Severian of Gabala

Severian was bishop of Gabala, a small coastal town in Syria, at the end of the fourth century. He is known for two things that do not sit comfortably together: a substantial body of preaching, and his part in destroying John Chrysostom.

He came to Constantinople around 401, apparently to raise money and make a name, and he succeeded. Socrates the historian says he had a good voice and considerable learning but spoke Greek with a heavy Syrian accent, which the capital found either charming or ridiculous depending on the day. He preached often, the court liked him, and the empress Eudoxia became his patron.

Chrysostom, the archbishop, went to Asia on church business and left Severian to preach in his absence. When Chrysostom came back the two fell out, the sources say through the whispering of Chrysostom's deacon Serapion, and through Severian's own ambition. Chrysostom ordered him out of the city. Eudoxia intervened, called him back, and forced a public reconciliation, which held on the surface and nowhere else.

In 403 Theophilus of Alexandria convened the Synod of the Oak, a packed assembly across the water at Chalcedon, and deposed Chrysostom on a list of trumped-up charges. Severian was among the bishops who did it, and he preached a sermon afterward justifying the sentence. Chrysostom was exiled, recalled, exiled again, and died in 407 on a forced march in bad weather. The Eastern church has honoured him ever since as one of its greatest, and has remembered Severian as one of the men who broke him.

His sermons had a strange afterlife because of it. Many of them were preserved by simply removing his name and attaching them to Chrysostom's, and for centuries they circulated in Greek, Latin, Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, and Georgian collections as the work of the man he had helped ruin. Modern scholars have been sorting the two apart for a hundred years, and the number of homilies now credited to Severian keeps growing.

The most substantial group is six homilies on the six days of creation. They are literal-minded, vivid, and completely unlike the allegorical Alexandrian handling of Genesis. Severian argues for a flat earth under a solid vaulted heaven, describes the sun as travelling behind a wall at night, and treats the text as a plain account of what happened. Whatever one makes of his cosmology, he takes the days as days and the account as history, and he preaches it to ordinary people with confidence.

He also preached on the Psalms, on Genesis, on Paul, and on the church feasts, and his exegesis is generally Antiochene, the plain sense first.

He was still alive in 408 and died sometime after; nothing is recorded of his end.

Sources: Severian of Gabala, Homilies on the Six Days of Creation (Migne, Patrologia Graeca 56; English translation by Robert C. Hill, Severian of Gabala: Homilies on Creation and Fall); Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History; Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St John Chrysostom.