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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Diodorus of Tarsus
died c. 390Patristic
He kept Antioch's orthodox congregation alive at gravesides and on the riverbank under an Arian emperor, and taught Chrysostom.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The First Council of Nicaea — Vasily Surikov (1876), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 390.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
Diodorus was born at Antioch to a good family, studied at Athens, and came home to run a school, an asketerion, a house of monastic training and biblical study on the edge of the city. Two of his students changed the church: John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia.
Under the emperor Valens, who backed the Arian party, the orthodox congregation at Antioch lost its churches. Diodorus, still a priest, held them together. They met outside the city walls, at the martyrs' graves and along the riverbank, and he kept preaching. Basil of Caesarea wrote to him with respect during those years. When Valens died and Theodosius came to power, Diodorus was made bishop of Tarsus in 378, and at the Council of Constantinople in 381 the emperor's edict named him as one of the bishops communion with whom defined orthodoxy.
His mark on the church is a method of reading the Bible. Alexandria read Scripture allegorically, looking through the literal sense to a hidden spiritual one. Diodorus set the Antiochene school on a different footing: begin with what the text actually says, in its own historical situation, and let any further meaning grow out of that soil rather than replace it. He distinguished theoria, a genuine contemplative sense grounded in the history, from allegoria, which he thought floated free of it. He wrote a treatise titled, in effect, on the difference between the two.
That instinct, that a passage means first what it plainly says, passed through his students into the whole later tradition of grammatical and historical exegesis, and it is the working assumption of most serious Bible study to this day.
His reputation did not survive him. Theodore of Mopsuestia, his pupil, was later blamed as the father of Nestorianism, and the blame ran backward. Cyril of Alexandria wrote against Diodorus by name. In 499 a synod condemned him, and after Constantinople II in 553 his books were no longer copied. Almost his entire output, commentaries on the whole Old Testament and much of the New, works against fate and astrology, against the Manichaeans, and a defense of the faith against the emperor Julian, is lost. Fragments survive in catenae, and a commentary on the Psalms has been recovered.
The Church of the East, which never accepted his condemnation, has honored him without a break.
Sources: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, VI.3; Theodoret of Cyrus, Ecclesiastical History, IV.24–25; Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 119; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Diodorus of Tarsus".
What was happening while he lived6 moments · AD 313–600
- 325The Council of NicaeaAbout three hundred bishops met in a lakeside town in what is now Turkey to answer Arius, an Alexandrian pastor who taught that the Son was God's first and greatest creature, glorious, but made, so that "there was when He was not." The council answered with one word: the Son is *homoousios* with the Father, of the very same being, begotten, not made.
- 335Athanasius is exiled for the first timeThe bishop of Alexandria, who had been at Nicaea as a young deacon, was banished to Trier in Germany after a rigged synod. Four more exiles followed; he spent roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop away from his city.
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
In their own words
“You notice that he hints more clearly at the repayment here in his mentioning, not vengeance by the wronged but personal disappointment by the frustrated, which resulted in their punishing themselves on seeing the one they envied held in high esteem. His meaning here is, …”
COMMENTARY ON PSALM 41 · on Psalms 41:11
“By this I know that You delight in me, for my enemy does not triumph over me.”
“He became manifest in the events themselves, by which he routed those harassing the godly and proved superior to their scheme, fearsome to the enemy and, in short, king like no other on earth, since he is also Lord of all.”
COMMENTARY ON PSALM 47 · on Psalms 47:2
“How awesome is the LORD Most High, the great King over all the earth!”
“By "youthful sin" he refers to the people's sins in Egypt, where they committed idolatry, remember. So now, he is saying, remember not those sins but your lovingkindness, by which even then you were kind to them in their ignorance and had mercy on them …”
COMMENTARY ON PSALM 25 · on Psalms 25:7
“Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my rebellious acts; remember me according to Your loving devotion, because of Your goodness, O LORD.”
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Diodorus of Tarsus at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Founded the Antioch school that insisted a Bible passage means first what it plainly says.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.