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| Parentage, Birth, and Education.
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Prolegomena.
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The Life and Writings of the
Blessed Theodoretus,
Bishop of Cyrus.
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I.—Parentage, Birth, and
Education.
At Antioch at the close of the
fourth century there were living a husband and wife, opulent and happy
in the enjoyment of all the good things of this life, one thing only
excepted. They were childless. Married at seventeen, the young bride
lived for several years in the enjoyment of such pleasures as wealth
and society could give. At the age of twenty-three she was attacked by
a painful disease in one of her eyes, for which neither the books of
older authorities nor later physiological discoveries could suggest a
remedy. One of her domestic servants, compassionating her distress,
informed her that the wife of Pergamius, at that time in authority in
the East, had been healed of a similar ailment by Petrus, a famous
Galatian solitary who was then living in the upper story of a tomb in
the neighbourhood, to which access could only be obtained by climbing a
ladder. The afflicted lady, says the story which her son himself
repeats,1
| 1 Relig.
Hist. 1188 et seq. | hastened to climb to the recluse’s
latticed cell, arrayed in all her customary elaborate costume, with
earrings, necklaces, and the rest of her ornaments of gold, her silk
robe blazing with embroidery, her face smeared with red and white
cosmetics, and her eyebrows and eyelids artificially darkened.
“Tell me,” said the hermit, on beholding his brilliant
visitor, “tell me, my child, if some skilful painter were to
paint a portrait according to his art’s strict rules and offer it
for exhibition, and then up were to come some dauber dashing off his
pictures on the spur of the moment, who should find fault with the
artistic picture, lengthen the lines of brows and lids, make the face
whiter and heighten the red of the cheeks, what would you say? Do you
not think the original painter would be hurt at this insult to his art
and these needless additions of an unskilled hand.” These
arguments, we learn, led eventually to the improvement of the young
Antiochene gentlewoman both in piety and good taste and her eye is said
to have been restored to health by the imposition of the sign of the
cross. Not impossibly the discontinuance of the use of cosmetics may
have helped, if not caused, the cure.
Six years longer the husband and
wife lived together a more religious life, but still unblessed with
children. Among the ascetic solitaries whom the disappointed husband
begged to aid him in his prayers was one Macedonius, distinguished,
from the simplicity of his diet, as “the barley eater.” In
answer to his prayers, it was believed, a son was at last granted to
the pious pair.2
The condition of the boon being that the
boy should be devoted to the divine service, he was appropriately named
at his birth “Theodoretus,” or “Given by
God.”3
| 3 The
Hebrew equivalents of this very general designation are Nathaniel and
Matthew. Modern English custom has travelled back to the Greek for its
Theodore, Theodora, but Dieudonné and Diodati are familiar in
French and Italian. | Of the exact date of this birth, productive
of such important consequences to the history and literature of the
Church, no precise knowledge is attainable. The less probable year is
386 as given by Garnerius,4
| 4 Garnier
the French Jesuit Father, was born in Paris in 1612, and died in 1681.
His “Auctarium Theodoreti Episcopi Cyrensis,” with
dissertations, was published in 1684. | the more probable and
now generally accepted year 393 follows the computation of Tillemont.5
| 5 According
to this reckoning Theodoret would be fifty-six at the time of the
letter to Leo, written 449, in which he speaks of his old age, and
about thirty at his consecration as bishop in 423.
W. Möller in
Herzog’s Encyclopedia of Prot. Theol. (Ed. 1885. xv. 402) gives
390. |
While yet in his swaddling bands the little Theodoret began to
receive training appropriate to his high career,6
and,
as he himself tells us, with the pardonable exaggeration of enthusiasm,
was no sooner weaned than he began to learn the apostolic teaching.
Among his earliest impressions were the lessons and exhortations of
Peter of Galatia, to whom his mother owed so much, and of Macedonius
“the barley eater,” who had helped to save the Antiochenes
in the troubles that arose about the statues.7
| 7 Ecc.
Hist. v. 19. p. 146. | Of the
latter8
Theodoret quotes the earnest charges to a
holy life, and in his modesty expresses his sorrow that he had not
profited better by the solitary’s solemn entreaties. If however
Macedonius was indeed quite ignorant of the Scriptures,9
it may have been well for the boy’s
education to have been not wholly in his hands. It is not impossible
that he may have had a childish recollection of Chrysostom, who left
Antioch in 398. To Peter he used to pay a weekly visit, and records10
how the holy man would take him on his knees
and feed him with bread and raisins. A treasure long preserved in the
household of Theodoret’s parents was half Peter’s girdle,
woven of coarse linen, which the old man had one day wound round the
loins of the boy. Frequently proved an unfailing remedy in various
cases of family ailment, its very reputation led to its loss, for all
the neighbours used to borrow it to cure their own complaints, and at
last an unkind or careless friend omitted to return it.11
| 11 The
confidence of Theodoret in the wonder working powers of half
Peter’s girdle may be taken as a crucial instance of what
detractors of the individual and of the age would call his foolish
credulity. But an unsound process of reasoning from post hoc to
propter hoc is not confined to any particular period, and it is
not impossible that the scientists of the thirty-fourth century may
smile benevolently at some of the cherished remedies of the
nineteenth. |
When a stripling Theodoret was
blessed by the right hand of Aphraates the monk, of whom he relates an
anecdote in his Ecclesiastical History,12
and
when his beard was just beginning to grow was also blessed by the
ascetic Zeno.13
At this period he was already a
lector14
and was therefore probably past the age of
eighteen. By this time his general education would be regarded as more
or less complete, and to these earlier years may be traced the
acquaintance which he shows with the writings of Homer, Thucydides,
Plato, Euripides, and other Greek classics. Lighter literature, too,
will not have been excluded from his reading, if we accept the
genuineness of the famous letter on the death of Cyril,15
| 15 Vide p.
