Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council

In the year 325, at the request of the holy Emperor Constantine the Great, three hundred and eighteen bishops from across the Christian world gathered in the city of Nicaea in Bithynia. They came from Egypt, from Palestine, from Syria, from Asia Minor, from Greece, and from the Latin West; they came as confessors who still bore upon their bodies the marks of the late persecutions—among them Paphnutius of Egypt with his blinded eye and his maimed hand, and Spyridon of Tremithus, the shepherd-bishop who had laid aside his crook only long enough to defend the divinity of the Son. Their task was not theological speculation but the rescue of the Gospel itself, for Arius of Alexandria had begun to teach that the Son of God is not eternal with the Father—that “there was a time when the Son was not”—and that He is only the highest of creatures, fashioned by the Father out of nothing.

Against this teaching the Fathers set the witness of the Apostles and the rule of prayer of the Church. They confessed the Son to be “begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father,” and they enshrined this confession in the first seven articles of what we now call the Nicene Creed. Athanasius, then a young deacon serving Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, became the council’s most eloquent voice; Nicholas of Myra, unable to bear the blasphemies of Arius, struck him on the face—and was rebuked by the Fathers, deprived for a night of his omophorion and the Gospels, and the next morning restored, for the Mother of God and the Lord Himself had appeared and returned to him his rank. The same Council fixed the date of Pascha for the whole Church, ruling that it be kept on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox, and never together with the Jewish Passover.

The Fathers are not commemorated as men of polemical sharpness alone, but as physicians of the soul. They saw that heresy is to the soul what cancer is to the body, and they laid down the dogmatic boundary lines not to wound but to save. In the high-priestly prayer that the Church reads at the Liturgy of their feast—“that they may be one, as We are one” (John 17:11)—the Fathers heard their own commission: to keep the Church one in the truth, lest the unity of love be purchased at the cost of the unity of faith. The Church appoints their commemoration on the Sunday between Ascension and Pentecost, that we may see them seated at the cleft between the two feasts, holding the Church safe at anchor in the harbor of right belief.

Symeon was born in Antioch in 521 to pious parents John and Martha; his father perished in an earthquake while Symeon was a small child, and his mother raised him alone with great tenderness and prayer. At the age of six he withdrew to the desert outside Antioch and placed himself under the spiritual direction of the elder John the Stylite. Under John’s guidance he ascended his first pillar at the age of seven and there began a life of fasting, vigil, and unbroken prayer that would last sixty-eight years.

After the death of his elder, Symeon was commanded by an angelic vision to move to a mountain not far from Seleucia in Syria, which the Lord Himself named “Wonderful” (in Greek, Thaumaston), and from which the saint received his epithet. There he built a stone pillar, and around it a monastery of disciples, and at the foot of the mountain the sick whom he healed built a church in gratitude. The Lord gave him the gifts of prophecy, healing, and the knowledge of hearts. Emperors and patriarchs consulted him; Justinian wrote to him about matters of state; the local Saracens were converted in great numbers through his miracles.

Symeon reposed in 596, having spent the whole of his adult life upon the pillar. The Church remembers him as a witness that the ascetic struggle is itself a witness to the divinity of the Son—for only the One who took on flesh and ascended into heaven could so transform earthly flesh that it could endure decades of standing prayer without falling. He stands, fittingly, on the Sunday of the Fathers: as Athanasius defended the consubstantial divinity of Christ in the world, Symeon witnessed to it on his pillar.

Vincent was born of a noble Gallo-Roman family in Toulouse, and in his youth he was a soldier in the service of the empire. Weary of the world after the sack of Rome in 410 and the upheavals of his time, he entered the monastery at Lérins (the island of Saint-Honorat off the coast of Provence), where he embraced the monastic life under the name Peregrinus, “the pilgrim.” There, around the year 434—three years after the Council of Ephesus had condemned Nestorius—he composed his Commonitorium, a small handbook intended to provide a sure criterion for distinguishing the apostolic faith from heretical novelty.

