Theodore of Edessa

Edessa, and the road to the Lavra

Theodore was born at Edessa, the Syriac-speaking Christian metropolis of Osrhoene, into a prosperous family; the Life names his father Symeon and his mother Maria and gives him an elder sister. He was set to school young and distinguished himself in rhetoric and philosophy — the two disciplines that mark him ever afterwards, and that his biographer never lets the reader forget. Orphaned in boyhood (the Greek and Slavonic Lives say at ten, the Russian synaxarion notice at twelve), he divided the inheritance with his sister, gave his own half away to the poor, and went up to Jerusalem to venerate the holy places.

He did not go home. He was received into the Great Lavra of Saint Sabbas in the Judaean desert — the mother-house of Palestinian monasticism, and in the eighth and ninth centuries the intellectual centre of Chalcedonian Christianity under Arab rule, the house of John of Damascus and of a whole school of Greek and Arabic theologians. There he passed, by the received account, twelve years in the common obedience of the brotherhood and a further twenty-four in the strict enclosure of a solitary cell, in fasting, vigil and the study of the fathers. The reckoning is that of his Life, and it is meant to be read as it stands: more than half a lifetime spent learning to be silent before he was made to speak.

It was at Saint Sabbas, according to the same tradition, that he had charge of a young kinsman from his own city — the monk Michael the Black-Robed, the Sabbaite, whose martyrdom at Jerusalem is transmitted embedded in Theodore's own Life.

Bishop of Edessa

When the see of Edessa fell vacant, the choice fell upon Theodore. The Life is careful about the procedure, and the care is worth noticing: he was put forward on the initiative of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and consecrated by the Patriarch of Antioch, in whose jurisdiction Edessa lay, with the consent of the clergy and people of the city. It is a small window onto the working of the Melkite patriarchates in the ninth century, when Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria all lay within the Abbasid caliphate and their affairs were transacted across it. Theodore, the Life says, was consecrated in his sixtieth year, and left his cell for the office unwillingly. At the consecration a dove white as snow is said to have circled beneath the dome of the church and settled on the new bishop's head.

The Edessa to which he came was not the Edessa of the Christian empire. The city had been Muslim-ruled since the seventh century; its Christians were divided among the Syrian Orthodox (whom the Greek Life calls Monophysites or Eutychians), the Church of the East (Nestorians), and the small Chalcedonian or Melkite community that was Theodore's own, and Manichaean teaching still had adherents in Mesopotamia. His episcopate is described almost entirely as a labour of controversy and consolidation: he preached, disputed, wrote, and held his flock together, and the Life preserves — at length, and with evident pride in its subject's rhetorical training — a long instruction delivered to the heretics of Edessa. It also records an attempt on his life by his opponents, from which he escaped. Near the city, at the monastery of the Great Martyr George, lived the clairvoyant stylite Theodosius, and the Life gives a conversation between the bishop and the pillar-dweller which is among its most attractive passages: the man of the city and the man of the column, each recognising the other's warfare.

The journey to Baghdad and the caliph John

The centrepiece of the Life is Theodore's journey to Baghdad, undertaken with the stylite's blessing, to lay before the caliph the injustices under which the Orthodox of Edessa were suffering. He found the caliph — named Mavias (Mu'awiya) in the Greek — gravely ill; the bishop put a little earth from the Sepulchre of the Lord into a vessel of water, prayed, and gave it him to drink, and the caliph was healed. Grateful, and then persuaded, the caliph heard his teaching, and at last received baptism in secret together with three of his intimates, taking the name John. Not long after, confessing Christ openly before the Muslims, he was killed with his three companions. He appeared, the Life says, on the same night and in the same words to Theodore and to Theodosius the Stylite, telling them that he had been granted to suffer for Christ, was numbered with the martyrs, and would meet them shortly in the Kingdom.

Theodore took the message as notice of his own end. He laid down his see, returned to the Lavra of Saint Sabbas, and there, in the cell where he had spent his best years, he reposed in peace in 848.

The writings

Under Theodore's name the Greek ascetic tradition transmits a century of chapters on the spiritual life (Ἑκατὸν κεφάλαια, "A Hundred Most Soul-Profiting Chapters") and a Theoretikon or "contemplative discourse," both of which were taken up by Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth into the Philokalia and so into the Slavonic Dobrotolubiye of Paisius Velichkovsky and the Russian Dobrotolyubiye of Theophan the Recluse. They are sober, closely argued texts in the line of Evagrius and the Palestinian fathers, on the passions, the guarding of the mind, and the ordering of the monastic day; their author is often cited simply as Theodore the Great Ascetic. A short catechetical discourse on the councils and a brief rule of monastic life are also ascribed to him.

The Life and its fortunes

The Life of Theodore of Edessa (Greek, ascribed to Basil of Emesa, whom the text presents as Theodore's nephew, his sister's son) is a long, elaborate and highly literary composition. It travelled remarkably well: translated into Church Slavonic at an early date, it survives in a great number of Russian manuscripts of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries and was among the standard devotional reading of Muscovy, whence Demetrius of Rostov drew the notice in his Menaion. Its account of the martyrdom of Michael the Sabbaite gave the Slavonic tradition one of its favourite passion-narratives.