Flavian II of Antioch
Our Father among the Saints Flavian the Confessor, Patriarch of Antioch
Patriarch · Bishop · Confessor · d. c. 518, in exile at Petra
Commemorated 20 July — Commemorated with Elias I of Jerusalem, confessors of Chalcedon
Flavian, Patriarch of Antioch from 498 to 512, is one of the two confessor-patriarchs whom the Church keeps on July 20, the other being his ally Elias I of Jerusalem. A Syrian monk of the monastery of Tilmognon who had served the see of Antioch as its envoy at the imperial court, he was raised to the patriarchal throne by the Emperor Anastasius I on the understanding that he would accept the Henotikon of Zeno; and though he subscribed that document and tried for fourteen years to hold a middle position, he would not do the one thing that was finally demanded of him — anathematise the Council of Chalcedon. Denounced as a Nestorian by Philoxenus of Mabbug, condemned by a packed synod at Sidon in 512, and replaced on his throne by Severus, he was deposed and banished to Petra in Arabia, where he died about 518, in the year in which the Empire returned to the faith of Chalcedon and restored his name to the diptychs.
Monk, envoy, patriarch
Flavian came out of the Syrian monastic world: he had been a monk of the monastery of Tilmognon, living under the rule attributed to Basil, before entering the service of the patriarchate of Antioch as apocrisiarius — the see's permanent representative at Constantinople. The office made him a known and trusted quantity at court, and when the patriarch Palladius died in 498 the Emperor Anastasius I procured his election.
The condition was the Henotikon, the "act of union" issued by the Emperor Zeno in 482, which sought to end the schism opened by Chalcedon by affirming Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus and the twelve chapters of Cyril, condemning Nestorius and Eutyches, and passing over the Council of 451 and the Tome of Leo in silence. Its studied ambiguity satisfied nobody for long: to Rome it was a betrayal (the Acacian schism between Rome and Constantinople had run since 484), and to the convinced anti-Chalcedonians it was only a stage on the way to an explicit repudiation of the Council. Anastasius himself leaned steadily toward that repudiation.
Fourteen years on a narrow ridge
Flavian's patriarchate was an exercise in holding a line while conceding ground. He accepted the Henotikon, as his predecessors at Antioch had done; he was pressed further, and about 508–509 subscribed it again in a fuller form; he anathematised, when required, the names his opponents put before him. What he never did was pronounce against the Council of Chalcedon itself or against the Tome of Leo. In the Antiochene patriarchate — where the Chalcedonian party was strong in the city and the anti-Chalcedonian party strong in the Syriac-speaking countryside and in many of the monasteries — this was a position with no comfortable resting place.
His most formidable adversary was Philoxenus (Xenaias), bishop of Mabbug, the greatest Syriac theologian of the anti-Chalcedonian cause, who denounced Flavian as a crypto-Nestorian and worked methodically to have him removed. In 511 Philoxenus brought monks into Antioch to compel the patriarch to condemn the Council; the Chalcedonian population of the city drove them out with violence and bloodshed. The episode, which might have vindicated Flavian, instead persuaded the Emperor that Antioch needed a different patriarch.
Sidon, deposition and exile
In 512 a synod was assembled at Sidon — some eighty bishops of the anti-Chalcedonian party, convened under Philoxenus and with the Emperor's backing — to obtain a formal condemnation of Chalcedon and of Flavian. Flavian, with Elias of Jerusalem, resisted, and the synod did not at first achieve its object; but the outcome was settled outside the council chamber. Later the same year Flavian was deposed and Severus, the learned monk of Maiuma who would become the great doctor of the non-Chalcedonian tradition, was enthroned as patriarch of Antioch in November 512.
Flavian was banished to Petra, in the Roman province of Arabia — a place of exile chosen for its remoteness — and there he remained until his death, which the tradition places about 518. He did not live to see, or barely lived to see, the reversal: on the death of Anastasius in July 518 the new Emperor Justin I and the patriarch John of Constantinople restored the Council of Chalcedon, ended the Acacian schism with Rome, and had the names of the confessors of the Council — Flavian's among them — read again in the diptychs. Severus withdrew to Egypt.
Veneration
Flavian is honoured as a confessor: not a martyr by blood, but a bishop who lost his throne and died in exile rather than deny a council of the Church. The Byzantine synaxaria join his memory to that of Elias of Jerusalem on July 20, the two of them having stood together at Sidon and fallen within four years of one another; the Roman Martyrology likewise pairs them. In the Antiochian tradition he takes his place in the long line of patriarchs of the see who suffered for the confession of the two natures, between Eustathius, exiled under the Arians, and the confessors of later centuries.
Feast and commemoration
July 20 (Old Calendar civil August 2), together with Elias I of Jerusalem. The commemoration is overshadowed in practice by the great feast of the Prophet Elijah kept on the same day, and no proper office for the two confessors is in general use; they are sung, where they are sung at all, from the common of hierarchs and confessors. The Roman Martyrology keeps them on July 4.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
O God of our fathers, who dealest with us ever according to thy gentleness: take not thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of thy hierarch Flavian, guide our life in peace.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Thou didst shepherd the throne of Antioch in evil days, and wouldst not betray the Council's confession of the two natures of Christ; wherefore, deprived of thy see and dying in a strange land, thou wast shown a confessor of the truth, O all-blessed Flavian.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No fixed iconographic type of Flavian II is transmitted, and no pre-modern image identified as his has been located for this corpus. Where he is painted he takes the ordinary hierarch's form: an elderly bishop in phelonion and cross-marked omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the closed jewelled Gospel in the left, with a short pointed beard after the Syrian type — the same manner in which the Antiochene patriarchs are shown in the hierarch registers of Syrian and Cypriot churches. As a confessor he would properly be shown without the martyr's cross. Modern Antiochian church art occasionally includes him in composite panels of the patriarchs of Antioch; such works are the property of living iconographers and are not reproduced here.
Disputed questions
- The date and manner of his death. The sources give 518 for his repose at Petra; some later notices place it earlier, immediately after the deposition of 512, and a strand of the hagiographic tradition (followed in parts of the West) makes him a martyr, killed in exile. The historical evidence supports death in banishment rather than execution, and the Church commemorates him as a confessor.
- How far he conceded. Flavian's repeated subscriptions to the Henotikon, and the anathemas he accepted under pressure, were held against him in his own lifetime by the more rigorous Chalcedonians, and are the reason some modern historians describe his position as vacillating. The judgement of the Church rests on the point at which he stopped: he would not condemn Chalcedon, and he was deposed for refusing.
- Not to be confused with Flavian of Constantinople (†449), the patriarch of the capital who condemned Eutyches, was beaten at the Robber Council of Ephesus and died of his injuries; nor with Flavian I of Antioch (†404), the patriarch of the Antiochene schism and the friend of John Chrysostom.