Christmas Every Day

St Agatha’s Day

There are thousands of saints who have been venerated by Christians  over the century and depicted in art. Since most of their real features are unknown to us, how do artists portray them and how can viewers distinguish one pictured saint from another? The trick is to look for visual clues. A saint, for example, carrying a palm branch may be reliably counted on to be a martyr. Or a saint can be determined by the presence of the weapon that killed him — St Paul by a sword, St Lawrence by a griddle or St Sebastian by an arrow. Then again, since saints can be prayed to for particular ailments, they are often shown with that particular part of the body emphasized. Those suffering from skin diseases will want to turn to St Job who sat on a dunghill scratching his afflicted flesh. And so it is with St Agatha, the saint who is memorialized with images of a breast.

Agatha was a Christian virgin who was caught up in the Decian persecution of 250. She refused to renounce her religion and so was sentenced to a brothel but refused to participate and remained a virgin. Her breasts were ripped off with pincers (though the painting above shows her wounds being healed by St Peter in their prison) and she was burnt to  death on hot coals. To this day, sufferers of sore breasts ask St Agatha to help them. In Catania where she originated, they celebrate her feast day with great spectacle. One visitor has described it thus:

The nearly manic celebration begins at dawn on February 4 when Agatha’s life-sized effigy, dripping in jewels collected since the 12th century, is pulled through the streets on a 40,000-pound silver carriage by a cast of 5,000 men. The soundtrack of the procession is grunting, crying, and the grinding wheels of the carriage or fercolo pushing through molten candle wax. All the while thousands scream, “Viva Sant’ Agata.”

St Theophilus the Penitent Day

Theophilus of Adana (d. 538) was a priest of Asia Minor in the Byzantine empire. He declined a bishopric because he thought himself unworthy of the position. Enemies slandered him to the new bishop with accusations of theft and he was removed from his position of archdeacon. Outraged by the injustice he signed a pact with the Devil. In return for vengeance, wealth and the bishopric, he was to deny Christ and the Virgin Mary in a pact written in his own blood. Repenting of his rashness later, he appealed to the Virgin and undertook a penitential fast of forty days. The Virgin rescued him by fetching back the contract he had signed with the Infernal Powers. The pact was burnt in the town square and Theophilus entered into legend with the story told many times in the Middle Ages. It was an influential story – perhaps the earliest tale of a deal with the devil – and it emphasised to the medieval mind the reality of Satan and the power of the Virgin Mary

1649

Charles I (1600-49) of the Stuart dynasty was the last man to be canonised by the Church of England. There had been other English kings known as saints before him (e.g., St Edmund, St Edward the Martyr and St Edward the Confessor) but he may have been the most incompetent ruler to be given that honour.

Coming to the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland in 1625, Charles inherited a history of bad relations between the crown, the English Parliament, and the Scottish church. A more flexible or far-sighted monarch might have saved himself from catastrophe but Charles was stubborn, short-sighted and untrustworthy. He tried to impose episcopacy on the Calvinist Scots; his religious leanings in England and his marriage to a French princess made many fear he was sponsoring a return to Catholicism; and his refusal to consult Parliament for over a decade led directly to the English Civil War.

Defeated in war, he was put on trial by his Parliamentarian captors, accused of treason. “[W]icked designs, wars, and evil practices of him, the said Charles Stuart, have been, and are carried on for the advancement and upholding of a personal interest of will, power, and pretended prerogative to himself and his family, against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice, and peace of the people of this nation.” He was found guilty and condemned to death. Charles behaved bravely on the block, though he broke with conventional piety by refusing to pardon his executioner. (The painting above is of his arch-enemy Cromwell peering into the royal coffin.)

For his personal religious faith, which was unquestionably deep, and his defence of the Church of England, Charles was regard as a martyr and canonized by Convocation on the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

St Francis de Sales

FRANCIS was born of noble and pious parents, near Annecy, 1566, and studied with brilliant success at Paris and Padua. On his return from Italy he gave up the grand career which his father had marked out for him in the service of the state, and became a priest. When the Duke of Savoy had resolved to restore the Church in the Chablais, Francis offered himself for the work, and set out on foot with his Bible and breviary and one companion, his cousin Louis of Sales. It was a work of toil, privation, and danger. Every door and every heart was closed against him. He was rejected with insult and threatened with death. But nothing could daunt or resist him, and ere long the Church burst forth into a second spring. It is stated that he converted 72,000 Calvinists. He was then compelled by the Pope to become Coadjutor Bishop of Geneva, and succeeded to the see in 1602.

At times the exceeding gentleness with which he received heretics and sinners almost scandalized his friends, and one of them said to him, “Francis of Sales will go to Paradise, of course; but I am not so sure of the Bishop of Geneva: I am almost afraid his gentleness will play him a shrewd turn.” “Ah,” said the Saint, “I would rather account to God for too great gentleness than for too great severity. Is not God all love? God the Father is the Father of mercy; God the Son is a Lamb; God the Holy Ghost is a Dove—that is, gentleness itself. And are you wiser than God?” In union with St. Jane Frances of Chantal he founded at Annecy the Order of the Visitation, which soon spread over Europe. Though poor, he refused provisions and dignities, and even the great see of Paris. He died at Avignon, 1622.