In that work Vincent gave the Church its most famous formula for catholicity: Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est—“what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” This rule—universality, antiquity, and consent—has remained ever since one of the touchstones by which Orthodox theology tests new teaching against the apostolic deposit. Although Vincent lived in the Latin West, his theological method is profoundly congenial to the Eastern conciliar mind; he is honored as a saint in the Antiochian, Greek, and Russian calendars, and his witness is read at the threshold of the commemoration of the Council of Nicaea precisely because he articulates the principle by which the work of the Fathers is to be received in every age.

Meletios was a Roman commander (in Greek, stratelates) in Galatia in the time of the Emperor Antoninus. A Christian of fervent prayer, he had implored the Lord that the pagan error in his city might be ended; one day, finding himself in a temple to the gods, he confessed the name of Christ and tore down its idols. The pagan authorities seized him, and with him all those of his command who refused to deny Christ—among them Stephen, John, and Serapion the Egyptian, the soldiers Kallinikos, Theodore, and Faustus, and (according to the synaxarion) one thousand two hundred eighteen soldiers together with the women and children of their households who would not be parted from the faith of their fathers. The men were crucified on trees by command of the governor; the women and children were beheaded. The Church honors them as a witness that fidelity to Christ knows no rank—that captain, foot-soldier, wife, and child stand or fall together at the altar of confession.

Gregory, born to pious parents Nicholas and Christina in Novgorod, was given in baptism the name Gabriel. With his brother Elias (the future Saint John, Archbishop of Novgorod and Wonderworker) he used the inheritance left them by their parents to build a small monastery dedicated to the Annunciation of the Mother of God; the brothers entered the monastic life there together, Gabriel taking the name Gregory. When Elias was elected Archbishop of Novgorod in 1165, Gregory remained at his side as his closest counsellor.

On the repose of Saint John on September 7, 1186, Gregory was elected to succeed his brother in the archiepiscopal throne. He governed the see of Novgorod for seven years (1186–1193), continuing the work of building monasteries—including the consecration of the great Khutyn Monastery founded by Saint Varlaam—and preserving the unity of the Church in northern Rus’ during a time of intense political division between the principalities. He reposed peacefully in 1193 and was buried in Holy Wisdom Cathedral beside his brother, the place where the people of Novgorod have honored them ever since as twin lamps of the city’s faith. His memory falls fittingly on the Sunday of the Fathers—a hierarch who, like the Nicene Fathers, kept the Church one in his own time and place.

• “He turns His discourse into a kind of prayer, allowing no interval to elapse between His teaching to His disciples and His prayer to the Father—herein also suggesting to us, by His own conduct, a type of admirable life.”—Cyril of Alexandria, on John 17:1
• “When He taught what is life eternal, He embraced the sacrament of life in a large and divine brevity, saying, ‘And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.’”—Cyprian of Carthage, on John 17:3
• “If the Son is not true God, how is He God? And how makes He us gods and sons, if He is not true?”—John Chrysostom, on John 17:3
• “The Holy and Consubstantial Trinity share the same kingdom, and their universal dominion is one and the same.”—Cyril of Alexandria, on John 17:10
• “Grant unto them, Holy Father, that as I and Thou are one, they also may be one in us.”—Ignatius of Antioch, citing Christ’s prayer for the Church
• “From the time I told them these things, they have learned that all that You have given Me is from You; nothing is alien, nothing peculiar to Me, with You.”—John Chrysostom, on John 17:7
• “He testified to those who love Him, that they received and kept the words given Him by the Father, and were brought thereby into the faith.”—Cyril of Alexandria, on John 17:8
• “He speaks for the most part like a man, and as one of us, ordering all His prayer for our profit and the strengthening of those who hear.”—John Chrysostom, on John 17:11

”These words spoke Jesus, and lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You.”

Cyril of Alexandria (+ 444)

Having given His disciples a sufficiency of things necessary for salvation, and incited them by fitting words to a more accurate apprehension of His doctrines, and made them best able to battle against temptation, He straightway changes the form of His speech for our profit, and turns it into a kind of prayer, allowing no interval to elapse between His discourse to them and His prayer to God the Father—herein also, by His own conduct, suggesting to us a type of admirable life. For the man who aims at serving God ought, I think, to bear in mind that he should at all events either be fond of discoursing to his brethren of things profitable to them, or be found earnest in prayer to God. (source)

John Chrysostom (+ 407)

