Olympiodorus of Alexandria

Olympiodorus was a deacon of the church of Alexandria in the sixth century. Nothing personal is recorded about him, no birth, no family, no controversy, no death scene. He appears in history only as the author of commentaries, and he is generally placed in the first half of the sixth century, working under the patriarchs of Alexandria in the age of Justinian.

He is easily confused with two other men of the same name from the same city: Olympiodorus the historian, who wrote about the fall of the West a century earlier, and Olympiodorus the Younger, the pagan Neoplatonist philosopher who taught at Alexandria in the same century and wrote on Plato and Aristotle. They are three different people, and the deacon is the one who commented on Scripture.

His surviving work is exegetical and unfashionably steady. He wrote a commentary on Job, one on Ecclesiastes, and one on Jeremiah with Baruch and Lamentations; fragments on other books survive in the catenae, the medieval chain-compilations that stitched together excerpts from many fathers verse by verse. In fact much of what remains of him remains only because catena-makers quoted him.

The choice of books tells you something. Job and Ecclesiastes are the two books of the Old Testament that press hardest on unanswered suffering and on the apparent pointlessness of life under the sun, and they were commented on far less often than the Psalms or Genesis. Olympiodorus takes them at length. On Job he follows the argument closely, the friends' speeches, Job's protests, the whirlwind, and refuses to soften Job's complaint into piety. On Ecclesiastes he works through Qoheleth's sentences one at a time.

His method sits between the two great schools of the ancient church. Alexandria was the home of allegory and Antioch of the plain historical sense, and by the sixth century educated readers used both. Olympiodorus gives the literal meaning of a phrase, notes the Greek where it matters, and then draws the moral or spiritual application, without the sustained allegorical flights of Origen. Modern editors value him partly for the biblical text he quotes, since his lemmas preserve readings of the Greek Old Testament.

He stands for a whole class of ancient Christian writers who are known by their work and nothing else: men who spent their lives explaining the Bible to congregations and students, left no memoir, and survive because somebody kept copying the explanations.

Sources: Olympiodorus of Alexandria, Commentary on Job (Greek text ed. Ursula and Dieter Hagedorn, Patristische Texte und Studien 24); the catena fragments on Ecclesiastes and Jeremiah in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 93; Johannes Quasten, Patrology.