Our father among the saints Theophilos, Archbishop of Antioch

Saint Theophilos of Antioch

A fluent tongue and an elegant style afford pleasure and such praise as vainglory delights in, to wretched men who have been corrupted in mind; the lover of truth does not give heed to ornamented speeches, but examines the real matter of the speech!

- Theophilos, Archbishop of Antioch, Pros Autolykon I.i

The thirteenth of October in the Holy Orthodox Church is the feast day of the seventh archpastor of the See of Antioch, Saint Theophilos, one of the great early Fathers of the Church of Antioch. He is often associated with his contemporaries Saint Irenæus of Lyons and Saint Justin Martyr. Living during the second century, he was a convert from Greek paganism. Originally hostile to Christianity, Saint Theophilos was drawn to the religion by his careful and meticulous study of the Holy Scriptures, which he studied at first only to critique and refute them. Today we honour him as one of the truly great minds who humbled himself before the revelation of Scripture and undertook to perform the law as it was given to him to understand it.

Saint Theophilos [Gk. Θεόφιλος, L. Theophilus, Ar. Ṯâwafîlûs ثاوفيلوس] was born in the part of Syria which borders Mesopotamia, not far from the sources of the Tigris and the Euphratēs, perhaps around the year 120. He was, as mentioned above, a pagan, and one wealthy enough to have been afforded no inconsiderable learning in his youth. He was lettered enough to approach the Scriptures and schooled enough in logic and rhetoric in order to attempt to rebut them effectively before an audience of similarly-literate people. We can see also from his extant writings that he had a certain passing familiarity with the works of Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Aristophanes and several other Classical Greek authors.

Although only one of Theophilos’s works is currently available – the Pros Autolykon – his contributions to the literature of the Early Church, particularly in the areas of apologetics, catechesis and exegesis, are attested in other sources as being considerable. Eusebios, the Church historian, makes note of his office as bishop of Antioch, to which Theophilos acceded in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, around the year 168. He remarks also with the zeal with which he attested to the truths he found in Scripture. He was in particular a defender of the witness of the Hebrew Scriptures against the hæresy of his contemporary Marciōn of Sinōpē, who denied that the Old Testament God was one and the same as the Father of Christ.

In fact, Saint Theophilos shows a particular reverence for the witness of the Hebrew Scriptures – the Law of Moses and the Prophets, particularly Isaiah, Jeremiah and Malachi. His argumentation against his pagan friend Autolykos in the Pros Autolykon is entirely based on the Hebrew Scriptures. His ‘apologetic’ argument for Christianity to Autolykos rests upon the antiquity of the Hebrew Scriptures, and also on argument to their internal consistency and reliability when compared with what both men could agree was true. It should therefore not be surprising to us that the Christianity that Theophilos presents to us is of a Magian spirit – having a Hebraic and prophetic character, and indeed also a concern for the moral state of the society around him, and in particular the treatment of the most vulnerable. If he is brusque with his fellow men-of-letters, it is largely on account of what he sees as their vanity and their highfalutin ostentation in diction, as they fail to get to the real matter (and here we can almost feel Theophilos thinking dabar דבר!) of their speech.

In Pros Autolykon we see that Theophilos reads the text, and understands that it is not man who judges the text, but man who is judged by the text’s Author. The Law and the Prophets are not occasion for philosophical speculation, and still less for what we vulgarly call ‘theology’; they are a social mandate to go and do likewise. He is amazed that the Hebrews – ‘illiterate, and shepherds, and uneducated’ – were somehow able to put together an entire textual tradition with such a remarkable degree of internal consistency: while the philosophers of the Greek world were confused among themselves about the origin of the world, the origin of the gods, what matter is and how it is ordered.

For Theophilos, we can see that the key and the greatest commandment in the Law of Moses and in the Prophets he studied so assiduously, was to show humanity to strangers, for the Law was written for a people who were landless, rootless strangers in the land of Ægypt. We find the stamp of Isaiah heavily upon Saint Theophilos in his teaching. The ‘righteousness’ of the Hebrew Scriptures we find he values so dearly, consists in the commands of God to the Hebrews to: ‘relieve the oppressed, judge [on behalf of] the fatherless, plead for the widow’, and further, to ‘dissolve every oppressive contract, let the oppressed go free, and tear up every unrighteous bond; deal out thy bread to the hungry, and bring the houseless poor to thy home; when thou seest the naked, cover him, and hide not thyself from thine own flesh.’ This is his understanding of the core of Christianity, of the Law of which Christ Himself is the completion.

Saint Theophilos is on record as well as having the earliest recorded instance of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity being stated explicitly: a τριάς of God, His Word, and His Wisdom (Pros Autolykon II.xv), by which he clearly means the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. By this we can see that Theophilos is indeed not an early Judaïser but that his Christianity is indeed sincere and Orthodox. Indeed, his insistence on the triune nature of the Godhead places him ‘ahead of his time’ in doctrinal terms, the formula of Nicæa not forthcoming for nearly another two hundred years. His usage of direct, straightforward language; his insistence on the historical dimension of Scripture; his emphasis on the social mandate of the Hebrew Law all demonstrate certain exegetical themes that would become the hallmarks of the Antiochian School.

The date of the repose of Saint Theophilos is not exactly known. He was succeeded as Archbishop of Antioch by Maximos I at some point after 180; most authorities place the date somewhere between the years 181 and 188. However, it is clear from references in the works of Eusebios and Ieronymos that his sanctity was honoured very early on in the Church. Holy father Theophilos, who humbled yourself before the Law and so overthrew the pride of the pagans, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!