Theodore of Mopsuestia

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A reader who opens Theodore of Mopsuestia on the prophet Joel finds something that would have unsettled his contemporaries and would not entirely settle a reader now. The locusts are locusts. The army that follows them is an army of the eighth century before Christ, marching against a small kingdom in a real season of drought, and the prophet who describes them is addressing the people in front of him about a calamity they can see. Where another interpreter would already be reaching past the insects toward the soul, or toward the church, or toward the end of the world, Theodore stays with the field. He reads what the human author meant in the human author’s own time. This patience — pressed to a principle, defended as a discipline, carried further than almost anyone before him — made him the most influential teacher of the Antiochene school of interpretation, earned him among his pupils the single title “the Interpreter,” and, a century and a quarter after his death, got his name struck from the books of the church he had died inside.

He held the see of Mopsuestia in Cilicia, in what is now southern Turkey, from 392 until his death in 428. He was born at Antioch around 350, studied rhetoric and philosophy under the sophist Libanius, and turned to the ascetic life in the company of John Chrysostom, with whom he trained under Diodore of Tarsus — the master from whom the Antiochene method descended to him. He was ordained presbyter at Antioch and spent his most productive years there before the bishopric, writing across nearly the whole of scripture. In his own lifetime he was a celebrated and orthodox figure, a correspondent of emperors and a defender of the faith against Origenists, Apollinarians, and others; he died in communion, honored, with no shadow on his name.

The plain sense against the veil

His reputation rests first on how he read scripture. Where the rival school of Alexandria favored allegory — treating the surface of the text as a veil over hidden spiritual meanings, so that every detail of the letter pointed past itself to a doctrine, a virtue, or the soul’s ascent — the Antiochenes insisted on the plain, historical sense, on what the human author had meant in his own setting. The text had a body before it had a soul, and the body was the events it actually described. Theodore carried this further than most. He pressed the literal and grammatical reading hard. He attended to the syntax, the speaker, the occasion, the genre; he asked who was being addressed and about what, and he refused to let a later meaning overwrite the one the words first carried.

The sharpest expression of this method fell on prophecy. The Christian habit inherited from the apostles and the Fathers was to read the Old Testament as a forest of foreshadowings, each psalm and oracle a coded announcement of Christ. Theodore would not grant that wholesale. He narrowed the range of passages that could be taken as direct prophecies of Christ to a small number — by the most common reckoning only four psalms, the second, the eighth, the forty-fifth, and the hundred-and-tenth, were for him genuinely and primarily messianic. The rest of the Psalter he returned to its historical authors and occasions, to David and to the crises of Israel’s kings, reading the songs as responses to events in front of the singer rather than as veiled predictions. Where the New Testament applied an Old Testament verse to Christ, Theodore preferred to call the relation an accommodation or a likeness — the later event resembling the earlier and the words being fitted to it — rather than a hidden forecast planted centuries in advance. He allowed typology, a real correspondence between an earlier figure and a later one grounded in the historical sense of both, but he policed the line between type and allegory with a severity the allegorists found cold.

This freedom extended to the shape of the canon and the worth of individual books. He judged the Song of Songs to be a love poem and nothing more — verse Solomon had written, on the most reported account, to answer criticism of a foreign marriage — and on that reading saw no place for it among the inspired scriptures. He thought the Book of Job a literary composition whose author had handled a holy man with more rhetorical license than reverence, and he doubted its standing. He set aside the superscriptions of certain psalms as later additions, questioned the inspiration of works he found historically thin, and in general treated the received text with a confidence that struck later readers as audacity bordering on irreverence. In his own time and school this was admired as rigor; among his pupils it earned him the name that the East would keep for him long after the empire had condemned him.

Two natures, kept apart

The Christological question is where the trouble lay. The central debate of his age concerned how the divine and human were joined in Christ, and the Antiochene instinct was to keep the two natures clearly distinct, guarding the full reality of the humanity against any sense that it had been swallowed by the divine. A salvation that depended on a real human life — a man who grew, learned, willed, struggled, and obeyed, the figure of the Gospels read at his word — could not afford to have that humanity thinned into a costume the Word merely wore.

