Methodius of Patara

The bishop and his see

Almost nothing of Methodius' life is transmitted apart from his books, and even the see he held is disputed (see Disputed questions below). Jerome, our earliest witness, calls him "bishop of Olympus in Lycia and afterwards of Tyre"; the later Greek synaxaria and the Slavonic books call him bishop of Patara, the metropolis of Lycia and the birthplace of St Nicholas the Wonderworker — the title under which the Orthodox calendar keeps him to this day. What the sources agree on is the region: the Lycian coast of south-western Asia Minor, in the generation between the death of Origen (c. 254) and the peace of the Church under Constantine.

He was a bishop of the old style, at once pastor and man of letters. The Slavonic synaxarion notice, which the Russian books repeat, describes a hierarch of monastic humility who taught his flock quietly and without harshness, and who spent what strength he had on writing: apologetic against the pagans, dogmatic against the heretics, moral discourses, and commentary on the Scriptures. That description is not far from what the surviving works themselves show.

The Symposium, or Banquet of the Ten Virgins

The Symposium (Συμπόσιον τῶν δέκα παρθένων) is the only work of Methodius preserved entire in Greek, and it is one of the most unexpected books of the early Church. Its frame is taken openly from Plato's Symposium: a company gathers in a garden — here the garden of Arete, "Virtue," daughter of Philosophia — and each guest in turn makes a speech on a single theme. Plato's theme was Eros; Methodius' is virginity, and his ten speakers are ten Christian women: Marcella, Theophila, Thaleia, Theopatra, Thallousa, Agathe, Procilla, Thekla, Tusiane and Domnina.

The speeches are not repetitions of one another. Theophila argues against any contempt for marriage and the body — the command to increase and multiply has not been revoked, and God is still at work in every conception. Thaleia reads the union of Christ and the Church out of Ephesians; Thallousa treats the vow; Thekla, given the longest and highest speech, expounds the woman clothed with the sun of Revelation 12 as the Church herself, ever bearing children in baptism. The whole ends with the crowning of Thekla and with her hymn — twenty-four stanzas, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet, with the refrain "I keep myself pure for Thee, O Bridegroom, and holding a lighted torch I go out to meet Thee." It is among the oldest Christian hymns preserved outside the New Testament, and it stands behind a great deal of later Byzantine bridal imagery.

The theology of the Symposium is as important as its literary form. Virginity is not presented as a rejection of the flesh but as its restoration: the virgin anticipates in her own body the incorruption promised to all flesh at the resurrection. Christ is himself the Archparthenos, the first virgin, and virginity is the way in which a Christian is conformed to him — "likeness to God," in Methodius' phrase, worked out in the body rather than away from it.

Against Origen

Methodius is remembered above all as the first systematic opponent of Origen, and he is the sharper for having learned so much from him: he shares Origen's allegorical method, his Platonic vocabulary and his interest in the pre-history of the soul, and disagrees with him inside that shared world rather than from outside it.

Three points divide them. First, the resurrection body. In On the Resurrection (Ἀγλαοφῶν ἢ Περὶ ἀναστάσεως, preserved chiefly in Slavonic with substantial Greek fragments in Epiphanius and Photius) Methodius rejects Origen's teaching that what rises is the form or pattern of the body and not its matter. For Methodius the body that rises is the very body that died, remade incorruptible as a statue is recast: God does not abandon his own workmanship but repairs it. He explains death itself in this light — God made man mortal after the fall not in anger but as a mercy, so that sin should not be immortalised in an endless body, and the flesh is broken up precisely in order to be remoulded without the evil.

Second, the pre-existence of souls. Origen's De principiis had taught that rational spirits existed before bodies, and were clothed in bodies as a consequence of a fall from contemplation. Methodius denies it outright: the soul is not older than the body, the body is not a punishment or a prison, and the creation of man in Genesis is a real beginning and not the record of a catastrophe.

Third, the eternity of the world. Against the Origenist tendency to make creation co-eternal with the Creator, Methodius insists on a true beginning; and against any reading that would have the cosmos annihilated, he insists on a true renewal. The world does not perish in the final fire but is purified by it, and "the earth and the heaven must exist again after the conflagration" — restored, not replaced.

In On Free Will (Περὶ τοῦ αὐτεξουσίου) he turns from Origen to the dualists, arguing against the Gnostic and Valentinian derivation of evil from an evil principle or from pre-existent matter. Evil has no substance of its own: it arises from the free choice of rational creatures, and freedom is precisely what makes a creature capable of the good.

Other writings

Beyond these, a group of shorter treatises survives complete only in Old Church Slavonic — the translations made in the Bulgarian and Russian lands preserved what the Greek tradition lost. They include De vita (on life and rational action), De cibis (on the distinction of clean and unclean foods, and on the heifer of Numbers 19), De lepra (on leprosy, read allegorically of sin) and De sanguisuga (on the leech of Proverbs 30:15, and on "the heavens declare the glory of God"). Fragments of a commentary on Job and of a work Against Porphyry — the most formidable pagan critic of the Church — are cited by later writers but are otherwise lost.

Eusebius of Caesarea, who admired Origen, does not mention Methodius once in the Ecclesiastical History, although he must have known his work. The silence is almost certainly deliberate, and later writers said so: Jerome reports that Eusebius wrote a reply defending Origen against him. It is the earliest sign of how divisive the Origenist question would become.

Martyrdom

Jerome, in On Illustrious Men, states that Methodius "at the end suffered martyrdom at Chalcis in Greece" — the notice is brief and gives no year. The Greek and Slavonic synaxaria place his death in the persecution of the early fourth century and say that he was arrested, confessed Christ steadily before the magistrates, and was beheaded; the Russian books give the year as 312. The commonly accepted range is c. 311–312, at the very end of the persecutions and on the eve of the peace of the Church.

The seventeenth-century icon stored with this entry shows exactly the scene the synaxarion describes: the hierarch in the cross-covered polystavrion bowed beneath the executioner's sword, his severed head lying haloed at the foot of the composition.