Lives of the Saints
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Lives of the Saints’
The Bishop of Myra’s ceaseless toil to put an end to the worship of Artemis made him some dangerous enemies.
By the 320s, Christians in the Roman Empire were no longer discriminated against, but that did not mean life was easy. As this story shows, the warm-hearted yet combative Bishop of Myra (now Demre in Turkey) made himself some dangerous enemies by continuing to insist that there was one God and one Truth, and that the popular and profitable religions of Rome were the delusions of a dark power.
In a sermon for the Feast of All Saints, eighth-century Northumbrian monk St Bede explains why it is worth going for the spiritual burn.
In a Sermon for All Saints Day, St Bede, a monk of Jarrow in early eighth-century Northumbria, picked up on a passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews which compared the Christian to a sprinter in a race. His gaze is fixed on Christ, waiting at the tape, and he is surrounded by cheering spectators from among his own family who have finished the race before him.
Eighth-century Northumbrian monk St Bede urged Christians to think of heaven, and then fight our way there for all we are worth.
In a Sermon for All Saints Day, St Bede, a monk of Jarrow in early eighth-century Northumbria, has been speaking of the Christian life as a spiritual warfare against the dark Enemy of mankind his unseen servants. The warefare does not last long, he tells us: soon we are released from it, and the warriors who have fought on to the end are gathered safely into a heavenly citadel.
John Mansur, working in Islamic Syria, thought he could safely criticise the Roman Emperor for meddling in Christian worship. But he was wrong.
In 726, the Roman Emperor Leo III, seated in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), declared that images of Christ and his saints were ‘idolatrous’ and must be scrubbed from all church walls. The ban was sternly enforced, but there were rebels; and the outspoken John Mansur encouraged them with stirring pamphlets written from the safety of the Islamic court of Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, Caliph of Damascus.
If only the primitive Christians had filled in the right forms and said that one man’s god is as good as another’s, they wouldn’t have had to die.
After telling the tale of St John’s banishment to the island of Patmos in 92, Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa (?1228-1298) and compiler of The Golden Legend, hazarded some guesses as to why the Roman Empire persecuted Christianity so pitilessly. The English translation below was made by William Caxton, pioneer of printing, in about 1483.
According to an ancient tradition, the Roman authorities banished St John the Divine to the island of Patmos because they were quite unable to kill him.
In the Revelation of St John, the ‘beloved disciple’ tells us that he spent some time on the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea. A tradition going back to Tertullian (155-220) says that John was banished there in 92 after frustrating the State’s attempt to execute him for his Christian beliefs. Pioneering English printer William Caxton translated the tale for his edition of The Golden Legend, published in 1483-84.