A shepherd who stayed with his people through hard times.
September 13
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Bishop
Confessor
Eulogius was a Syrian who became a monk young and kept himself apart from the errors and loose morals of many monks around him.
He became a great student of Scripture and the Fathers, and Butler ranks him with St. Gregory the Great as a light of his age. The patriarch Anastasius made him a priest of Antioch, and he later became patriarch of Alexandria. Butler gives 608; Baring-Gould, the text on this page, gives about 605. The sources differ.
S. Eulogius wrote against the Acephali, and several discourses of which Photius has preserved some fragments. He also composed six books against the Novatians, and one against the Agnoetae, a sect of Eutychians, which ascribed to Our Lord, as man, ignorance of many things which are open to the eye of God. John Moschus says that one night Eulogius rose to say his office in his private oratory, when he saw his archdeacon kneeling behind him.
Build up the community you belong to. This life was lived with and for a community.
Learn from the kind of life it was. A shepherd who stayed with his people through hard times.
S. Eulogius wrote against the Acephali, and several discourses of which Photius has preserved some fragments. He also composed six books against the Novatians, and one against the Agnoetae, a sect of Eutychians [followers of Eutyches, who said Christ had only a divine nature; condemned at Chalcedon in 451], which ascribed to Our Lord, as man, ignorance of many things which are open to the eye of God.
John Moschus says that one night Eulogius rose to say his office in his private oratory, when he saw his archdeacon kneeling behind him. His archdeacon’s name was Julian. And he was offended, because none had right of admission without leave asked and given. And when he had finished reciting his psalm, he prostrated himself, and the archdeacon prostrated himself also. Then Eulogius rose, but Julian remained lying on his face, with outspread hands. And the Patriarch said to him, “ Arise/' “ I cannot/' answered the archdeacon, “ without thy assistance/' Then he stretched forth his hand to him, blessed him, and raised him, and Julian straightway disappeared.
Now when morning was come, the patriarch [the title of the bishops of the great ancient sees: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem] rebuked his chamberlain, Mennas, for admitting the archdeacon without leave. Mennas replied that he had not done so. And shortly after Julian entered and denied he had been in the oratory that night.
Then Eulogius guessed that Julian the Martyr had appeared under the form of Julian the archdeacon, to hint to him the advisability of raising a church in his honour. S. Eulogius.
Moschus was told this story by Mennas himself. In the days of Eulogius, the Sarmatians were torn with factions, one party declaring that the words of Moses, “ A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you, like unto me/7 referred to Joshua the son of Nun, the other party that it applied to Dositheus the master of Simon Magus. Eulogius convoked a council to determine this knotty point, and decreed that the prophecy applied to neither one nor the other, but to the Messiah. Several letters were addressed by S. Gregory, after he was pope, to S. Eulogius, among them is one in which he joyfully announces the success of S. Augustine in Britain, “ among the race of Angles settled in an angle of the world,” and asking his prayers and those of the Alexandrian Church for the mission.
In a letter to S. Gregory, Eulogius had addressed him as “ Universal Pope,” S. Gregory rejected the title in the same letter, in noble words, “ I desire to increase in virtue and not in words. I do not consider myself honoured in that which dishonours my brethren. It is the honour of the Universal Church which honours me. It is the strength of my brethren which does me honour. I feel myself honoured only when I see that no man refuses to another the honour due to him. Away with those words which inflate vanity and wound charity !.... The holy council of Chalcedon and other Fathers have offered this title to my predecessors, but none of them has ever used it, that they might guard their own honour in the sight of God, by seeking here below the honour of all the priesthood.”
Eulogius did not long survive his friend S. Gregory, who died in a.d. 604. Eulogius followed him to a better land in the following year, or, at latest, in 606.
Feast: September 13
One short email a day for nine days. The day's prayer, a line from St. Eulogius's story, and a nudge to keep going.
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897–98); text from the Internet Archive scan (OCR, lightly cleaned; errors possible). Public domain.
From Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, new edition in 16 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897–98); text from the Internet Archive scan (OCR, lightly cleaned; errors possible). Public domain in the United States. Reproduced unedited, except for short bracketed notes in grey that we added to explain names and terms (“S.” is the old abbreviation for Saint). Some history and judgments reflect 19th-century scholarship.
