HistoricalChristian.Faith

Theophilus of Alexandria and John Chrysostom: the Origenist controversy in the East

This is the story of how a grudge over an episcopal election destroyed the greatest preacher of the early Church. Theophilus of Alexandria (patriarch 385–412) came to Constantinople in 398 to consecrate a bishop he had tried to keep out of the chair, and spent the next five years contriving his fall. John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), the “golden-mouthed” preacher of Antioch, had never asked for the see, quarrelled with the court and half his own clergy once he had it, and was finally condemned in absence by a synod of his enemies, exiled twice, and marched to death on a road in Pontus. The charge that opened the campaign was Origenism — and by the time the synod met, no one mentioned Origen at all.

Unlike the belief-timelines elsewhere on this site, this page is a relationship told through its dated moments: the events, letters, synods, and documents of an enmity, set down earliest first, each footnoted to its source. It runs from Theophilus's accession at Alexandria and the contested election of 398, through the anthropomorphite riot that turned Alexandria against Origen and the raid on the monasteries of Nitria, to the flight of the “Tall Brothers” to Constantinople that gave Theophilus his opening; then the Synod of the Oak (403) and the two depositions, the burning of the Great Church, the exile to Cucusus and the forced march that killed Chrysostom in 407; and last the long rehabilitation — the name restored to the diptychs and the relics carried back to the capital in 438 — and the two very different records of the affair that survive.

This is the Eastern half of the crisis whose Latin half is told on the Origenist controversy (Jerome and Rufinus): the same campaign, run from the same chancery, in the same years. Jerome was its translator into Latin, and rendered Theophilus's invective against the fallen Chrysostom for Western readers.

Related doctrines: Controversies among the Fathers — see also the Origenist controversy (Jerome and Rufinus) · Jerome and Augustine: a correspondence across the Mediterranean · Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius · the condemnation of Origen · was Tertullian a heretic?.

Timeline

Theophilus becomes patriarch of Alexandria (385)

Theophilus held the see of Alexandria from 385 until his death in 412 — a reign remembered for three things: the collapse of Egyptian paganism (in 391 the Serapeum was destroyed and a church raised on its ruins), the Origenist controversy, and the deposition of John Chrysostom. Even sympathetic reference works call him “extremely violent and unscrupulous in the choice of his means.” His nephew and successor was Cyril.¹

Nectarius dies; Theophilus's candidate is passed over (September 397 – 26 February 398)

Nectarius of Constantinople died on 27 September 397, and the court sent to Antioch for a presbyter “there was a report that he was very instructive, and at the same time eloquent.” Bishops were summoned for the consecration, Theophilus among them, and, as Socrates says flatly, “This person did everything he could to detract from John's reputation, being desirous of promoting to that see, Isidore a presbyter of his own church.”² He was overruled — and not gently. The chamberlain Eutropius had collected the written accusations against Theophilus that were then before the council, and used them:

Eutropius the chief officer of the imperial bed-chamber collected these documents, and showed them to Theophilus, bidding him ‘choose between ordaining John, and undergoing a trial on the charges made against him.’ Theophilus terrified at this alternative, consented to ordain John.

— Socrates, Church History VI.2. John was consecrated on 26 February 398 by the hand of the man he had beaten.³

The grudge takes root (398)

Socrates names the motive without hedging, and dates the plot to the very beginning of the episcopate:

Wherefore Theophilus bishop of Alexandria, immediately after his ordination, was plotting his overthrow; and concerted measures for this purpose in secret, both with the friends who were around him, and by letter with such as were at a distance. For it was not so much the boldness with which John lashed whatever was obnoxious to him, that affected Theophilus, as his own failure to place his favorite presbyter Isidore in the episcopal chair of Constantinople.

— Socrates, Church History VI.5. The contemporary who wrote Chrysostom's defence reports the hostility as instant and instinctive: Theophilus, he says, “is very clever at judging faces,” and, “not finding anything in John's face corresponding to his own eye, or that which he desired to find, inferred his hostility, as a matter of unsupported conjecture.”⁴

The anthropomorphite riot: Alexandria turns against Origen (c. 399)

Egypt was meanwhile arguing whether God has a body and a human shape. The simpler monks said yes; the learned said no; and Theophilus, having preached the learned view in church and in his paschal letter, found a mob of desert ascetics at his door threatening to kill him. He talked his way out of it in one sentence, and paid for the escape with Origen:

Going to the monks, he in a conciliatory tone thus addressed them: ‘In seeing you, I behold the face of God.’ The utterance of this saying moderated the fury of these men and they replied: ‘If you really admit that God's countenance is such as ours, anathematize Origen's book; for some drawing arguments from them oppose themselves to our opinion. If you will not do this, expect to be treated by us as an impious person, and the enemy of God.’ ‘But as far as I am concerned,’ said Theophilus, ‘I will readily do what you require: and be ye not angry with me, for I myself also disapprove of Origen's works, and consider those who countenance them deserving of censure.’

