Theodoret of Cyrus

Theodoret was born about 393 at Antioch. His mother, according to his own account, had been childless for years and had gone to a local hermit for prayer. He was raised around the monks of the district, gave away his inheritance when his parents died, and entered a monastery near Apamea.

In 423, against his will, he was made bishop of Cyrrhus, a poor, mostly Syriac-speaking diocese in the countryside northeast of Antioch with about eight hundred parishes. He stayed there the rest of his life and worked at it. He records building bridges, aqueducts, baths, and porticoes for the town out of church income and his own; bringing in doctors; and travelling constantly among villages where the church had barely reached. He says he never took a bribe, never accepted a gift, and owned nothing.

He was also the ablest writer his party had, which made him a target.

When Cyril of Alexandria published his twelve anathemas against Nestorius, John of Antioch asked Theodoret to answer them, and he did, sharply. At the Council of Ephesus in 431 he stood with John and the Eastern bishops against Cyril. Two years later he helped negotiate the Formula of Reunion that ended the split, but he would not personally condemn Nestorius, who had been his friend, and that refusal followed him for the rest of his life.

In 449, at the assembly Leo the Great called the Robber Council, Theodoret was deposed in his absence and confined to his monastery. He appealed to Rome. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451 he was brought in, and the bishops shouted that he must anathematise Nestorius before he could take his seat. He tried to speak; they would not let him. Finally he said the words, was restored to his see, and went home. A century later, at Constantinople in 553, certain of his writings against Cyril were condemned as one of the Three Chapters, though the council was careful not to condemn the man, since Chalcedon had received him.

His books outlasted the politics. He wrote commentaries on the Psalms, the Song of Songs, the prophets, and all fourteen letters of Paul, in a clear question-and-answer style that has kept him readable; he is one of the most quoted of the Greek fathers on Paul. He wrote a Church History continuing Eusebius to 428, a Compendium of Heretical Fables, a defence of providence in ten discourses, and Eranistes, a dialogue on the person of Christ.

And he wrote the Religious History, thirty short lives of the Syrian ascetics he had known personally, including Symeon the Stylite on his pillar. It is the record of a whole movement that would otherwise be almost invisible, written by a bishop who had grown up among them.

He died about 458 or shortly after.

Sources: Theodoret of Cyrus, Ecclesiastical History, Letters, and Dialogues (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series volume 3); A History of the Monks of Syria, trans. R. M. Price; the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon.