream where it lay, found it outside the city and received her sight. Feast: October 16.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Macarius the GreatA camel driver from the Nile delta who went into the desert of Scetis at thirty and stayed sixty years, and around whom one of the four great monastic settlements of Egypt grew. The Sayings preserve him as one of the desert’s most quoted fathers, and as the one who answered a brother asking how to be saved by telling him to go and speak to the dead, praise them and insult them, and learn from their silence. The Spiritual Homilies that circulate under his name are of disputed authorship and are read for their teaching on the heart as the place where God is met, which is one of the springs of the hesychast tradition. Feast: January 19.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Macrina the YoungerThe eldest of the ten children of a Cappadocian family that gave the Church three bishops, and by the account of her brother Gregory of Nyssa the one who taught them all. After her betrothed died she refused to marry, turned the family estate at Annesi into a community of women where she and her mother lived with their former servants as equals, and drew her brother Basil, back from Athens full of himself, toward the monastic life. Gregory wrote her Life, and set his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection at her deathbed, where she argues with him about death and wins. She died in 379. Feast: July 19.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Maria of ParisElizabeth Pilenko, a poet of the Petersburg literary world and a revolutionary, deputy mayor of Anapa in 1918, who emigrated to Paris, buried a daughter, and was tonsured a nun in 1932 on the condition that she would not be sent to a convent. She rented a house in the rue de Lourmel and filled it with the destitute: a hostel, a canteen, a chapel she decorated herself. Under the German occupation she and Fr Dimitri Klepinin issued baptismal certificates to Jews and hid people in the house. She was arrested in 1943 and died at Ravensbruck on 31 March 1945, sent to the gas chamber - by a tradition that came from the camp, in place of another woman. Glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2004 with her son and Fr Dimitri. Feast: July 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Marina the Great MartyrBy the account the Church reads, a girl of fifteen at Antioch in Pisidia, the daughter of a pagan priest, brought up by a Christian nurse, who refused the governor both his gods and his proposal of marriage. In prison, the story goes, the devil came to her and she seized him and beat him with a hammer, which is how she is painted; she was beheaded around 304. The West knows her as Margaret. Her right hand is kept at the Vatopedi monastery on the Holy Mountain, and she is loved especially by the islands, where her day is one of the feasts of the summer. Feast: July 17.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Mark of Ephesus (1394-1444)Manuel Eugenikos, a teacher of rhetoric who became a monk and, in 1437, Metropolitan of Ephesus, the see of St John, in order to go to the council of union at Ferrara and Florence as the leading theologian of the Greek delegation. For fifteen months, with the empire asking for Western help against the Turks, he argued the Filioque, purgatory, the epiclesis and the papal claims, and when the decree of union was put before the Greeks he alone of the bishops present would not sign it. At home he became the voice of those who rejected it, and they were most of the Church: the clergy and people of Constantinople would not receive the union, and the Eastern patriarchs repudiated it. He died in 1444, asking that no one who had accepted it pray at his funeral. Glorified in 1734. Feast: January 19.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Mary MagdaleneA woman of Magdala in Galilee out of whom Christ cast seven demons, who followed Him and provided for Him, stood at the cross when the disciples had fled, came to the tomb with myrrh before dawn, and was the first to see Him risen, sent by Him to tell the Apostles. The Church calls her Equal-to-the-Apostles. The Orthodox tradition has never made her the sinful woman of Luke 7: that identification comes from a sermon of Pope Gregory the Great in 591, and it is the reason the West painted her as a penitent for a thousand years. The East kept her as a witness. By tradition she preached in Rome and came before Tiberius with a red egg, the reason for the eggs of Pascha, and died at Ephesus. Feast: July 22.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Matrona of MoscowBorn blind and without eyes in a village in Tula province in 1881, and unable to walk from the age of seventeen. She spent the Soviet decades moved from one room to another across Moscow by whoever would take her, praying with the stream of people who found her, and she died in 1952 saying they should come to her grave and speak to her as if she were alive. They did, in such numbers that the grave became one of the few open places of pilgrimage in the Soviet Union. Glorified in 1999 and now among the most visited saints in Russia. Feast: April 19 (on the Old Calendar, 2 May).ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Matthew the EvangelistLevi, a tax collector at Capernaum, a collaborator in the eyes of his people, who got up from his table when Christ said follow me and gave a dinner for his fellow publicans, at which the Pharisees asked why the Teacher ate with sinners. His Gospel was written, by the earliest account, for Jews who had believed, and shows Christ fulfilling the Law and the prophets at every turn; it holds the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s Prayer in the form the Church says it. Tradition sends him to preach in the East and has him die a martyr. Feast: November 16.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Menas the Great Martyr (d. c. 304)An Egyptian, born to pagan parents in the middle of the third century and a Christian from his youth, who served with distinction in the Roman cavalry. When Diocletian and Maximian ordered the persecution he laid down his command and withdrew to live as an ascetic; at about fifty he came down into the city on a pagan feast day, confessed Christ before the crowd, and was imprisoned, tortured and beheaded, about 304, at Cotyaeum in Phrygia by the Greek synaxarion. His body was carried home to Egypt, and his shrine at Abu Mena, west of Alexandria, became one of the great pilgrimages of the ancient world, its little clay flasks of oil taken home all round the Mediterranean. The Patriarchate of Alexandria keeps him as its own, and Heraklion in Crete as its patron since the Easter of 1826, when the city’s Christians believed he saved them. Feast: November 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Methodius the ConfessorA monk from Syracuse in Sicily who carried a letter from the Pope defending the icons to the iconoclast emperor Michael II, and was flogged and shut for years in a tomb on an island with two thieves. Freed, he went on defending the icons. In 843, after the death of the last iconoclast emperor, the Empress Theodora had him made Patriarch, and on the first Sunday of Lent that year they carried the icons back into Hagia Sophia: the Triumph of Orthodoxy, which the Church keeps on that Sunday every year and for which the Synodikon was drawn up. He died in 847. Feast: June 14.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Moses the BlackAn Ethiopian slave in Egypt, dismissed by his master for theft and violence, who became the leader of a band of robbers and was feared along the Nile, and then became a monk at Scetis and a priest. The Sayings keep him as the father who would not judge: summoned to a council to condemn a brother, he came carrying a leaking jug of water, and said, my sins run out behind me and I do not see them, and I have come today to judge the sins of another. When Berber raiders came in about 405 he told his brothers to flee and stayed, with seven who would not leave him, and they were killed. Feast: August 28.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nicholas CabasilasA layman of Thessalonica in the fourteenth century, a court official and friend of emperors, who wrote two of the finest books of Orthodox theology without ever being ordained. His Commentary on the Divine Liturgy explains the service as the work of Christ and the offering of the whole Church, and defends the epiclesis against the Latin theologians of his day. The Life in Christ shows the Christian life as flowing from baptism, chrismation and communion rather than from private effort: the mysteries are Christ Himself given, and holiness is living what one has received. He stood with St Gregory Palamas. The Ecumenical Patriarchate glorified him in 1983. Feast: June 20.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nicholas of JapanIvan Kasatkin, a seminarian from Smolensk, read an account of Japan and volunteered for the consular chapel at Hakodate in 1861. He gave eight years to the language, the history and the Buddhist and Shinto classics before he attempted to preach, on the principle that a missionary who has not understood a people has nothing to say to them. His first convert was Sawabe Takuma, a Shinto priest and swordsman who came to kill him and stayed to argue. He translated the services and much of the Scriptures into Japanese, built the cathedral in Tokyo, and in the war of 1904 told the Japanese Orthodox to pray for their own country while he himself did not serve, and cared for the Russian prisoners. Glorified in 1970. Feast: February 3.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nil SorskyA monk who went to the Holy Mountain in the fifteenth century, learned the prayer of the heart there, and came home to found a skete in the forests on the Sora river, where a few monks lived in separate cells, worked with their hands and owned nothing. He wrote a rule for skete life drawn from the Fathers of the Philokalia. At the council of 1503 he spoke for those who held that monasteries should not own villages and serfs, against St Joseph of Volokolamsk, and lost; the two are both saints, and the argument between the non-possessors and the possessors ran through Russian monasticism for centuries. He died in 1508. Feast: May 7.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Nino, Equal-to-the-ApostlesA young woman from Cappadocia who, by the Georgian tradition, came to Kartli in the fourth century as a captive or a pilgrim carrying a cross made of two vine branches bound with her own hair. She lived by the royal city of Mtskheta, prayed, and healed: a child, then Queen Nana. King Mirian held out until, lost in a sudden darkness on a hunt, he prayed to the God of Nino and saw the light return; he and his people were baptised, and he asked the emperor for priests. The church of Svetitskhoveli rose over the place where she prayed. She died at Bodbe in Kakheti, where she is buried and where a convent keeps her grave, and her vine cross is the emblem of the Georgian Church. Feast: January 14.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Olga, Equal-to-the-ApostlesPrincess of Kiev, the widow of Prince Igor, whom the Drevlians killed, and whose revenge on them the chronicle tells without softening. Ruling for her young son, she went to Constantinople around 957 and was baptised there, the first of the ruling house of Rus to become a Christian. She could not persuade her son Sviatoslav, who said his warriors would laugh at him, but she raised her grandson Vladimir, who would baptise the land. She died in 969 and asked for a Christian burial without a pagan feast. The Church calls her the morning star before the sun. Feast: July 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Pachomius the GreatThe father of communal monasticism. A conscript in the Roman army, he was fed by Christians at Thebes who expected nothing for it, and he resolved to serve their God. After years as a hermit he founded at Tabennisi a monastery where monks lived under one roof, one rule, one table and one superior, which is the form almost every monastery in the world has kept since. His Rule reached the West through the translation of St Jerome and stands behind the Rule of St Benedict. By his death nine monasteries and two convents followed it. Feast: May 15.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Paisius Velichkovsky (1722-1794)A priest’s son from Poltava who left the Kiev Academy because it taught him nothing he wanted to know, wandered the monasteries of Moldavia and came to the Holy Mountain, where he began collecting and correcting the Greek texts on the prayer of the heart. He gathered a brotherhood that grew to several hundred and moved it across the Danube to Moldavia, to Dragomirna, Secu and finally Neamt, where the brothers served in Slavonic and Romanian and copied and translated day and night. His Slavonic Philokalia, printed in Moscow in 1793, carried hesychasm north into Russia, and through his disciples the eldership of Optina and the Russian startsy began. He died at Neamt in 1794. Glorified by the Romanian Church in 1988. Feast: November 15.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Parascheva of IasiAn eleventh-century woman from Epivates on the Sea of Marmara who gave away her clothes to a beggar as a child, left home, and lived as a solitary in the desert of the Jordan until she was warned in a dream to go home to die. Her relics made a long journey after her, following the fortunes of the Orthodox peoples: to Tarnovo in Bulgaria, to Belgrade, to Constantinople, and in 1641 to Iasi in Moldavia, where they are kept in the cathedral. Every October hundreds of thousands of pilgrims queue for days to venerate them. She is called Petka among the Serbs and Bulgarians. Feast: October 14.