The Life
Barbara was born around 290 in the Phoenician city of Heliopolis (modern Baalbek in Lebanon) into the family of a wealthy pagan named Dioscorus. Her mother died early. Her father, who saw that she was beautiful and wanted to control her future, locked her in a tall tower from her childhood, allowing only pagan teachers to visit her. She had no Christian instruction, no Christian friends, no access to scripture. But the tower had high windows, and from those windows she could see the sky and the mountains and the meadows and the rivers. She began to think about who had made all this. The pagan stories about gods and goddesses making the world made no sense to her: those gods quarreled, deceived, and committed every kind of evil. Whoever had made the orderly and beautiful world she could see from her window must be a single, wise, good, all-powerful God. By the use of her own reason alone, in a tower with no Christian teaching, she became a believer in the one true God. When some Christians eventually reached her in secret, they only confirmed and completed what she had already worked out. She was baptized. When her father discovered her faith, he denounced her himself, watched her tortured, and beheaded her with his own sword on December 4, around the year 306.
Heliopolis in the Phoenician region was a wealthy and important Roman city, famous for its great temples to the pagan gods. Barbara’s father Dioscorus was one of the leading citizens. He was so devoted to his only daughter, especially after her mother died, that he wanted to control everything about her: her education, her marriage, her religious formation. He believed that if he could keep her isolated from outside influences, she would grow up to be exactly what he wanted: a perfectly cultivated pagan young woman whom he could marry to a wealthy man of his choosing. So he built a tower for her on his estate, a fine tall tower with comfortable rooms, beautiful furniture, expensive clothing, fine food, and a small staff of servants and tutors. She was permitted to leave the tower only under his direct supervision; otherwise she remained inside. She had access to the best pagan literature, the best pagan philosophy, the best pagan art. But she had no contact with Christians and no exposure to the Gospel. The tower had three high windows. From those windows she could see across the great landscape of southern Phoenicia: the mountains, the sea, the agricultural valleys, the changing seasons, the stars at night.
By the time she had reached young adulthood, Barbara had become a monotheist in the privacy of her own mind. She had not yet met any Christians. She knew nothing about the Trinity in any explicit way. But her contemplation of creation had led her to think that the one God she had inferred must somehow have an internal life of relationships, that He was perhaps not a single isolated being but in some way an unity-in-multiplicity. Then a particular event made her thinking more concrete. Her father, before going on a long business trip, ordered a private bathhouse built next to her tower for her exclusive use. He drew up the plans himself. The plan called for two windows. While he was away, Barbara approached the workmen and asked them, with the authority of the master’s daughter, to add a third window. They were puzzled but they did it. Why? she had asked them; she did not at that point say. When her father returned and saw the third window he was angry: I gave you orders for two windows; why three? She then explained: I have ordered three windows because the true God whom I worship is a Trinity, three Persons in one divinity. Father and Son and Holy Spirit — the three windows give light because the three Persons give all the light there is. He understood for the first time that she had become a Christian.
When Dioscorus understood that his daughter had become a Christian, he was not merely angry; he was murderous. He had spent years building her tower, hiring her tutors, planning her marriage, intending her to be the perfect continuation of his pagan house. She had betrayed him, in his eyes, in the deepest possible way. He drew his sword and pursued her through the estate, intending to kill her himself. She fled. She ran out of the house, across the gardens, toward the open country. He was right behind her. As she reached a cliff at the edge of his estate, the rock face suddenly opened before her, allowed her to enter, and closed behind her. She was hidden inside the rock itself. Dioscorus searched the entire area but could not find her. After several days he learned where she was hiding (some hagiographical traditions say a shepherd betrayed her location and was punished by being turned into stone; others omit this episode). Dioscorus dragged her out of the cleft in the cliff, beat her severely, and turned her over to the Roman magistrate Martianus, formally denouncing her as a Christian and demanding that she be tortured and killed in accordance with the imperial edicts of persecution.
The Roman magistrate Martianus accepted Dioscorus’s denunciation and immediately began the standard torture procedures used to make Christians recant. Barbara was stripped, suspended, and her body raked with iron hooks until she was covered with wounds and blood. She did not recant. Martianus had her thrown into a dark prison cell to think about her decision overnight. As she lay in the cell, broken and bleeding, the Lord Jesus Christ appeared to her with His angels. He spoke kindly to her. He said: be brave, my Barbara, for you will not be alone. He healed her wounds completely; in the morning she emerged from the prison without any sign of the torture. The Christian woman Juliana, watching the proceedings from the crowd, was so moved by Barbara’s witness that she stepped forward and declared herself a Christian as well. Martianus, enraged at the failure of his torture and the new conversion in the crowd, ordered both women tortured again. They were stripped, raked again with hooks, and dragged naked through the streets of the city. Barbara prayed for relief from the public humiliation. An angel descended and covered both women with a brilliant white robe of light. They were finally led to the place of execution. Juliana was beheaded first by the executioner. Then Dioscorus himself, with his own hands, took the sword and beheaded his daughter Barbara.