The Lord lifts up His eyes that He may teach us, in our prayers, to keep the mind unwandering, and as it were to make the very gesture of the body witness to the lifting up of the heart. Each word has its force. “Father”—Christ prays not as one who lacks, but as the only-begotten Son who knows the Father’s heart. He has Himself given the disciples His doctrine; now He asks the Father to seal it with the glorification of the Son in the Cross. (source)

Theophylact of Ochrid (+ 1107)

By “the hour” Christ does not mean a moment of dread, as if compelled by necessity, but the appointed time of the divine economy—the hour for which He came into the world. The glorification He seeks is not an addition to the glory He had with the Father before the worlds, but the manifestation of that glory through the Cross, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. The Son glorifies the Father by accomplishing the work of our salvation; the Father glorifies the Son by raising Him from the dead and seating Him at His right hand. (source)

”As You have given Him power over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as You have given Him.”

Cyril of Alexandria (+ 444)

He says that the Father has given Him power over all flesh, not as one who at some moment received what He did not have, but according to the economy of the Incarnation, by which He took flesh and exercised His divine authority within human nature. This power is not arbitrary dominion but the authority to bestow life—and life of a kind that no creature can give, since eternal life belongs properly to the Author of life alone. (source)

John Chrysostom (+ 407)

If the Son is a creature, as the heretics say, when did He receive this power? Was it before He formed all things, or after? But the Father has given Him power over all flesh from before the foundation of the world, and this is the language of an equal sharing, not a delegation. He gives eternal life—and only God gives that. (source)

”And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”

Cyprian of Carthage (+ 258)

The Lord, the same who is sent and the same who sends, declares that it is the knowledge of the two together which saves. When He taught what is life eternal, He embraced the sacrament of life in a large and divine brevity, saying, “And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.” (source)

John Chrysostom (+ 407)

If the Father is the only true God, the heretics say, then how is the Son also called true God? Well—shall not the Son be God? But if the Son be God, and the Son of the Father who is called the only God, it is clear that He also is true, and the Son of Him who is called the Only True God. When Paul says, “Or I only and Barnabas” (1 Cor. 9:6), does he exclude Barnabas? Not at all; for the “only” is put by way of distinction from others. And if the Son is not true God, how is He God? And how makes He us gods and sons, if He is not true? (source)

Cyril of Alexandria (+ 444)

The Son is not excluded by the word “only.” For the Father is the only true God in distinction from the false gods of the nations, not in distinction from His own Son, who is the Truth itself. The knowledge of the Father is impossible apart from the Son, for “no one knows the Father except the Son and the one to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him” (Matt. 11:27). Eternal life is therefore not bare cognition but communion with the consubstantial Trinity. (source)

”I have glorified You on the earth. I have finished the work which You have given Me to do.”

Cyril of Alexandria (+ 444)

He says that He has finished the work, not as one who has yet to die, but anticipating the Cross as already accomplished. For the will to suffer for our sake was perfected in Him from the beginning, and the act of His passion is, in His Father’s foreknowledge, already complete. The work is the salvation of the human race—and this is the glory which He has rendered to the Father on earth. (source)

John Chrysostom (+ 407)

How has He finished the work, when He has not yet been crucified? Because the things which the Father willed for Him to do, He has from the beginning of His ministry willed in return. The Cross is not a defeat to be averted but the very work for which He came. By calling it finished before it has happened, He teaches us to lay hold of the will of God in advance, and never to count any duty unfinished if our heart is set upon it. (source)

Theophylact of Ochrid (+ 1107)

The work He has finished is twofold: He has revealed the Father to those who did not know Him, and He has set on the path of salvation those who would believe through the Apostles’ word. The full accomplishment of the work belongs to the Cross and the Resurrection, but the seed is already sown; the Father is already glorified in the lives of those who have followed Him. (source)

”And now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.”

John Chrysostom (+ 407)

Mark how He destroys with one stroke the entire teaching of Arius. He says that He had glory with the Father before the world was made—that is, before any creature existed. If He existed before the world, then He is not numbered among the things that were made; if He had glory before time itself, He is no creature of time. The glory He asks is not the giving of what He did not have, but the manifesting in His flesh of what He has eternally. (source)

Irenaeus of Lyons (+ 202)

The Word of God was always with the Father, and is the Image of the invisible God. He took our flesh that the glory which He has from before the foundation of the world might shine forth even in our nature, and that what He is by nature, we might become by adoption. (source)

”I have manifested Your name to the men whom You have given Me out of the world. They were Yours, You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.”

