SOPHIA AND HER THREE DAUGHTERS AT ROME

On the last day of the first autumn month, September 30 (17), the Church honors the memory of the martyrs Faith, Hope, Love, and their mother Sophia. In different cities and countries, and, in fact, in local churches, similar stories were kept about Christian martyrs - mothers and daughters - who bore such names. Thus, many similar stories were formed about the testimony of the suffering of the martyrs celebrated today.

One of these stories over time became the most generally accepted. It tells us that Faith, Hope and Love, and their mother Sophia were Roman Christians and lived in Rome in the 1st century. According to the testimony of their life, they themselves rushed to suffer for Christ in testimony of faith, that is, even contrary to canonical rules, not only did not hide from representatives of the pagan authorities, but „hurried“ to Heaven. For Christianity is „life not here“. The faith of the first Christian generations called for witnessing to the faith in Christ even unto death, regardless of gender, age, intelligence, and origin.

Thus, the memory of the Church has preserved not only the names, but also a unique detail about the voluntary testimony of the martyrs for Christ. Later information from the time of the Roman bishop St Gregory the Great (+604) says that Sophia was a widow from Milan. Having sold her estate there, she moved to Rome. Her daughters suffered for Christ first. Their mother buried them on the famous Appian Way, and she herself died of grief three days later. “Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light? It is darkness, and there is no brightness in it,” wrote the biblical prophet (Amos 5:20). It turns out that Sophia is one of those very few saints whom Christianity glorified in the host of “martyrs of sorrow,” or “bloodless martyrs.”

Perhaps one of the most amazing paradoxes of human language is the limited number of names. The constant striving of every human being for his own “uniqueness” always, or almost always, corresponds to the repetition of the name. After all, even the rarest names are repeated, and those unique, new, creatively invented names that parents sometimes call their children so that they can thus be especially distinguished, often still remain too “ordinary” when translated into other languages ​​or cease to be modern.

In essence, each name is a kind of antipode of a homonym. After all, behind it, repeated, multiple, found in many and so different people, there is always hidden a unique, unique, genuine, individual person. If we continue this logic, each person, moreover, all of humanity, is a homonym in relation to each other. A paradoxical, tragic, unique and unrepeatable homonym, which God Himself conceived. Uniqueness is one of the possible definitions of the image of God. Uniqueness and “indestructibility” are what every person strives for. This aspiration, about which the Church Father Saint Augustine wrote a lot in his “Confessions”, affects everyone in different ways.

The names of Faith, Hope, and Love correspond to the names of the main Christian virtues. Sophia in Greek means wisdom, that is, human and philosophical wisdom, and at the same time points to Divine Wisdom - Christ. The Church of the Lord Jesus is the Society of believers, the Community of Christ, and, in essence, the fellowship of names sanctified by the Name of the Lord Jesus. Some of the names, such as Faith, Hope, and Love, owe their origin to Christianity, while others - to human and divine virtue, such as Sophia. It is interesting that the names of the daughters were translated from the original language into Russian and other Slavic languages, and became „Vera, Nadezhda, and Liubov“, while the name of the mother “Sophia” remained untranslated. It denotes one of the names, properties, or even, applied to Christ, the hypostases of the One God.

Holiness is the gift of intercession; it is the boldness, or rather the audacity, to call by name the One without whose Name ‘it is impossible for men to be saved’ (cf. Acts 4:12). In Baptism a person not only receives a name, but also brings his own name, given by his parents, into the great Assembly of Names. This is the communion of persons and names of all those who henceforth participate in the Communion of Saints, the faith in which is spoken of in the Apostles’ Creed. In it, this Assembly, from now on and forever, the faithful are made partakers of the prayerful intercession of the boundless Ocean of Holiness, and even of the Gift of intercession for the whole world.