Theophilus of Alexandria

Theophilus was patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412. He was a formidable administrator, a capable writer, and by common consent one of the least attractive figures in the history of the ancient church.

His first great act was the destruction of the Serapeum. In 391 a dispute over a former temple site in Alexandria escalated into street fighting between Christians and pagans, with the pagan party barricaded in the great temple of Serapis. Imperial authority came down on the Christian side. Theophilus led the demolition of the Serapeum, one of the most famous buildings in the ancient world, and the systematic dismantling of the city's other temples, with the cult images broken up and paraded. Pagan Alexandria never recovered, and the historian Socrates, a Christian, describes the whole business with visible discomfort.

His second was the Origenist controversy, and here he changed sides for advantage. Theophilus had been an admirer of Origen, the great third-century Alexandrian, and had defended the monks of the Nitrian desert who read him. In 399, faced with a furious anti-Origenist reaction among the simpler Egyptian monks, he reversed himself completely, condemned Origen, and turned on the very monks he had protected. Four leaders among them, the so-called Tall Brothers, fled Egypt and went to Constantinople to appeal to the archbishop, John Chrysostom.

Chrysostom received them courteously without formally taking their case. It was enough. Theophilus travelled to Constantinople, and in 403 convened a synod across the water at Chalcedon, at an estate called the Oak, packed with his own suffragans. Chrysostom was summoned four times, refused to appear before an assembly of his open enemy, and was deposed in absentia on a list of charges that included wasting church money, eating alone, and, when they ran short, treason. The empress Eudoxia, whom Chrysostom had offended from the pulpit, backed it. Chrysostom was exiled, recalled after an earthquake frightened the court, exiled again, and died in 407 on a forced march in bad weather.

Rome broke communion with Alexandria over it and did not restore Chrysostom's name to the diptychs for years.

Theophilus was not only a politician. He wrote festal letters, paschal computations, homilies, and works against Origen, and he was a serious builder, Alexandria's churches multiplied under him. He was also the uncle and patron of Cyril of Alexandria, who succeeded him and inherited both his gifts and his methods.

He died on 15 October 412. The Coptic Orthodox Church honours him as a saint. The Greek tradition, which honours Chrysostom above almost any other bishop, has never done the same.

Sources: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History; Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St John Chrysostom; Theophilus, Festal Letters (preserved in Jerome's Latin translation, among Jerome's Letters); the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.