— Socrates, Church History VI.7. Sozomen tells the same story and draws the same conclusion: “By these means he deluded the brethren, and broke up the sedition.”⁵ Both historians insist that Theophilus's own view of the divine nature never changed — only his public alignment.⁶

Isidore falls; the Tall Brothers withdraw (c. 399–400)

The presbyter Isidore — the same man Theophilus had wanted in Constantinople — became his bitterest enemy over a witness he would not withhold. Asked to confirm that Theophilus had known of, and sanctioned, a Manichaean convert's admission to communion, Isidore said so; Theophilus “became enraged and in anger ejected them both.”⁷ Sozomen had heard other causes from an insider — a will Isidore would not attest in the patriarch's sister's favour, and alms Isidore refused to divert into building work, “saying that it is better to restore the bodies of the suffering, which are more rightly to be considered the temples of God, and for which end the money had been furnished, than to build walls.”⁸

At the same time Theophilus lost the four brothers who had been his closest monastic allies — Dioscorus, Ammonius, Eusebius, and Euthymius, called “the Tall Monks” for their stature. He had made Dioscorus bishop of Hermopolis “against his will” and kept two of the others in his administration; they left, Socrates says, because they were “observing the bishop to be devoted to gain, and greedily intent on the acquisition of wealth.”⁹

Origenism as a weapon: the letters to the desert, and the raid on Nitria (400)

To reach men who owned nothing, Theophilus attacked their reputation among the illiterate monks — by charging them with the very doctrine he himself held:

Theophilus, however though entertaining the very same opinion respecting the Divine nature, yet to gratify his vindictive feelings, did not hesitate to pervert what he and they had rightly taught: but imposed upon the majority of the monks, men who were sincere but ‘rude in speech,’ the greater part of whom were quite illiterate. Sending letters to the monasteries in the desert, he advised them not to give heed either to Dioscorus or to his brothers, inasmuch as they affirmed that God had not a body.

— Socrates, Church History VI.7. The desert split into “Origenists” and “Anthropomorphitae,” and Theophilus went to Nitria in person “accompanied by a multitude of persons,” armed one party against the other, and drove the brothers out for their lives.¹⁰ Chrysostom's defender describes a night attack with soldiers and a hired mob: Theophilus “set their cells on fire with faggots, burning up with them all their copies of the canonical scriptures, and other valuable writings, as well as a boy (so eye-witnesses said), and the sacred elements,” and had earlier throttled the aged Ammonius with his own hands, “shouting, ‘Anathematize Origen, you heretic!’ when the only point at issue was the petition on behalf of Isidore.”¹¹ Whether the Origenism charge was the campaign's real ground or its instrument is a question in its own right.

Theophilus wrote the same news west to Jerome at Bethlehem — “we have cut down with the prophet's sickle certain wicked fanatics who were eager to sow broadcast in the monasteries of Nitria the heresy of Origen” — and enlisted him as the campaign's Latin voice. That western front is the subject of its own timeline.¹²

The Tall Brothers reach Constantinople; Chrysostom's careful reception (401)

The expelled monks went first to Jerusalem and Scythopolis; when Theophilus's agents followed them with complaints to the capital, some eighty of them took ship for Constantinople with Isidore, and asked to be tried before the emperor and the bishop. Writing to Epiphanius of Salamis to ask for a condemning council on Cyprus, Theophilus betrayed his alarm at where they had gone.¹³ What Chrysostom actually did is the hinge of everything that followed, and both historians record it the same way — hospitality, prayer, but no communion until the case was heard:

John, although he received them with kindness, and treated them with honor, and did not forbid them to pray in the church, refused to admit them to participation in the mysteries, for it was not lawful to do this before the investigation. He wrote to Theophilus, desiring him to receive them back into communion, as their sentiments concerning the Divine nature were orthodox; requesting him, if he regarded their orthodoxy as doubtful, to send some one to act as their accuser. Theophilus returned no reply to this epistle.