Theodore built his account on that conviction. He spoke of the assumed man, the homo assumptus of the Latin tradition that preserved fragments of him, and of the assuming Word; the divine Logos did not turn into flesh but took to itself a complete human being, body and rational soul, including a free human will that was genuinely tested and genuinely victorious. The bond between the two he described as an indwelling — not the indwelling by which God is present in any saint, which differs in degree, but an indwelling of good pleasure, of divine favor, unique in kind, by which the Word made the assumed man wholly its own. The two natures, each keeping its own properties, met in a single presented person — a single prosopon, the one Christ who could be named, worshipped, and addressed as one. His careful insistence on that distinction, his language of two natures held together in one prosopon, was, in his lifetime, a respected position, argued in good faith against the opposite danger of confusing the Creator with the creature.

The danger his critics later read in it was the reverse: that two natures held this firmly apart amounted to two persons loosely associated, a divine Word keeping company with a human man rather than becoming him — that the union he described was a partnership and not an identity. Whether his own words bear that charge, or whether his prosopon meant something far closer to a genuine single subject than his enemies allowed, became one of the long questions of later scholarship; he himself died before the controversy that would make the question unavoidable.

The heir and the suspicion

Nestorius, who came from the same Antiochene school and is often read as his theological heir, carried a similar emphasis north to the pulpit of Constantinople. There, in the winter of 428 — the year Theodore died — he objected to calling Mary the Mother of God, Theotokos, on the ground that a woman bears a person of her own kind and not the eternal Godhead, and proposed the narrower Christotokos instead. The objection was the two-nature instinct of Antioch turned into a controversy over a single word. Within three years it had cost Nestorius his see; the council that met at Ephesus in 431, opened by Cyril of Alexandria before the Syrian bishops arrived, condemned and deposed him, and his name was fixed to a heresy.

By association, Theodore’s own writings fell under suspicion. He was the master behind the condemned pupil, the source of the vocabulary Nestorius had pushed into open conflict, the teacher whose books the East-Syrian church revered above all others. Cyril, who had broken Nestorius, turned on the dead bishop’s works directly, gathering objectionable extracts and arguing that the root of the error lay there. For a generation the attack went no further than polemic. Theodore had died in the church’s good graces, and to condemn a man already at peace with God was a step the church had rarely taken.

The Three Chapters and 553

What followed is one of the stranger episodes in conciliar history. More than a hundred years after he died in communion with the church, Theodore became the chief target of the so-called Three Chapters controversy. The emperor, seeking to win back the anti-Chalcedonian churches of Egypt and Syria — for whom the Antiochene legacy was the great offense — issued an edict around 543 condemning three things at once: the person and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia; the writings of Theodoret of Cyrus against Cyril; and a letter of Ibas of Edessa. All three were Antiochene, all three friendly to the diophysite cause, and the gambit was meant to prove imperial orthodoxy against the suspicion that Chalcedon had been soft on Nestorianism.

At the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 the condemnation became conciliar law. Theodore’s person and his works were formally anathematized, his writings ordered destroyed, his name placed among those marked for heresy. The verdict was retrospective and, to many in the West at the time, deeply contested: to condemn a man who had died at peace with the church, and to do so under the pressure of the Byzantine court, looked to Latin bishops like an assault on the authority of Chalcedon itself, which had received Theodoret and Ibas. The reigning pope resisted for months, issued a document sparing Theodore’s personal memory while faulting propositions drawn from his books, then bent under coercion and accepted the council. In the Latin West the acceptance did not hold cleanly: churches in northern Italy broke communion with Rome over it, and the resulting schism in the provinces around Aquileia outlasted the emperor by generations. The controversy had begun as a maneuver of empire and ended as a wound in the unity it was meant to secure.

Destruction in Greek, survival in Syriac

The effect on the written record was lasting and nearly total. Most of Theodore’s vast output in Greek — and it was vast, commentaries on most of the biblical books, treatises on the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit, against the Origenists and the Apollinarians — was destroyed or left to perish once its author was a condemned heretic in the empire that held the manuscripts. Of the Greek, the commentary on the Twelve Prophets survives entire, a single great work that escaped because copyists could not easily tell it was his; otherwise the Greek comes down in fragments, often quoted by the very enemies who meant to bury him, embedded in the conciliar acts and in the catenae assembled to refute him.

