Teachers, Truth and Torture

St. Cassian's martydom

Today the Church commemorates St. Cassian, a schoolmaster, who refused to offer sacrifice to pagan gods and was handed over to his students to be tortured, before being stabbed to death with the iron styles they used for writing.

Also today we remember St. Maximus the Confessor, who resigned an imperial post to become a monk and abbot of Chyrsopolis. After his community disbanded he went to Alexandria, Carthage and Rome, where he worked with Pope Martin I against the Monothelists. Falsely accused of treason, he defended the orthodox faith and was sent to Constantinople. After years in prison, he received his final sentence: he was flogged, his tongue and right hand cut off, he was paraded through the streets and exiled to the Black Sea. St. Maximus also wrote many ascetical, mystical and theological writings. The Orthodox Church refers to him in the office for his feast as, "a guide of Orthodoxy, a teacher of piety and modesty, a luminary of the world, the God inspired pride of monastics."

The extremities of the earth, and all in every part of it who purely and rightly confess the Lord look directly towards the most holy Roman Church and its confession and faith, as it were to a sun of unfailing light, awaiting from it the bright radiance of the sacred dogmas of our Fathers according to what the six inspired and holy councils have purely and piously decreed, declaring most expressly the symbol of faith. For from the coming down of the incarnate Word amongst us, all the Churches in every part of the world have held that greatest Church alone as their base and foundation, seeing that according to the promise of Christ our Saviour, the gates of hell do never prevail against it, that it has the keys of a right confession and faith in Him, that it opens the true and only religion to such as approach with piety, and shuts up and locks every heretical mouth that speaks injustice against the Most High. - St. Maximus the Confessor