Severus of Antioch

Severus was born about 465 at Sozopolis in Pisidia, in Asia Minor, into a wealthy family; his grandfather had been a bishop. He was sent to Alexandria to study grammar and rhetoric, then to Berytus, Beirut, to study Roman law, the best legal school in the empire.

He was not baptized until he was in his twenties. About 488, at the shrine of the martyr Leontius at Tripolis, he was baptized, and he abandoned law altogether. He became a monk in Palestine, first in the community of Peter the Iberian and then in the desert near Gaza, and eventually founded his own monastery near Maiuma.

He was drawn into the great controversy of the age. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had defined Christ as one person in two natures. A large part of the church in Egypt, Syria, and Armenia rejected that language, holding with Cyril of Alexandria to the one incarnate nature of God the Word, and fearing that 'two natures' divided Christ in half. Severus became the most formidable theologian that side ever produced.

He went to Constantinople about 508 to plead the case with the emperor Anastasius, who favoured it, and stayed three years. In 512 he was made patriarch of Antioch. He held the seat six years, reorganising the liturgy, preaching constantly, corresponding across the East.

In 518 Anastasius died and Justin I came to the throne with the opposite policy. Severus was deposed and fled to Egypt, where he spent the remaining twenty years of his life in hiding, moving among the monasteries of the Nile delta, still writing and still directing his churches by letter. He was called back to Constantinople once, in 535, under the empress Theodora's protection, but the reconciliation failed and he was condemned by a synod in 536. He died in Egypt in 538.

His writings were ordered burned by imperial decree, and the Greek originals are almost entirely lost. They survive because Syriac-speaking Christians translated everything they could get and copied it for centuries.

What remains is very large: about a hundred and twenty-five Cathedral Homilies preached at Antioch, some four thousand letters of which many hundreds survive, hymns still sung in the Syriac Orthodox liturgy, and long polemical works, against the Chalcedonian Grammarian John of Caesarea, and against Julian of Halicarnassus, a fellow anti-Chalcedonian who had gone on to teach that Christ's body was incorruptible from conception.

Severus fought that as fiercely as he fought Chalcedon, insisting that if Christ's flesh could not suffer, then nothing was accomplished at the cross.

The Syriac Orthodox, Coptic, Armenian, and Ethiopian churches honour him as a father and a saint. The Chalcedonian churches condemned him. Modern dialogue between the two families has largely concluded that the quarrel was in significant part over words.

Sources: Severus of Antioch, The Sixth Book of the Select Letters (ed. and trans. E. W. Brooks) and the Cathedral Homilies (Patrologia Orientalis); Zacharias Scholasticus, Life of Severus; Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History; W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement.