Anatolius of Constantinople
Our Father among the Saints Anatolius, Archbishop of Constantinople
Patriarch · Bishop · b. late 4th century, at Alexandria — d. July 458, at Constantinople
Commemorated 3 July — Repose of the patriarch (458)
Anatolius (died July 458) was Archbishop of Constantinople from 449 to 458 and the patriarch under whom the Fourth Ecumenical Council met at Chalcedon in 451. An Alexandrian by birth, ordained deacon by Cyril of Alexandria and present at Ephesus in 431, he was raised to the throne of the capital by Dioscorus of Alexandria in the wake of the Robber Council, in the expectation that he would be a compliant instrument of the Eutychian party. He was not. Within a year he had condemned Eutyches and Dioscorus at a council in his own city, received the Tome of Leo, and restored the name of the murdered Flavian to the diptychs; two years later he presided with the imperial commissioners over Chalcedon, where the definition of the two natures "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation" was promulgated and the celebrated 28th canon on the rank of the see of Constantinople was passed. He is remembered also as a hymnographer, and the Anatolian stichera of the Octoechos are traditionally ascribed to him.
An Alexandrian deacon
Anatolius was born at Alexandria in the second half of the fourth century, in a generation of provincial gentry that had begun to put a Greek philosophical education at the service of the Church rather than of the imperial administration. He studied philosophy, and was ordained deacon by St Cyril of Alexandria, whose confidence he evidently possessed: he was present with Cyril at the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431, the council that condemned Nestorius and vindicated the title Theotokos.
After Cyril's death in 444 he remained in the Alexandrian clergy under Cyril's successor Dioscorus, and was sent by him to Constantinople as apocrisiarius — the resident representative of the Alexandrian see at the imperial court. It is in that capacity, as Dioscorus's own man in the capital, that the crisis found him.
The Robber Council and the vacant throne
The controversy that made him patriarch was the teaching of the archimandrite Eutyches, who, pressing Cyril's language past Cyril's meaning, held that after the union there was but one nature in Christ, the divinity having absorbed the humanity as a drop of wine is absorbed in the sea. The consequence, as the Church saw at once, was fatal: what is not assumed is not healed, and a Christ who is not truly man saves no man.
Eutyches was condemned at Constantinople in 448 by the patriarch Flavian. Dioscorus, with imperial support, convened a second council at Ephesus in 449 — the latrocinium, the "Robber Council" — which reinstated Eutyches, deposed Flavian, and refused even to read the dogmatic letter of Pope Leo the Great. Flavian was so handled at that council that he died of his injuries a few days later in exile.
Two months after Flavian's death, on 11 August 449, Dioscorus procured the election of Anatolius to the vacant throne of Constantinople. The calculation was obvious: an Alexandrian deacon, Dioscorus's own apocrisiarius, ordained by Dioscorus's own hands, could be relied upon. The calculation failed completely. As the Greek synaxarion puts it with some relish, Dioscorus "supported the election of Anatolius in the hope of having him under his thumb — but he was disappointed."
Patriarch: the turn of 450
The death of Theodosius II in July 450 and the accession of Pulcheria and Marcian removed the political protection of the Eutychian party overnight, and Anatolius moved with speed and without ambiguity.
At a home synod (σύνοδος ἐνδημοῦσα) at Constantinople in 450 he required the subscription of the Tome of Leo from his clergy and from the bishops present, anathematised Eutyches and Nestorius alike, and condemned the teaching of Dioscorus. He restored the name of Flavian to the diptychs, and Flavian's relics — the relics of a patriarch killed by a council — were brought back to the capital and laid in the church of the Holy Apostles among the bishops of the city. Anatolius himself, who had been made bishop by the men he was now condemning, wrote to Leo of Rome; Leo's reply, while accepting his orthodoxy, did not conceal that his elevation had been irregular in its circumstances.
The Fourth Ecumenical Council
In October 451 the Fourth Ecumenical Council assembled at Chalcedon, across the water from the capital, with some six hundred bishops — the largest council the Church had yet held. Anatolius presided in the ecclesiastical order together with the papal legates, under the presidency of the imperial commissioners.
The council deposed Dioscorus; it received the Tome of Leo with the acclamation that Peter had spoken through Leo; and it promulgated the Definition, which confesses one Christ, "perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, true God and true man… made known in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation" (ἀσυγχύτως, ἀτρέπτως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀχωρίστως) — the four adverbs that have governed Orthodox Christology ever since.
The council also settled the standing of sees. Canon 28, passed in a late session in the absence of the Roman legates and over their protest, confirmed to the see of Constantinople privileges equal to those of Old Rome, second in order of honour, on the ground that the city is the seat of the empire and the senate; and it placed under Constantinople the metropolitans of the dioceses of Pontus, Asia and Thrace, together with the bishops of those dioceses among the barbarian peoples. Leo refused to ratify the canon, and the disagreement between the two sees over it outlasted them both.
