Methodius of Olympus

Methodius was a bishop in Lycia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, in the late third century. The sources disagree about his see, Olympus is the usual name, with Patara and Tyre also appearing, and the confusion is old. Of his life almost nothing is recorded beyond his writings and his death.

He was educated in Greek philosophy and wrote in dialogue form, in conscious imitation of Plato, which makes him one of the few early Christian writers who is a pleasure to read as literature.

His best-known work is the Symposium, or Banquet of the Ten Virgins. It answers Plato's Symposium directly: where Plato's dinner party was a company of men praising erotic love, Methodius stages a garden banquet of ten Christian women, each giving a speech in praise of chastity, ending with a hymn sung by all of them to Christ the Bridegroom. It is the earliest sustained Christian treatment of consecrated virginity, and it treats women as the speakers rather than the subject.

His heavier work was a long argument with Origen, who had died a generation earlier and whose authority in the East was enormous. Origen had taught that the risen body is not the same material body but a form or pattern that God reclothes, the soul's outline restored in a spiritual substance. Methodius wrote On the Resurrection, a dialogue also called Aglaophon, against it.

His position was blunt: God raises this body, the one that died, because it was the body that sinned and the body that suffered, and a salvation that discards it is not a salvation of the human being. He also wrote On Free Will, against the determinism of the gnostics, and On Things Created, against Origen's idea of an eternal creation.

He was not simply an opponent. He used Origen's allegorical method constantly, and much of his own exegesis reads like Origen's. He fought the master with the master's tools.

Jerome, listing him among Christian authors, says he was crowned with martyrdom at the end of the last persecution, at Chalcis, and Jerome adds, or so some assert, showing that even in the fourth century the detail was reported rather than certain. The usual date given is about 311, in the last phase of the persecution under Maximinus.

Most of his work survives only in an Old Church Slavonic translation, and in fragments quoted by Epiphanius and Photius. The Symposium alone comes down complete in Greek.

Sources: Jerome, On Illustrious Men 83; the works of Methodius (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6); Epiphanius, Panarion 64; Photius, Bibliotheca.