What the empire destroyed, a church beyond its reach preserved. The Church of the East, the East-Syrian church centered in Persia outside the Roman frontier, never accepted the verdict of 553 and held Theodore as its supreme doctor — “the Interpreter” without qualification, the standard against which all reading of scripture was measured. At the School of Nisibis, the theological academy that shaped East-Syrian clergy for centuries, the senior professor bore the very title of Interpreter and taught the Bible through Theodore’s commentaries, adding little of his own. His works were translated into Syriac and copied for the worship and instruction of a Christianity that carried his two-nature confession east along the trade routes into Central Asia, India, and Tang China — a whole branch of the faith reading scripture through a man the Greek and Latin councils had anathematized. A eucharistic liturgy, the Hallowing of Theodore the Interpreter, still bears his name in the East Syriac rite. Much of his theology reaches the present only through this Syriac channel: his catechetical homilies on the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the sacraments; his commentary on the Gospel of John; portions of his commentary on the Psalms. The man the empire tried to erase was, in another language and another empire, the first authority of the faith.

Recovery and the modern verdict

Modern scholarship has largely worked to recover him from the caricature the condemnation left behind, and the work began with manuscripts the East had kept and the West had never read. The recovery turned in the early twentieth century on the publication of long-lost Syriac texts — above all the catechetical homilies, edited from Mingana manuscripts and printed in the early 1930s, which for the first time let his Christology be read at length and in context rather than through the extracts his prosecutors had chosen. Read whole, the homilies make several of the condemned propositions sound less like the partition of Christ than like a careful guarding of his humanity, and they reopened the question of whether the man taught the heresy named for his pupil.

His exegesis fared even better in the modern eye. The literal-historical method that struck a later age as irreverence reads now as a serious early attempt at something like historical criticism — attention to authorship, occasion, genre, and original audience, a refusal to let dogma dictate the sense of a verse, a willingness to ask what a text meant before asking what it had come to mean. It is an approach to the Bible that the academic study of scripture would arrive at independently after the long Middle Ages, centuries past his erasure. The question of whether his Christology was genuinely “Nestorian,” or whether that label was projected backward onto a thinker who died before the controversy hardened, remains open, argued from the recovered Syriac and the Greek fragments in turn. He sits at a fault line: between two ancient ways of reading sacred text, and between an age that honored him and one that struck his name from its books.

Texts and scholarship

Of Theodore’s Greek corpus, the Commentary on the Twelve Prophets alone survives complete; it is available in English in Robert C. Hill’s translation in the Fathers of the Church series (Catholic University of America Press, 2004), the only one of his major commentaries to come down whole in its original language. The Greek fragments and catena excerpts of his other commentaries were gathered by Robert Devreesse and others; his Commentary on the Gospel of John survives in a Syriac version edited with a Latin rendering by Jacques Vosté (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Louvain, 1940), with a modern English translation by George Kalantzis (2004). Much of his Commentary on the Psalms is recoverable from the Greek catenae and a Latin epitome.

The decisive modern documents are the Syriac catechetical works edited and translated by Alphonse Mingana in his Woodbrooke Studies: the commentary on the Nicene Creed (1932) and the commentary on the Lord’s Prayer and the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist (1933). The introduction to the Nicene Creed volume is available online, as is the prologue to his commentary on Acts. For the modern reassessment, Frederick G. McLeod’s volume in the Early Church Fathers series (Routledge, 2009) collects and translates representative texts with a study of the prosopic union, the assumed man, and the indwelling of good pleasure; the scholarly debate over whether his two-prosopa-in-one-prosopon language is heretical or orthodox is set out in McLeod’s journal studies. On how the East received and transmitted him while the empire condemned him, Adam H. Becker’s study of the sixth-century reception traces the divergence of the Greek, Syriac, and Latin afterlives. J. N. D. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines gives the balanced textbook account of his Christology and the controversy that consumed it.

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