Category Archives: Saints

St. Agnes in Prague

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A view of the St. Agnes convent in Prague; the national museum’s stunning collection of medieval art is displayed here.

In the well-known Christmas carol, “Good King Wenceslaus looked out” from his castle in Prague and saw a poor beggar struggling to get home during a blizzard. The king asked his page if he knew who the poor man was and the page answered that he did; the poor man, the page told the king, that the poor man lived several miles away in a hovel near beneath the bluffs overlooking the river that runs through Prague. The poor man’s house was also on the edge of the forest, near “St. Agnes’ fountain.”

St. Agnes was a Czech princess who was born in AD 1200. She became a Franciscan nun–known as “Poor Clares”–and established a convent along the edge of the river, on what was then the edge of the city, right against the forest and in the shadow of the bluff on the other saide of the river. There was a well and a fountain in the convent courtyard which the nuns used for their drinking water. The convent is now the site where the National Museum of the Czeck Republic displays the collection of medieval art.

The princess shared a name with a much earlier St. Agnes, a young woman who lived inn Rome and who was executed for her Christian faith during the Great Persecution of Diocletian in AD 304; this Agnes refused to marry because she wanted to embrace life as a Christian ascetic. Agnes’ bones are conserved beneath the high altar in the church of Sant’Agnese fuori le mura in Rome, built over the catacomb that housed her tomb. Her skull is preserved in a separate chapel in the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone in Rome’s Piazza Navona.

According to Robert Ellsberg, in his book Blessed Among all Women: Women Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for our Time,
“…the story of Agnes the opposition is not between sex and virginity. The conflict is between a young woman’s power in Christ to define her own identity versus a patriarchal culture’s claim to identify her in terms of her sexuality. According to the view shared by her ‘suitors’ and the state, if she would not be one man’s wife, she might as well be every man’s whore. Failing these options, she might as well be dead. Agnes did not choose death. She chose not to worship the gods of her culture. …Espoused to Christ, she was beyond the power of any man to ‘have his way with her’. ‘Virgin’ in this case is another way of saying Free Woman.”

This Roman St. Agnes was very popular throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. The well and fountain in Prague might have been associated with a church dedicated to her even before the princess built her famous convent there.

The young woman martyred in Rome was a member of a very prominent and wealthy family, which is why the Roman authorities cared that she had embraced the illegal Christian faith. The princess who became a nun evidently knew St. Clare herself, the founder of the Franciscan nuns and a friend of St. Francis of Assisi. Both women named Agnes–the Roman virgin-martyr and the Czech virgin-princess-nun–live on in the Christmas carol we sing every December.

St. Nina and the Georgians

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This 20th century icon of St. Nina shows her holding her cross made of sturdy grape vines.

St. Nina, said to be a relative of the famous St. George who killed the dragon, is thought to be the saintly missionary who brought Christianity to the people of Georgia just as St. Patrick brought Christianity to the Irish. Nina was a young girl of a pious family who was apparently abducted and sold into slavery in Georgia. Her prayers healed both the king and the queen on different occasions. Deprived of any other devotional aids, she made a cross from very sturdy grape vines and is often depicted holding the vine-cross. She has many feast days in Georgia, commemorating various events in her life; her principal feast day is January 14, the anniversary of her death in AD 340, her “birthday into heaven.”

The people of Georgia have a fascinating collection of folklore and tales. According to one story, God decided to make life easier for those who were driven out of Eden and forced to work hard on Earth. After a long time of thinking, God decided to create a beverage that would let people return to Paradise for even a short time. He invited all the angels and the devil to taste his creation: wine.

Everyone liked wine, including the devil, but the devil felt obligated to compete with God. So, the devil created chacha, a potent alcoholic drink made from the remains of crushed wine grapes, and invited God to taste it. God drank one glass of chacha, then a second, a third and a fourth. After the fourth, he said to the devil, “Those who will drink three glasses of chacha may be on my side, but anyone who drinks more than that will be yours!”

This icon depicts St. Nina of Georgia, holding her grapevine cross, with her relative St. George the Great-Martyr.

A contemporary icon from Georgia, depicting St. Nina holding her cross made of grape vines, with scenes from her life.

The Magi and Their Dream

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The magi have a dream in which an angel warns them to avoid revealing the location of the Christ-child to King Herod. So they go home via another route; as a result, King Herod slays all the boys in the region of Bethlehem who are 2 years old or younger.

In the gospel according to St. Matthew, we read that the Magi–the 3 kings–were on the road for 2 years, following the star that announced the birth of Christ to Judea but had to consult King Herod about where in Judea the new-born king might be located. Herod consulted religious authorities and scholars who told him that Bethlehem was the most likely location. He sent the Magi there but asked them to come and tell him where in Bethlehem they found Christ. They did locate Christ, worshipping him with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. (One story says that the gold was later stolen by the two thieves who were later crucified alongside Jesus. Another tradition suggests that Joseph and Mary used the gold to finance their travels when they fled to Egypt from Bethlehem.) But an angel warned the Magi all in a dream not to reveal the location of the Christ-child to King Herod and so they returned home via a different route, avoiding Herod. When Herod realized the Magi were not coming back to him, he ordered all the baby boys in the Bethlehem region to be killed, hoping to eradicate the baby who was the threat to his rule. But an angel had warned Joseph in a dream to take his family to Egypt and so they escaped, just in the nick of time; they returned to Judea only after Herod was dead.

The star the magi had followed was most likely a conjunction of Saturn (indicating the Last Days) and Jupiter (indicating a great king) in Pisces (associated with Judea and the people of Israel). Dreams were taken seriously as visitations of God, the angels, or other spirits. Dreams and astrology were acceptable tools of divination to discover or understand the will of God and were not considered “magic” by most people until fairly recently. But people who had such dreams might become proud or arrogant, telling others how special they were for having received such a visitation from God in a dream; many spiritual teachers had to warn their disciples against taking such dreams too seriously or becoming arrogant because of them. Rules were established for how to interpret such dreams and how much attention they should be given. But dreams can still inspire us or lead to new inventions, as this recent New Yorker article attests.

A shrine of the Three Kings at Cologne Cathedral, according to tradition, contains the bones of the Magi. Reputedly they were first discovered by Saint Helena on her famous pilgrimage to Palestine and the Holy Lands. She took the remains to the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople; they were later moved to Milan before being sent to their current resting place by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I in 1164.

Read more about the Magi in previous posts here and here.