Butler’s Book of Saints

In 1923, Pope Pius XI proclaimed him a patron of writers and journalists, because he made extensive use of broadsheets and books both in spiritual direction and in his efforts to convert the Calvinists of the region. St. Francis developed a sign language in order to teach a deaf man about God. Because of this, he is the patron saint of the deaf.

‘Tis prophecied in the Revelation, that the Whore of Babylon shall be destroyed with fire and sword and what do you know, but this is the time of her ruin, and that we are the men that must help to pull her down?’
John Rogers, 1657

‘A thing that never was heard of, that so few men should dare and do so much mischief.’
Samuel Pepys, 1661

On this day in 1661 Thomas Venner was executed in London for treason, suffering the usual punishment of traitors: being hanged, drawn and quartered. He had led a rebellion against the English government in the name of the Fifth Monarchy, violently rampaging through London before being cornered in a tavern and his men shot to pieces.

The English Civil War of the 1640s had pitted defenders of the Stuart monarchy against supporters of a Puritan-dominated Parliament. The chaos engendered allowed a number of extravagant fringe movements to develop: “Ranters”, amoral pantheists who found virtue in blasphemy; “Levellers” who wanted an end to social distinctions; and agrarian socialist “Diggers”. Among the most radical were the believers in the Fifth Monarchy, an idea taken from the Book of Daniel where King Nebuchadnezzar dreamt of a final kingdom that would last forever. They were millennialists, confident that the End Times were near and they hoped to set up an English theocracy before witnessing the conversion of the Jews and Moslems and the return of Christ. Some Fifth Monarchy Men were hoping to accomplish their goals peacefully but others such as Thomas Venner, a London cooper, were prepared to use force to overturn the government. In 1661, hoping to prevent the re-establishment of the Anglican Church and the Stuart monarchy he led an uprising of a few hundred men under the slogan “King Jesus and the heads upon the Gates”. For a few days they controlled parts of London before being trapped and overcome by regular army troops. Wounded 19 times, Venner was placed quickly on trial and executed with other of his surviving men.

The Fifth Monarchy movement abandoned its violent wing and continued to press for reform and hope in the Second Coming well into the 18th century.

St Hilary’s Day

St Hilary of Poitiers (300-368) was a Gaulish bishop who was one of the most prominent defenders of Trinitarianism in the western empire. A convert from paganism, he turned his considerable learning against the Arian heresy which denied the divinity of Christ. The 325 Council of Nicaea had condemned this view of the Godhead but Arianism was protected by emperors and many churchmen in the middle of the fourth century — for these men the notion that Christ was a powerful but inferior creation was the best way to cling to monotheism. Like many who defended the Trinity in this era, Hilary was persecuted and sent into exile. In time, his writings won him recall to Poitiers and he spent the rest of his life battling the Arian heretics.  He said: “For one to attempt to speak of God in terms more precise than he himself has used — to undertake such a thing is to embark upon the boundless, to dare the incomprehensible. He fixed the names of His nature: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Whatever is sought over and above this is beyond the meaning of words, beyond the limits of perception, beyond the embrace of understanding.” Hilary is the patron saint of those who suffer from snake-bite.

347

Birth of a Trinitarian emperor.

In the fourth century Christianity had, at last, become a legally-tolerated religion, able to own property, preach openly and overtly influence Roman society. Though the royal family of Constantine had accepted Christianity, the majority of the empire was still pagan and, moreover, the faith was harshly divided theologically. On one hand were the Arians who asserted absolute monotheism and who denied full divinity to Christ; on the other were the Trinitarians who saw a single God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Council of Nicaea in 325 had decided emphatically for the Trinitarian position but the emperors after Constantine were largely Arian.

Theodosius, born in Spain in 347, became a general and fought his way to the imperial throne of the eastern empire in 379 and ruler of the whole empire by 393, the last emperor to rule an undivided Roman realm. His reign was largely spent battling Germanic invaders and usurping generals but his career had great consequences for Christianity.

In 380 he decreed that the Trinitarian position was to be the true form of religion; he expelled Arian bishops and acted strongly against paganism. He disbanded the Vestal Virgins, banned animal sacrifice, halted the Olympic Games, ended state subsidies to pagan cults and closed polytheistic temples, decreeing that “no one is to go to the sanctuaries, walk through the temples, or raise his eyes to statues created by the labor of man”.

A riot in Thessalonica in 390 resulted in the murder of some of Theodosius’s troops; in retaliation he ordered a massacre of the civilian population. This outraged Christian leaders and the bishop of Milan, Ambrose, demanded that Theodosius do penance for the crime and excommunicated him until he did so. (see the Van Dyke painting above) The submission of the emperor to the bishop was often cited for the next thousand years as a symbol of the relationship between church and state.

The death of Theodosius in 395 was a disaster for the Roman imperium and civilization. Rule was split between two of his incompetent sons and within a generation the western empire had fallen to the barbarians.