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Paraskevi of RomeA second-century Christian of Rome named for Friday, the day of the Cross, because she was born on one. By the account the Church reads, she gave away her inheritance, preached, and was tortured under Antoninus Pius, and restored the sight of an emperor who had been blinded; she was beheaded. The Church prays to her for the healing of eyes and she is painted holding a dish with two eyes on it. There are chapels to her and springs named for her across Greece, Cyprus and the Balkans, and her day at the height of summer is a festival in hundreds of villages. Feast: July 26.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Photius the Great (c. 810-893)The most learned man of ninth-century Byzantium, a layman and imperial secretary, made Patriarch of Constantinople in 858 in six days, from layman to patriarch, when his predecessor was forced out. Pope Nicholas I refused to recognise him, and the quarrel that followed was the first open break between Rome and the East. Photius answered on the ground that mattered: in his encyclical of 867 and his Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit he named the Filioque, then spreading in the West, as a change to the Creed and an error about the Trinity. Deposed and restored, he presided at the council of 879-880, which Rome’s own legates attended and which forbade any addition to the Creed. It was under him that Cyril and Methodius went to the Slavs. His Bibliotheca preserves summaries and extracts of hundreds of ancient books, many of them otherwise lost. Feast: February 6.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Polycarp of Smyrna (c. 69-155)Bishop of Smyrna, taught by the Apostle John and teacher in his turn of St Irenaeus. In old age he travelled to Rome to talk with its bishop about the date of Pascha, and the two parted in peace keeping different customs, which the Church has remembered ever since as the way a disagreement about practice should end. Arrested at eighty-six and told to curse Christ to save himself, he answered: eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong; how can I blaspheme my King who saved me? The account of his death, written by his own church to another, is the oldest martyrdom narrative outside the New Testament, and the first place the Church is seen keeping the day of a martyr’s death as his birthday. Feast: February 23.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Raphael of BrooklynRaphael Hawaweeny, born in Beirut to a Damascene family, educated at Halki and the Kiev Academy, who came to New York in 1895 at the request of the Syrian Orthodox immigrants there, who had no priest who spoke their language. He built St Nicholas Cathedral in Brooklyn, travelled the continent on foot and by rail looking for scattered Orthodox families, founded some thirty parishes and an Arabic journal, and in 1904 became the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in North America, at the hands of St Tikhon. He died in 1915. Glorified by the Orthodox Church in America and the Antiochian Archdiocese in 2000. Feast: February 27.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Romanos the Melodist (c. 490-556)A Syrian from Emesa, a deacon at Beirut and then at the church of the Theotokos in Constantinople, who by tradition had no gift for singing until, on the eve of the Nativity, the Mother of God appeared to him in sleep and gave him a scroll to eat, and he rose and sang Today the Virgin gives birth to the One above all being. That hymn is still sung on the feast. He is the master of the kontakion, the long sung sermon in verse, with a refrain taken up by the people after every stanza, in which Scripture is dramatised with dialogue between its characters. Tradition credits him with a thousand; about sixty survive that are certainly his. The Akathist is sometimes attributed to him and the attribution is disputed. Feast: October 1.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Simeon the StyliteA Syrian shepherd boy whose asceticism was too severe for any monastery to keep him, who in about 423 climbed a pillar near Aleppo to escape the crowds that came to him, and lived on top of pillars, each taller than the last, for thirty-seven years. He preached from it twice a day, settled disputes, wrote to emperors about the defence of Chalcedon, and converted whole tribes of nomads. Theodoret, who visited him, is the eyewitness. After his death in 459 a great church was built around the column, and its ruins stand north of Aleppo. His day is the first of the Church year. Feast: September 1.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Sophronius of JerusalemA scholar of Damascus who wandered the monasteries of the East with his friend John Moschus, whose Spiritual Meadow records what they found. He was the first to see that the compromise of one energy in Christ, which the emperor hoped would reunite the Church, gave away His humanity, and as Patriarch of Jerusalem from 634 his Synodical Letter set out the answer the Sixth Council later gave. In 638, with the city besieged, he surrendered Jerusalem to the Caliph Umar and died within months. He wrote the Life of St Mary of Egypt, and prayers of the Great Blessing of the Waters are traditionally his. Feast: March 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Sophrony of EssexA Russian painter who left Moscow for Paris, abandoned art because he judged it was taking him away from God, went to Athos, and there became the disciple and afterwards the witness of St Silouan. He published the elder’s writings with a long introduction that is a work of theology in its own right, and in 1959 founded a monastery of men and women together at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex. His own book, We Shall See Him as He Is, is an account of personhood and of the prayer for the whole Adam that he learned from Silouan. Glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2019. Feast: July 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Tamar, Queen of GeorgiaCrowned in 1184 and styled king of kings, who ruled Georgia at the height of its power and its culture. She summoned a church council at the start of her reign to reform the clergy, built churches and monasteries, among them the cave city of Vardzia, sent gifts to the monasteries of Athos, Sinai and Jerusalem, and was remembered for abolishing the death penalty and mutilation in her courts. The great Georgian poem, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, is dedicated to her. Her burial place was kept secret and has never been found. The Georgian Church keeps her as a righteous queen. Feast: May 1.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Tarasius of ConstantinopleA layman and imperial secretary made Patriarch of Constantinople in 784, at the Empress Irene’s wish and on his own condition that a council would restore the icons. The first attempt, in 786, was broken up by soldiers loyal to the iconoclast party; the second, at Nicaea in 787, met under his presidency and became the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which defined that icons are to be venerated and their honour passes to the one they show. He was known for his care of the poor and the strictness of his own life. He died in 806. Feast: February 25.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Thekla, Equal-to-the-ApostlesA young woman of Iconium who heard St Paul preaching from a window next door, broke off her engagement, and followed him. Her story is told in the second-century Acts of Paul and Thekla, which the Church reads for its witness rather than for its history: condemned to be burned, she was saved by a storm; thrown to the beasts, she was defended by a lioness. She taught and lived out her life near Seleucia, where her shrine became one of the great places of pilgrimage of the ancient world, visited by the pilgrim Egeria, and where St Gregory the Theologian went to pray. The Church calls her Protomartyr among women and Equal-to-the-Apostles. Feast: September 24.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Theodore the RecruitA newly enlisted soldier at Amasea in Pontus who refused to sacrifice, was given time to think better of it, and used it to set fire to the temple of the mother of the gods. He was burned alive around 306. St Gregory of Nyssa preached his panegyric at his shrine, and it is the earliest witness to him. The Church keeps him a second time on the first Saturday of Great Lent, remembering the tradition that when Julian the Apostate had the food in the markets of Constantinople sprinkled with the blood of sacrifices, Theodore appeared to the bishop and told him to feed the people boiled wheat instead: which is why koliva is blessed that day. Feast: February 17.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Theodore the Studite (759-826)Abbot of the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople, which he turned into a community of a thousand monks under a rule of work, obedience, frequent confession and liturgical order that Athos and the Caves of Kiev later adopted. He was exiled three times: twice for refusing to bless an emperor’s adulterous remarriage, and once for six years in the second wave of iconoclasm, after he led his monks through the city on Palm Sunday of 815 carrying the icons the emperor had forbidden. His Refutations of the iconoclasts sharpened the argument of the Seventh Council: an icon shows the person, and Christ is a person who can be shown, so to refuse His image is to deny that He became flesh. His letters, more than five hundred of them, carried the resistance while he was in prison. He died in 826. Feast: November 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Theodosius the CenobiarchA Cappadocian who founded near Bethlehem the great common-life monastery of the Judaean desert, with guest houses, an infirmary, a home for the old and a house for the mentally ill, and churches so that Greeks, Armenians and the Bessi from Thrace could each serve in their own language, with all coming together for communion. He and St Sabbas were made heads of all the monks of Palestine, he of those in community, which is his title. When the emperor Anastasius tried to impose a creed against Chalcedon, the two of them read an anathema of it from the pulpit in Jerusalem. He died in 529 at a hundred and five. Feast: January 11.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894)George Govorov, a priest’s son who became a scholar-monk, served in the Russian mission in Jerusalem and in Constantinople, and was a bishop at Tambov and Vladimir before he asked to retire in 1866. At the hermitage of Vysha he shut himself into two rooms for the last twenty-two years of his life, served the Liturgy alone, and wrote. He translated the Philokalia into Russian in five volumes and adapted it for readers in the world, wrote The Path to Salvation, commented on the Psalms and the letters of Paul, and answered letters: twenty or forty a day, to anyone who wrote, which is how most of his teaching on prayer of the heart reached ordinary people. Glorified in 1988. Feast: January 10.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Thomas the ApostleThe Twin, who said let us go and die with Him when Christ turned toward Jerusalem, and who was not there on the evening of the Resurrection. Unless I see and touch, I will not believe, he said, and a week later Christ came and let him, and Thomas answered with the first plain confession in the Gospels that Jesus is God: my Lord and my God. The Church keeps that Sunday, the first after Pascha, as his, and calls his doubt blessed, because it made the Resurrection something touched. By the tradition of the Christians of India, who carry his name, he preached there and was killed with a spear near Madras. Feast: October 6.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Tikhon of Moscow (1865-1925)Vasily Bellavin, a village priest’s son who became bishop of the Aleutians and North America from 1898 to 1907, moved its see to New York, built St Nicholas Cathedral there and founded St Tikhon’s Monastery in Pennsylvania. In November 1917, eleven days after the Bolsheviks took power, the restored Council of the Russian Church elected him Patriarch of Moscow, the first in two centuries, and he led the Church through the first years of the persecution. He anathematised those who shed innocent blood, protested the seizure of church valuables in 1922, was arrested and held for a year, and was kept under watch in the Donskoy Monastery until his death on the Annunciation in 1925. Glorified by the Church Abroad in 1981 and by Moscow in 1989. Feast: March 25 (on the Old Calendar, 7 April).ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Tikhon of ZadonskThe son of a poor village sexton who became Bishop of Voronezh, worked himself into illness in four years, and retired to the monastery at Zadonsk, where he spent his last fourteen years in a cell giving everything he had to the poor. He wrote On True Christianity and A Spiritual Treasure Gathered from the World, which finds a lesson of the Gospel in everything from a ploughed field to a stove. He was known to bear insults without answering them, and once asked forgiveness of a nobleman who had struck him. Dostoevsky drew on him for the elder Zosima. He died in 1783 and was glorified in 1861. Feast: August 13.ImportantSaints & Church FathersSt. Xenia of PetersburgA fool for Christ in eighteenth century Petersburg. Widowed at twenty-six when her husband died without confession or communion, she gave away the house and everything in it, put on his uniform, answered to his name and not her own, and spent forty-five years in the streets of the city taking his repentance on herself. She was thought mad and then she was thought holy. She carried bricks by night to the builders of the church on the Smolensk cemetery, and people still write to her at the chapel over her grave. Glorified by the Russian Church in 1988. Feast: January 24.ImportantTheology & DogmaSynergy (Free Will & Grace)Orthodoxy teaches synergy, synergeia, the working together of divine grace and human freedom. Grace goes before, awakens and enables; the will must consent and keep consenting, and it remains free to refuse. This rules out Pelagianism, which makes salvation the work of human effort, and it rules out absolute predestination, the decree that saves or damns without regard to the will. Scripture does speak of those God foreknew and predestined, and the Fathers read that as foreknowledge, not as compulsion: God knows what a free creature will choose without choosing it for him.