1: SEVERUS'S LIFE
BACKGROUND
In 451 the Council of Chalcedon promulgated a definition of faith which outlawed the extremes of the theological traditions of Antioch and Alexandria, namely Nestorianism and Eutychianism, and attempted a balance between the christological terminology of each. Christ was proclaimed ‘in two natures’, as opposed to the expression ‘from two natures’ favoured by the Alexandrians. The Council also recognized the Tome of Pope Leo I of Rome as orthodox, and in harmony with the Fathers and with Cyril of Alexandria.
The definition was problematical from the start because in the East it was seen as only an interpretation of the symbol or creed of Nicaea, whereas for Pope Leo I it was an absolute definition which allowed no addition or subtraction. Also critical was the resolution of the Council, later known as Canon 28, which gave to Constantinople (New Rome) equal privileges with Old Rome in ecclesiastical matters, and decreed that the eastern city should hold second place after Rome. As a result of this canon, the traditional influence of Alexandria was short-circuited. To the bishop of Rome, the canon was also unfavourable, and he was reluctant to accept it explicitly. The issue of the formula ‘in two natures’ and Canon 28, as well as the ratification of the Tome (considered by many in the East to be Nestorian), were to cause unrest and resentment among Christians in both East and West in the century that followed, and a lasting division in the churches of the eastern Roman empire. Christians were polarized into ‘dyophysites’ and ‘monophysites’. With good reason could this be called ‘The Great Schism’.
The edict of 7 February 452, by which the emperors Marcian and Valentinian III enjoined their subjects to obey the decisions of the Council, was promulgated amid turbulence in Palestine, Egypt and Antioch in the aftermath of the Council. That monks and lay people also defined and enforced orthodoxy at this time is clear from such cases as that of Bishop Juvenal of Jerusalem, who lost the support of the influential monks in his see, and on his return to Jerusalem after the Council was forced to flee in the face of their determined opposition. The amount of popular literature written in the century after Chalcedon both for and against the Council demonstrated that reaction to the perceived issues was not confined to emperors or patriarchs.
In the fifty years after Chalcedon, there were repeated efforts by the imperial government in the East to restore ecclesiastical and political unity. The most famous example of this was the Henotikon of Emperor Zeno in 482, which emphasized the faith of Nicaea. Although it was a masterpiece of imperial diplomacy, and nominally at least brought the eastern sees into communion, in the long run it was unsuccessful, because for those opposed to the Council only an outright condemnation of the Tome of Leo and of Chalcedon would suffice.
This is the background against which we must situate the life and thought of Severus of Antioch.
SOURCES FOR SEVERUS'S LIFE
The sources for the life of Severus, anti-Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch from 512–18, are many and varied, with the result that we have a comprehensive and multidimensional picture of the man, his life and his times. In the first place, we have nearly 300 of his own letters, written prior to and during his patriarchate, as well as during his long exile. In addition, some of his 125 cathedral homilies, particularly Homilies XXVII and XXX, contain autobiographical information. In the Coptic version of Homily XXVII we find a section in which Severus narrates his conversion at Tripolis, showing that until he went to Beirut to study he was still a pagan (Garitte 1966: 335–90).To his friend and fellow-student Zachariah Scholasticus, later bishop of Mitylene on Lesbos, we owe the first biography of Severus. Composed in Greek around 515 and surviving in a Syriac translation, it was a response to a pamphlet defaming the patriarch (Vie 7–10, 75) on the grounds that he was guilty of pagan practices and of being baptized late. Although it is a contemporary document, it needs in part to be used with caution because some of its details are in conflict with those given by Severus himself (Darling 1982: 20). A second biography, similarly composed in Greek but surviving in a Syriac translation and some Coptic fragments, is that of John, abbot of the monastery of Beith Aphthonia on the Euphrates, who died c. 558. Another biography is ascribed to one of Severus's successors as anti-Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch, Athanasius Gamala or the Camel-Driver (594–630/1), which has come down to us in Coptic fragments and in an Ethiopic version derived from an Arabic model, which in its turn was possibly a translation from Coptic. Dependent on John of Beith Aphthonia is the Syriac biography in metrical homi-letic form of George, bishop of the Arabs, who was born around 640 (George, bishop of the Arabs 1993: XI–XIII). We have a fifth bio graphy, written in Syriac by Qyriaqos, the Syrian Orthodox patriarch of Antioch from 793–817, which was discovered in 1975 and remains unpublished (Voobus 1975–6: 117–24). A sixth biography, composed in Arabic by a certain bishop of Assiut, probably John, in the fifteenth century, was discovered by Youhanna Nessim Youssef in 2002 in the monastery of St Menas at Mariout. All of these hagiographical works need to be used with varying degrees of caution, and checked wherever possible against other historical sources.
