St. Acacius

Acacius — also called Achatius — is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, the company of early martyrs whose intercession was invoked across medieval Europe in times of plague, danger, and crisis, and among the most obscure of the group as far as historical biography is concerned. The account preserved in the German tradition associates him with the martyrdom of the ten thousand Christians on Mount Ararat: a Roman military tribune who converted with his entire company when a heavenly voice promised them victory against a vastly superior enemy force, and who was then martyred on the same mountain by imperial order.

This account belongs to the category of pious legend rather than history; no early independent source corroborates any element of the specific narrative. The ten thousand martyrs of Mount Ararat appear in no martyrology before the eleventh century; the details of the account — the heavenly voice, the miraculous battle, the mass conversion and mass martyrdom — are literary types that appear in too many contexts to function as biography.

What is historically substantial is the antiquity and specificity of the German cult. In the German-speaking lands Acacius was venerated with a particular fervour among those facing the terror of dying — not sudden death in battle, which the patronage of other Holy Helpers covered, but the slower terror of a death approached with time to feel it, the fear of dying without adequate spiritual preparation. He was invoked against this specific fear, called upon by those who wanted to die consciously, penitently, in full possession of their faculties and their faith. The intercessory role is psychologically precise and theologically serious: the martyr who faced death under imperial power became the patron of those who face it under natural necessity, which is the condition of every human being.