The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Long Middle
Sophronius of Jerusalem
died 638Patristic
The patriarch who handed over Jerusalem's keys in 637 and bargained for the safety of the Christians he was leaving behind.
Summary
- Lived died 638.
- Stood in The Long Middle (AD 600–1500).
- Hangs on The Fathers and The Hymn Writers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
Sophronius was born about 560 in Damascus and taught rhetoric before he gave it up for the monastic life, men who knew him called him Sophronius the Sophist. He travelled for decades: the monasteries of Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, Asia Minor, North Africa, Rome. His constant companion was John Moschus, and the pair went from monastery to monastery collecting the sayings and stories of the desert monks. Moschus wrote them down in The Spiritual Meadow and dedicated the book to Sophronius. When Moschus died in Rome about 619, Sophronius carried his body back to Palestine for burial.
He was a poet as well, his anacreontic odes on the holy places of Jerusalem are among the better Greek verse of the age, and he wrote saints' lives, including one of the Egyptian penitent Mary.
In 634, already an old man, he was made patriarch of Jerusalem. He walked immediately into two fights.
The first was doctrinal. The imperial court was pushing a compromise formula, that Christ had two natures but only one activity, and then only one will, designed to win back the churches of Syria and Egypt. Sophronius saw it as a denial that Christ was fully human, and he refused. His synodical letter of 634 laid out the case in careful detail and was later read into the record of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which ruled his way in 681. Maximus the Confessor, who fought the same battle and paid for it with his hand and tongue, had been formed under him.
The second fight he lost, and he knew he was going to. Arab armies took Damascus in 635 and closed on Jerusalem. His Christmas sermon of 634 describes a congregation unable to reach Bethlehem because the roads were held. After a siege of months, Sophronius surrendered the city, by the tradition, in 637, to the caliph Umar in person, and refused to hand it over to anyone lower.
What he negotiated is the reason he is remembered. The terms guaranteed the lives, churches, and property of the Christians of Jerusalem, and safe conduct for those who wished to leave. He walked the caliph through the holy places himself. When the hour of prayer came, tradition says Umar declined to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre so that no one could later claim it as a mosque.
Sophronius died soon after, in March 638. He had held the see less than four years and spent them defending the humanity of Christ and the safety of his people.
Sources: John Moschus, The Spiritual Meadow; Sophronius, Synodical Letter (Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 87); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).
What was happening while he lived1 moments · AD 600–1500
- 590–604Gregory the Great, and a mission to EnglandA Roman monk becomes bishop of Rome during plague and famine, feeds the city, writes a handbook on pastoral care that shapes clergy for a thousand years, and in 597 sends Augustine of Canterbury with about forty monks to the Anglo-Saxons. Within a century England is sending missionaries of its own.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Sophronius of Jerusalem at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Handed over Jerusalem's keys in 637 and negotiated protection for the Christians he was leaving behind.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received. Hangs on The Hymn Writers: The poets who taught the church to sing what it believes.
Standing beside himThe Long Middle · 51 on this stretch of wall
Asked why God became man, and answered it so well the question has never gone away since.
Wrote England's first history from inside a Northumbrian monastery and dated everything from the birth of Christ, which is why we still count years that way.
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Preached with such fire that Europe followed him, and wrote 'Jesus, the very thought of Thee.'
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Wrote the most careful theology of the Middle Ages, then saw something of God and called all of it straw.
Wrote Columba's life, and pushed through a law protecting women and children from war.
Charlemagne's teacher, who cleaned up the Bible's Latin text and rebuilt the schools of Europe.