Given his pivotal role in the ecclesiastical politics of his time, Severus features in most of the historical and theological works which were composed either in or about the period, from the Chalcedonian as well as the anti-Chalcedonian side. Because these are too numerous to list here, we mention only the anti-Chalcedonian Church History of Zachariah Scholasticus and his continuator, ps.Zachariah, which contains several of the patriarch's letters, and the Chalcedonian Church History of Evagrius Scholasticus (d. before 600), which preserves unique information about him.
BEFORE THE PATRIARCHATE
Severus was born around 456 in Sozopolis (Pisidia) to a well-to-do family. Despite the assertions of his friend and biographer, Zachariah, that his grandfather, also called Severus, was bishop of the city, had attended the Council of Ephesus in 439, and had been one of the bishops who condemned Nestorius, it is clear from Severus's own words that the family was pagan.1 Thus his relatively late baptism should not be attributed – as it is by Zachariah – to an unduly long catechumenate as supposedly practised in Pisidia (Vie 11), but to a radical conversion from paganism to Christianity (Darling 1982: 24). After the death of his father, in 485 Severus and his two older brothers were sent by their mother to Alexandria to study grammar and rhetoric, both Latin and Greek (Vie 11), a prerequisite for legal studies. In Alexandria Severus met Zachariah, his future biographer, and for the next twelve or so years the fortunes of the two young men were inexorably intertwined. Because Zachariah wrote his biography as a defence of Severus against claims that at the beginning of his career he had worshipped demons and idols and given himself over to magical practices (Vie 9, 75), much of the work deals with pagan and magical practices in Alexandria and Beirut, where the two fellow-students went on to study law While the account is partisan, it discloses incidentally details of the students’ timetables, programmes of courses, the names and provenance of students and the names of professors, the liveliness of paganism in the two cities at the end of the fifth century, and student life at the time (Poggi 1986: 59, 62; Blazquez 1998: 415–36). No doubt one of Zachariah's aims in dropping the names of young rich Christian men who went on to stellar careers in church and state was to add weight to his claims that Severus was not guilty of paganism or magic (Vie 10).
Severus is presented consistently as an unbaptized adviser to his fellow students, who as Christians were fighting paganism in both Egypt and Phoenicia (Vie 44, 65, 91). According to Zachariah, his Christian fellow students in Alexandria persuaded Severus to abandon the reading of the great Antiochene orator Libanius in favour of two illustrious Christian Cappadocians, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzen (Vie 13). This study programme was to be continued by both Severus and Zachariah when they met up in Beirut in 488, a year after the future patriarch had arrived there (Vie 46). The Cappadocians in fact were to become models for Severus both personally and ecclesiologically, and he believed that they would be his judges at the Last Judgement.2 Zachariah instructed his friend in the Scriptures and the Fathers: the two of them pursued their legal studies from Monday to Friday, rested on Saturday morning, then spent the remainder of the weekend studying theology (Vie 52–3). At the end of his five-year stay in Beirut, Severus had composed a legal work and graduated as master of law (Poggi 1986: 65). His legal training remains discernible in his writings, and accounts for his interest in canon law, as evidenced particularly in his letters.
Severus was given formal catechesis by a monk before being baptized in the church of the martyr Leontius at Tripolis (Vie 80–2). The choice of this venue was almost certainly not accidental, although Zachariah glosses over the motive. Leontius was credited with the power of converting pagans from demon-worship to Christianity, and in Homily XXVII (PO 36/4: 563), delivered in 513 in the church of Leontius in Daphne, Severus was to claim that before his baptism he was a pagan converted suddenly from his parents’ religion (Darling 1982: 22–5). That both catechesis and baptism occurred outside the hierarchy of the church in Beirut may be explained by the fact that the local bishop was a Chalcedonian (Darling 1982: 20), and perhaps also by the close nexus in Syrian and Palestinian monasticism between baptism and asceticism (Escolan 1999: 41–2). For an ascetic is what Severus became, after his indisputably anti-Chalcedonian baptism. Despite the fact that after his graduation he went shopping for official legal robes before his planned return to Pisidia via Jerusalem, he was won over by meeting some disciples of the famous first-generation anti-Chalcedonian Peter the Iberian, and in c. 490 became a monk in Peter's monastery near Gaza (Vie 92–3). In so doing, he parted company with his friend and mentor Zachariah, who recounts sheepishly that he could not follow Severus into the monastic life because his father wanted him to become a lawyer in Constantinople (Vie 95).
Under Peter's charismatic leadership, the area around Gaza had produced an influential group of anti-Chalcedonian monastics and intellectuals (Steppa 2002: 163–4) that was to be involved in the course of both ecclesiastical and secular politics in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. In fact, with his entry into the monastic world of Palestine, Severus had ‘joined the most volatile and influential subculture’ of late antiquity (Darling 1982: 26), for it was a breeding-ground of theologians, bishops, and ecclesiastical administrators for the eastern empire. However, Chalcedonian monks in the area were even more influential under the leadership of Sabas, whose life was written by Cyril of Scythopolis in the mid-sixth century.
