Theoleptos of Philadelphia
Our Father among the Saints Theoleptos, Metropolitan of Philadelphia, the Confessor
Bishop · Venerable · Confessor · b. c. 1250, at Nicaea — d. 1322, at Philadelphia in Lydia
Commemorated 25 June — Repose at Philadelphia
Theoleptos, Metropolitan of Philadelphia in Lydia for nearly forty years, is the hinge between the hesychasm of the thirteenth-century Athonite fathers and the theology of Gregory Palamas, whom he taught the prayer of the heart while Palamas was still a boy in Constantinople. Born at Nicaea about 1250 and married, he left the world about 1275; he refused the union of Lyons and was imprisoned for it under Michael VIII; and after that emperor's death he was given the see of Philadelphia, which he held from 1283/4 until his death in 1322, governing it as a frontier bishop of an empire in dissolution and leading its people in the successful defence of the city against the Turks in 1310. He was the spiritual father of the princess-nun Irene-Eulogia Choumnaina, and the author of the Monastic Discourses and of two treatises that entered the Philokalia. He is commemorated on June 25.
Nicaea, marriage, and the monastic vocation
Theoleptos was born at Nicaea, the city of the councils and the capital of the Byzantine government in exile, about 1250 — a generation after the empire's recovery of Constantinople was still in the future, and a generation before its theological crisis broke. He was educated there, married, and was ordained deacon. About 1275, when he was twenty-five or so, he left his wife and the world for the monastic life. The sources are not sentimental about the separation, and neither was he: his later letters to monastics deal repeatedly with the cost of renunciation and with the temptation to reconsider it.
He went to Mount Athos, where he was formed in the practice of inner prayer — the tradition associates him with Nikephoros the Hesychast, the Italian convert whose treatise On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart is the classic statement of the method of attention that Theoleptos would transmit.
Against the union of Lyons
The Council of Lyons in 1274 had bound the Byzantine Church, on the emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos's initiative and against the mind of most of its monks, to communion with Rome on Rome's terms. Theoleptos was among the resisters. He was arrested, ill-treated and imprisoned for his refusal — the sources speak of blows as well as confinement — and belongs therefore, properly, among the confessors: he suffered for the faith and did not die of it.
Michael VIII died in 1282, and his son Andronikos II at once repudiated the union. Theoleptos was one of those raised on the strength of his resistance, and about 1283/4 he was consecrated Metropolitan of Philadelphia in Lydia.
Philadelphia
Philadelphia — the last of the seven churches of the Apocalypse, to which alone the risen Christ had no reproach to make (Rev. 3:7–13) — was by the end of the thirteenth century an isolated Greek city in western Asia Minor with Turkish emirates closing round it. Theoleptos held it for nearly forty years, and the city held out with him: it would survive as a Byzantine enclave for a century after his death, long after everything around it had gone.
The decisive episode is the siege of 1310, when Theoleptos organised and led the defence and the city was not taken. The tradition remembers him standing on the walls; what the sources establish is that the bishop rather than any imperial officer was the effective head of the resistance, which tells one everything about the condition of Byzantine authority in Asia at that date.
He was equally firm inside the Church. He opposed the terms on which the Arsenite schismatics — the party of the deposed patriarch Arsenius — were reconciled to the Church in 1310, holding the settlement too easy, and he stood apart from it. He was in Constantinople repeatedly on the affairs of his province and of the patriarchate, and his surviving correspondence shows him consulted from the capital as a spiritual authority long after he had ceased to live there.
Spiritual fatherhood, and the transmission of hesychasm
Two lines of influence make him more than a provincial hierarch.
The first is his direction of Irene-Eulogia Choumnaina Palaiologina (1291–1355), daughter of the minister Nikephoros Choumnos and widow, at sixteen, of the despot John Palaiologos, who became a nun and refounded the convent of Christ Philanthropos Soter in Constantinople. Theoleptos was her spiritual father, and the letters and discourses he addressed to her — some of the most substantial spiritual correspondence to survive from Byzantium, and among the very few addressed by a named director to a named woman — are the principal channel through which his teaching came down.
