26 August 2024 (MIA)

Macedonian Orthodox Church Calendar

Saint Maximus the Confessor

Saint Maximus was born at the end of the sixth century in Constantinople of noble parents and received an excellent philosophical and theological education. Under Emperor Heraclius, he was among the imperial counselors. Seeing the spread of the heresy of the Monothelites, with which even the Emperor himself was infected, he left the imperial palace and joined the monks in the Chrysopolis Monastery.

Venerable Maximus became the superior of this monastery. But they cut off his right hand and tongue, and they dispatched him to confinement in Lazov (a region of Mingrelia) in the Caucasus. Here, Venerable Maximus died on the August 13, 662.

Catholic Calendar

St. Anastasius

Bishop of Antioch, AD 559, distinguished for his learning and austerity of life, excited the enmity of the Emperor Justinian by opposing certain imperial doctrines about the Body of Christ. He was to he deposed from his see and exiled when Justinian died; but Justin II carried out his uncle’s purpose five years later, and another bishop, named Gregory, was put in his place; on the death of that prelate in 593, Anastasius was restored to his see. This was chiefly due to Pope Gregory the Great, who interceded with Emperor Maurice and his son Theodosius, asking that Anastasius be sent to Rome, if not reinstated at Antioch.

From some letters sent to him by Gregory, it is thought that he was not sufficiently vigorous in denouncing the claims of the Patriarch of Constantinople to be a universal bishop. He died in 598, and another bishop of the same name is said to have succeeded him in 599, to whom the translation Gregory’s “Regula Pastoralis” is attributed, and who is recorded as having been put to death in an insurrection of the Jews. Nicephorus (Hist. Eccl., XVIII, xliv) (declares that these two are the same person. The same difficulty occurs about certain Sermons de orthodoxâ fide, some ascribing them to the latter Anastasius; others claiming that there was but one bishop of that name.