Chalcedon and the East: the Antiochian dimension
For the Church of Antioch the council was a vindication and a settlement at once. It was Antiochene theology — the insistence that the two natures remain what they are in the one Christ — that the Definition wrote into the faith of the Church, in the language of the Formula of Reunion of 433 that John of Antioch and Cyril had agreed between them. The patriarch of Antioch, Maximus, sat at Chalcedon and subscribed; and it was at Chalcedon, under the presidency in which Anatolius shared, that Antioch's long dispute with Jerusalem over the three Palestines was compromised — Juvenal of Jerusalem receiving the three provinces of Palestine and renouncing his claim to Phoenicia and Arabia, which remained with Antioch. The see of Antioch thus emerged from the council with its patriarchal rank formally recognised and its southern frontier fixed. The price was heavy elsewhere: the great non-Greek populations of Syria, Egypt and Armenia would not accept the Definition, and the division that began at Chalcedon has never closed.
The relations of Anatolius with Antioch were, so far as the acts show, correct and untroubled — the crisis of his patriarchate lay always with Alexandria and with Rome, not with the East.
The capital under Anatolius
Two things of lasting consequence for the liturgical life of Constantinople fall in his years:
- The relics of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste were discovered and translated to the capital in his time, an event the Greek synaxarion attaches expressly to his patriarchate.
- The empress Pulcheria built, about 450, the three great Marian churches of the city — the Chalkoprateia, the Blachernae, and the Hodegetria — which between them shaped the whole later Marian devotion of Byzantium and, through it, of the Orthodox world.
He died in July 458, having held the see nine years.
Hymnographic legacy
Tradition credits Anatolius with a considerable body of hymnography: stichera for the resurrectional offices of Sunday, for the Nativity and the Theophany, and for martyrs — Panteleimon, George, Demetrius of Thessalonica. In the service books a class of stichera in the Octoechos is headed simply Ἀνατολικά, "Anatolian," and these are traditionally understood as his.
Feast and commemoration
July 3 (church date; New Calendar civil July 3, Old Calendar civil July 16). The Greek synaxarion gives him the second notice of the day, after Hyacinth, with a couplet built on his name — Ἀνατολή is the dawn, the east, the rising — and on its reversal at his death: "Setting, O Anatolius, at the end of thy life, thou drawest near to the sun that never sets." The Menaion appoints no proper service for him; where his feast is kept with a service, the common of a hierarch is used, together with the proper apolytikion given below. Kept in Greek and Slavonic usage alike; the Russian books style him свт. Анатолия, патриарха Константинопольского.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 3
Sealing thy name by thy work, O holy father, thou didst show forth to the world, in word and in deed, the radiance of the Dawn that is beyond understanding; for thou, O Anatolius, didst proclaim Christ twofold in wills and in natures, unconfusedly, yet bearing one hypostasis — for the salvation of our souls.
Synaxarion
Setting, O Anatolius, at the end of thy life, thou drawest near to the Sun that never sets.
Iconography
Anatolius is painted as a hierarch: an aged bishop with a long, pointed, grey or white beard, in phelonion and cross-patterned omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel-book in the left, in the ordinary type of the patriarchs of Constantinople. He is not given the martyr's cross, and he has no distinguishing attribute of his own; in narrative cycles of the Ecumenical Councils he appears among the fathers of Chalcedon, ordinarily seated at or near the centre of the assembly with the emperor Marcian and the empress Pulcheria enthroned above, and it is the council-scene rather than the single portrait that carries his identification.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located that can be securely stored. The one Wikimedia Commons candidate found under his name — a Russian hierarch-icon with border saints, inscribed Стый Анатолiй — carries no date, no attribution and no museum reference on its file page, and its saturated, printed appearance is that of a late chromolithograph or a modern workshop print rather than of a panel icon. It was therefore rejected rather than stored, and a the list of icons still being sought entry stands in its place.
Disputed questions
- Were the Anatolika written by Anatolius? Almost certainly not, in the main. The adjective ἀνατολικά means "eastern" — stichera of eastern, that is Palestinian or Syrian, provenance — and the ascription of the whole class to the fifth-century patriarch is a later and probably mistaken reading of the rubric. The traditional attribution is recorded here because it is old, universal in the Orthodox books, and part of how the saint is remembered; it is not asserted as fact. That Anatolius wrote some hymns is independently transmitted and is not in doubt.
- Was he complicit in the Robber Council? He was Dioscorus's apocrisiarius in the capital in 449 and was consecrated by him. The Roman correspondence treats him as a man who had to clear himself, and Leo required from him an explicit subscription to the Tome before recognising him. His own conduct from 450 onward — the condemnation of Eutyches and Dioscorus, the rehabilitation of Flavian — is the Church's answer, and the reason he is numbered among the saints; but the shadow over the manner of his elevation is part of the record and is not effaced by it.
- Canon 28. Anatolius was the immediate beneficiary of the canon and, on the Roman reading, its instigator; the Byzantine tradition regards it as the council's act and not his. He wrote to Leo in terms that laid the initiative on the bishops of the council rather than on himself. The question of who drove it cannot be settled from the acts.
- The date of his repose. The Greek synaxarion says only "in July 458," and the commemoration stands on July 3; some modern reference works give July 3 as the day of death and others place it later in the month. The church date is not in dispute.
- Not to be confused with the two monastics of the Kiev Caves named Anatolius commemorated on this same day — Anatolius of the Kiev Near Caves and Anatolius the Recluse of the Kiev Far Caves — nor with Anatolius of Optina (19th c.), nor with the martyr Anatolius who suffered with the great-martyr George.