346. To what is said there may be added the following remarks from Dr.
Salmon’s “Infallibility of the Church,” p. 303, n.
“The letter from which these passages are taken was read as
Theodoret’s at the fifth General Council (fifth Session) and
there accepted as his. But on questions of this kind Councils are not
infallible; and the letter contains a note of spuriousness in
purporting to be addressed to John, bishop of Antioch, who died before
Cyril. I own that the suggestion that for ‘John’ we ought
to read ‘Domnus’ does not suffice to remove suspicion from
my mind. But it is solely for the reason just stated that I feel no
confidence in accepting the letter as Theodoret’s. Newman’s
opinion that it is incredible Theodoret could have written so
‘atrocious’ a letter is one which it is amazing should be
held by any one familiar with the controversial amenities of the time.
Our modern urbanity is willing to bury party animosities in the grave;
but in the fifth century Swift’s translation would be thought the
only proper one of the maxim ‘De mortuis nil nisi
bonum,’ ‘when scoundrels die let all bemoan
them.’ Certainly the man who half a dozen years after
Chrysostom’s death spoke of him as Judas Iscariot had no right to
expect to be politely treated after his own death by one whom he had
relentlessly persecuted.”
Glubowski, whose great
work on Theodoret now in progress is unfortunately a sealed volume to
the majority of the readers on account of its being written in the
author’s native Russian, is of opinion that the letter is
spurious. See also Schröckh Kircheges. xviii. 370. I am myself
unable to see the force of the internal evidence of
spuriousness. It may have been half playful, and never meant for
publication. | and may infer that the dialogues of Lucian are
more likely to have amused the leisure hours of a lad at school and
college than have intruded on the genuine piety and marvellous industry
of the Bishop of Cyrus.
Theodoret was familiar with
Greek, Syriac, and Hebrew, but is said to have been unacquainted with
Latin.16
| 16 Cf. Can.
Venables Dict. Christ. Biog. iv. 906. | Such I presume to be an inference from a
passage in one of his works17
| 17 Græcarum affectionum curatio 843. | in which he tells us
“The Romans indeed had poets, orators, and historians, and we are
informed by those who are skilled in both languages that their
reasonings are closer than the Greeks‘ and their sentences more
concise. In saying this I have not the least intention of disparaging
the Greek language which is in a sense mine,18
| 18 To a
Syrian it would not be literally the mother tongue but was possibly
acquired in infancy. | or of
making an ungrateful return to it for my education, but I speak that I
may to some extent close the lips and lower the brows of those who make
too big a boasting about it, and may teach them not to ridicule a
language which is illuminated by the truth.’ But it is not clear
from these words that Theodoret had no acquaintance with Latin. His
admiration for orthodox Western theology as well as his natural
literary and social curiosity would lead him to learn it. In the
Ecclesiastical History (III. 16) there is a possible reference to
Horace.
Theodoret’s chief
instructor in Theology was the great light of the school of Antioch,
Theodorus, known from the name of the see to which he was appointed in
392, “Mopsuestia,” or “the hearth of Mopsus,”
in Cilicia Secunda. He also refers to his obligations to Diodorus of Tarsus.19
Accepting 393 as the date of his birth and
392 as that of Theodore’s appointment to his see, it would seem
that the younger theologian must have been rather a reader than a
hearer as well of Theodore as of Diodore. But Theodore expounded
Scripture in many churches of the East.20
The
friendship of Theodoret for Nestorius may have begun when the latter
was a monk in the convent of St. Euprepius at the gates of Antioch. It
is recorded21
| 21 Cyril.
Alex. Ep. LXIX. | that on one occasion Theodore gave
offence while preaching at Antioch by refusing to give to the blessed
Virgin the title θεοτόκος. He afterwards retracted this refusal for the sake of
peace. The original objection and subsequent consent have a curious
significance in view of the subsequent careers of his two famous
pupils. Of the school of Antioch as distinguished from that of
Alexandria it may be said broadly that while the latter shewed a
tendency to syntheticism and to unity of conception, the former, under
the influence of the Aristotelian philosophy, favoured analytic
processes.22
And while the general bent of the
school of thinkers among whom Theodoret was brought up inclined to a
recognition of a distinction between the two natures in the Person of
Christ, there was much in the special teaching of its great living
authority which was not unlikely to lead to such division of the Person
as was afterwards attributed to Nestorius.23
| 23 e.g.
Theodorus, Migne 776. | Such
were the influences under which Theodoret grew up.
On the death of his parents he
at once distributed all the property that he inherited from them, and
embraced a life of poverty,24
retiring, at about
the age of three and twenty, to Nicerte, a village three miles from
Apamea, and seventy-five from Antioch, in the monastery of which he
passed seven calm and happy years, occasionally visiting neighbouring
monasteries and perhaps during this period paying the visit to
Jerusalem which left an indelible impression on his memory. “With
my own eyes,” he writes,25
| 25 Græc. Affect. Cur. 1099. | “I have seen
that desolation. The prediction rang in my ears when I saw the
fulfillment before my eyes and I lauded and worshipped the
truth.” Of the peace of Theodoret’s earlier manhood Dr.
Newman26
| 26 Historical Sketches iii.
319. | says in a sentence less open to criticism
than another which shall be quoted further on, “There he laid
deep within him that foundation of faith and devotion, and obtained
that vivid apprehension of the world unseen and future which lasted him
as a secret spring of spiritual strength all through the conflict and
sufferings of the years that followed.”E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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