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipThe Akathist HymnThe most famous and beloved hymn of the Orthodox Church, dedicated to the Theotokos. An 'akathist' means 'not seated': the congregation stands throughout. Composed in the 5th-6th century (attributed variously to St. Romanos or Patriarch Sergius). Chanted in full during the 5th Saturday of Great Lent and at other times. Contains 24 stanzas alternating 'Rejoice' invocations.ImportantHoly ScriptureThe Anagignoskomena (The Readable Books)The books of the Greek Old Testament that stand outside the Hebrew canon: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, the additions to Daniel and Esther, 1, 2 and 3 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151. The Greek name means the ones that are read, and it is a description of practice: they are read in church, quoted by the Fathers and printed in Orthodox Bibles. The Orthodox list is not the Roman one, being longer by 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151, and the Church has generally declined to rank them against the rest with a technical term. The Council of Jerusalem in 1672 affirmed them.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsThe Apostolic CanonsEighty-five rules handed down under the name of the Apostles, the oldest body of church law the Orthodox Church receives. They were compiled in Syria in the later fourth century as the close of the Apostolic Constitutions, and the Church took the canons while setting the Constitutions aside: the second canon of the Council in Trullo (692) received the eighty-five and rejected the rest as corrupted by heretics. The councils already treated them as binding; Nicaea I's fifteenth canon appeals to "the apostolic canon" against a cleric moving from city to city. They come first in every collection and in the Pedalion, and they govern ordination (a bishop by two or three bishops), the conduct of the clergy, the reception of heretics, the Paschal reckoning, and, in the eighty-fifth, which books are to be held as Scripture.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsThe Council of Constantinople (879-880)Held under St Photios the Great, with legates sent by Pope John VIII. It restored Photios to his see, annulled the council of 869-870 that had deposed him, and anathematised anyone who should add to or take from the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which is a condemnation of the Filioque before Rome itself had added it to the Creed. John VIII accepted its decisions; Rome repudiated it in the eleventh century and now counts the council of 869-870 as its eighth. Many Orthodox reckon this council the Eighth Ecumenical Council, and that reckoning is not universally settled among them.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtThe DeesisChrist enthroned, with the Theotokos on His right and St John the Forerunner on His left, both turned towards Him with their hands raised and their heads inclined. The word means supplication, and the composition is an argument about prayer: the two greatest of those born of women are shown doing the one thing the Church asks them to do, which is to ask. It is the centre of the iconostasis, the row that gives its name to the whole tier, and in a large church that row is extended with the archangels, the apostles and the hierarchs, all inclined the same way. Nobody in the composition looks at the viewer except Christ.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Didache (Teaching of the Twelve)The earliest known Christian catechetical text (c. 50-120 AD), discovered in 1873. Contains instructions on ethics (the 'Two Ways': life and death), baptism, fasting, prayer (including the Lord's Prayer three times daily), the Eucharist, and church order. Provides a window into the worship and life of the earliest Christian communities.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsThe DiptychsThe lists of names commemorated aloud at the Liturgy: the primates of the autocephalous churches, each in his place, read by the bishop or the priest at the anaphora. They are the plainest instrument the Orthodox Church has for saying who is in communion with whom, because a name is either said or it is not, and everyone present hears which. A church that breaks communion strikes a name from them, and restoring communion means putting it back. The order of the lists is the order of honour, and the churches do not all keep identical lists, which is one of the ways a dispute about rank shows itself without anyone having to announce it.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Dormition FastFourteen days, from 1 to 14 August, and the strictest of the four after Great Lent: no fish except on the Transfiguration, which falls in the middle of it. The Paraklesis to the Theotokos is sung every evening, alternating the small and great canons, so the fast is the most audibly Marian season of the year. It ends at the Dormition, and in many places the burial service of the Theotokos is sung with a bier and an epitaphios exactly as on Great Friday, which is the clearest statement the calendar makes about what her death is.ImportantSpiritual Life & PracticesThe Eight Passions (Logismoi)The eight principal thoughts through which the soul is attacked, as Evagrius of Pontus set them out from the experience of the Egyptian desert: gluttony, fornication, avarice, grief, anger, acedia, which is the noonday weariness that makes the cell unbearable, vainglory and pride. St John Cassian carried the list to the West, where it was later folded into seven deadly sins, but the East kept it as a map of a battle rather than a list of crimes. What the Fathers watched was the way a thought becomes a passion, which St John Climacus describes in stages: the provocation, the conversation with it, the consent, the captivity, the struggle, and at last the passion itself, a habit worn into the soul. Each has its remedy, fasting against gluttony, almsgiving against avarice, humility against pride, and the goal is dispassion: not an absence of feeling, but freedom from being ruled by what one feels.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtThe Eleousa (Tenderness)The Child presses His cheek against His mother’s and she inclines her head to Him, and in most of them she is looking out of the icon rather than at Him, with an expression that is not happiness. The type says two things at once: the Incarnation is real enough for a child to cling, and she already knows. The Vladimir icon, brought from Constantinople to Kiev in the twelfth century and afterwards the palladium of Moscow, is the most famous of them. Where the Hodegetria points, the Eleousa holds, and the two types between them cover most of the Marian icons in any Orthodox church.ImportantSaints & Church FathersThe Forty Martyrs of SebasteForty soldiers of a Roman legion stationed at Sebaste in Armenia who refused to sacrifice under Licinius around 320 and were stripped and left all night on a frozen lake, with a warm bath house lit on the shore for any who would deny Christ. One went. He died on the threshold, and one of the guards, seeing crowns come down on the thirty-nine, threw off his clothes and walked out on to the ice to make the forty. St Basil preached on them at Caesarea a generation later, and his homily is how the Church has told it since. Their day falls in Lent and is kept with the Presanctified Liturgy. Feast: March 9.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipThe Great Blessing of the WatersAt Theophany the Church blesses water, and it is the one blessing of the year that is done twice, at the Liturgy of the eve and again on the day, often at a river or the sea with a cross thrown into it. The prayer does not ask God to make the water holy as a symbol: it asks Him to send down the grace of the Jordan, since it was by being baptised that Christ sanctified the waters and crushed the heads of the dragons lurking in them. The water is taken home and kept, and the tradition that it does not spoil is old enough to be recorded by St John Chrysostom in a Theophany homily.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipThe Great EntranceThe gifts are carried from the table of preparation, out of the north door, through the nave and in again through the royal doors, while the Cherubic Hymn is sung and the choir holds the melody open in the middle of a sentence for the procession to pass. The hymn says what is happening: those who mystically represent the cherubim now lay aside every care of this life, for they are to receive the King of all. It is not yet the Body and Blood, which is why the older commentators are careful about the honour shown to it, and it is already a burial procession, which is why the large veil over the gifts, the air, is laid on them as the winding sheet.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtThe Hodegetria (She Who Shows the Way)The Theotokos holds the Child on one arm and points to Him with the other hand. She is not looking at Him and not looking away from the viewer: she is directing attention, and the gesture is the whole content of the type. The Child is shown as a small man rather than a baby, blessing, holding a scroll. The original hung in the Hodegon monastery at Constantinople, was carried round the walls in processions, and was lost when the city fell. Tradition ascribes the first of them to the Evangelist Luke, which the Church understands as a claim about authority rather than about brushwork.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipThe IconostasisThe icon-adorned screen separating the nave from the altar/sanctuary in an Orthodox church. Features tiers of icons: local tier (Christ, Theotokos, patron saint), Deesis tier (Christ enthroned with intercessors), Feasts tier, Prophets tier. The Royal Doors (center) open during specific liturgical moments, revealing the altar.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtThe Image Not Made by Hands (Mandylion)The cloth on which, by the tradition, Christ left the imprint of His own face and sent it to Abgar the king of Edessa, who was sick. It is the icon the iconodules reached for first in the quarrel over images, because it is an image of Christ that no painter made and that Christ Himself gave, so the argument that an image of God is presumption has to answer it. The cloth was brought from Edessa to Constantinople in 944 and the Church keeps that day. In painting it is always the face alone on a cloth, frontal, with no body, and it is the image traditionally set over the doors of a church or above the royal doors. Feast: August 16.ImportantPsalmody & HymnographyThe Ison (The Holding Note)One or more singers hold a single note while the melody moves above it. The ison is not a harmony and not a bass line: it is the tonic of the mode made audible, so that every interval the melody sings is heard against the ground it belongs to. It moves only when the mode moves, and a good isokrates changes it late and quietly. Theologically it is the closest thing the psaltic art has to an argument about itself, since the many voices sing one melody over one unchanging note, and the Church has never wanted a texture in which the voices go their own ways.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Nativity FastForty days before the Nativity, from 15 November to the eve of 25 December, and the mirror of Great Lent as the Nativity is the mirror of Pascha. It is kept less strictly: fish is allowed on most days until the feast of St Spyridon, and the rule tightens through the last week. The Sundays before Christmas bring the genealogy forward, with the Forefathers and then the Fathers, so that the fast ends with the whole ancestry of Christ read out. In the Slavic churches it is called the Philip fast, because it begins the day after the apostle’s feast.ImportantChurch HistoryThe New Martyrs under the OttomansBetween the fall of Constantinople and Greek independence, several hundred Christians were put to death for the faith under Ottoman rule, and the Church calls them the New Martyrs to distinguish them from the martyrs of the first three centuries without ranking them below. Many were people who had converted to Islam, often as children or under duress, and then returned to Christ publicly knowing what the law prescribed for it. St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St Macarius of Corinth collected their accounts in the New Martyrologion of 1799, partly to answer Western writers who said the Greek Church was dead. The collecting was itself an act of resistance.ImportantChurch HistoryThe Old Believer SchismPatriarch Nikon set out in 1653 to correct the Russian books and usages against the contemporary Greek ones: three fingers for the cross instead of two, three alleluias instead of two, a different spelling of the Saviour’s name, a procession the other way round the church. The council of 1666 and 1667 approved the changes and anathematised those who kept the old rites, and a large part of the Russian people would not. The state enforced it. The Archpriest Avvakum was burned in 1682, communities burned themselves rather than submit, and the schism has lasted to this day. In 1971 the Moscow Council lifted the anathemas and declared the old rites equally honourable, which is an admission that what was imposed by force had not needed imposing at all.