Hi, everyone. On April 12, the holy Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of our venerable Mother Anthousa. Now, Anthousa was the daughter of the infamous and very anti-Orthodox Constantine V, or Constantine Copronymos, as he is known to us today. Constantine had three wives, and they all gave him a number of children, but his third wife, the one who was to become Anthousa’s mother, was having difficulty in labor. So he called out of exile a nun named Anthousa who was actually an iconodule, because Constantine himself was an iconoclast, and brought her into the court so that she may pray for his wife, the mother of Anthousa. Well, the prayers worked, and the third wife gave birth to five sons and one daughter. The daughter, in honor of the person who had prayed for the mother, was also named Anthousa.

Now, life was not easy for Anthousa because she was very, very devout. She was very, very pious, and was actually an iconodule as well. She greatly venerated the sacred icons, but Constantine, as was mentioned, did not. In fact, Constantine didn’t like anything about the faith. You could not even mention the word “saint” to him because he disliked it so much. If you mentioned the great cathedral of Agia Sophia, you had to simply call it “Wisdom” without mentioning “[Holy].” He despised relics, he did not like monastics—in fact, he seemed to war against God in about every way you could consider.

Anthousa was different, though. She was a very devout young lady who, it was said, went about her daily chores wearing the finery that a princess of the realm would wear, but wore a hair shirt underneath. She was very ascetical in terms of what she ate, and she drank only water. She desperately wanted to become a nun, but was afraid to broach the subject with her father. Well, she eventually did, and as might be predicted Constantine rejected the idea, and he quoted to her the fifth commandment: “Honor your father and your mother.” Well, in those days, probably more so than now even, these things were taken very seriously, and Anthousa was someone who did take that seriously and did not want to go against her father’s wishes in this regard.

Well, she continued, however, to exercise her extreme prayer life and ascetical efforts for a long while, until finally, after her father’s repose, she indeed did become a nun, and she was content in the idea of living out her life in that service. Well, one of Constantine’s sons, Leo IV, when he was 19 years of age, took a wife, Irini, who was 17 years of age. Leo IV was also an iconoclast, whereas Irini was not. She was definitely one dedicated to the preservation and veneration of the holy icons. As time went on, and finally after her husband, Leo IV, reposed in the same city as his father, Constantine Copronymos did, Irene, along with the Patriarch Tarasios, convened the famous Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 AD, which indeed restored—at least theologically at that point, because there were still so many battles to be fought—the veneration of icons.

And during this time, before and after, she had often asked that Anthousa join her in serving as regents in the empire, to help in the governance of the empire. But Anthousa, having had plenty of bitter taste over Byzantine politics, always refused. She would have nothing of it. So she lived on, only about a brief 53 years, but in peace and contentment that the choices she had made were indeed the better choices, and although Empress Irene is regarded as someone very great in the eyes of the Orthodox Church today because of her courage and what she did for the icons, Anthousa perhaps ultimately chose the better part and reposed peacefully in the Lord.