Reception and Legacy

From a single source in Acts, Stephen became one of the most widely venerated saints of the Christian world: the head of the martyr-tradition, the patron of deacons (and, in the West, of stonemasons and others), the namesake of countless churches, and a constant subject of preaching, hymnography, and art. This file traces the reception of the protomartyr — the spread of his cult after 415, his patronage and dedications, his place in later theology and liturgy, and the enduring significance of the first witness.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Protomartyr)

At the Head of the Martyrs

Stephen’s primary legacy is structural: he stands at the head of the whole company of martyrs as their first and their pattern (the theology is set out in The Protomartyr). When the church of Smyrna, around the middle of the second century, framed the death of Polycarp as “a martyrdom according to the gospel,” conformed at every point to the Passion of Christ, it was elaborating a theology whose first instance was Stephen’s Christ-shaped death (the Martyrium Polycarpi; see St. Polycarp of Smyrna). When Ignatius of Antioch longed to “attain to God” by being ground as wheat in the jaws of the beasts, he wrote within the tradition of witness that Stephen opened (see St. Ignatius of Antioch). The calendars of East and West alike place him first among the martyrs of the year, and the patristic preachers — Gregory of Nyssa, Asterius of Amasea, Augustine, Fulgentius — return to him as the protomartys, the leader and firstfruits of the witnesses, the one who showed the rest how to die (Gregory of Nyssa, On Saint Stephen I–II; Augustine, Sermons 314–319; Fulgentius, Sermon on Stephen).

The Spread of the Cult and the Dedications

Before 415 the cult of Stephen was necessarily limited — there were no relics and no known tomb. The inventio of that year transformed his veneration almost overnight (see The Cult and the Miracles). Within a generation his relics were enshrined in Jerusalem (in the basilica built by the empress Eudocia), in Constantinople, in Rome (where churches were dedicated to him), and across North Africa, Italy, Gaul, and Spain. Dedications to St. Stephen multiplied: Pope Simplicius dedicated the great round church of Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome in the later fifth century; Saint-Étienne became one of the commonest church-names of Gaul and later France (the first cathedral of Paris, on the site of Notre-Dame, was dedicated to St. Stephen); San Esteban spread through Spain; and the protomartyr’s name traveled with the missions into northern and eastern Europe. By the early Middle Ages Stephen was among the most universally honored of the early saints, his feast (December 26/27) kept everywhere and his name borne by churches, towns, and persons across Christendom (Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, 1982, 221–248).

Patronage

As the archetype of the diaconate, Stephen is the patron of deacons — the model and intercessor of the order the Church reads back to the Seven of Acts 6 (see The Origin of the Diaconate). In the Western tradition the manner of his death made him also the patron of stonemasons and bricklayers (those who work with the stones that killed him), and he is invoked for headaches and against the stoning’s afflictions — patronages that grew from the iconographic identification of the saint by the stones of his passion (see The Iconography of the Deacon-Martyr). His name, Stephanos, “crown,” made him a natural patron of kings and a favored royal name — borne by kings of Hungary (St. Stephen of Hungary), of Serbia (the Nemanjić “Stephens”), and of England (King Stephen), among many — so that the protomartyr’s “crown” passed, by a happy etymology, to the crowned heads of Christendom.

In Theology and Liturgy

Theologically, Stephen’s legacy is fourfold. His speech (Acts 7) became a locus for the Christian reading of the Old Testament as the history of God’s dealings culminating in Christ, and for the theology of the Temple “not made with hands” fulfilled in the incarnate Lord and the Church (see The Temple and the Law). His vision of the Son of Man standing at God’s right hand (Acts 7:56) entered the Church’s christology as a witness to the exaltation of the crucified Christ (see The Vision of the Son of Man). His prayer for his killers became, through Augustine, the model of the martyr’s forgiving love and the seed of Paul’s conversion (see The Seed of the Church). And his death within the Nativity octave made him the perpetual companion of the manger, the first to be crowned for the King newly born (see The Feast and the Nativity Octave). The liturgical tradition gathers all four into the services of December 27 and August 2, and the iconographic tradition into the figure of the young crowned deacon at the sanctuary door.

The Enduring Significance of the First Witness

The deepest legacy of Stephen is the one his name and his place declare: he is the first. The Church that lives by witness — martyria — looks back to him as the one who first carried witness to its bloody completion and showed that the death of the witness is the life of the Church. From his blood the gospel spread beyond Jerusalem; from his prayer, by the Church’s reading, came Paul; from his death came the pattern by which every later martyr would die “according to the gospel.” The young deacon of Acts 6, set over the tables of the Hellenist widows, became the firstfruits of the martyrs and the perpetual companion of Christ’s nativity — the Stephanos who, gazing into the opened heaven, was the first to be crowned. That is what the Church remembers when it keeps his feast: not chiefly the questions of source and date that this section has weighed, but the first man who, full of the Holy Spirit and seeing the Lord, gave his life and his enemies alike into the hands of the risen Christ (Acts 7:55–60).

See Also

References

  • The Holy Bible — Acts 6:1–8:3; 7:55–60. Cited by book chapter:verse.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. Two Homilies on Saint Stephen the Protomartyr. Greek text in Gregorii Nysseni Opera X/1, ed. O. Lendle. Leiden: Brill, 1990.
  • Augustine of Hippo. Sermons 314–319, 382. Trans. in The Works of Saint Augustine III/9–10. Hyde Park: New City Press, 1994–95.
  • Fulgentius of Ruspe. Sermon on Saint Stephen. (Stephen and Paul.)
  • Hunt, E. D. Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312–460. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. (The spread of the cult and dedications.)
  • The Menaion for December 27 and August 2. (The liturgical reception.)