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipThe Panikhida (Service for the Departed)The memorial service for the dead, served at the grave, in the church, and on the appointed days: the third, the ninth and the fortieth after a death, the anniversaries, and the Soul Saturdays when the whole Church remembers everyone at once. Boiled wheat is brought, because the grain must fall into the ground and die. The prayers ask for rest in a place of light where there is no pain or sorrow or sighing, and they say plainly that no one lives and does not sin, that God alone is without sin. The Orthodox Church prays for the departed and refuses to describe the mechanism by which the prayer helps them, which is where it parts from the Latin doctrine of purgatory.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipThe Paraklesis (Supplicatory Canon)A service of intercession to the Theotokos, sung when someone is in trouble and, in the Greek use, on the evenings of 1 to 13 August through the Dormition fast, except Saturday evenings and the eve of the Transfiguration. The Small Paraklesis is the one most parishes know. It is built as a canon, with the names of the sick or the afflicted read into the middle of it, and its refrain is short enough to carry a whole congregation: Most holy Theotokos, save us. Where the Akathist stands and praises, the Paraklesis asks, and that is the difference between the two great Marian services of the Byzantine rite.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipThe Proskomedia (Preparation of the Gifts)The service before the service. At a side table the priest cuts the Lamb from the first prosphoron with a lance, pierces it, pours wine and water into the chalice, and then sets particles on the diskos: one for the Theotokos at the right of the Lamb, nine for the ranks of the saints at the left, then particles for the living and for the dead by name, as many as are asked for. What stands on the diskos by the end is the whole Church gathered around Christ, the living and the departed together and no distinction drawn between them. Those particles are not communion and are never given to anyone; at the end of the Liturgy they are placed into the chalice with the words that ask the Blood of Christ to wash away the sins of all who have been remembered.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Protection of the Theotokos: October 1During a siege of Constantinople, at the all-night vigil in the church at Blachernae where her robe was kept, St Andrew the Fool for Christ saw the Theotokos come in above the people, pray, and spread her veil over them. The feast keeps that vision. It is not one of the Twelve, and in the Slavic churches it is kept with more solemnity than several that are: the Pokrov is one of the great days of the Russian year, and the Ukrainian and Serbian churches keep it likewise. The Greek Church moved its observance to 28 October to join it with the anniversary of the refusal in 1940, which is a rare case of a modern deliverance being written into the calendar.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsThe Quinisext Council (Trullo, 692)Called Penthekte, the fifth-and-sixth, because it supplied the canons that the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils had not issued, both having ruled on doctrine alone. Its 102 canons are the backbone of Orthodox canon law: they settle the scriptural canon by receiving the earlier lists, regulate the clergy, forbid depicting Christ as a lamb in place of His human form, and legislate on fasting and marriage. The Orthodox Church receives them as having the authority of the Sixth Council; Rome never accepted them in full, which is itself one of the older fault lines between East and West.ImportantPatristic & Ascetical TextsThe Rudder (Pedalion)The canonical collection of the Greek Church, compiled by St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain with Agapios the Monk and first printed in 1800. It gives the canons of the Apostles, of the Ecumenical and local councils and of the Fathers, each followed by Nikodemos’ own commentary and by a note on how it is actually applied, which is what makes it a rudder rather than a law code. It is the standard reference for Orthodox canon law in Greek practice, and its footnotes are where a reader meets the principle that the canons are steered rather than obeyed mechanically.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Saturdays of the SoulsSaturdays given to the dead. The Saturday before Meatfare Sunday and the second, third and fourth Saturdays of Great Lent are the chief of them, with Radonitsa in the second week after Pascha in the Slavic practice and the Saturday before Pentecost everywhere. Saturday is the day because it is the day Christ lay in the tomb. The Church serves a general memorial, boiled wheat is brought, and lists of names are read for as long as the lists take. The pre-Pentecost one prays for everyone who has died from Adam onwards, including those nobody is left to remember and those who died in ways the Church cannot name, which is the widest prayer in the Orthodox year.ImportantEschatology & AfterlifeThe Second Coming of ChristOrthodox eschatology affirms Christ's visible, glorious return at the end of history. The Creed states: 'He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, whose Kingdom shall have no end.' Orthodoxy avoids detailed end-times speculation and rejects millennialism (1000-year earthly kingdom). The focus is on readiness through repentance.ImportantHoly ScriptureThe Septuagint (LXX)The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made at Alexandria in the last centuries before Christ, which the Letter of Aristeas tells of as the work of seventy-two elders, and the Bible of the apostles: most of the Old Testament quotations in the New follow it, sometimes where it differs from the Hebrew. It carries the books the Church reads beyond the Hebrew canon, such as Wisdom, Sirach and Tobit, and it numbers the Psalms and the books of Kingdoms its own way. The Orthodox Church reads the Old Testament in it: the Greek Church uses it as its text, and the Slavonic Bible was translated from it. The nineteenth-century Russian Synodal translation followed the Hebrew instead, which is still argued over. Where the Fathers read a prophecy of Christ in it, as the Virgin shall conceive, the Church reads it with them.ImportantCouncils and Their CanonsThe Synod of Jerusalem (1672)Convened at Bethlehem under Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem to answer a Calvinist confession circulated under the name of Patriarch Cyril Loukaris of Constantinople. Its Confession of Dositheos rejects predestination without regard to the will, faith without works, and the reduction of the Mysteries to signs; it affirms the real change of the gifts in the Eucharist, the veneration of icons and saints, and the anagignoskomena as genuine Scripture. It is the nearest thing Orthodoxy has to a formal reply to the Reformation, and it is a local council of high authority rather than an ecumenical one.ImportantTheology & DogmaThe Theotokos and the Immaculate ConceptionOrthodoxy honours the Theotokos above every creature and does not hold the Immaculate Conception, the dogma defined at Rome in 1854 that she was preserved from the stain of original sin from the first moment of her conception. The Orthodox objection is not that she is less holy but that the dogma answers a question Orthodoxy does not ask: it presupposes inherited guilt, which the East has never taught, so there is no stain for her to be preserved from. She was mortal as we are mortal, she died, and her purity is the fruit of a free obedience rather than an exemption granted before she could consent. Making her an exception makes her less like us, and it is precisely as one of us that she gave the Word His flesh.ImportantPsalmody & HymnographyThe Three Genres of ChantByzantine chant sings at three speeds, and the speed is a decision about what the text is for. Heirmologic is close to one note a syllable, brisk, and used where a lot of text has to pass: canons, the ordinary of the Liturgy. Sticheraric is slower and more ornamented, for the stichera that comment on a feast. Papadic is slow, melismatic and may take several minutes over a single line, and it belongs to the moments when the words matter less than the standing still: the Cherubic Hymn, the communion verse. The same mode and the same text sound like different pieces in the three genres.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Triumph of OrthodoxyThe first Sunday of Great Lent, keeping the restoration of the holy icons at Constantinople in 843 under the Empress Theodora, after the second iconoclast persecution. The icons are carried in procession by the faithful, and the Synodikon of Orthodoxy is proclaimed: a long text acclaiming the teachers of the faith with Eternal Memory and pronouncing anathema on the heresies the Church has condemned, added to over the centuries as new ones arose. It is called the Triumph of Orthodoxy and not the triumph over iconoclasm, because what was vindicated in 843 was the whole confession that God has truly become visible.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipThe TypikonThe book that orders the services: which hymns are sung on which day, how the fixed calendar of the Menaion is combined with the movable cycle of the Triodion and Pentecostarion, what happens when a great feast falls in Lent, and how strictly to fast. It is not a single book but a family of them, descending from the monastic rules of St Sabbas and of the Stoudios, with the Typikon of the Great Church governing much Greek parish usage. Every apparent inconsistency between two Orthodox parishes usually turns out to be two Typika, both ancient.ImportantChurch Structure & JurisdictionsThe Ukrainian QuestionIn 1686 the metropolitanate of Kiev passed under Moscow by a letter of the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the two churches have never agreed on what that letter did. In 2018 the Ecumenical Patriarchate judged it a temporary arrangement, revoked it, lifted the anathemas on two bodies not in communion, and in January 2019 granted a tomos of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Moscow broke communion with Constantinople, and afterwards with Alexandria, Greece and Cyprus as each recognised the new church. Most of the other local churches have not recognised it, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Moscow remained the largest body in the country and declared its own independence from Moscow in 2022 under the conditions of the war. This site states the positions and does not adjudicate between them, because no pan-Orthodox council has.ImportantChurch HistoryThe Union of Brest (1596)Most of the Orthodox bishops of the metropolitanate of Kiev, then inside the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and under heavy pressure, submitted to Rome at Brest while keeping the Byzantine rite, married clergy and Slavonic services. Two bishops refused, and with them the brotherhoods, most of the monasteries and a great part of the laity, who were left without a hierarchy until one was restored in secret in 1620. The result was two churches using the same rite in the same towns, and four centuries of bitterness. The Orthodox objection has never been to the rite but to the method: a communion joined at the top, by the bishops, over the people, in a jurisdiction where the state rewarded it.ImportantIconography & Sacred ArtTheotokos Icon TypesMajor iconographic types of the Virgin Mary: Hodegetria ('She Who Shows the Way', pointing to Christ), Eleusa/Glykophilousa ('Tenderness', cheeks touching), Platytera ('More Spacious than the Heavens', Christ in her womb, hands raised in prayer), Orans (praying with raised hands). Famous miracle-working icons: Iveron, Kazan, Vladimir, Tinos Megalochari.ImportantMonasticismTrinity-Sergius LavraThe spiritual heart of Russian Orthodoxy, founded by St. Sergius of Radonezh around 1345 near Moscow. The holiest monastery in Russia. St. Sergius blessed Dmitry Donskoi before the Battle of Kulikovo (1380). Rublev painted his Trinity icon here. Houses the Moscow Theological Academy. The Laura survived the Soviet era and remains the center of Russian spirituality.ImportantMonasticismTypes of MonasticismThe ways the monastic life is lived, all of them older than any rule that describes them. The coenobium is a community with everything in common, meals, work and prayer, under an abbot, as St Pachomius founded it in Egypt, St Basil gave it its rules and St Theodore the Studite its Byzantine form. The lavra, as St Sabbas built his in the Judaean desert, scatters its monks in cells around a church and gathers them at the weekend. The skete is a village of small houses around a central church; the kellion is a single house with its elder and one or two disciples; and the hermit lives alone, as some still do in the cliffs at the southern tip of Athos. The idiorrhythmic way, where each monk kept his own purse and table, spread on Athos in the late Middle Ages and ended there in 1992, when the last such house returned to the common life.ImportantLiturgy & WorshipVespers (Evening Service)The evening service, and the beginning of the Church’s day, which starts at sunset as the days of Genesis do: there was evening and there was morning. It opens with Psalm 103, the psalm of creation, read in the Greek use and at the Russian All-Night Vigil said or sung while the priest censes the whole church, and moves through the great litany and the psalter to the psalms of the