Proclus of Constantinople

Proclus was born at Constantinople toward the end of the fourth century. He began as a secretary, first to the patriarch Atticus, who ordained him deacon and then priest, and he had earlier been in the service of Sisinnius, who consecrated him bishop of Cyzicus about 426. The people of Cyzicus refused to receive him and elected someone else, so Proclus stayed in the capital as a bishop without a diocese, preaching in the great church.

That is how he came to give the most consequential sermon of the century.

In late 428 or 429, in the presence of the new patriarch Nestorius, Proclus preached a festival homily in honour of the Virgin. He called her Theotokos, God-bearer, and built the whole sermon on it: 'the holy Mary, the spotless treasury of virginity, the spiritual paradise of the second Adam.' Nestorius, who had already objected in public to that title and preferred Christ-bearer, answered from the same pulpit, and the argument was out in the open. Cyril of Alexandria took it up. Ephesus followed in 431, Nestorius was deposed, and the eastern churches divided.

Proclus did not profit from it immediately. He was passed over twice for the patriarchate. Only in 434, when Maximian died, was he installed, by imperial order, on the day of the funeral, before an election could be held.

His twelve years in office were the opposite of his famous sermon in temper. He set out to heal what Ephesus had torn.

His great act was the Tome to the Armenians, written about 435. The Armenian church had asked for a ruling on the teaching of Theodore of Mopsuestia. Proclus answered with a careful statement of one Christ in two natures, insisting on the unity of the person without erasing the humanity, and pointedly declined to condemn Theodore by name. Both sides could read it, and both did. It anticipates the Definition of Chalcedon by sixteen years.

In 438 he did something that mattered as much to ordinary Christians. John Chrysostom had died in exile in 407, driven out by a court faction, and his supporters had been in schism ever since. Proclus persuaded the emperor Theodosius II to bring the body back. Chrysostom's remains were carried into Constantinople and laid in the Church of the Apostles, with the emperor publicly asking pardon for what his parents had done. The schism ended.

About twenty of his homilies survive, along with several letters. He died in 446 or 447. The Eastern Orthodox church keeps his feast on 20 November.

Sources: Proclus of Constantinople, Homilies and the Tome to the Armenians (Migne, Patrologia Graeca 65; English translation of the Marian homilies by Nicholas Constas, Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin); Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History; the Acts of the Council of Ephesus.