— Sozomen, Church History VIII.13. A false report then reached Alexandria that John had communicated them after all — “wherefore he resolved not only to be revenged on Isidore and Dioscorus, but also if possible to cast John out of his episcopal chair.”¹⁴ The monks appealed to the empress in the street, and got a promise: “For my part, I shall shortly cause a council to be convened, to which Theophilus shall be summoned.”¹⁵

Theophilus is summoned — as the defendant (402)

At the end of 402 an imperial order summoned Theophilus to Constantinople to answer the monks' charges before a synod, and Chrysostom, as bishop of the capital, was to preside. Theophilus's reply was jurisdictional and blunt: “I think that you are unaware of the order of the Nicene Canons, in which it is laid down that a bishop shall not exercise jurisdiction beyond his boundaries … if there was any need for me to be put on my trial, it should be before Egyptian judges, not before you, at the distance of a seventy-five days' journey.” It is the argument he would abandon the moment the roles reversed.¹⁶

Epiphanius is enlisted; the exchange of prophecies (403)

Theophilus first made peace with Epiphanius of Salamis — whom he had previously accused of thinking God had a human form — and got him to convene a Cyprus synod condemning Origen's books; then held one of his own at Alexandria. Socrates says the object was never Origen: the condemnation fell on a man “who had been dead nearly two hundred years: not having this as his first object, but rather his purpose of revenge on Dioscorus and his brethren.”¹⁷ Epiphanius then came to Constantinople with the decree, ordained in another bishop's city, refused Chrysostom's roof, and demanded that he expel the Tall Brothers and subscribe against Origen before they would pray together. Confronted by the Tall Brothers themselves, he admitted he had never read a word they had written.¹⁸ He left for Cyprus, and the two men parted with a famous exchange:

Some say that when he was about to depart, he said to John, ‘I hope that you will not die a bishop’: to which John replied, ‘Expect not to arrive at your own country.’ I cannot be sure that those who reported these things to me spoke the truth; but nevertheless the event was in the case of both as prophesied above.

— Socrates, Church History VI.14. Epiphanius died at sea on the voyage.¹⁹

The sermon against women, and the emperor's authorization (403)

Told that the empress Eudoxia had set Epiphanius on him, Chrysostom — “being of a fiery temperament, and of a ready utterance” — preached against the vices of women, and the sermon was carried to the palace as an insult to the empress. “The emperor therefore authorized Theophilus to convoke a Synod without delay against John.”²⁰ Sozomen, who records the story, declines to vouch for it: “I am not in possession of sufficient data to determine whether there was any truth in the current report that John delivered the discourse above mentioned with express allusion to the empress.”²¹ Whether Chrysostom really aimed his most famous line at Eudoxia is a question in its own right.

The Synod of the Oak: the accusers take the bench (403)

Theophilus reached Constantinople in June 403 — not alone, as ordered, but with twenty-nine of his suffragans, and money. No clergy met him; some Alexandrian grain-sailors cheered him in. He avoided the church, lodged in an imperial mansion, and crossed the water to a suburban estate of Chalcedon called “the Oak,” where he convened the synod that was supposed to have tried him.²² There, says Sozomen, “he judged it expedient to make no further allusion to the works of Origen, and called the monks of Scetis to repentance”; Socrates puts it more sharply still: “for no mention was now made of Origen, but all were intent on urging a variety of criminations, many of which were ridiculous.”²³

The acts are lost, but Photius read and summarized them, and his summary states the structural objection in a line:

The presidents were Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, Acacius of Beroea, Antiochus of Ptolemais, Severian of Gabala, and Cyrinus of Chalcedon, who were bitterly hostile to Chrysostom, and constituted themselves judges, accusers, and witnesses. There were thirteen sessions: twelve against Chrysostom, the thirteenth against Heraclides, whom Chrysostom had ordained bishop of Ephesus.