Cyril of Alexandria (+ 444)

He uses the word “Name” instead of “glory,” as is the usual practice in our speech; for, as the wise Solomon wrote, “A good name is more to be desired than great riches” (Prov. 22:1). By manifesting the Father’s Name, He has unfolded to us the Father’s character—that He is not the distant Judge of pagan dread, but the Father of the only-begotten Son, and through the Son the Father of those who receive adoption. (source)

John Chrysostom (+ 407)

“Messenger of great counsel” the Son of God is called (Isa. 9:6 LXX), because of the other things which He taught, and principally because He announced the Father to men. After having said, “I have finished Your work,” He next explains it in detail: “I have manifested Your Name unto the men.” The Name was indeed known in the Old Testament—for Isaiah says, “You are our Father”—but it was not yet known as the Name of Him who is Father of an only-begotten consubstantial Son. (source)

Theophylact of Ochrid (+ 1107)

“They were Yours”—for every soul, by the fact that it has been made by God, belongs to God. “You gave them to Me”—for the Father draws those whom the Son receives, and the Son receives those whom the Father draws. This is no division of persons but the harmony of the one divine will operating in Father and Son alike. (source)

”I pray for them. I do not pray for the world but for those whom You have given Me, for they are Yours. And all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them. Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are.”

Cyril of Alexandria (+ 444)

He says, “All Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them.” Those given to Christ are the Father’s, but are not therefore removed from Christ. For God the Father reigns with Him, and through Him rules over His own. The Holy and Consubstantial Trinity share the same kingdom, and their universal dominion is one and the same; whatever is the Son’s is subject to the glory of the Son and of the Father; whatever is said to be under the rule of the Father, over that the Son will surely hold sway. (source)

John Chrysostom (+ 407)

Do you see how He says continually, “I am not in the world,” and “because I leave them I commit them to You”? If one should take these words in their simple sense, many absurdities will follow. For how could it be reasonable to say that He is no longer in the world, when He has promised to be with us to the end of the age? He speaks for the most part like a man, and as one of us, ordering all His prayer for our profit and the strengthening of those who hear. (source)

Ignatius of Antioch (+ 108)

For, says He, “Grant unto them, Holy Father, that as I and Thou are one, they also may be one in us.” This unity is not a sentimental agreement of opinion, but a participation in the very unity of the Father and the Son. Schism in the Church is therefore not a difference of preference but a wound in the body of Christ, which the prayer of Christ Himself is set to heal. (source)

”While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Your name. Those whom You gave Me I have kept; and none of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I come to You, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves.”

Cyril of Alexandria (+ 444)

The disciples were faint at heart, left desolate as it were on the earth, with the world raging around them like fierce billows. They thought that our Saviour’s departure in the flesh would inflict on them great loss. But He teaches them—and us—that no one could prevent His being with them as God, even when He was no longer visible to them as man. They ought to have known that, even though He were to deprive them of converse with Him in the flesh, yet His presence as God would never be withdrawn. (source)

John Chrysostom (+ 407)

Why does He call Judas “the son of perdition” rather than the lost one? Because Judas’s loss was not from any failure of Christ’s keeping, but from his own free turning away from the keeping that was offered. The Lord kept all that were given Him in love and patience; the loss of one was the loss of one who would not be kept. So also of us: the Lord keeps all who consent to be kept, and the joy which is fulfilled in us is not coerced but received. (source)

Source: On the Incarnation, §54; Discourses Against the Arians, II.

Athanasius—who as a young deacon attended Nicaea, and who would defend its faith through five exiles over forty-five years—gives the classic answer to Arius in a single sentence: “He became man so that we might become god” (Inc. 54). His argument throughout the Discourses is that only if the Son is true God of true God can the salvation effected in Christ be true salvation—for a creature, however exalted, cannot deify other creatures. Athanasius reads John 17 as the Son’s own testimony to His pre-temporal glory, and as the foundation of the Church’s deifying communion with the consubstantial Trinity.