The second is Gregory Palamas. Philotheos Kokkinos, who wrote Palamas's life, records that the young Gregory, still in the world and at his studies in Constantinople, was initiated into the discipline of noetic prayer by Theoleptos of Philadelphia before ever he went to Athos. Palamas himself, in the Triads, names Theoleptos among the fathers from whom the hesychast practice he was defending had been received. Whatever the exact measure of the debt, the fourteenth-century controversy over the uncreated light has an unbroken line running back through Theoleptos to the Athonite hesychasts of the previous century, and it is that line, not any novelty, that Palamas claimed to be defending.
Writings
Theoleptos's chief work is a series of some twenty-three Monastic Discourses (Λόγοι), composed for the nuns of Philanthropos Soter and for his own clergy, together with a body of letters. Two pieces entered the Philokalia of St Macarius of Corinth and St Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1782) under his name — the discourse setting forth clearly the hidden work in Christ, and a set of chapters on watchfulness — and it is through the Philokalia, and its Slavonic and Russian translations, that he became known far beyond the Greek world. Much of the rest of his corpus remained unpublished until modern critical editions.
His subject is single: the turning of the mind into the heart, the driving out of the images and preoccupations that clutter it, and the continuous invocation of the name of Christ until prayer becomes the mind's own condition rather than an act it performs. He writes as a bishop, not a theorist, and the discourses are full of the ordinary obstacles — distraction, resentment among sisters, the memory of the world, the wish to be thought spiritual.
Repose
He died at Philadelphia in 1322, having held the see through the whole reign of Andronikos II. The city he had defended outlived him by seventy-eight years.
Feast and commemoration
June 25 (church date; New Calendar civil June 25, Old Calendar civil July 8). The commemoration is Greek, carried into the OCA calendar and into English lists; it is not in the Slavonic books. The day is dominated by the leavetaking of the Nativity of the Forerunner and by Febronia of Nisibis, and Theoleptos, who has no proper service, is kept at the proskomedia and in the commemorations rather than by a sung office. His memory is honoured particularly on the Holy Mountain and in the Philokalic tradition, where he is read rather than sung.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a hierarch)
Guide of Orthodoxy, teacher of piety and holiness, lamp of Philadelphia, God-inspired ornament of hierarchs, O most wise Theoleptos: by thy teaching thou hast enlightened all, thou harp of the Spirit. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Theoleptos is painted in the type of the hierarch: an old man with a pointed grey beard, in phelonion and crossed omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the jewelled Gospel in the left; where the composition is monastic rather than episcopal he is given the mandyas and the schema instead, with a scroll, and the scroll bears a sentence of the Discourses on the prayer of the heart. Because he belongs to the Philokalic company he is sometimes shown among the hesychast fathers — with Nikephoros the Hesychast, Gregory of Sinai and Gregory Palamas — rather than among the bishops. Where a city is indicated behind him it is Philadelphia, which the painters mark with a wall and a tower for the siege of 1310.
No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection: Commons returns nothing under either the Greek or the English form of the name, and June lies wholly outside the Menologion of Basil II. The entry is listed in the the list of icons still being sought index.
Disputed questions
- The feast day. June 25 is the date given by the Greek synaxaria and by the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America; some lists have carried other days, and the OCA's own life-page for him is empty of biography, which suggests the commemoration entered the English calendars from a Greek list rather than from a circulating vita. No day of the month is recorded in the historical sources for his death.
- The extent of his teaching of Palamas. That Theoleptos taught the young Palamas the method of inner prayer rests on Philotheos Kokkinos's Life of Palamas and on Palamas's own allusions. It has been read both as a formal discipleship and as a single decisive encounter. The sources will not settle it; what they do establish is that Palamas himself named Theoleptos among his masters.
- Not one of the anti-Palamite Theoleptoi. The name recurs in fourteenth-century sources; this Theoleptos died in 1322, sixteen years before the controversy with Barlaam began, and took no part in it.
- His relation to Athanasius I. He was a contemporary and ally of the reforming patriarch Athanasius I of Constantinople in the same monastic-rigorist current of the reign of Andronikos II, though the two are not always in agreement in the surviving correspondence.