Sophronius of Jerusalem

Sophronius was born about 560 in Damascus and taught rhetoric before he gave it up for the monastic life — men who knew him called him Sophronius the Sophist. He travelled for decades: the monasteries of Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, Asia Minor, North Africa, Rome. His constant companion was John Moschus, and the pair went from monastery to monastery collecting the sayings and stories of the desert monks. Moschus wrote them down in The Spiritual Meadow and dedicated the book to Sophronius. When Moschus died in Rome about 619, Sophronius carried his body back to Palestine for burial. He was a poet as well — his anacreontic odes on the holy places of Jerusalem are among the better Greek verse of the age — and he wrote saints' lives, including one of the Egyptian penitent Mary. In 634, already an old man, he was made patriarch of Jerusalem. He walked immediately into two fights. The first was doctrinal. The imperial court was pushing a compromise formula — that Christ had two natures but only one activity, and then only one will — designed to win back the churches of Syria and Egypt. Sophronius saw it as a denial that Christ was fully human, and he refused. His synodical letter of 634 laid out the case in careful detail and was later read into the record of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which ruled his way in 681. Maximus the Confessor, who fought the same battle and paid for it with his hand and tongue, had been formed under him. The second fight he lost, and he knew he was going to. Arab armies took Damascus in 635 and closed on Jerusalem. His Christmas sermon of 634 describes a congregation unable to reach Bethlehem because the roads were held. After a siege of months, Sophronius surrendered the city — by the tradition, in 637, to the caliph Umar in person — and refused to hand it over to anyone lower. What he negotiated is the reason he is remembered. The terms guaranteed the lives, churches, and property of the Christians of Jerusalem, and safe conduct for those who wished to leave. He walked the caliph through the holy places himself. When the hour of prayer came, tradition says Umar declined to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre so that no one could later claim it as a mosque. Sophronius died soon after, in March 638. He had held the see less than four years and spent them defending the humanity of Christ and the safety of his people. Sources: John Moschus, The Spiritual Meadow; Sophronius, Synodical Letter (Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 87); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).