Source: On the Holy Spirit, ch. 18; Letter 38 (To Gregory of Nyssa).

Basil takes up the Nicene confession and extends it to its proper Trinitarian conclusion: the homoousios of the Son requires the consubstantiality of the Spirit. He notes that the unity of the disciples for which Christ prays in John 17 is grounded in the unity of essence in the Holy Trinity—the disciples are made one by participation in the same divine life which the Persons share by nature. Basil’s argument is foundational for understanding why the Council’s Trinitarian work and the Church’s unity are inseparable.

Source: Oration 21 (On the Great Athanasius); Oration 31 (On the Holy Spirit).

Gregory’s funeral panegyric on Athanasius is the Church’s most sustained reflection on the moral character of the Nicene struggle: the Fathers, he says, were not philosophers parsing terms but pastors defending the flock from the wolves Paul foretold. In Oration 31 Gregory gives the principle of doctrinal development that underlies the conciliar method itself: the Old Testament revealed the Father; the New Testament revealed the Son; the age of the Spirit is the age in which the consubstantial Trinity is fully confessed—and this confession is the soul’s path into the life of God.

Source: Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit; Letter to the Patriarch of Aquileia.

Photius’s defense of the original Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed—without the Filioque—rests on the same principle the 318 Fathers themselves invoked: the deposit of faith is to be received, not amended, and an addition to the conciliar Creed by any local synod, however well-intentioned, breaks the conciliar method by which the Creed was given to the Church. Photius is therefore an indispensable companion to the Fathers of Nicaea: he shows the Church how to keep what the Fathers gave, by refusing to add to it.

Source: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, chs. 2–3.

Lossky’s twentieth-century retrieval of the Nicene legacy frames the dogmatic work of the Fathers as the protection of the Church’s mystical life. The homoousios of the Son, he argues, is not a metaphysical curiosity but the condition of possibility of deification: only a Son who is true God can communicate the divine life to those who are united to Him by the Holy Spirit. The high-priestly prayer is the inner voice of the doctrine the Fathers defended.

The Gospel opens with the Lord’s own definition of eternal life: “that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (Jn. 17:3). The verb “to know” (γινώσκω) here is not the bare apprehension of a fact but the covenantal knowing of communion—the same word used in the Septuagint for the love between husband and wife and for the prophetic intimacy of Israel with her God. The Fathers of Nicaea saw, with absolute clarity, that this saving knowledge collapses if Christ is anything less than true God of true God: for a creature, however exalted, can give us knowledge of God only by report, not by communion. To know the Father in the Son is to participate in the Son’s own filial knowing of the Father—and that participation is what we call salvation.

This is why the dogmatic precision of the homoousios matters pastorally and not merely academically. The preacher who reduces the doctrine to a slogan (“Jesus is God”) leaves his people short of the Fathers’ gift. The Fathers gave us not a slogan but a grammar—a way of speaking about the Son that makes possible an actual ascent into the life of God. Eternal life, as the Lord prays it in John 17, is the life of the Trinity opened to those who are baptized into the Name and fed at the Chalice.

The Lord’s prayer “that they may be one as We are” (Jn. 17:11) is the most-cited and most-misused verse in the Gospel of John. Arius could have said the words; the modernist can say them. The Fathers of Nicaea understood that the unity the Lord asks is not a unity despite the truth but a unity in the truth. The Trinity is one not by suppressing the distinctions of Persons but by the perichoretic communion of those who share one essence; the Church is one not by suppressing the truth of the Gospel but by the conciliar communion of those who confess one faith. To pursue unity at the cost of the faith is to mistake the Church for an institution rather than the body of Christ.

This is the Fathers’ great pastoral gift to every age that follows. The preacher this Sunday can name the contemporary form of the Arian temptation—the reduction of Christ to “a great moral teacher,” the embrace of “all paths lead to God,” the willingness to surrender the filioque-free Creed in the interests of polite ecumenism—and call his people to the Fathers’ kind of unity: the unity of those who stand together in the truth, even when standing requires the omophorion-restoring courage of Saint Nicholas, the patient exile of Saint Athanasius, or the simple brick-faith of Saint Spyridon.