lamp-lighting, Lord, I have cried unto Thee, let my prayer be set forth as incense, with the hymns of the day between their verses. The censer is carried in procession and one of the oldest hymns the Church still sings follows, O Gladsome Light, which Christians were singing at the lighting of the lamps before St Basil’s time. On feasts three readings from the Old Testament follow. The service ends with the Song of Simeon, Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, the troparion of the day, and the dismissal. Great Vespers is served on the eve of Sundays and feasts, and in the Russian use it is joined to Matins as the All-Night Vigil.ImportantEschatology & AfterlifeWhy There Is No PurgatoryOrthodoxy prays for the departed and believes those prayers avail, and it has never taught a purgatory. The Latin doctrine supposes a place of temporal punishment where a debt of satisfaction still owing after forgiveness is paid off, and each of its parts is foreign to the Orthodox mind: that sin leaves a quantity of punishment to be discharged, that the discharge happens in a distinct place, and that its length can be reckoned or shortened by indulgence. Orthodoxy speaks instead of souls awaiting the Judgment in a foretaste of what is coming, helped by the prayers of the Church, and refuses to say more. St Mark of Ephesus argued exactly this at the Council of Florence and refused to sign.ImportantPsalmody & HymnographyZnamenny ChantThe chant of the Russian Church from the conversion until the seventeenth century, written in hook notation, the kryuki, and sung in unison without harmony or instruments. It is built from formulae rather than from scales: a singer learns the popevki, the melodic turns proper to each of the eight tones, and a chant is assembled from them. Polyphony arriving from the West in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very nearly killed it, and it survived among the Old Believers and in a few monasteries. It has been recovering since the late nineteenth century, and many Russian parishes now sing at least the tones from it.Spiritual Life & PracticesAlmsgiving & CharityOne of the three pillars of the spiritual life alongside prayer and fasting. Giving to the poor is giving to Christ Himself (Matthew 25:40). Orthodoxy emphasizes that almsgiving is not mere philanthropy but a spiritual practice that purifies the soul from attachment to material things. 'Alms delivers from death and purges every sin' (Tobit 12:9).Theology & DogmaAngelic & Demonic RealmAngels are bodiless spiritual beings created before the material world. Orthodox tradition follows Pseudo-Dionysius in describing nine angelic orders in three triads: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominions, Powers, Authorities; Principalities, Archangels, Angels. Satan (Lucifer) and the demons are fallen angels who rebelled through pride. Guardian angels are assigned to each person at baptism.Church Structure & JurisdictionsBulgarian Orthodox ChurchBulgaria was Christianized in 864 under Khan Boris I. The Bulgarian Church became a center of Slavonic literacy: the First and Second Bulgarian Empires produced the Cyrillic alphabet, trained clergy for all Slavic lands, and developed rich literary traditions. Patriarchate briefly in the medieval period and permanently since 1953. Survived Ottoman and Communist persecution.Church Structure & JurisdictionsChurch of CyprusOne of the oldest autocephalous churches (autocephaly since the Council of Ephesus, 431). Founded by the Apostles Paul and Barnabas. The Archbishop of Cyprus has the unique privilege of signing in red ink and wearing a purple mantle: imperial prerogatives granted by Emperor Zeno. Currently Archbishop Georgios.Church Structure & JurisdictionsChurch of GreeceThe Church of the Greek state, whose autocephaly was declared by the state in 1833 and granted by Constantinople in 1850. It is governed by a Holy Synod under the Archbishop of Athens, Ieronymos II since 2008. Its map is not simple: Crete and the Dodecanese belong to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, as Mount Athos does, and the dioceses of the New Lands, won in the Balkan wars, belong to Constantinople but are administered by the Church of Greece under an arrangement of 1928. Most Greeks are baptised into it, the Constitution names Orthodoxy the prevailing religion, and its feasts are the calendar of the nation. It gave the twentieth century St Nektarios of Aegina and the elders Paisios and Porphyrios, and it keeps the new calendar for its fixed feasts, adopted in 1924.Orthodox Philosophy & EthicsEcumenism & Inter-Christian DialogueThe Orthodox relationship with other Christian bodies is complex. Official participation in the World Council of Churches (since 1948) coexists with strong anti-ecumenist movements within Orthodoxy. The goal is not compromise but witness to the fullness of apostolic truth. Bilateral dialogues exist with Roman Catholics, Oriental Orthodox, and Lutherans. The tension between 'ecclesiological exclusivism' and 'pastoral openness' remains unresolved.Liturgical Calendar & FeastsEntry of the Theotokos into the Temple: Nov 21Commemorates the presentation of the three-year-old Virgin Mary in the Jerusalem Temple by her parents, Joachim and Anna. According to Tradition, she entered the Holy of Holies and was nourished by an angel. Celebrates Mary's dedication to God from earliest childhood. One of the 12 Great Feasts.Church Structure & JurisdictionsGeorgian Orthodox ChurchOne of the oldest Christian nations: Georgia was Christianized by St. Nino in the 4th century. Autocephalous since the 5th century (autocephaly granted by Antioch c. 486, recognized by Constantinople in 1990). Rich literary and artistic tradition. The Georgian alphabet was created to translate Scripture. Survived Persian, Arab, Mongol, and Soviet domination. Patriarchate since the 11th century.Church HistoryGreek Independence & Church AutocephalyThe war the Greeks began in 1821 against Ottoman rule, which ended in an independent kingdom by 1830. The Church was in it from the first: the nation remembers Metropolitan Germanos of Patras raising the banner of the Cross at Agia Lavra on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, and the day is still kept as both, though historians argue over the details. In Constantinople Patriarch Gregory V was hanged from the gate of the Patriarchate that Easter in reprisal. The new state, under a Bavarian regency, declared its Church independent of Constantinople by its own act in 1833, on the model of the Russian Synod, and the rift was healed only when the Ecumenical Patriarchate granted autocephaly by its Tomos of 1850.Church HistoryHoly & Great Council (Crete, 2016)The first pan-Orthodox council in over a millennium, held in Crete in June 2016. Addressed: the Orthodox diaspora, autonomy, the relationship with other Christians, fasting, marriage, and the mission of the Church. Four autocephalous churches (Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch) did not attend, limiting its authority.Holy Mysteries (Sacraments)Holy Unction (Anointing of the Sick)The anointing of the sick, for the healing of soul and body and the forgiveness of sins, as St James tells the elders of the Church to do. The full rite is served by seven priests, with seven readings from the Epistles and seven from the Gospels, seven prayers and seven anointings; in practice fewer priests often serve it. It is not only for the dying, as the West came to use it: in the Orthodox Church it is given to anyone who is sick, and on the evening of Holy Wednesday it is offered to the whole congregation as a preparation for Pascha, since all are sick. The prayers name the unmercenary physician saints, St Panteleimon among them.Liturgy & WorshipHoly Water (Agiasmos)Water blessed by priestly prayer and the invocation of the Holy Spirit. Two forms: Great Blessing of Water (at Theophany, January 6, commemorating Christ's baptism in the Jordan) and Small Blessing (throughout the year). Used for blessing homes, objects, and persons. Drunk by the faithful after fasting. The Great Blessing makes the water truly sanctified.Psalmody & HymnographyKontakion & TroparionTroparion: a short hymn summarizing the feast or saint being celebrated. Kontakion: originally a longer poetic sermon (St. Romanos the Melodist wrote the greatest examples); now usually a single stanza. Every feast and saint has assigned troparia and kontakia. The Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos is the most famous kontakion.Iconography & Sacred ArtMajor Icon StylesThe ways icons have been painted within one tradition, every one of them bound by the same faces, the same feasts and the same canon. Byzantium set the forms, from the Macedonian and Komnenian centuries to the Palaiologan painting of the fourteenth, with its movement and its light. Novgorod painted with clear colour and bold line, and Moscow gave the tradition Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev and Dionisy. After 1453 the Cretan painters, Theophanes the Cretan among them, kept the Byzantine manner alive under Venice and taught it to Athos, while Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Georgia each gave it an accent of their own. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries much painting turned toward the naturalism of Western art, and the twentieth century turned it back: Photios Kontoglou in Greece and Leonid Ouspensky in Paris returned to the old models and the old reasons for them.MonasticismMeteora MonasteriesThe monasteries built on the sandstone pillars of Thessaly, where hermits lived in the caves from the eleventh century and St Athanasios the Meteorite, come from Mount Athos, founded the Great Meteoron in the fourteenth. There were once more than twenty; six still live. Until the 1920s the only way up to several of them was a rope ladder or a net hauled up by a windlass, and the monks, asked when the rope was replaced, are said to have answered: when the Lord lets it break. UNESCO listed them in 1988. They draw great numbers of visitors now, and still keep the round of services, the fasts and the silence for which they were built so far from the ground.MonasticismMonastic TonsureThe rite by which a monk or nun is made, with a cutting of the hair in the form of a cross as a first offering of the whole self. It comes in stages. A novice becomes a rassophore, receiving the black robe and usually a new name, without vows. The small schema brings the vows of obedience, chastity and poverty, the mantle and a prayer rope, called in the rite a sword of the Spirit. The great schema, which some receive only near death, is the full angelic habit. The service is spoken of as a second baptism, because the one tonsured is washed of what went before and begins again, and the Church sings over him the parable of the prodigal son, and the Father who ran to meet him.Theology & DogmaMonophysitismThe teaching of Eutyches that after the union Christ has one nature only, His humanity absorbed into His divinity as a drop of wine into the sea. Condemned at Chalcedon in 451, which confessed one Person in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The condemnation stands and has never been revisited.Theology & DogmaMonothelitismThe teaching that the incarnate Christ has one will, put forward in the seventh century as a formula on which Chalcedonians and those who had refused Chalcedon might agree, and pressed by imperial decree in the Ekthesis of 638 and the Typos of 648. Its earlier form was monoenergism, one operation. Orthodoxy refused it because a will belongs to a nature: a Christ with no human will is not a man, and the will is the very faculty that fell, so what He did not assume He did not heal. St. Maximus the Confessor and Pope St. Martin I were tried and exiled for refusing it, and St. Maximus had his tongue and right hand cut off so that he could neither say it nor write it. The Sixth Ecumenical Council condemned it in 681, after both were dead.Liturgical Calendar & FeastsNativity of the Theotokos: Sept 8The birth of the Virgin Mary to Joachim and Anna, who had been barren into old age, kept on 8 September, the first Great Feast of the Church’s year, which begins on the first of the month. Its story comes from the second-century Protevangelium of James, which the Church does not read as Scripture but whose account it sings. The feast is the first step of the Incarnation: the one through whom God would enter the world is herself born into it, and its troparion says so, Thy Nativity, O Theotokos, has proclaimed joy to the whole world, for from thee has shone forth the Sun of righteousness, Christ our God. St Andrew of Crete preached on it. Its first Great Feast answers the last of the year, the Dormition in August, so that the Church year begins with her birth and ends with her falling asleep.Theology & DogmaNestorianismThe teaching condemned at Ephesus in 431 in the person of Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, who would not call the Virgin Theotokos, Mother of God, but only Christotokos, mother of Christ. St Cyril of Alexandria saw in it a Christ divided into two subjects, a man and the Word who dwelt in him, and insisted that the one born of the Virgin, who suffered and died, is the Word of God Himself in the flesh. Nestorius was deposed and died in exile. Whether he held the doctrine that bears his name is still argued, and the Church of the East, which honours him, was never party to the council. The Orthodox Church keeps the council’s judgment, and every time it calls the Virgin Theotokos it confesses what Ephesus defended: one Christ, God made man, and not a man God came to live in.Psalmody & HymnographyOctoechos (Eight Tones)The system of eight modes (tones) used in Orthodox worship, rotating weekly over an eight-week cycle. Each tone has a distinct character and associated hymns. Attributed