Theophylact of Ohrid

Theophylact was born about 1050 on the island of Euboea, came to Constantinople, and studied under Michael Psellos, the outstanding scholar of eleventh-century Byzantium. He did well in the capital: he was a deacon of Hagia Sophia, held the post of maistor ton rhetoron, master of the rhetors, the senior teaching chair of the church, and was made tutor to Constantine Doukas, the young heir to the throne.

Then, some time in the 1080s or early 1090s, he was appointed archbishop of Ohrid, the head of the Bulgarian church, and sent to the Balkans.

His letters make no secret of what he thought about it. He was a Greek intellectual dropped into a Slavic province he found rough, poor, and provincial; he complains about the food, the smell, the mud, the tax collectors who bled his people, and the isolation. He calls himself an exile. He served there for something over twenty years, he was still writing after 1107, and the date of his death is not known.

He was also, by the evidence of the same letters, a real pastor. He defended his flock against imperial tax officials, intervened for the poor, argued with governors, and stayed. He learned to respect the Bulgarians he had complained about, and he wrote a life of Clement of Ohrid, the disciple of Cyril and Methodius who had brought Slavic Christianity to that region, honouring the local tradition rather than replacing it.

His commentaries are why he is on this wall. He wrote on all four Gospels, on Acts, on the epistles of Paul, on the catholic epistles, and on several minor prophets.

They are not original, and he never claimed they were. They are largely a distillation of John Chrysostom, compressed, simplified, and made continuous, Chrysostom's exegesis without Chrysostom's length. That turned out to be exactly what people needed. Theophylact's Gospel commentary became the most widely used handbook on the Gospels in the Greek-speaking church, and it was read in the West too: Erasmus used it, Aquinas used it, and Calvin cites him.

He also wrote a temperate treatise on the errors of the Latins, notable in a polemical age for how much of the quarrel he was willing to call a matter of custom rather than heresy.

A man who wanted a chair in the capital, got sent to the mountains instead, and spent his exile writing the plainest commentaries in Byzantium.

Sources: Theophylact of Ohrid, Commentary on the Gospels (Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vols. 123–126); Theophylact, Letters; Margaret Mullett, Theophylact of Ochrid: Reading the Letters of a Byzantine Archbishop; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).