Theophylact of Nicomedia
Our Father among the Saints Theophylact the Confessor, Bishop of Nicomedia
Bishop · Confessor · b. mid-8th century, at Constantinople — d. c. 842–845, in exile at Strobilos
Commemorated 8 March — Repose in exile at Strobilos
Theophylact (mid-8th century – c. 842/845) was bishop of Nicomedia in Bithynia and one of the leading confessors of the second Iconoclasm. A gifted disciple of the Patriarch Tarasius of Constantinople, he was trained in monastic life at a house on the Black Sea coast together with his friend Michael, later bishop of Synada, and was raised by Tarasius to the see of Nicomedia, which he governed with a boundless charity — building hospices, hospitals, and homes for strangers, and tending the lepers with his own hands. When the emperor Leo V the Armenian renewed the war on the holy images, Theophylact stood with the Patriarch Nicephorus against him, and to his face foretold the sudden and violent end that overtook the emperor. For this confession he was banished to the fortress of Strobilos, where he endured some thirty years and reposed still in exile, about the year 842 or 845. After the restoration of the icons his relics were carried back in honour to Nicomedia. The Church keeps him on March 8.
Origins and early life
Theophylact was a native of Constantinople, born about the middle of the eighth century, and was given an excellent education, so that he became known while still young for his learning and his wisdom. His formation belongs to the years of the first restoration of the icons — the generation of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea, 787) — and his master and lifelong patron was Tarasius, the layman-secretary raised to the patriarchal throne of Constantinople (784–806) who convened that council and healed the Church of the first Iconoclasm. Drawn to Tarasius, Theophylact renounced the world with the patriarch's blessing and withdrew to a monastery on the shore of the Black Sea (the Euxine), where he took up the ascetic life in the company of a fellow-disciple named Michael — the future bishop of Synada and himself a confessor for the icons. The two became renowned for the strictness of their struggle and for the gift of wonders: the tradition remembers, among the signs granted them, that in a season of drought they prayed together and an empty vessel was filled with water, a mercy for the labourers of the harvest and a token of the favour of God upon their prayer.
Bishop of Nicomedia
After some years in the monastery, Tarasius called the two friends out of their solitude and consecrated them bishops for the Church he governed: Michael to the see of Synada in Phrygia, and Theophylact to the metropolis of Nicomedia in Bithynia — the great city on the gulf across from the capital, one of the chief sees of the Byzantine East. As a hierarch Theophylact was remembered above all for the breadth of his charity, which the synaxaria dwell on with particular warmth. He built churches, and beside them the works of mercy that were the mark of a good bishop of the age: hospices and lodging-houses for travellers and the homeless, hospitals for the sick, homes for the destitute; he was, the account says, the guardian of orphans and widows, a generous almsgiver who emptied his resources upon the poor. Most memorably, he did not disdain the lepers, the most shunned of the sick, but served them in person — providing for their needs, and with his own hands washing and binding their sores. In this ministry of a settled and peaceable episcopate he passed the years of the peace of the Church, from his consecration under Tarasius through the patriarchate of Nicephorus (806–815), Tarasius's successor and, like him, a defender of the images.
Confession under Leo the Armenian
That peace ended in 815. The emperor Leo V the Armenian (813–820), seeking — as the iconoclast emperors before him had done — to bind the fortunes of his reign to the rejection of the icons, moved to overthrow the settlement of the Seventh Council and to renew the persecution. He pressed the Patriarch Nicephorus and the bishops gathered about him to abandon the veneration of the holy images; and when persuasion failed he turned to threats. Theophylact was among the hierarchs who stood with Nicephorus in the confrontations with the emperor, refusing to betray the faith of the Fathers. The tradition preserves the boldness of his witness: face to face with Leo, when the emperor would not be moved, Theophylact rebuked him openly and foretold his ruin — that a sudden and merciless destruction would fall upon him, and that he would find none to help him in the day of his calamity. The prophecy was remembered because it was fulfilled: Leo V was cut down by conspirators before the altar of the Great Church on the night of the Nativity, December 820.