in its liturgical form to St. John of Damascus. Governs the Sunday hymns, troparia, and kontakia throughout the year.Orthodox Philosophy & EthicsOikonomia (Pastoral Economy)The principle of pastoral flexibility in applying Church canons: adapting the strict rule (akribia) to the needs and circumstances of the individual for the sake of their salvation. The bishop exercises oikonomia. It does not change doctrine but applies mercy in discipline. Example: receiving converts by Chrismation rather than re-baptism.Orthodox Philosophy & EthicsOrthodox BioethicsOrthodox positions on bioethical issues: life begins at conception (opposing abortion); euthanasia is rejected (suffering has redemptive value); organ donation is generally accepted as an act of love; IVF raises concerns about embryo destruction; cloning is rejected. The sanctity of human life from conception to natural death is foundational.Liturgy & WorshipOrthodox Church ArchitectureThe traditional Orthodox church building is a theological statement in stone. Key features: cruciform plan or cross-in-square; dome representing heaven (often with Christ Pantocrator frescoed inside); narthex (entrance), nave (for the faithful), and sanctuary (altar area behind the iconostasis). The entire building is oriented East: toward the rising sun symbolizing Christ.Orthodox Philosophy & EthicsOrthodoxy & Hellenistic PhilosophyThe Church Fathers 'baptized' Greek philosophy: using Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic concepts to articulate Christian truth while rejecting pagan theology. Key syntheses: Ousia/Hypostasis terminology (Cappadocians), logos theology (Justin Martyr), apophatic method (Pseudo-Dionysius). Orthodoxy insists philosophy serves theology, not the reverse: 'philosophy is the handmaid of theology.'Church Structure & JurisdictionsPatriarchate of AlexandriaOne of the four ancient patriarchates, traditionally founded by the Evangelist Mark. Historically the center of Christological theology (Athanasius, Cyril). After the Arab conquest (642), the Greek-speaking Orthodox community shrank dramatically. Today the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria has jurisdiction over all of Africa and has a growing missionary presence.Church Structure & JurisdictionsPatriarchate of AntiochThe Church of the city where the disciples were first called Christians, whose first bishop, by tradition, was St Peter, and whose bishops include St Ignatius and St Meletius, who baptised St John Chrysostom. Its patriarchs have sat in Damascus since the fourteenth century, and its faithful are mostly Arabic-speaking Christians of Syria and Lebanon, with a large diaspora. In 1724 part of it entered communion with Rome as the Melkite Church, so that two patriarchs of Antioch have claimed the see since. Its Archdiocese of North America, gathered in the first place by St Raphael of Brooklyn, received in 1987 a whole body of American evangelical Christians who had found their way to Orthodoxy on their own. Patriarch John X has led it since 2012, through the war in Syria and the kidnapping of its Metropolitan of Aleppo, Paul, in 2013.Spiritual Life & PracticesPenthos (Gift of Tears)Compunction, mourning for sin, and joyful sorrow: a central practice of Orthodox spiritual life. Not depression but grace-filled repentance that leads to spiritual consolation. The 'gift of tears' (charisma ton dakryon) is considered a sign of spiritual progress. 'Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted' (Matthew 5:4).Spiritual Life & PracticesPrayer Rope (Komboskini/Chotki)A knotted rope (usually 33, 50, 100, or 300 knots) used to count repetitions of the Jesus Prayer or other short prayers. Made with complex knots containing small crosses. Monks and laity use it for daily prayer rule. The Orthodox equivalent of a rosary but predates it historically.Liturgy & WorshipProsphora (Liturgical Bread)The leavened bread offered for the Divine Liturgy. Baked from wheat flour, water, yeast, and salt, symbolizing Christ's full humanity. Stamped with a seal (usually IC XC NI KA, 'Jesus Christ Conquers'). During the Proskomedia, the priest cuts portions: the Lamb (for consecration), particles for the Theotokos, saints, living, and departed.Church Structure & JurisdictionsRomanian Orthodox ChurchThe second largest of the Orthodox Churches, with some sixteen million faithful. It serves in Romanian, a language descended from Latin, in the Byzantine rite, so that the Liturgy of Constantinople is sung there in the speech of Rome. Its autocephaly was recognised by Constantinople in 1885 and it became a patriarchate in 1925. Its monastic life was renewed in the eighteenth century by St Paisius Velichkovsky at Neamt, whose disciples carried the Jesus Prayer from there to Russia, and its monasteries of Bucovina are painted inside and out, their walls a Bible in colour. Under communism its priests and monks filled the prisons, and one of them, Fr Dumitru Staniloae, spent five years in them; he translated the Philokalia into Romanian in twelve volumes and wrote a dogmatic theology that is read across the Orthodox world. The relics of St Parascheva at Iasi draw one of the largest pilgrimages in Europe each October.Church Structure & JurisdictionsSerbian Orthodox ChurchThe Church St Sava made self-governing in 1219, when he was consecrated its first archbishop at Nicaea with the blessing of the Patriarch of Constantinople in exile there. It became a patriarchate at Peć in 1346, lost it to the Ottomans in 1766 and regained it at Belgrade in 1920. The medieval monasteries of Kosovo, Peć, Dečani and Gračanica, keep some of the finest frescoes of the Orthodox world. In the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Serbs, priests and bishops among them, were killed in the Independent State of Croatia, and under communism the Church was watched and constrained. Its twentieth century also gave the whole Church St Justin Popovic and St Nikolaj Velimirovic. In 2022 it granted autocephaly to the Church of North Macedonia, which it had long refused to recognise. Patriarch Porfirije has led it since 2021.Psalmody & HymnographySlavic Church SingingThe singing of the Slavic Churches, which began as Byzantine chant carried north with the Slavonic books of Sts Cyril and Methodius and their disciples. In Russia it grew into Znamenny chant, a single melodic line in its own notation, and for five centuries that was the sound of the Russian Church. From the seventeenth century singing in parts came in through Ukraine, and in the eighteenth an Italian style of concert writing, of which Dmitry Bortniansky was the master. The nineteenth century fixed a plainer common chant, the Obikhod, and at its end the Moscow Synodal school, Kastalsky, Chesnokov and Rachmaninoff, whose All-Night Vigil of 1915 is its crown, turned back to the old chants and set them for choir. The Old Believers still sing Znamenny in unison, and monasteries such as Valaam and the Kiev Caves keep chants of their own.Theology & DogmaSophiologyA system developed by Vladimir Soloviev and worked out theologically by Fr Sergius Bulgakov, in which Sophia, the Wisdom of God, is treated as a principle standing between God and creation and in some sense personal. It was condemned in 1935 by the Moscow Patriarchate and, separately and in the same year, by the Russian Church Abroad, which rarely agreed with Moscow about anything in that decade. The objection is that it introduces a fourth something into the doctrine of God and blurs the line between the uncreated and the created, which is the one line Orthodox theology will not let go of. What Sophiology was reaching for, a real contact between God and the world that is God Himself and not a creature, the tradition already has in the distinction between the essence and the energies.Saints & Church FathersSs. Boniface and AglaeAglae, a rich and noble woman of Rome known for her charity, and Boniface, the honest and open-handed steward of her estates, lived together in sin, and both came to repent of it. She sent him to the East to bring back the relics of martyrs, and at Tarsus in Cilicia, seeing Christians tortured for their faith, he declared that he was one of them, and was put to death, about 290. His companions brought his body home to Rome, where Aglae received it as a martyr’s, gave away all she had, and lived the rest of her life in penance and prayer. The Church keeps the two together as witnesses that repentance restores what sin had lost. Feast: December 19.Saints & Church FathersSs. Cosmas and Damian of AsiaTwo brothers of Asia Minor whose father died when they were small, and whose mother, Theodotia, brought them up in the faith and had them taught medicine. They healed for nothing, taking the Lord’s word as it stands, "freely ye have received, freely give" (Matthew 10:8), and so the Church calls them the Unmercenaries, anargyroi, "without silver"; tradition adds that they tended animals too. Unlike the two other pairs of the same names, the Romans kept on 1 July and the Arabians on 17 October, who died as martyrs, these two died in peace. They are named with Panteleimon and the other unmercenary physicians in the prayer of Holy Unction. Feast: November 1.Saints & Church FathersSs. Gurias, Samonas and AbibusThree confessors of Edessa, kept together because they were buried together. Gurias and Samonas were seized in the persecution of Diocletian for turning people from the idols, and beheaded after long torture, about 306. Abibus, a deacon of the same country, was burned alive under Licinius some years later for his preaching, and laid in their tomb. The tomb is the setting of the story of Euphemia, a girl of Edessa married to a Gothic soldier who deceived her, whom the three delivered, and ever since they have been asked to guard marriages and to reconcile husband and wife. Their day is the first of the Nativity Fast, and Nicosia has their church. Feast: November 15.Saints & Church FathersSs. Menas, Hermogenes and EugraphusMenas, called Kallikelados, "the fair-voiced", for his eloquence, was an Athenian of a pagan family who came to the faith by reading the Scriptures and the lives of the saints, and was baptized. Not knowing it, the emperor Maximinus sent him to govern Alexandria, and when the order came to persecute, Menas not only refused it but brought many to Christ. Maximinus sent Hermogenes to replace him. Hermogenes had Menas tortured and left in prison to die, and finding him alive and healed, believed, was baptized by him, and was afterwards made a bishop. Then both confessed Christ before the emperor himself, with Eugraphus, Menas’s secretary, and all three were put to death, about 313. This is not the Great Martyr Menas of 11 November. Feast: December 10.Saints & Church FathersSs. Neophytos, Ignatios, Prokopios and Neilos of MachairasNeophytos and Ignatios, hermits from the desert of the Jordan, came to Cyprus, and in 1145, by the tradition of the house, found in a cave on the mountain of Machairas an icon of the Theotokos held to have been painted by the Apostle Luke; in 1148 they founded a monastery round it. After Neophytos died, Ignatios and the monk Prokopios went to Constantinople and obtained from the emperor Manuel Komnenos the whole mountain and the rank of a stavropegion, answerable to no local bishop. Neilos, who joined them, became the first abbot, enlarged the church, and left the monastery the written rule for a common life that bears his name. Feast: December 13.Saints & Church FathersSt. Anastasia the Deliverer from PotionsA Roman woman who spent her fortune going from prison to prison in the last persecution, feeding, washing and treating the confessors in chains, and who was burned at Sirmium around 304. Her name means resurrection. Her relics were brought to Constantinople in the fifth century, and she was called Pharmakolytria, the one who loosens the effects of poison and potions, because of the healings asked of her. The monastery that bears her name near Thessaloniki has kept a relic of her since the ninth century. Feast: December 22.Saints & Church FathersSt. Anastasia the RomanLeft an orphan at three, Anastasia was brought up in a women’s monastery near Rome by its abbess, Sophia, and became a nun there. In one of the persecutions of the third century the governor Probus had her brought before him and urged her to spare her youth and her beauty, worship the gods and marry; she answered that the only youth and beauty she knew were the ones Christ gives. He had her stripped, beaten and mutilated, and at last beheaded; a Christian named Cyril, who brought her water, was beheaded for it. Sophia and two others buried her. Her right tibia is kept at the monastery of Grigoriou on Mount Athos. She is not St Anastasia the Deliverer from Potions, whose day is 22 December. Feast: October 29.Saints & Church FathersSt. Andrew in Krisei (d. 767)Not the archbishop of Crete who wrote the Great Canon, but a monk of the same island who died a generation after him. Andrew came to Constantinople in the reign of Constantine V, the emperor who made the destruction of icons law and filled his prisons with those who would not comply, and there, before the emperor himself, he rebuked him: whoever suffers for the icons suffers for Christ, and whoever insults the icon on which Christ is shown insults Christ. He was tortured and dragged through the streets to his death in 767. Christians buried him at a place called Krisis, "the Judgment", which gave him his name, and the monastery of St Andrew in Krisei, dedicated to him, still stands in Istanbul as the Koca Mustafa Pasha mosque. St Joseph the Hymnographer wrote his canon. Feast: October 17.Saints & Church FathersSt. Charalambos the HieromartyrA priest of Magnesia in Asia Minor who, by the tradition of the Church, was more than a hundred years old when he was tortured and put to death under Septimius Severus around 202 for refusing