— Photius, Bibliotheca, codex 59. Forty-seven articles were tabled in two memorials. Among them: that he had sold Church plate; that he had called Epiphanius “a fool and a demon”; that he did not pray on the way into church; that he received women alone; that “a bath was heated for him alone”; that he “ate gluttonously alone, living like a Cyclops”; that he “dressed and undressed on his throne, and ate a lozenge.” Two concern Origenism. Photius's own comment on the list is one sentence: “Such were the charges against this holy man.”²⁴

Chrysostom refused to come, four times, and said exactly why:

Those to whom I object as judges are Theophilus, whom I call to account for having said both at Alexandria and in Lycia, ‘I go to the court to depose John.’ … I beg you therefore, if you really desire me to appear, in regard to these four; if they are entered as judges, remove them from the panel; if as accusers, put them into the witness-box, that I may know how to prepare to meet them——whether as opponents or as judges. Then I will appear at all costs, not only before your love, but before any synod in the world.

— Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St John Chrysostom, ch. VIII. The synod deposed him on the sole ground that he had not obeyed the summons, and referred the one charge it said it could not try — treason, for words spoken against the empress — to the emperor.²⁵

Exile, riot, and recall within days (403)

The sentence provoked an all-night crowd around the church; Chrysostom slipped away by himself on the third day “for he dreaded any insurrectionary movement on his account,” and was taken to Praenetum in Bithynia. The city did not settle. “Many who before were adversely disposed against him, now changed their hostility into compassion,” and blamed Theophilus, whose hand was now plain to everyone — “especially by the fact of his having held communion with Dioscorus, and those termed ‘the Tall Monks,’ immediately after John's deposition.”²⁶ Within a day or two something frightened the palace badly enough to reverse everything; the eunuch Briso was sent after him, and the empress “protested that she had taken no part in the machinations that had been carded on against him.” He refused to re-enter until a larger synod had cleared him, then yielded to the crowds, who met him with psalms and tapers.²⁷

Theophilus flees; the Oak's acts are annulled (403/404)

“Theophilus, seeing what was done, fled to Alexandria without ceremony,” sailing at the onset of winter; sixty bishops then met in Constantinople and annulled everything the Oak had decreed.²⁸ His reputation did not survive the affair, and Socrates says what finished it was that he went straight back to reading the author he had anathematized:

And when he was asked why he thus countenanced what he had publicly condemned, he replied, ‘Origen's books are like a meadow enameled with flowers of every kind. If, therefore, I chance to find a beautiful one among them, I cull it: but whatever appears to me to be thorny, I step over, as that which would prick.’

— Socrates, Church History VI.17. It is a defensible principle of reading; it is also, from the man who had just burned monasteries over it, the plainest evidence that the heresy-hunt had been a means and not an end.²⁹

The silver statue; the second deposition (403/404)

A silver statue of Eudoxia was raised on a porphyry column near the great church, and dedicated with the games and mimes customary for imperial statues. Chrysostom denounced the spectacle from the pulpit; the empress took it personally, and this time she got her council. It was then, Socrates says, that he preached “that celebrated oration commencing with these words: ‘Again Herodias raves; again she is troubled; she dances again; and again desires to receive John's head in a charger’” — the most-quoted sentence of the whole affair, and one that cannot in fact be traced to him.³⁰ The assembled bishops dropped the substance of the charges and rested the case on a single canon: that he had resumed his throne after deposition without a synod's leave. Chrysostom answered that sixty-five bishops had restored him, and that the canon invoked was an Arian one, framed at Antioch against Athanasius; the bishops “would not listen to his defence, but immediately condemned him, without considering that by using this canon they were sanctioning the deposition of Athanasius himself.”³¹

Easter Eve in the baptistery; the second exile and the burning of the Great Church (404)

Barred from his church, Chrysostom's people kept Easter of 404 elsewhere; the vigil was broken up by soldiers in the baptistery itself, mid-baptism — “the water ran red with blood,” in the defender's account, and Sozomen too describes clergy beaten and ejected in their vestments while “the women wept and lamented, and the children screamed.”³² On 24 June 404 he was taken into exile for good. That day the Great Church caught fire and burned, taking the senate house with it. Socrates lays the arson at the door of “some of the Johannites”; Sozomen records each side accusing the other and heads his chapter “Conflagration of the Church by Fire from Heaven”; Chrysostom asked, and was refused, a hearing on the charge: “You refused to give me the opportunity of defending myself on the other matters; at least let me have a hearing in regard to what happened to the church, as to whether I am guilty, as you allege, of the incendiarism.”³³

Cucusus, Arabissus, and the road to Pityus (404–407)