“Father, the hour has come” (Jn. 17:1) is one of the great clocks of the Gospel of John. From Cana onward the Lord has spoken of “the hour” that “is not yet come”—and now, in the upper room, the hour arrives. But what is the hour? It is the Cross—and through the Cross, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the sending of the Spirit. The high-priestly prayer is the seam between the supper and the garden, between teaching and Passion. The Lord prays for the glorification of the Son not in any worldly sense but in the radical Johannine sense: the lifting up of the Son on the Cross is itself the manifestation of His pre-temporal glory, and the Resurrection is the vindication of that glory in human flesh.

For the seventh Sunday of Pascha, between Ascension and Pentecost, this theme acquires extraordinary weight. The Lord has been lifted up; the glory has been manifested; the Church now waits, as the Mother of God and the Apostles waited, for the descent of the Spirit who will make the glorification fruitful in the life of the body. The preacher can place the Fathers of Nicaea precisely here: they are the post-Pentecostal witnesses that the hour was indeed the hour of glory, and that the glory is now poured out in the conciliar mind of the Church.

The Epistle reading from Acts 20 places into the Sunday a charge that is impossible to miss: “Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood. For I know this, that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock” (Acts 20:28–29). Paul’s farewell to the Ephesian elders is the apostolic charter for the very episcopate that will gather at Nicaea three centuries later. The Fathers of the Council are the answer to Paul’s prophecy: the bishops who, when the savage wolves came, did not spare the flock to make peace with the predators.

There is a hidden depth here for the preacher. Paul says that the Holy Spirit has made the elders overseers—and that the Church is purchased with God’s own blood. The conjunction is the same one the Fathers will use at Nicaea: the blood of the Cross can be called the blood of God only if the One who shed it is truly God. The episcopate that defends the Nicene Creed is therefore not protecting a tradition; it is protecting the only ground on which the Eucharist can be celebrated as the participation in the body and blood of the Lord.

”The angelic powers were at Your tomb; the guards became as dead men. Mary stood by Your grave, seeking Your most pure body. You captured hell, not being tempted by it. You came to the Virgin, granting life. O Lord, who rose from the dead, glory to You.”

The Resurrectional Apolytikion in the Sixth Tone is appointed for the seventh week of Pascha. It reminds the gathered Church that the high-priestly prayer is spoken on this side of the empty tomb: the One who prays the prayer is the Risen Lord, and the glory He has asked for is the glory He has already received.

”You ascended in glory, O Christ our God, gladdening Your disciples by the promise of the Holy Spirit. Through the blessing they were assured that You are the Son of God, the Redeemer of the world.”

Because the apodosis of the Ascension falls on Friday, May 29—after this Sunday—the Apolytikion of the Ascension is still sung at the Liturgy of May 24. Its theological weight bears directly on the high-priestly prayer: the Lord who prays “Father, the hour has come” is the same Lord who has now ascended, and the assurance of His divinity given to the disciples by the Ascension is the very assurance the Fathers of Nicaea would defend three centuries later.

”Most glorified are You, O Christ our God, who established our Fathers as luminous stars upon the earth, and through them led us all to the true Faith. O most merciful One, glory to You.”

This Apolytikion is one of the great compositions of the Pentecostarion. It does not praise the Fathers in themselves but praises Christ for raising them up—for the Fathers are luminous only in the degree that they reflect the Light who alone is the source of light. The preacher can pause here on the word “stars”: the Fathers do not eclipse the Sun; they witness to it. So, too, the preacher this Sunday is not asked to magnify the Council but to let the Council’s stars point upward to Christ.

”When You had fulfilled Your plan for us and united things on earth with those in heaven, You ascended in glory, O Christ our God, in no way distant, but remaining inseparable, and crying to those who love You: I am with you and there is no one against you.”

The Kontakion of the Ascension is appointed at the Divine Liturgy through the apodosis. Its concluding line—“I am with you and there is no one against you”—is the exact answer to the disciples’ fear of being abandoned which Cyril of Alexandria locates in John 17:11–12. The high-priestly prayer and the Ascension Kontakion belong to one another: in the prayer the Lord commits His own to the Father; in the Kontakion the Risen and Ascended Lord assures them that the committing has not been a leaving.