to stop preaching. He is prayed to against plague and epidemic. His skull is kept at the monastery of St Stephen at the Meteora, and churches dedicated to him are found in almost every Greek town. Feast: February 10.Saints & Church FathersSt. Cosmas of Aetolia (1714-1779)A monk of the Philotheou monastery on Athos who asked leave of the Patriarch in 1760 to preach, and spent the next nineteen years walking the villages of Ottoman Greece and southern Albania. He preached in the open air to crowds of thousands, from a portable wooden platform, in plain spoken Greek, and wherever he went he asked for a school: tradition counts two hundred founded, so that children would learn to read the faith for themselves. His sayings about the future were remembered and repeated long after him. Accused of stirring up the people, he was hanged near Berat in 1779 without a trial, and his body thrown into a river. He is called Equal-to-the-Apostles. Glorified in 1961. Feast: August 24.Saints & Church FathersSt. Daniel the Stylite (409-493)Given to God by his parents, Daniel was in a monastery by the age of five, and as a young monk he met Simeon the Stylite on his pillar and was blessed by him. After Simeon died he settled at Anaplus on the Bosporus, above Constantinople, and in 460 went up a pillar of his own, where he stood for thirty-three years through heat and snow, praying, counselling and healing; the emperor Leo raised a taller pillar for him and a church beside it. Only once did he come down: in 476, when the usurper Basiliscus decreed against the Council of Chalcedon, Daniel went into the city, rebuked him before the people, and the decree was withdrawn. He died on his pillar in 493, aged eighty-four. Feast: December 11.Saints & Church FathersSt. George Karslidis (1901-1959)Athanasios Karslidis was born in 1901 at Argyroupolis in Pontus and orphaned young. At seven he went on pilgrimage to the monastery of Panagia Soumela and stayed as a novice; he was tonsured in 1919 as George and ordained deacon. Driven out with the Greeks of Pontus, he lived in Georgia under the Soviets, where he was imprisoned, paraded in mockery and condemned to be shot, and lived. Ordained priest, he became a confessor to many, and in 1929 he came to Sipsa, now Taxiarches, near Drama in Macedonia, where he spent the thirty years left to him; the Bulgarian occupiers condemned him to death in 1941, and again he was spared. He died on 4 November 1959, and in 2008 Patriarch Bartholomew proclaimed him a saint at the monastery he had founded there. Feast: November 4.Saints & Church FathersSt. Gerasimos of the JordanA Lycian monk who founded a lavra near the Jordan in the fifth century, where hermits lived alone on bread, water and dates through the week and came in to the community on Saturday and Sunday. As a young monk he was drawn for a time into the teaching of Eutyches, and St Euthymius brought him back. The Spiritual Meadow tells the story he is painted with: a lion that came to him lame, whose paw he healed, and which stayed and served the monastery, and when he died lay down on his grave and would not eat, and died there. He died in 475. Feast: March 4.Saints & Church FathersSt. Iakovos of EviaIakovos Tsalikis, born in Asia Minor in 1920 and brought to Greece as a child in the expulsions of 1922, who grew up in a village of Evia, was tonsured at the monastery of St David the Elder, and was its abbot from 1975. He spent long hours in confession with the crowds who came to the monastery, was known for his simplicity and for a gift of healing, and said of himself that he was an uneducated man who knew only the services. He died on the feast of the Entry of the Theotokos in 1991. Glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2017. Feast: November 22.Saints & Church FathersSt. James the Persian (d. 421)James was a noble of Beth Lapat in Persia, born a Christian, who at the court of Yazdegerd I denied Christ to keep the king’s friendship. His mother and his wife wrote to him that they would have nothing more to do with him while he denied his Lord, and he repented; when Bahram V came to the throne James confessed Christ before him, and in 421 he was condemned to be cut apart joint by joint, fingers and toes, hands and feet, arms and legs, praising God at every cut, until he was beheaded. In Latin he is called Intercisus, "cut in pieces", and sings that his body was pruned like a vine. His church in the walled city of Nicosia stands on the ceasefire line. Feast: November 27.Saints & Church FathersSt. John Lampadistis (10th c.)John was born in the tenth century at Lampadou in Cyprus, the only son, long prayed for, of a priest named Kyriakos and his wife Anna. At eighteen he was betrothed to the daughter of a rich family, though he wished to give his whole life to God, and when he drew back her people took it for an insult and had a sorcerer poison his food. He ate little, as was his habit, and lived, but he was blinded. He forgave them and went with his servant, another John, to the monastery of St Herakleidios in the Marathasa valley, where he lived as a hermit, known for healing the possessed, until he died at twenty-two on 4 October. The monastery, across the river from Kalopanagiotis, now bears his name: his tomb is in its chapel and his skull in a silver reliquary beside it, among the painted churches of the Troodos that UNESCO listed in 1985. Feast: October 4.Saints & Church FathersSt. Luke of Crimea (1877-1961)Valentin Voyno-Yasenetsky, a surgeon, who after his wife died in 1919 was ordained a priest in Tashkent and then consecrated a bishop in secret, taking the name Luke. He was arrested for the first time in 1923 and spent eleven years in prison and exile in Siberia, operating wherever they sent him and writing a textbook on septic surgery that the state awarded the Stalin Prize in 1946, while he was still a bishop, and whose prize money he gave to children orphaned by the war. As Archbishop of Crimea he operated, taught and served until he went blind. He died in 1961. A doctor who prayed before every operation and marked the incision site with iodine in the sign of the cross. Glorified in 2000. Feast: May 29 (on the Old Calendar, 11 June).Saints & Church FathersSt. Marcellus of the Unsleeping Ones (d. 485)Marcellus came from Apamea in Syria, studied at Antioch and Ephesus, and joined the brotherhood that Alexander the Unsleeping had gathered near Constantinople, whose monks kept the praise of God going day and night, one choir relieving another. After Alexander and his successor he was made abbot against his will, and under him the Akoimetoi, "the unsleeping", in choirs of Greek, Latin and Syriac speakers, became the most renowned house of the city; he built a great church, a hospital and a hostel for the homeless. He stood with the Council of Chalcedon against the teaching of Eutyches, at the council and after it, and died in peace in 485. Feast: December 29.Saints & Church FathersSt. Melania the Younger (c. 383-439)Melania was born in Rome about 383 to one of its richest families and married at fourteen to Pinian, though she had wished to be a nun. When their two children died she persuaded her husband to live with her as brother and sister in the service of God, and together they sold estates across the empire to feed the poor, set thousands of slaves free and build churches and monasteries in Italy, Africa and the East. At last they settled in Jerusalem, where after Pinian’s death she lived in a cell on the Mount of Olives and founded communities of women and of men beside it. She died there on the last day of 439. Feast: December 31.Saints & Church FathersSt. Mnason of Tamassos"Mnason of Cyprus, an old disciple", with whom Paul and his companions lodged on their last journey up to Jerusalem (Acts 21:16): Luke’s word marks a believer of the very first years. The Church of Cyprus remembers the rest. Born to a pagan family, he came to the faith in Rome through some of the Seventy, went to Jerusalem to receive the blessing of Peter and John, and returned to his island, where he lived with his teacher Herakleidios in a cave near Tamassos. When Herakleidios knew that his end was near he ordained Mnason bishop of Tamassos in his place, and Mnason shepherded it, teaching and healing, until he in turn named Rhodon to follow him. The see of Tamassos was restored in 2007, after eight centuries. Feast: October 19.Saints & Church FathersSt. Neophytos the RecluseA farmer’s son from Lefkara in Cyprus who ran from an arranged marriage to the monastery, learned to read there as a young man, and failed to reach the Holy Land. In 1159 he cut a cell for himself into a cliff above Paphos, the Enkleistra, had it painted, and lived in it for sixty years, while a monastery grew below him. He wrote a rule, homilies and commentaries, and a bitter account of the calamities of Cyprus when Richard the Lionheart took the island in 1191 and sold it to the Templars and then to the Lusignans: the first voice of Cypriot Orthodoxy under Latin rule, which lasted nearly four hundred years. His cell and its frescoes survive. Feast: January 24.Saints & Church FathersSt. Olympias the DeaconessA rich widow of Constantinople, widowed within two years, who refused the emperor’s choice of a second husband, was ordained a deaconess, and gave her fortune to the Church and the poor through a community of women beside the cathedral. She was the closest friend of St John Chrysostom, and when he was exiled she was tried and fined for her loyalty to him. Seventeen of his letters to her from exile survive, among the most personal things he wrote, on suffering and despondency. She died in exile at Nicomedia around 408. Feast: July 25.Saints & Church FathersSt. Philemon the ApostleA Christian of Colossae in Phrygia, taught by Paul, in whose house the church of the town met, and to whom Paul wrote the shortest of his letters. His slave Onesimus had wronged him and run away, met Paul in prison and was baptized by him, and Paul sent him back with the letter, asking Philemon to receive him "not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved" (Philemon 16). The letter greets Apphia, by tradition his wife, and Archippus, "our fellow soldier". Tradition counts Philemon among the Seventy and says that he, Apphia and Archippus were martyred at Colossae under Nero. Feast: November 22.Saints & Church FathersSt. Philoumenos of Jacob's Well (1913-1979)Sophocles Hasapis was born in 1913 at Orounda in Cyprus, one of twins; at fourteen he and his brother Elpidios became novices at Stavrovouni, and six years later they went to Jerusalem as monks of the Holy Sepulchre. As Philoumenos he served the Patriarchate of Jerusalem for forty years, and in 1979 he was given the keeping of Jacob’s Well at Nablus, where Christ spoke with the Samaritan woman (John 4), though he had been threatened there by men who wanted the shrine cleared of Christians. On 29 November, while he served Vespers, a man broke in and killed him with an axe. His body was found undecayed when it was raised four years later; in 2009 Patriarch Theophilos numbered him among the saints, and his relics lie in the church at the well. Feast: November 29.Saints & Church FathersSt. Polychronius the Hieromartyr (4th c.)Polychronius was the son of a landowner, brought up to work and to pray. He hired himself out in the vineyards of a rich man, who marvelled at his labour and at how little of his wage he kept, and with that wage he built a church. He was ordained deacon and priest in Constantinople and taught his people the faith, and tradition counts him among those who defended the Creed against Arius at the First Ecumenical Council. The Arians could not bend him, so they killed him: they burst into his church as he served the Divine Liturgy and struck him down at the holy table, in the fourth century. In Cyprus the people of three villages in the north, occupied since 1974, Agios Nikolaos near Lefkoniko, Kalogrea and Trypimeni, keep him as their own, and Melanarga in the Karpas has his church. Feast: October 7.Saints & Church FathersSt. Tabitha of JoppaA disciple of Joppa, the port of Judea, "full of good works and almsdeeds"; her Aramaic name, Tabitha, is Dorcas in Greek, a gazelle (Acts 9:36). When she fell sick and died, the disciples sent to nearby Lydda for Peter, and the widows met him weeping, showing him the tunics and cloaks she had made for them. He put them all out, knelt and prayed, and said, "Tabitha, arise"; she opened her eyes and sat up, and many in Joppa believed (Acts 9:36-42). The Church remembers that she lived many years more in the same service. In Jaffa the Russian church of St Peter, consecrated in 1896, stands on the ground of the burial cave tradition calls hers. Feast: October 25.Eschatology & AfterlifeThe Aerial Toll HousesAn account of what the soul meets after death: a passage upward through the air in which demons bring accusations, sin by sin, and the angels who lead the soul answer with what has been repented of. Its oldest witness is St Athanasius, who tells how St Antony, caught up in prayer, saw himself led through the air while bitter and terrible beings stood in the way and demanded an account of his life. It is told most fully in the Life of St Basil the New, where the Blessed Theodora describes passing twenty toll houses, and the Church prays it at every Saturday Midnight Office in the words of the martyr Eustratius, printed below. A homily on the departure of the soul sets it out at length and was long printed in the Slavonic Psalter under the name of St Cyril of Alexandria, though it is not his; in the nineteenth century St Ignatius Brianchaninov and St Theophan the Recluse defended it, St Theophan warning that however absurd the toll houses seem to the wise of this world, they will not escape passing through them. It is also seriously contested inside the Church, and both things are true. No council has defined it, no Creed mentions it, and Orthodox theologians disagree about how far it is a vision given in the language of visions. This site records it as a strong strand of the tradition, not a dogma, and not a thing anyone is required to picture.Liturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Apostles’ FastIt begins on the Monday after the Sunday of All Saints and ends on 28 June, the eve of Sts Peter and Paul. Because it starts on a movable day and ends on a fixed one, it has no fixed length: it can run to six weeks in a year when Pascha is early and shrink to eight days in a year when Pascha is very late, which is the kind of thing a calendar that computes rather than remembers gets wrong. On the New Calendar it is shorter still and in some years does not happen at all. It is the mildest of the four, with fish on most days.Patristic & Ascetical TextsThe Arena (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov)A comprehensive guide to the spiritual life written by St. Ignatius Brianchaninov (1807-1867), a Russian bishop and ascetical writer. Systematic presentation of Orthodox asceticism for monks, beginning with novices: prayer, fasting, watchfulness, humility, dealing with thoughts. Emphasizes that the patristic teachings apply to all Christians, not just monks.