Saint Theodore of Tarsos
Our seventh consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury – or eighth, if you count poor Wigheard – the successor to the first native-born Englishman (Saint Deusdedit) to hold that office, was not a Latin but instead a saintly Greek from the city of Tarsos in Cilicia – the home of the Apostle Paul and the site of the first Saint Boniface’s martyrdom – named Theódōros, or Theodore in English sources. Saint Theodore is also one of the most tangible and direct linkages – but very far from the only one – between the Apostolic Church in the British Isles and that in the Greek-speaking East. Today we commemorate his feast in the Holy Orthodox Church.
Saint Theodore was born in the Year of our Lord 602 – which is to say, he was born during a very interesting time. The Sasanian Empire under Khosrow II Parvêz (of the literarily-immortal love affaire with the Syriac Christian Shirin) had, at the time of Saint Theodore’s birth, just declared war on the Eastern Roman Empire and invaded the eastward-facing provinces, to avenge the political murder of his benefactor in exile, Emperor Maurice. The war lasted over twenty years. When young Theodore was only about eleven years of age, the Sasanian Persians made a massive offensive that seized Antioch – where they plundered the city and drove many Christians into exile – and then Tarsos after they breached the Cilician Gate, splitting the Roman Empire in half and dividing the north from the south. For much of his early life, Theodore lived under Persian rule, and there is evidence he was familiar with not only Persian but also Syriac culture and language. He studied in Persian-ruled Antioch and may have travelled to Edessa.
When the Arabs under the al-Khulafâ’ began to conquer and subjugate the Eastern Middle East in the wake of that war, Saint Theodore was forced to relocate himself – first to Constantinople, and then to what was then still the Eastern Roman-ruled Exarchate of Ravenna. While in the Second Rome, Saint Theodore mastered the arts of astronomy, medicine, civil law, rhetoric and philosophy. After he arrived in the First Rome, he settled down in a community of Eastern monks at the Abbey of Saint Anastasios of the Three Fountains (now run by the Latin Cistercian Order). While in this holy house he added to his already-formidable store of knowledge, the understanding of the Latin language and literary works both sacred and sæcular.
In 667, a plague struck Europe, and one of its victims was the aforementioned Bishop Wigheard, who had been selected by the Church in Canterbury, by Ecgberht I of Kent and by Óswiu wæs Æþelferþing of Northumbria, to be their Archbishop. He fell ill on the road to Rome and died before he could receive his omophor from Pope Vitalian. Pope Vitalian, when he heard of this news, set about finding a replacement bishop for Wigheard. Among his first choices was the holy Berber monk Saint Hadrian, who turned the offer down. Instead, he suggested to Pope Vitalian that his good friend Saint Theodore would be better suited to the rôle. Pope Vitalian agreed, but only on condition that Hadrian accompany Theodore to England to serve as his legate; in addition, because Hadrian was a skilled seafarer and knew the whale-roads like the back of his own hand, it was a surety to the Holy Father that the Greek monk would arrive there safely. On the twenty-sixth of March, 668, the Holy Father bestowed the omophor of Canterbury upon the Syrian Greek monk’s shoulders, and sent him off to England along with Hadrian. The two of them arrived in Kent fourteen months later, on the twenty-seventh of May the following year.
By this time, Theodore was already well-advanced in years, having reached the age of sixty-six. But he took to his new office in this chilly island at the bottom of the world with the zeal and energy of a man half his age. He undertook an ambitious reform of the Church by calling a Synod at Hertford in 672, and in so doing unfortunately trod on a few local toes. In his understandable and laudable desire to ensure that every corner of his new island home had its own bishop, its own monastic communities and its own clergy, he appointed men to seats in diocæses that had long been left empty. He also tried to regulate the Easter controversy by bringing the Celtic churches into agreement with the Roman date, and attempted to combat the practice of close-kin marriage among the English. In addition, he strode boldly into the doctrinal field at Hatfield against the Maronite hæresy (toward which Pope Honorius was a bit too friendly) and kept England secure against the seductions of monothelitism. But he also floated the idea of breaking the archdiocæse of Northumbria into smaller ones – and this idea was very much not to the liking of the Archbishop of York whom Theodore himself had appointed: Bishop Saint Wilfrið. This faux pas by the Greek archbishop sparked off a long rivalry between the two strong-willed and stubborn holy churchmen that spanned fifteen years. Saint Theodore even deposed Saint Wilfrið and sent him into exile in Francia for several years, breaking up the Northumbrian archdiocæse in his absence. Eventually the two men were reconciled, though it took many years and the active interventions of two of their saintly contemporaries: Holy Mother Ælfflæd of Whitby and Bishop Eorcenwald of London.
Despite this unseemly feud with one of his own clergy, Archbishop Theodore was otherwise a skilled diplomat and a peacemaker. The kingdom of Northumbria threatened to go to war with Mercia in 679 over the death of Ælfwine King of Deira at the hands of the Mercians in a skirmish at the River Trent. Archbishop Theodore managed to prevent war between the two kingdoms by convincing Æþelrǽd King of Mercia to pay the weregild for Ælfwine’s wrongful death. As we can see, Saint Theodore was a quick study of Teutonic customary law as well as Roman civil and Greek canon law!
Saint Theodore brought his luminous love of learning to English shores, and was gladly joined by his friend the venerable Abbot Hadrian. Together they established a monastic school in Canterbury where Greek was taught alongside Latin, and where the liberal arts of poetry, astronomy and philosophy were taught alongside learning in Holy Writ. This school also welcomed both Celtic and English scholars and pupils, and brought the two groups of Christians on the British Isles closer together than they had ever hitherto been. The Archbishop of Canterbury took part in the instruction at the school himself – he taught sacred music, as well as introducing English pupils to saints of the Greek-speaking Churches of the Roman East. He wrote a Litany of the Saints and authored several commentaries on Scripture, one of which is still extant in the Laturculus Malalianus. He presided over what many consider to be a ‘golden age’ of English learning.
Saint Theodore of Tarsos was utterly invaluable in uniting and strengthening the English Church, as well as enriching it with a truly formidable wealth of knowledge and wisdom brought from the Greek-speaking East. English spirituality after him – as witnessed by such holy men as Gúðlác of Crowland, Aldhelm of Sherborne and of course Bede the Venerable – was enriched not only by the Latin and Celtic, but also the Greek and Middle Eastern witness. Traces of this witness reappear with Lancelot Andrewes, Mary Astell, John Ruskin and Richard Tawney. Saint Theodore reposed in the Lord at the age of eighty-eight, on the nineteenth of September in the year 690. He had held the Archbishopric of Canterbury for twenty-two of those years. His incorrupt relics were housed in the Church of Saint Peter (later Saint Augustine’s Abbey) wherein the bishops of Canterbury before him had all been interred. Holy Archbishop Theodore, far-wandering friend of monks, wise and gentle teacher of the English, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!
As a compatriot of the preëminent Paul and a scion of Tarsos, O Theodore,
Bestowed upon the West by God thou didst traverse afar,
Proclaiming the peerless Gospel of Christ among the Angles and Saxons.
Wherefore, having received thee as a gift divine and great,
We cry out in thanksgiving to the Lord on high:
Truly wondrous art Thou, O Saviour,
In Thy holy bishop and in all the saints!
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