He was sent to Cucusus, a village on the Armenian frontier “in the hope of getting him killed by the Isaurians, who were continually raiding the place, by night and by day,” and thence to the fortress of Arabissus. From exile he wrote to Rome, and Innocent I answered that no accusation had been proved and none even heard. That an exiled and disfranchised priest still frightened them is the defender's bitterest point: “Here is a formidable dead man, who frightens living men, and men in authority too, as bogies frighten children.”³⁴ In 407 a harsher rescript ordered him on to Pityus, a desolate spot on the Black Sea, within a fixed time and under penalty; the escort marched him through rain and sun for three months, being told, so Palladius says, that “if he died by the roadside, the higher the promotion they would earn.”³⁵

Death at Comana (14 September 407)

They lodged outside Comana at the shrine of the martyr Basiliscus. Palladius reports a dream, a refusal to delay, a collapse thirty furlongs down the road, and a return to the shrine:

On his arrival, he asked for white clothes——clothes befitting his life——and taking off those he was wearing, he put these on, deliberately changing everything down to his shoes. All but these he distributed among those present. Then he partook of the symbols of the Lord's appointment, and offered his last prayer, in the presence of those who stood by, using his customary formula, ‘Glory to God for all things;’ and signing himself at the last Amen, he raised his feet…

— Palladius, Dialogue, ch. XI. Socrates gives only the bare fact: “John taken into exile died in Comana on the Euxine, on the, 14th of September.” He was buried beside Basiliscus, and a crowd came from Syria, Cilicia, Pontus, and Armenia “so that many supposed that they had been summoned by signal.”³⁶

Theophilus dies unrepentant; his nephew keeps the name off the diptychs (412 – c. 417)

Theophilus died on 15 October 412 and was succeeded by his nephew Cyril — who inherited the quarrel along with the see, and long refused to let Chrysostom's name be entered on the Alexandrian diptychs, saying one might as well put Judas among the apostles; he gave way only under pressure from Isidore of Pelusium. Atticus of Constantinople — who had himself testified against Chrysostom at the Oak — restored the name at the capital under Roman and popular pressure, and so ended the breach with Rome.³⁷ Theophilus is nonetheless venerated as a saint in the Coptic and Syriac Orthodox churches.³⁸

The relics come home (27 January 438)

Thirty-one years after the road to Pityus, under the patriarch Proclus, Chrysostom's body was brought back from Comana: “On 27 January, 438, his body was translated to Constantinople with great pomp, and entombed in the church of the Apostles where Eudoxia had been buried in the year 404.” The “Johannite” schism closed with it.³⁹

The record, and who kept it (c. 408 – ninth century)

Nearly everything above comes from men with a side. Palladius of Galatia wrote the Dialogue about 408 as an advocate's brief — and as one of the accused: he was himself deposed at the Oak, and Bishop Isaac's memorial named him among the Origenists Chrysostom was blamed for consorting with. He is a contemporary insider and an interested party at once, and the same man wrote the warm portrait of Rufinus and the cold one of Jerome that closes the Latin timeline.⁴⁰ Socrates and Sozomen, writing a generation later, are sympathetic to Chrysostom but not to Palladius's degree; Socrates goes out of his way to defend Origen and to name Theophilus as the fourth of a “quaternion of revilers,” while still declining to say whether the deposition was just: “God only knows, who is the discerner of secrets … I have simply recorded the reports which were current at that time.”⁴¹ The acts of the Oak themselves survive only because Photius, a ninth-century patriarch of the same see, read them and wrote down what was in them. The numbers in the sources do not agree — Photius counts forty-five bishops voting, Palladius thirty-six against Chrysostom's forty — and neither do the details: they differ on when Dioscorus died, on who set the church alight, and on the exact words the two men exchanged as Epiphanius sailed.⁴²

Arguments

Off-timeline questions this history raises, weighed on their evidence:

Related arguments — the case against Chrysostom

Two coupled questions about what he was actually brought down for: the doctrinal charge that opened the campaign, and the personal insult that closed it.

• Was John Chrysostom deposed for Origenism? — weak (Origen was the lever, not the grievance: the charge was raised by a man who held the doctrine himself, dropped the moment the synod convened, and abandoned once the objective was met — though the accusation was not empty noise, and it did real damage)
• Did Chrysostom preach the “Again Herodias raves” sermon against the empress Eudoxia? — weak (that he provoked her from the pulpit is certain and not in question; that this particular line is his rests on one historian a generation later, a second who copies him, and a homily now reckoned spurious — while the contemporary source reports a different alleged insult and no sermon at all)

Sources