Exile and repose at Strobilos
For his defiance Leo drove Theophylact from his see and sent him into exile, to the remote fortress of Strobilos (Strobilus) on the southern coast of Asia Minor. There the bishop of Nicomedia remained, cut off from his flock and his city, through the reign of Leo and of the iconoclast emperors who followed — Michael II and Theophilus — enduring the hardships of a long captivity without yielding. The sources reckon his exile at some thirty years, and it was in that exile, still a confessor and never restored to his throne, that he reposed, about the year 842 or 845 — on the very threshold, as it proved, of the Church's deliverance.
Relics and later cultus
The final restoration of the holy icons came in 843, when the Empress Theodora, regent for her son Michael III, and the Patriarch Methodius proclaimed the Triumph of Orthodoxy and ended the Iconoclast heresy for ever. Among the acts of the restored Church was the honouring of the confessors who had suffered and died for the images. The relics of Theophylact were taken up from his place of exile and carried back to Nicomedia, the city he had served and been torn from, and there enshrined with honour — the vindication of his long confession and the seal of his sanctity. He is numbered by the tradition among the company of the confessor-bishops of the second Iconoclasm — with Nicephorus the Patriarch, Michael the Synkellos, the Graptoi brothers, his own friend Michael of Synada, and the rest — the pastors who kept the faith of Nicaea through the second persecution and handed on undimmed the veneration of the image of Christ.
Feast and commemoration
Theophylact is kept on March 8 (church date; New Calendar civil March 8; Old Calendar civil March 21), the day of his repose. Because the church date falls in early March it very often lies within Great Lent, whose bounds are movable; on the weekdays of the fast the full Liturgy is not celebrated and no fixed Epistle and Gospel are appointed to the saints of the day, and when March 8 falls on a Sunday of the Fast — the Sunday of Gregory Palamas or the Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross — the resurrectional and Triodion office governs the day and the saint is commemorated with what the rubrics allow. His memory is kept across the Antiochian, Greek, and Slavic calendars alike; the Greek Menaion for March 8 gives him a proper apolytikion, and the Slavic Menaia commemorate him together with the venerable Lazarus of Murom and the apostle of the day.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 3
A sleepless guardian of the Church and a caster-down of impiety hast thou been shown to be, O hierarch Theophylact; for in venerating the Icon of Christ thou didst endure banishment and afflictions. O venerable Father, entreat Christ our God to grant us great mercy.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Theophylact is depicted in the settled type of a bishop-confessor: an elderly, grey-bearded hierarch vested in the phelonion or the cross-figured polystavrion, wearing the omophorion and holding or blessing over the Gospel-book. As a confessor for the icons his image belongs with those of the iconodule hierarchs of his age — Nicephorus, Methodius, the Graptoi — and where a narrative scene is given it shows his exile: the bishop led from his city, or standing before the emperor to defend the sacred image he holds. He is not to be figured with the instruments of a bloody martyrdom, for he died a confessor in banishment, not by execution.
No public-domain image whose identity can be verified as this Theophylact has been stored. An 1835 fresco at the Rila Monastery in Bulgaria, catalogued on Wikimedia Commons as "Saint Theophylact of Nicomedia," was considered and declined: it carries no legible inscription distinguishing him from Theophylact of Ohrid, whose cultus belongs precisely to the Bulgarian sphere of Rila, and the identification would prejudge the very confusion the tradition warns against. A securely identified early image is wanting.
Disputed questions
- The dates. The year of his repose is given as c. 842–845; the sources vary within that narrow range, and some notices, reckoning back from a thirty-year exile begun in 815–816, place it about 840–842. The feast-day, March 8, is the fixed anchor. His birth is undated and is given only as the middle of the eighth century, inferred from his discipleship under Tarasius.
- A muddled chronology in some notices. A few service-books and web notices (including the Orthodox Church in America's) loosely set his life "in the eighth century" and even name the emperor Constantine VI, conflating the era of his monastic beginnings under Tarasius with the age of his martyric confession. The substance of his life belongs to the ninth century and to the reign of Leo V the Armenian, under whom he was exiled, and this entry follows that chronology, which the Greek Menaion and the death-date of c. 842/845 require.
- Not to be confused with Theophylact of Ohrid (c. 1050 – after 1107), the learned archbishop of Ohrid and Biblical commentator of a far later age (commemorated December 31), with whom the shared name and episcopal rank invite confusion; nor with the several other Theophylacts of the calendars. "The Confessor, Bishop of Nicomedia" belongs to this saint of the Iconoclast age alone.