Theodosius the Younger
The Holy and Right-believing Emperor Theodosius the Younger, called the Calligrapher
Righteous · King · b. 10 April 401, at Constantinople — d. 28 July 450, near Constantinople, of a fall from his horse
Commemorated 29 July — Repose of the emperor
Theodosius II (401–450), called the Younger to distinguish him from his grandfather Theodosius the Great, reigned over the Eastern Roman Empire for forty-two years — longer than any other emperor of Constantinople — having been proclaimed Augustus in infancy and left sole ruler of the East at seven. Formed in piety by his elder sister Pulcheria, he lived by a monastic rule inside the palace, copied manuscripts with his own hand (whence his by-name ho Kalligraphos, "the Calligrapher"), and gave the Church of the fifth century two of its permanent foundations: the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431, which he summoned and whose condemnation of Nestorius he ratified, and the Theodosian Code. He built the land walls that kept Constantinople for a thousand years, and reposed on 28 July 450 from a fall while riding. The Greek and Slavic calendars commemorate him on July 29.
The child emperor
He was born in the purple at Constantinople on 10 April 401, the son of the emperor Arcadius and of Eudoxia, and grandson of Theodosius the Great. He was proclaimed Augustus at about one year old, and on his father's death in 408 he became, at the age of seven, sole emperor of the East. The government was conducted in his minority by the praetorian prefect Anthemius — to whom the city owes the land walls begun in 413 — and thereafter, from 414, by his sister Pulcheria, then fifteen years old, who took the title of Augusta and the effective regency.
Pulcheria's formation of her brother is the point on which the Church's memory of Theodosius turns. She had vowed virginity and had brought her sisters into the same vow, and she made the palace into something between a court and a monastery: fixed hours of prayer, the chanting of the psalms by the imperial household, fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, and a rule of life that the chroniclers describe with a mixture of admiration and bewilderment. In this regimen Theodosius was taught Scripture, the deportment proper to a Christian prince, and — since Pulcheria intended a ruler and not only a devout man — Greek and Latin letters, riding, and the arts of government.
The scholar-emperor
The habits stayed with him. Theodosius rose in the night for prayer; he was a practised copyist of manuscripts, illuminating and writing them out by his own hand, from which he was surnamed the Calligrapher; he collected books; and in 425 he founded, or refounded, at the Capitol of Constantinople the Pandidakterion, the higher school of the capital, with its endowed chairs of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and law in Greek and Latin — the institution that made Constantinople an intellectual capital and not merely an administrative one.
To his reign belongs the Codex Theodosianus (438), the first official codification of the imperial constitutions since Hadrian, promulgated for both halves of the empire; and the completion of the Theodosian Walls, thrown around the landward side of the city and rebuilt in a famous sixty days after the earthquake of 447, which held every attacker out of Constantinople until 1453.
The chroniclers do not conceal that he was manageable. He was governed successively by Anthemius, by Pulcheria, by his wife the Empress Eudocia — the Athenian Athenaïs, whom Pulcheria found for him and who became a considerable Christian poet and a benefactress of Jerusalem — and in his later years by the eunuch Chrysaphius, whose influence produced the worst act of the reign.
The Third Ecumenical Council
The great ecclesiastical achievement of Theodosius is the Council of Ephesus. When the dispute broke out between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius, archbishop of Constantinople, over whether the Virgin might be called Theotokos, the emperor issued the summons — his sacra of 19 November 430 convoked the bishops — and the council opened at Ephesus on 22 June 431. It condemned Nestorius, affirmed the unity of the person of Christ and the title Theotokos, and its decisions Theodosius, after considerable hesitation and under pressure from Pulcheria and from the monks of the capital, confirmed and enforced. The Church numbers it the Third Ecumenical Council; and the emperor who called it is remembered in the synaxaria for that above all.
Other acts of piety of the reign belong to the Church's calendar in their own right: the translation of the relics of John Chrysostom from Comana back to Constantinople in 438, at which Theodosius laid his own face on the coffin and begged pardon for his parents' part in the exile; the finding of the relics of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste at Constantinople; the sending to the city of relics from the Holy Land by Eudocia; and — in the tradition, and dated to his reign by the synaxarion itself — the awakening of the Seven Youths of Ephesus, whose miracle the Church places under Theodosius the Younger and reads as a divine confirmation of the resurrection of the body against the doubters of his day.
Repose
On 28 July 450, while riding near the city — by the river Lycus, say the chroniclers — Theodosius was thrown from his horse and injured his spine, and died the next day, in his fiftieth year. He left no son. Pulcheria took the government, married the soldier Marcian, and the two together summoned the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon in 451 — the council which undid the principal failure of her brother's reign.
Feast and commemoration
July 29 (church date; New Calendar civil July 29, Old Calendar civil August 11), a synaxarion commemoration without proper hymns, kept in Greek and Slavic usage alongside Callinicus of Gangra. His sister Pulcheria is commemorated separately (September 10), and the empress Eudocia in some Greek books on August 13.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Reared in the purple and taught in the fear of God, thou didst rule the empire as a steward and not as a master; the hand that signed the laws thou didst also set to the copying of the holy books, and thou didst gather the fathers at Ephesus to confess the Theotokos. O right-believing Theodosius, entreat Christ God that our souls be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Theodosius the Younger is shown as a crowned emperor in the loros — the jewelled imperial stole — with the closed crown and the cross-sceptre, usually bearded and of middle age, and often paired with Pulcheria, likewise crowned. He appears not as an independent icon-subject but chiefly within larger compositions: in the icon of the Third Ecumenical Council, enthroned above or beside the assembled fathers; in the cycle of the Seven Youths of Ephesus, where he is the emperor who comes to the cave; and in the scene of the return of the relics of Chrysostom, where he is shown bowed over the reliquary. He is not to be given the halo of a monastic or the cross of a martyr.
No pre-1900 icon of Theodosius the Younger alone has been located for this repository, and the manuscript images that circulate under his name are for the most part portraits of Theodosius I or ambiguous imperial figures from council-miniatures, which the identity rule forbids storing as his. He is therefore listed among the wanted icons.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with his grandfather Theodosius the Great (†395, commemorated January 17), with whom he is regularly confused in indexes and even in service books; the by-name the Younger or the New exists precisely to keep them apart. Nor with the several monastic saints named Theodosius — Theodosius the Cenobiarch (January 11), Theodosius of the Kiev Caves (May 3).
- The Robber Council. In 449 Theodosius, under the influence of Chrysaphius and of the archimandrite Eutyches, summoned the second council of Ephesus — the Latrocinium, the "Robber Council," which rehabilitated Eutyches, deposed Flavian of Constantinople and refused to read the Tome of Leo. The Church annulled it at Chalcedon two years later. The synaxaria that commemorate Theodosius pass over this in silence; honesty requires it be recorded. His cultus rests on Ephesus 431, on his personal asceticism, and on the witness of Pulcheria, not on an unblemished doctrinal record.
- Rank of the commemoration. He has no proper service and is not universally kept. The Greek synaxaria list "Theodosius the New, emperor" on July 29 and the OCA repeats the entry; Antiochian usage does not generally name him. His feast is placed on the 29th though he died on the 28th, the 28th being occupied in the fixed calendar by other commemorations.