Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Episcopate at Cyrus.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
II.—Episcopate at
Cyrus.
Cyrus or Cyrrhus was a town of
the district of Syria called after it Cyrestica. The capital of
Cyrestica was Gindarus, which Strabo describes27
as
being in his time a natural nest of robbers. Cyrus lies on a branch of
the river Œnoparas, now Aphreen, and the site is still known as
Koros. A tradition has long obtained that it received the name of Cyrus
from the Jews in honour of their great benefactor, but this is more
than doubtful. The form Cyrus may have arisen from a confusion with a
Cyrus in Susiana.28
| 28 Glubokowski p. 31. Tillemont v. 217. | The Cyrestica is a
fertile plain lying between the spurs of the Alma Dagh and the
Euphrates, irrigated by three streams and blessed with a rich soil. The
diocese, which was subject to the Metropolitan of Hierapolis, contained
some sixteen hundred square miles29
and eight
hundred distinct parishes each with its church.30
But
Cyrus itself was a wretched little place31
scantily inhabited. Before it was beautified by the munificence of
Theodoret it contained no buildings of any dignity or grace. The people
of the town as well as of the diocese seem to have been poor in
orthodoxy as well as in pocket, and the rich soil of the district grew
a plentiful crop of the tares of Arianism, Marcionism, Eunomianism and
Judaism.32
Such was the diocese to which
Theodoret, in spite of his honest nolo episcopari,33
was consecrated at about the age of
thirty, a.d. 423. Of the circumstances of this
consecration we have no evidence. Garnerius conjectures that he must
have been ordained deacon by Alexander who succeeded Porphyrius at
Antioch. He was probably appointed, if not consecrated, to succeed
Isidorus at Cyrus, by Theodotus the successor of Alexander on the
patriarchal throne of Antioch. In this diocese certainly for five and
twenty years, perhaps for five and thirty, with occasional intervals he
worked night and day with unflagging patience and perseverance for the
good of the people committed to his care, and in the cause of his
Master and of the truth. The ecclesiastic of these early times is sometimes
imagined to have been a morose and ungenial ascetic, wasting his
energies in unprofitable hair-splitting, and taking little or no
interest in the every day needs of his contemporaries. In marked
contrast with this imaginary bishop stands out the kindly figure of the
real bishop of Cyrus, as the modest statements and hints supplied by
his own letters enable us to recall him.
As an administrator and man of
business he was munificent and efficient. Stripped, as we have already
learnt, of his family property by his own act and will, he must have
been dependent in his diocese on the revenues of his see. From these,
which cannot have been small, he was able to spend large sums on public
works. Cyrus was adorned with porticoes, with two great bridges, with
baths, and with an aqueduct, all at Theodoret’s expense.34
On assuming the administration of his
diocese he took measures, he tells us,35
to secure for
Cyrus “the necessary arts,” and from these three words we
need not hesitate to infer that architects, engineers, masons,
sculptors, and carpenters, would be attracted “from all
quarters” to the bishop’s important works. And for this
increased population it is interesting to note that Theodoret provided
competent practitioners in medicine and surgery, in which it would seem
he was not himself unskilled.36
| 36 Epp.
CXIV, CXV, and Dial. p. 217 cf. also de Prov. 518 et seqq. | His keen interest in
the temporal needs of his people is shown by the efforts he made to
obtain relief for them from the cruel pressure of exorbitant
taxation.37
| 37 Epp.
XLII, XLIII, XLV. | So unendurable was the tale of imposts
under which they groaned that in many cases they were deserting their
farms and the country, and he earnestly appeals to the empress
Pulcheria and to his friend Anatolius to help them.38
The tender sympathy felt by him for all
those afflicted in body and estate, as well as in mind, is shown in his
letters on behalf of Celestinianus, or Celestiacus, a gentleman of
position at Carthage, who had suffered cruelly during the attack of the
Vandals,39
and in the admirable and touching letters
of consolation addressed to survivors on the deaths of relatives. That
these should have been religiously preserved need excite no surprise.40
| 40 cf. Epp.
VII. VIII. XIV. XV. XVII. XVIII. LXV. LXIX. | Of the terms on which he lived with his
neighbours we can form some idea from the justifiable boast contained
in his letter to Nomus. In the quarter of a century of his episcopate,
he writes, he never appeared in court either as prosecutor or
defendant; his clergy followed his admirable example; he never took an
obol or a garment from any one; not one of his household ever received
so much as a loaf or an egg; he could not bear to think that he had any
property beyond his few poor clothes.41
Yet he was always
ready to give where he would not receive, and in addition to all the
diocesan and literary work which he conscientiously performed, he spent
more time than he could well afford in all sorts of extra diocesan
business which his position thrust in his way.
As a shepherd of souls he was
unceasing in his efforts to win heathen, heretics and Jews to the true
faith. His diocese, when he assumed its government, was a very hotbed
of heresy.42
| 42 “In a diocese such as his, lying as it were in a corner of
the world, not reached by the public posts, isolated by the great river
to the east and the mountain chains to the west, peopled by
half-leavened heathen, Christianity assumed many strange forms,
sometimes hardly recognisable caricatures of the truth.” Canon
Venables. Dict. Christ. Biog. iv. 906. | Nevertheless in the famous letter to
Leo43
he could boast that not a tare was left to
spoil the crop. His fame as a preacher was great and wide, and makes us
the more regret that of the discourses which in turn roused, cheered,
and blamed, so little should survive. The eloquence, so to say, of his
extant writings, gives indications of the force of spoken utterances
not less marked by learning and literary skill. Two of his letters give
vivid pictures of the enthusiasm of oriental auditories in Antioch,
once so populous and so keen in theological interest, where now, amid a
people numbering only about a fiftieth part of their predecessors of
the fifth century, there is not a single church. We see the patriarch
John in a frenzy of gladness at Theodoret’s sermons, clapping his
hands and springing again and again from his chair;44
we see the heads of the congregation receiving the bishop of Cyrus with
frantic delight as he came down from the pulpit, flinging their arms
round him, kissing now his head, now his breast, now his hands, now his
knees, and hear them exclaiming, “This is the Voice of the
Apostle!”45
But Theodoret had to encounter
sometimes the fury of opposition. Again and again in his campaign
against heretics and unbelievers he was stoned, wounded, and brought
nigh unto death.46
“He from whom no secrets are hid
knows all the bruises my body has received, aimed at me by ill-named
heretics, and what fights I have fought in most of the cities of the
East against Jews, heretics, and heathen.”47
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
