Porphyrios

We thought it was appropriate to start the episode out with this one.

And I wanted to, you know, read a quote for those that haven't read The Homilies of Metropolitan Theophytos of Morphou, Volume 1, Words of Empirical Theology from Our Holy Fathers, Porphyrios, Paisios, and Iakovos.

Be sure to check that out from Uncut Mountain Press.

We'll probably link it down below.

But in the prologue to this book by George Kithriotis, he says, and he's a friend of Metropolitan Neophytos, he says, "...in the barrenness of the twentieth century infiltrated even the ecclesiastical sphere, as the ascetic and monastic tradition underwent a serious decline, and an alien moralistic perspective increasingly prevailed over the folk piety." that has been passed down through generations.

And this book in Metropolitan Jovitos talks about this a lot, how some of these great modern saints, again, St. Paisios, Porphyrios, Iakovos, others, Elder Ephraim, they were raised by very pious parents, grandparents in villages, in refugee camps from Turkey, in Anatolia itself as very, very young children in the case of St. Paisios and St. Iakovos.

And this sort of unbroken, true Christian piety that dates all the way back to the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and frankly, even early church history, this is Romanity, as some people call it.

This is that sort of universal church history.

Back at the height of Justinian's reign, the straits' vital traffic faced a threat that came from neither a rival army nor open water but from something moving, unrecorded.

Beneath it, Porphyrios, terror of the Bosporus, Unlike the allegorical monsters of medieval folklore, this beast was entirely real and earned a fearsome, specific name – Porphyrios.

He was a massive, aggressive sea creature that stalked the waters around Constantinople, fully embracing the defensive doctrine of exploiting a narrow transit route.

a spatial habit that had shattered a Persian armada at Salamis centuries earlier.

Only in this case the creature applied the tactic directly against the Byzantines.

Porphyrios haunted the active shipping lane of the Bosporus, persistently ramming ships, overturning boats, and attacking almost anything that crossed his path.

He elevated the simple act of bumping into floating wood into a sustained campaign of geopolitical sabotage.

His assaults were so disruptive that he was officially blamed for interrupting the empire's vital grain transport, directly threatening the food supply and political stability of the capital.

He was born in Rome of a noble family and very young, renounced the world to live as a Christian.

living an ascetic life under Porphyrios.

And it's interesting to note that Porphyrios' feast day is today, St. Porphyrios.

And tomorrow there's another saint who was also a martyr, St. Anastasios Ptolemy, I forget his name exactly, but who was converted at seeing the martyrdom of the St. Agapetus.

So there's quite a few saints that are around this time.

And so the question comes to us, was the heaven that this young Atticus was striving after any different from the heaven that we are striving after? Was the hell that he was trying to avoid any different from the hell that we are trying to avoid? Why did he do so much and why do we do so little? It's a good question that we could ask.

Obviously, there were millions of martyrs in these first centuries, but not everyone is called to be a martyr.

And in fact, Saint Porphyrios, who was the teacher of Saint Agapetus, was not a martyr.