From the monastery of Peter, Severus graduated to the solitary life in the desert of Eleutheropolis, where, however, his health suffered so badly from the rigours of asceticism that he was taken by the abbot of the monastery of Romanus and nursed back to health.3 This anti-Chalcedonian establishment was built c. 459 near Eleutheropolis, and soon after, according to John Rufus (Rufus 1912: 58), it housed 600 monks. According to John of Beith Aphthonia (JBA 229), at this stage Severus used his not inconsiderable family legacy to help the poor and to found his own monastery in Maiuma near Gaza.4 Zachariah would have us believe that this establishment was necessary to accommodate the numbers of disciples who had gathered around Severus. By 500, Severus had received priestly ordination at the hands of Epiphanius, bishop of Magydon in Pamphilia (Vie 98–100).5 Although in reading Zachariah's biography of Severus one is given the impression that the anti-Chalcedonian monks were in the ascendant in Palestine at this time, this was far from being the case, as Severus's encounter a little later with the theologian and Alexandrian monk Nephalius, a convert from anti-Chalcedonianism, illustrates.
A born agitator, Nephalius would have known that the safest region in which to launch an attack on the by-now outstanding anti-Chalcedonian monastic leader was Palestine. He attacked the future patriarch, who responded; then Nephalius delivered a speech ‘in front of the church’ in Jerusalem (Vie 103–4) and, with the aid of the clergy and monks there, succeeded in expelling Severus in 508. This is testimony to the decline of the anti-Chalcedonian cause in the region as a result of the vigorous propaganda of the great Abbot Sabas (Frend 1973: 265). Severus went to Constantinople with 200 monks (Moeller 1944–5: 105) to plead his case with Emperor Anastasius, and was followed by Nephalius and an entourage of Chalcedonian monks from Palestine (Vie 103–5). The two monks were to cross swords again publicly in the imperial capital, but in the meantime Severus had won the trust of the emperor and was soon acting as his theological adviser.
Shortly before this, the militant anti-Chalcedonian bishop of Mabbog, Xenaias (whose name was Hellenized as Philoxenus), had been invited to Constantinople by the emperor, perhaps in order to participate in an anti-Chalcedonian synod convoked by imperial order.6 While Anastasius was sympathetic to the anti-Chalcedonian cause, the patriarch of the capital, Macedonius, was a strict Chalcedonian in a largely Chalcedonian city, and refused to communicate with Philoxenus in any sense of the word (de Halleux 1963: 61). Philoxenus had left the capital by the time Severus arrived in 508 (de Halleux 1963: 59), but, despite the differences in their age and backgrounds,7 the two men developed a partnership which was a turning-point in the history of incarnational theology (Moeller 1951: 670).
Both Severus and Philoxenus would be content only with an outright condemnation of Chalcedon. Yet the eirenic Anastasius, whose aim was to minimize disruption in his realm, was committed to using the Henotikon as the main tool of his ecclesiastical policy, and indeed neither Severus nor Philoxenus would have rejected the document outright. The patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch and Jerusalem were led by staunch Chalcedonians. Philoxenus campaigned relentlessly against Patriarch Flavian of Antioch, and perhaps also against Patriarch Elias of Jerusalem (de Halleux 1963: 69). Faced with the insistence of Severus and Philoxenus, and with the growing inefficacy of the Henotikon to achieve his aims, Emperor Anastasius apparently entrusted Severus with the task of drawing up a document known as the Type, which gave to the Henotikon an anti-Chalcedonian interpretation, without, however, anathematizing Leo and the council of 451 explicitly.8 Judging from the embarrassed manner in which the Byzantine chroniclers relate the event, it seems that Severus's formula was accepted at least temporarily or conditionally by the patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch and Jerusalem (de Halleux 1963: 69).
It was about this time that the controversial doxology known as the Thrice-Holy or Trishagion came to play a decisive role in the career of Macedonius. Some forty years before, one of the first generation of anti-Chalcedonians, Peter the Fuller, patriarch of Antioch, had introduced into the doxology ‘Holy God, holy mighty, holy immortal, have mercy on us’, the words ‘who was crucified for us’, in order to reinforce the christological interpretation of the hymn such that the second person of the Trinity was said truly to have become incarnate and to have suffered. The addition was seen by anti-Chalcedonians in Syria as an antidote to Nestorianism,9 but to those who understood the hymn to be addressed to the Trinity, it was deeply shocking because it implied theopaschite doctrine; that is, that the impassible Godhead had suffered. While the addition is described by Bacht as a liturgical extravagance (1951: 280) and by Moeller as baroque (1951: 652–3), it had become an anti-Chalcedonian catch-cry. It was this formula that was used by the monks who had accompanied Severus to the capital, and Anastasius acquiesced in the practice until Chalcedonian monks from Palestine objected. In this they were followed by Macedonius. This only served to sharpen the confrontation between Severus and the patriarch, who was eventually deposed by a synod on 7 August 511 and banished (Frend 1972: 168, 218). He was replaced by the more moderate Timothy (511–18). The extent to which the use of the addition ‘who was cruci...