Immediately after Dioscorus had beheaded his daughter, before he could even leave the place of execution, lightning fell out of a clear sky and struck him dead on the spot. The same lightning struck the magistrate Martianus, who was standing nearby, and killed him also. The crowd of pagans who had watched the execution was terrified. Many of them concluded that Barbara had indeed been a witness to the true God and that the lightning was His judgment on her persecutors. A substantial number converted on the spot. Christians later said that it was the saint’s prayer that had brought down the lightning: she had asked the Lord, even as she was being killed, that her father and the magistrate be made to recognize the truth they had refused to receive in their lives. The lightning was their final and unanswerable lesson. From that day forward, Saint Barbara has been venerated by the Church as a particular protector against lightning and against any kind of sudden, unexpected death. Soldiers who work with explosives — artillerymen, military engineers, miners — have made her their special patron because they live with the constant possibility of unexpected explosion. Many Christians have prayed her troparion every day, calling upon her promise that those who venerate her will not depart this life without the consolation of the holy Mysteries.
According to the consistent tradition of the Orthodox Church, the Lord made a particular promise to Saint Barbara before her death. He promised her that anyone who would venerate her memory and remember her sufferings, and would call upon her in the hour of need, would not depart this life without the consolation of the holy Mysteries — confession and the Holy Eucharist. This promise has been received by the Church throughout the centuries and has produced one of the most widespread of all the patronages of any saint. Many Orthodox Christians make a daily practice of praying her troparion as a way of placing themselves under her protection in this matter, especially as they grow older and the possibility of sudden death becomes more present. The promise is theologically significant. It does not promise that her devotees will be preserved from suffering or from death; everyone dies eventually. It promises something more important: that the means of grace will be available to them at the hour of death. They will not die in spiritual isolation, cut off from the sacraments, unable to receive the final confession and Communion that the Church offers to those preparing for death. They will be able to die as Christians die: with the body of their Lord on their lips and His forgiveness in their souls.
Saint Barbara is the patron of natural reason’s ascent to God. The patristic tradition has consistently held that every human soul, simply by virtue of being human and rational, has access to a partial knowledge of God through the contemplation of creation. The order of the world, the beauty of the world, the goodness of the world all point beyond the world to a single, wise, good, all-powerful Creator. This argument does not produce the full Christian faith — it cannot, by itself, produce knowledge of the Trinity, of the Incarnation, of redemption, of the Church. But it produces the foundation on which those further doctrines can be built. Barbara’s narrative is the icon of this pattern. Locked in her tower, sealed off from any explicit Christian teaching, she nevertheless became a monotheist by reasoning from creation to the Creator. When the explicit Christian instruction eventually reached her, it built on the foundation she had already laid by her own contemplation. The patristic tradition has held this out as the model for all Christian missionary engagement with non-Christian cultures: meet pagans where they are, in the contemplation of the world they already see, and lead them from that recognition to the fuller revelation of the Christian Gospel. The Christian missionary is a guide who leads the soul from where it already is, in the partial truth of natural revelation, to where it can be, in the fullness of the revealed Christ.
After the martyrdom, the Christians of Heliopolis buried Barbara and Juliana with great honor. Their tombs became pilgrimage sites. The faithful prayed for healings and received them. As the centuries passed, the relics were moved several times for their protection: in the sixth century they were transferred to Constantinople, the great Christian city of the eastern Mediterranean. In the twelfth century, when a Byzantine princess named Barbara (named for the saint) married a Russian prince and went to live in Kiev, she brought a substantial portion of the relics with her as part of her dowry. They were placed in the great Cathedral of Saint Volodymyr in Kiev, where they remain to this day. From Kiev the veneration of Saint Barbara spread throughout the entire Slavic Orthodox world: through Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania. From Constantinople and the Byzantine Greek world the veneration spread west into the Latin Christian tradition: Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal. By the late medieval period Saint Barbara had become one of the most universally venerated saints in the entire Christian world, East and West. She is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers of the Western tradition; she is one of the Great-Martyrs of the Eastern tradition; she is the patron of artillery, of mining, of mathematics, of architecture; she is the patron of those threatened by lightning, by sudden death, by accident; she is the daily intercessor of millions of Orthodox Christians who pray her troparion as preparation for the death they know must eventually come.