Theodosius the Great
The Holy and Right-believing Emperor Theodosius the Great
Righteous · King · b. January 11, 347, at Cauca in Hispania — d. January 17, 395, at Mediolanum (Milan)
Commemorated 17 January — Repose at Milan
Theodosius the Great (347–395) was the Roman emperor under whom the Nicene faith became, in law and in fact, the faith of the Empire — the last sovereign to rule both East and West, and the emperor who, at the Second Ecumenical Council he convened at Constantinople in 381, saw the Creed brought to its completion in the confession of the Holy Spirit. A Spaniard, the son of a great general, raised to the purple in the Empire's darkest hour after the disaster of Adrianople, he was baptized in a grave illness by an Orthodox bishop, gave the force of law to the Nicene confession, and put down the last public worship of the old gods. The Church of the East honours him not only as a defender of Orthodoxy but as a penitent: for after the massacre at Thessalonica he bowed to the rebuke of Ambrose of Milan and did public penance, an emperor humbling himself before the judgment of God. He reposed at Milan on January 17, 395.
Origins and accession
Flavius Theodosius was born on January 11, 347, at Cauca (Coca) in the Spanish province of Gallaecia, the son of the elder Theodosius, one of the foremost generals of the age, and of Thermantia, both devout Orthodox Christians. He was trained to arms under his father, served with distinction in Britain and on the Danube, and seemed set for high command until his father, victim of a court intrigue, was suddenly executed in 376; Theodosius withdrew to his estates in Spain.
The catastrophe of Adrianople recalled him. In August 378 the eastern emperor Valens and two-thirds of his army were destroyed by the Goths, and the East lay open. The western emperor Gratian, needing a soldier of proven skill, summoned Theodosius from Spain and on January 19, 379, proclaimed him Augustus of the East. He set himself to stabilise the Gothic war by arms and by treaty, and to restore the shaken Empire.
Baptism and the triumph of the Nicene faith
Theodosius, though born of Christian parents, was not yet baptized — as was then common, baptism was deferred. In 380, at Thessalonica, he fell gravely ill, and resolving on baptism received it from Ascholius (Acholius), the Orthodox bishop of the city, a firm Nicene. From that confession his religious policy flowed. In the same year he issued, with his colleagues, the edict Cunctos populos — the Edict of Thessalonica — commanding that all peoples hold the faith "which the Apostle Peter delivered to the Romans," the faith of Nicaea, of the consubstantial Trinity; those who dissented were branded heretics. The long ascendancy of Arianism in the East, entrenched under Constantius and Valens, was broken: the Arian bishops were required to yield their churches to the Nicaeans, and at Constantinople the great Gregory the Theologian (Gregory of Nazianzus) was installed in the cathedral the orthodox had so long been denied.
The crown of this work was the Second Ecumenical Council, which Theodosius summoned to Constantinople in 381. There the hundred and fifty fathers condemned the surviving errors — the Arians, and the Macedonians or Pneumatomachi who denied the Godhead of the Holy Spirit — and confessed the Spirit "the Lord, the Giver of life," completing the Creed of Nicaea in the form the Church confesses to this day, and defining the honour of the see of Constantinople. Under Theodosius the Nicene faith was, for the first time since Constantine, both the law of the Empire and the settled confession of a Council.
Against paganism, and the penance before Ambrose
Theodosius pressed also against the old religion, forbidding sacrifice and divination and, in the laws of 391–392, closing the temples and prohibiting the public worship of the gods — measures that made Nicene Christianity not merely tolerated but established. He won two hard civil wars against usurpers who had seized the West — against Magnus Maximus in 388, and, at the Battle of the Frigidus in 394, against Eugenius and the pagan general Arbogast, a victory the Christians read as God's own judgment on the last armed bid of paganism.
Yet the memory the Orthodox tradition most cherishes is not of his victories but of his repentance. In 390, provoked by a riot at Thessalonica in which an imperial officer had been killed, Theodosius in anger permitted a massacre — thousands of the city's people cut down in the hippodrome in reprisal. Ambrose of Milan, the great bishop of the western capital, refused the emperor the Holy Mysteries and called him to account for the innocent blood; and Theodosius — who might have crushed the bishop — submitted, laid aside the imperial insignia, and did public penance among the penitents of the Church until he was restored to communion. In that scene the tradition sees the true greatness of the emperor: that the master of the world bowed to the law of God and confessed his sin, teaching, as the Church has never tired of repeating, that the Christian sovereign stands under God and not above him.
Repose
Theodosius was the last to rule the whole Roman world. After the Frigidus he lived but a few months, and reposed at Milan on January 17, 395, dividing the Empire between his sons — Arcadius in the East and Honorius in the West — a partition that proved permanent. Ambrose preached his funeral oration, praising the faith and the humility of the dead emperor; his body was carried to Constantinople and laid among the emperors. The Church of the East keeps his memory as a holy and right-believing sovereign, the defender of the Nicene faith and the penitent of Thessalonica.
Feast and commemoration
Theodosius is commemorated on January 17 (church date; Old Calendar civil January 30), the day of his repose, on which his memory is joined to the great feast of Anthony the Great. His commemoration is kept chiefly in the Slavic tradition and in the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America. As an emperor-saint he is classed here, per the interim usage of this collection, among the royal saints (king), together with the mark of the righteous layman glorified in the world; the taxonomy question of a dedicated emperor/empress term is noted in the project's record of open questions.
Iconography
Theodosius is depicted, in the manner of the holy emperors, in the imperial loros and crown (stemma), holding a cross or a scroll — of the type of Constantine and the right-believing sovereigns — often bearded in the fashion of the later fourth century. Ancient portraits of the emperor survive in another key — the silver Missorium of Theodosius and the reliefs on the base of his obelisk in the Hippodrome of Constantinople — but these are monuments of state, not icons; no pre-1900 devotional icon of the saint has been identified in a form storable for this collection, and the entry carries a description only.
Disputed questions
- The massacre and the sanctity. That a saint's memory should carry the guilt of Thessalonica has always been felt as a tension. The tradition resolves it not by excusing the deed but by honouring the repentance: Theodosius is glorified not as a man without sin but as a ruler who, sinning grievously, submitted to the Church's rebuke and did penance — the model of the Christian prince under discipline.
- Calendar. His commemoration on January 17 is kept in the Slavic Menaion and in the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America and is noticed in the Greek synaxaristes, though not every printed Menaion of the day includes him; the day is everywhere led by Anthony the Great.
- Not to be confused with Theodosius the Cenobiarch (†529), the monastic father of the Judaean desert, who is likewise surnamed "the Great" and is kept a few days before, on January 11; nor with the later emperor Theodosius the Younger (Theodosius II, †450, commemorated July 29), his grandson, who summoned the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus; nor with Theodosius of the Kiev Caves (†1074, May 3), the father of cenobitic monasticism in Rus'.