ON THE THIRTY-EIGHT HOLY MONKS, MARTYRS, IN IONIA.
Under Copronymus.
CommentaryThirty-eight monks, Martyrs at Ephesus (Sts.)
From various sources.
[1] We shall give on November 28 the Acts of the glorious Martyr Stephen, surnamed the Younger, Archimandrite of the community of Auxentius; in which are narrated the illustrious struggles of very many others for the veneration of sacred images, and especially of the Thirty-eight monks who, shut up in an old bath at the farthest bounds of Ephesus, were thus forced to die. Their feast is recorded in the Roman Martyrology on the day before the Ides of January in these words: The feast of these Saints. "At Ephesus, of the forty-two holy monks who, for the veneration of the holy images, were most cruelly tortured under Constantine Copronymus and completed their martyrdom." There is an error either in the Acts of St. Stephen edited by Jacques Billy, or in the tables of the Martyrology: for here they are said to have been two and forty, there thirty-eight, that is, thirty and eight.
[2] The Greeks, says Baronius in the Notes to the Martyrology, hold them in special honor. But we have found mention of them neither in the Menologion nor in the Menaea. Their contest was related to St. Stephen and his other fellow captives by Theosterictus, their colleague, an eyewitness of the events, but not also a writer of that time, as Baronius thought, volume 9, at the year 767, number 28. Whence the Acts were received. For who cites this Theosterictus as a writer? It is one thing to recount something by word of mouth to someone, even to one who is going to write it down and hand it on to posterity, another to commit it to writing with one's own hand. Yet this narrative deserves all the greater credence in that Theosterictus was renowned for the hardships and torments he endured for the faith, and was afterward entered in the roll of the Heavenly Ones, as we shall show on March 17. Another is the Theosterictus somewhat younger, whose oration on the deeds of St. Nicetas the Archimandrite exists in Metaphrastes, on April 3.
[3] St. Theosterictus the Confessor, March 17. The narrative of Theosterictus runs thus: "When he (Antony of Crete) had recounted these things, and the Fathers were wet with tears, a certain Theosterictus, who had deservedly obtained this name, an old man adorned with the dignity of the priesthood, who was from that pious monastery which is called Peleceta, and who had his nose cut off and his cheeks smeared with boiling pitch and bitumen and wretchedly burned (for he had endured these torments for the sake of piety), coming forward himself also into the midst, added these things to the preceding discourses: 'It is impossible, impossible, I say, that even this our Prelate himself should recount these things with dry eyes. For by what speech could anyone encompass the fury of him who then held Asia with command? whose surname was indeed Lachanodracon, but whose gall and wrath surpassed in bitterness even the venom of a dragon.' To whom Blessed Stephen said: 'Tell it, I beg you, Father, omitting nothing of what happened then, but following out everything in your discourse. For through examples of this kind, The fruit of a pious narrative. filled both with readiness of spirit and with strength, we are prepared for the same zeal: if indeed the will of God should so bring it about that we too should undergo the contest for His divine image.'
[4] Then Theosterictus continued the discourse he had begun in this manner: 'When the unbloody sacrifice was being celebrated in our monastery (it was the evening of the holy and great Thursday, on which Christ was to be handed over to the Jews), this man who had the name of dragon, at the tyrant's command, made an assault upon the monastery with a great band of soldiers. And he overthrew the mystical rite, the mystical hymns being forthwith suppressed into silence: and he bound the thirty-eight choicest monks with iron chains. The torments and slaughter of the 38 Monks. The rest he partly lacerated cruelly with blows, partly burned their beards after smearing them with pitch, having first cut off their noses. Their number I myself also increase, as the marks of my face most certainly testify. Not yet satisfied with these things, that impious man afterward set fire to the whole monastery, burning the very churches too, together with the other buildings. And soon he banished the aforesaid thirty-eight Fathers to the farthest bounds of Ephesus: where, having shut them up in the vault of an old bath, and then blocked up the entrance, in this way he forced them to depart from life.'"
[4] Wion entered them in the Benedictine Martyrology, because he had learned from certain records that the rule of St. Benedict was customarily observed in those parts.