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Autonomous Church of SinaiThe smallest autonomous church in the Orthodox world: one monastery, its dependencies, and an archbishop who is also its abbot, elected by the brotherhood and consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalem. St Catherine’s at the foot of the mountain has never been destroyed or abandoned since Justinian built its walls in the sixth century, which makes it the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery on earth, and its independence is a recognition of that continuity rather than a modern grant.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Japanese Orthodox ChurchFounded by one man. St Nicholas Kasatkin arrived at Hakodate in 1861 as chaplain to the Russian consulate, spent eight years learning the language and the classics before he preached at all, and converted the samurai priest who had come to kill him. By his death in 1912 there were more than thirty thousand Japanese Orthodox, a cathedral in Tokyo that Tokyo still calls Nikorai-do, and the services and the Scriptures in Japanese. During the Russo-Japanese war he told his flock to pray for the victory of their own country and stayed to minister to Russian prisoners. Autonomous under Moscow since 1970.Church HistoryThe Martyrs of Persia (4th-5th c.)When Constantine made the Roman empire Christian, the Christians of the Persian empire, many of them in Mesopotamia along the old frontier, became suspect to their own king as friends of Rome, and Constantine’s own letter to Shapur II commending them to his care did them no good. From about 340 until his death in 379 Shapur waged the longest persecution of the early Church. Symeon bar Sabbae, bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, was put to death with a hundred of his clergy, and Sozomen, writing a century later, knew the names of sixteen thousand martyrs and knew there were more. Persecution returned under Yazdegerd I and Bahram V in the 420s, when James, a courtier who had denied Christ and repented, was cut apart limb by limb. The Orthodox Church keeps these martyrs through the year, beside those of Rome.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Oriental Orthodox ChurchesThe Coptic, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Malankara churches, which did not receive Chalcedon and are not in communion with the Orthodox Church. They confess one united nature of the incarnate Word, miaphysis, and they reject Eutyches as firmly as Chalcedon did, so they are not what Chalcedon condemned. Joint commissions at Anba Bishoy in Egypt in 1989 and at Chambesy in 1990 and 1993 concluded that the two christologies agree in substance. Those agreements were never received: the Sacred Community of Mount Athos and a number of hierarchs rejected them, no local council has ratified them, and communion has not been restored. Theirs is an ancient and venerable tradition, and it is a different one.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Orthodox Church of AlbaniaAutocephaly was declared in 1922 and recognised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1937. In 1967 Albania declared itself the first officially atheist state in the world and closed or destroyed every church and mosque in the country; clergy were imprisoned or shot and public worship of any kind was a criminal offence for more than twenty years. When the regime fell there were reportedly twenty-two surviving Orthodox clergy in the whole country. The church was rebuilt from that point from 1991 under Archbishop Anastasios, and now has hundreds of parishes, a seminary and a full hierarchy, which is one of the clearest cases in modern Orthodox history of a local church raised from nothing.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Orthodox Church of FinlandAutonomous under the Ecumenical Patriarchate since 1923, and the one Orthodox church in the world that keeps Pascha on the Gregorian reckoning, by a decision of the Finnish state in 1923 that the church has not reversed. Its people are largely the Karelians who were evacuated when the Soviet Union took Karelia in 1940, and the monastery of New Valamo at Heinavesi is the old Valamo carried west in the evacuation, monks, bells, icons and all. It is a state-recognised church in a Lutheran country and its services are sung in Finnish.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and SlovakiaA small church with a heavy history. It traces itself to the mission of Sts Cyril and Methodius in Great Moravia in the ninth century, and in its modern form to St Gorazd of Prague, who was consecrated in 1921 and was shot by the Germans in 1942 after the cathedral crypt in Prague was found to have sheltered the men who killed Heydrich. The church was suppressed entirely for the rest of the occupation. Moscow granted it autocephaly in 1951 and the Ecumenical Patriarchate recognised that in 1998.Iconography & Sacred ArtThe Painter’s Manual (Hermeneia)A working handbook compiled on Athos by Dionysius of Fourna around 1730, and the nearest thing the tradition has to a written standard for painting. Half of it is craft: how to prepare a panel, grind pigments, lay gold, build flesh from the dark underpaint upward. The other half is iconography proper, scene by scene, saying who stands where in each feast, what each saint looks like and what his scroll says. It is descriptive rather than legislative, recording what was already done, which is why it is useful and why no council ever had to approve it.Church Structure & JurisdictionsThe Polish Orthodox ChurchThe Orthodox of the lands that became interwar Poland received a tomos of autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1924, which Moscow did not accept; Moscow granted its own in 1948, which is why the church keeps two dates. Its people are largely the Orthodox of the eastern borderlands and the Lemkos deported westward in 1947. The monastery on the Holy Mountain of Grabarka, covered in the crosses pilgrims carry up to it, is its best known place. It is small, around half a million faithful, and it holds a position of some delicacy between the Slavic churches.Saints & Church FathersThe Prophet MalachiThe last of the Twelve Prophets, whose name means "my messenger". He spoke to Jerusalem after the return from exile, rebuking priests who brought the blind and the lame to the altar and a people grown weary of God, and foretold that from the rising of the sun to its going down a pure offering would be made to God among the nations (Malachi 1:11), which the Fathers from the Didache on read of the Eucharist. He foretold the messenger sent to prepare the way of the Lord (3:1), whom the Gospels find in John the Forerunner (Mark 1:2), and Elijah, sent before the great and glorious day of the Lord. Feast: January 3.Holy ScriptureThe Twelve ProphetsHosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi: twelve prophets whose books were copied as one scroll, the Book of the Twelve, and are called minor for the length of their books, not their weight. The Septuagint, the Church’s Old Testament, keeps them in an order of its own (Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and on). They speak across three centuries, from the kingdom of Israel before its fall to Jerusalem rebuilt after the exile, and the Church hears Christ in them: Micah names Bethlehem (5:2), Zechariah the king coming on an ass (9:9), Jonah the three days in the belly of the whale (Matthew 12:40), Malachi the messenger sent before the Lord. Their words are read at Vespers on the great feasts, the whole of Jonah on Holy Saturday, and each is kept on his own day: Hosea 17 October, Joel 19 October, Obadiah 19 November, Nahum 1 December, Habakkuk 2 December, Zephaniah 3 December, Haggai 16 December, Malachi 3 January, Zechariah 8 February, Amos 15 June, Micah 14 August, Jonah 22 September.Liturgy & WorshipCompline (Apodeipnon)The last service of the day, prayed after supper. Small Compline is the everyday form. Great Compline is served during Great Lent (Monday-Thursday evenings) and features the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete during the first week. Includes the confession of faith, Psalm 50, and the prayer 'It is truly meet to bless thee, O Theotokos.'Church Structure & JurisdictionsOrthodox Church in America (OCA)The Orthodox Church in America, which grew from the mission eight monks of Valaam brought to Alaska in 1794, among them St Herman. St Innocent built it up in Alaska, St Tikhon led it as archbishop in North America before he became Patriarch of Moscow, and St Raphael of Brooklyn gathered its Arab faithful. After the Russian revolution it governed itself as the Metropolia, and in 1970 the Moscow Patriarchate granted it autocephaly, which Constantinople and several other Churches have not recognised. It worships largely in English, and its seminary of St Vladimir’s gave the Church Fr Alexander Schmemann, Fr John Meyendorff and Fr Thomas Hopko. Metropolitan Tikhon has led it since 2012.Orthodox Philosophy & EthicsOrthodox Social TeachingOrthodoxy does not have a single social encyclical tradition like Catholicism, but derives social principles from theology: the dignity of the person (image of God), the common good (koinonia), care for the poor (Matthew 25), stewardship of creation, the limits of state authority, and the primacy of spiritual over material values. Recent documents: Russian Church's 'Bases of the Social Concept' (2000).Eschatology & AfterlifeParticular Judgment & Toll HousesAt death, the soul undergoes a particular judgment. Some Orthodox tradition describes 'aerial toll houses' (telonia): where demons accuse and angels defend the soul. This is not official dogma but a widespread teaching in patristic and hagiographic literature. The final state is determined at the Last Judgment.Spiritual Life & PracticesPilgrimage (Proskynema)Traveling to holy sites for prayer, veneration, and spiritual renewal. Major Orthodox pilgrimage sites: Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Mount Athos, Mount Sinai, Tinos (Megalochari icon), Patmos (cave of the Apocalypse), Kiev Caves Lavra, Sergiev Posad, and numerous local shrines. Pilgrimage is both physical and spiritual: an outer journey mirroring the inner journey toward God.Patristic & Ascetical TextsShepherd of HermasAn early Christian text (c. 100-160 AD) that was widely read and nearly included in the New Testament canon. Contains visions, commandments, and parables given to Hermas by an angel in shepherd's clothing. Important for its teaching on repentance after baptism and the possibility of a 'second repentance.' Influenced Eastern Christian penitential theology.Liturgy & WorshipThe Hours (Horai)Short services marking the canonical hours: First (6am), Third (9am), Sixth (noon) and Ninth (3pm). Each keeps its own memory. The First recalls Christ led before Pilate, the Third the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Sixth the nailing to the Cross, the Ninth His death. Monasteries serve all four daily; parishes commonly serve the Third and Sixth before the Liturgy.Church HistoryThe Three Chapters ControversyThree items condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553: the person and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the writings of Theodoret of Cyrus against St. Cyril, and the letter of Ibas of Edessa to Mari the Persian. All three had been left standing at Chalcedon, and that is what made the question hard: condemning them looked like a retreat from Chalcedon, and leaving them looked like a licence to read Chalcedon as Nestorius would. Justinian condemned them by edict in 544 and the council confirmed it, holding that Chalcedon is to be read through St. Cyril and not beside him. The Latin West took the condemnation as an attack on Chalcedon itself, and the sees of Milan and Aquileia broke communion with Rome over it, Aquileia for more than a century.Liturgy & WorshipAntidoronThe blessed bread given at the end of the Liturgy, cut from the loaves offered at the preparation of the gifts after the Lamb has been taken out of them. Its name means instead of the gifts: it is given to those who did not receive communion as well as to those who did, and it is what a visitor who is not Orthodox may take from the priest’s hand. The faithful receive it as they come forward to kiss the cross, eat it in church or take it home to those who could not come, and it is not the Eucharist but a blessing, a share in the offering and in the fellowship of the one table. In some places it is eaten fasting, before anything else that day.