Saint Methodius, Patriarch of Constantinople

Life

A native of the city of Syracuse in Sicily. After completing his secular education he was tonsured a monk and began the ascetical life in a monastery. Patriarch Nicephorus took him into his service. During the time of the iconoclast emperors he became known everywhere as a resolute defender of the veneration of icons. The wicked Emperor Theophilus imprisoned him on an island, in a prison with two common criminals, where he spent a full seven years in damp, without light, and without sufficient food, as in a grave. In the time of the pious Empress Theodora and her son Michael, he was freed and elected patriarch (according to the earlier prophecy of Saint Joannicius the Great). On the first Sunday of Great Lent, Methodius solemnly brought icons into the church and composed a canon in honor of the icons. Unable to get at him in any other way, the vile heretics hired a woman who declared that the patriarch had impure bodily relations with her. All Constantinople was in an uproar from this slander. Not knowing how otherwise to prove his innocence, the patriarch overcame his modesty and undressed before the court, which he himself had requested, and showed his dry body, emaciated from fasting. The court was visibly convinced that the patriarch had been slandered. The people, hearing of this, rejoiced, and the heretics were put to shame. Then the woman herself confessed that she had been instigated and paid to bring this slander against the saint of God. And so those who had thought to bring shame upon Methodius involuntarily increased his glory. This great confessor of the faith peacefully ended his life in the year 846 and departed to the Kingdom of God.