Stephen the New Light

Holy Venerable Stephen the New Light of Constantinople was an ascetic and recluse in prayer, a bishop by consecration, and fell asleep in the year 912, at seventy-⁠three.

He was born and raised in Constantinople, of devout parents, Zacharias and Theophania, who lived near the church of the first martyr, Archdeacon Stephen. His mother kept, from the pregnancy, a strict abstinence in food, eating only bread, vegetables and water, preparing in her womb an ascetic. At his birth a beautiful image of the cross was found on his chest, a sign of the "crucifixion of the flesh with its passions and desires" that he would accomplish. He fasted from his swaddling clothes: he would not take his mother's milk when she nursed him after eating a lot. This happened many times, for two or three days, so that the relatives wondered and grieved, but it did no harm to his health. He was baptized, grew and was weaned. In childhood he studied eagerly and obeyed his parents. When Saint Methodius became patriarch (842-846), his father, Zacharias, was found worthy of the priesthood and enrolled in the clergy of the Great Church. Stephen too received tonsure, entered the clerics of the same church and foretold his father's coming end. At eighteen, after his father's death, he shut himself in the church of the holy Apostle Peter, taking only vegetables and praying unceasingly. He received encouragement from above: one night an apostle of Christ appeared to him and said, "Peace to you, child. May this beginning of your virtuous life be for your good and may the Lord strengthen you in it." After three years he had a vision of the hieromartyr Antipas, who said to him, "Peace to you, child; take heed to yourself; I will not leave you." From then he ate only once or twice a week, vegetables without salt. He reached a high moral purity, received the episcopal rank and worked many wonders.

In the twelfth year of the reign of the pious emperor Basil (879), when Stephen was forty, a great earthquake destroyed the church of Saint Antipas, where he lived. He moved into a tomb cave, where he stayed twelve years; from its dampness all the hair of his head and beard and his teeth fell out, and his body was enfeebled, reaching the utmost mortification of the flesh. Coming out of the cave, a plain board covered with a rough sackcloth served him as a bed. Then he received the angelic schema and ate only on the feasts of the Lord, after the Divine service, a single vegetable and a little water. On such food he walked for fifty years the narrow path of ascetic life, and at seventy-⁠three, in 912, gave up his spirit to God.

He is commemorated on 22 December, in the new style. The name New Light is given because he shone, like the ascetics of old, with a holy life.