HistoricalChristian.Faith

Theophilus of Alexandria and the fall of John Chrysostom

Dates: patriarch of Alexandria 385–412 (d. 15 October 412) · Wikipedia
Summary: Theophilus was the most powerful churchman in the East and the architect of the campaign that destroyed John Chrysostom. This page tells the quarrel from his side: the contested election of 398 in which he was compelled to consecrate the man he had opposed; the anthropomorphite riot that turned him publicly against Origen; the destruction of his own former allies, the “Tall Brothers,” and the raid on Nitria; the reversal by which the defendant summoned to Constantinople became the president of the tribunal at the Oak; his flight when the city turned; and the after-history — the meadow-and-flowers answer about Origen, and a nephew who kept the fallen bishop's name off the diptychs for years. He also ran the western half of the same campaign through Jerome, told on the Origenist controversy timeline.

The see and the man (385–397)

Twenty-seven years at Alexandria

Theophilus held Alexandria from 385 to his death in 412 — the years in which Egyptian paganism collapsed. In 391 the Serapeum fell and he raised a church on its ruins. The standard reference article attaches his name to three things: “the decay of paganism in Egypt, the Origenistic controversy, and the deposition and banishment of St. John Chrysostom,” and describes him without euphemism as “extremely violent and unscrupulous in the choice of his means.” His nephew and successor was Cyril.¹ He is nonetheless commemorated as a saint in the Coptic and Syriac Orthodox churches.²

Not, at first, an enemy of Origen

He came to the controversy from the sympathetic side. Rufinus of Aquileia had studied at Alexandria under him as well as under Didymus the Blind, and as late as Easter 397 Theophilus's influence helped broker the reconciliation of Jerome and Rufinus at the Holy Sepulchre. Both Socrates and Sozomen insist that his personal view of the divine nature — that God is incorporeal, the view the Origenists held — never actually changed; only his public alignment did.³

The election he lost (397–398)

Isidore passed over, and a consecration under duress

When Nectarius of Constantinople died in September 397, Theophilus wanted his own presbyter Isidore in the chair and worked against the Antiochene candidate: he “did everything he could to detract from John's reputation.” The court preferred John, and the chamberlain Eutropius produced the file of written accusations then pending against Theophilus and offered him the choice of consecrating John or standing trial. He consecrated John, on 26 February 398.⁴

Socrates dates the plot from that moment and names the cause:

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, source.

The turn against Origen (c. 399–400)

“In seeing you, I behold the face of God”

Theophilus had preached in church, and written in his paschal letter, that God is incorporeal — and a mob of anthropomorphite monks came down from the desert to kill him for it. He escaped by a compliment and a concession:

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 …’ ‘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, source. Sozomen's verdict on the manoeuvre: “By these means he deluded the brethren, and broke up the sedition.”⁵

The doctrine turned into a weapon

He then used against his former friends a charge he knew to be a description of his own belief. Socrates is explicit that this was knowing misrepresentation:

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.

— Socrates, Church History VI.7, source. He went to Nitria in person with a crowd at his back and drove the Tall Brothers out; the contemporary defence adds soldiers, a hired mob primed with drink, and cells burned with the scriptures in them.⁶ The quarrel that lay underneath it is not in dispute even in the hostile telling: when he seized the aged Ammonius by the neck and shouted “Anathematize Origen, you heretic!”, “the only point at issue was the petition on behalf of Isidore.”⁷

The western front

The same campaign was run in Latin. Theophilus wrote to Jerome at Bethlehem in 400 — “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 Jerome became its translator, Latinizing the Alexandrian synodical letter and the paschal letters of 401, 402, and 404. In 405 Theophilus sent him the invective against the fallen Chrysostom to be put into Latin for the West.⁸

Defendant into judge (402–403)

The jurisdictional principle, held and dropped

Summoned by imperial order at the end of 402 to answer the monks' charges before a synod at Constantinople presided over by Chrysostom, Theophilus objected on the canons:

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 so, now that you know it, leave these charges against me alone, 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.

— Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St John Chrysostom, ch. VII, source. Within a year he was presiding over a synod that tried the bishop of Constantinople in Constantinople's own suburbs — and Chrysostom's friends threw the same canon straight back at him: “you are overthrowing the canons of the 318 bishops at Nicaea, and are trying a case beyond your boundaries.”⁹ This is the sharpest single count against him: the principle was invoked when it shielded him and abandoned when it did not.

The Oak

He arrived in June 403 with twenty-nine suffragans and money, avoided the church for three weeks, and convened the synod across the water. Sozomen notes what he decided to leave out of it: “he judged it expedient to make no further allusion to the works of Origen, and called the monks of Scetis to repentance.” Photius, who read the lost acts, records that Theophilus and his four co-presidents “were bitterly hostile to Chrysostom, and constituted themselves judges, accusers, and witnesses.”¹⁰ Whether Origenism was ever the real ground is weighed on its own page.

After the victory (403–412)

Flight, and the meadow of flowers

When the city rioted and Chrysostom was recalled within days, Theophilus “fled to Alexandria without ceremony” at the onset of winter; sixty bishops then annulled everything the Oak had decreed. What finished his reputation, Socrates says, was that he went straight back to reading the author he had anathematized:

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, source. As a rule of reading it is unobjectionable — and close to what Rufinus and Jerome had each claimed for themselves. Coming from the man who had burned monasteries over the same books, it is the best evidence in the record that the heresy-hunt was an instrument. Theophilus also made his peace with the surviving Nitrian monks, and shed tears at the news of Ammonius's death.¹¹

Death, and a nephew who did not forgive

Theophilus died on 15 October 412 with the quarrel unresolved. Cyril inherited both the see and the feud, and for years refused to enter Chrysostom's name on the Alexandrian diptychs — saying one might as well put Judas among the apostles — yielding only under pressure from Isidore of Pelusium. At Constantinople the name went back on under Atticus, who had himself been a witness against Chrysostom at the Oak; the relics came home in 438.¹²

Assessment of the sources on him

Everything hostile above is hostile in a traceable way. Palladius, who supplies the most lurid details — the beetle, the bloodshot dragon's eyes, the burning cells — was Chrysostom's advocate and one of the men the Oak deposed, and stood himself accused of Origenism; his Dialogue is a brief, not a chronicle. Socrates and Sozomen are calmer but not neutral: Socrates writes a whole chapter in Origen's defence and lists Theophilus fourth among a “quaternion of revilers,” while declining to say whether the deposition was just.¹³ What survives without any friendly counter-testimony, however, is not the invective but the conduct: the consecration extorted by blackmail, the letters to the illiterate monks, the canon invoked and abandoned, the synod of his own partisans, and the return to reading Origen the week after. No source, hostile or otherwise, records a defence of any of these; the one document we have in his own voice on the affair — the invective he sent Jerome to translate — rests the case against Chrysostom squarely on Origenism, the charge his own synod had by then dropped.¹⁴

Sources