Editor’s Introduction

Saint Theophylact, Archbishop of Ohrid and all Bulgaria, was born on the island of Euboea, at Euripus (Chalcis), some time between about 1050 and 1060. He went as a young man to Constantinople and studied literature and rhetoric under the capital’s leading teachers. He entered the clergy of the Great Church as a deacon of Hagia Sophia and took a place as a teacher of rhetoric in the patriarchal school, and he became known there as a preacher and a master of eloquence. Much of the present volume bears the mark of that training: the balanced periods, the classical allusions, the ease with which a Scripture text and a line of Euripides can stand in one sentence.

The court soon drew on his gifts. He became tutor to Constantine Doukas, born around 1074, the son of the emperor Michael VII and of the empress Maria of Alania, and the empress remained his patron. For Constantine he wrote The Education of a Prince, which closes this collection. Maria’s household afterward became a center of literary patronage, and the tradition that links Theophylact’s biblical commentaries to her encouragement comes from the same circle.

At some point in the late eleventh century he was consecrated bishop and sent to Ohrid, the seat of the Bulgarian church, a posting he is said to have accepted against his own wishes. The year of his appointment is variously given, from 1078 to about 1090, and recent accounts more often give the later dates. He remained there for the rest of his active life. More than 130 of his letters survive, and they reveal a bishop who missed the libraries and friends of Constantinople, who complained of provincial manners, and who nonetheless pleaded his people’s cause before the imperial government. The latest event that can be dated from his correspondence falls in 1107–1108, and he is reported to have spent his last years at Thessalonica. The place and date of his death are uncertain. The Church commemorates him on 31 December.

He is best known for his commentaries on the four Gospels, Acts, the Epistles and several of the Minor Prophets, works that draw heavily on John Chrysostom and have been read by Eastern Christians for nine centuries. The five pieces gathered here come from the same pen and the same mind, and they show the rest of his ministry: the preacher at the feast, the counselor of a young sovereign, and the bishop asked by a friend how to think about Christians of the West.

The five works in this volume were composed for five different occasions and belong to three literary kinds. Three are homilies, each tied to a liturgical moment. One is a short treatise in reply to a private request. One is an address to a prince. The volume is a gathering, arranged in the order in which the pieces stand in the standard Greek edition of his works.

The Oration on the Veneration of the Precious Cross belongs to the veneration of the Cross at the midpoint of Great Lent, kept on the third Sunday of the fast, when the cross is brought out and set in the middle of the church. Theophylact says as much in his own words: the Cross is set forth “in the middle of the fasting days.” The Oration on the Feast of Our Most Holy Theotokos, When She Was Brought to the Temple by Her Parents belongs to the feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple, kept on 21 November, and it retells the story of Mary’s presentation as the Protoevangelium of James tells it. The third homily, The Last Part of the Homily on the Eleventh Matins Gospel, comes from the Sunday cycle of eleven Resurrection Gospels read at Matins in the Byzantine rite; the eleventh is John 21:15–25. Only its final portion survives in the printed text, and the piece opens in the middle of an argument.

The Discourse to One of His Companions Concerning the Charges Against the Latins takes its occasion from a letter. A “most reverent son in the Lord” asked Theophylact to reply, as briefly as he could, to the ecclesiastical errors of the Latins, which the questioner believed to be many and grave enough to divide the Churches. The date is not recorded. The treatise was written in the decades after the exchange of excommunications between Rome and Constantinople in 1054, a time when, as a recent presentation of the text observes, there was still no sense of a complete separation.

The Education of a Prince, in Greek Paideia Basilike, in Latin Institutio Regia, was addressed to the young Constantine Doukas while Theophylact was still tutor at the capital. A modern account dates its delivery to about 1085–1086. It addresses the boy as emperor, which he was in title, and it speaks of his mother Maria as one who has already taken up the monastic life.

Each piece shows Theophylact at work in a role the commentaries seldom display. A commentator on Scripture sits with a text and follows its lines. A preacher must hold a congregation and send it back into the week changed. A counselor must speak to one person about a hard question. A tutor must persuade a boy who will one day rule.

The five works are gathered in a deliberate order. The three homilies come first and keep the rhythm of the Church’s year, from the Lenten cross to the winter feast to the Sunday Gospel. Then come the two works that carry the reader outside the church building, first to a question of doctrine and order that concerned the whole Christian world, then to the palace.

The oration begins by asking whether it is right to praise the Cross when so many have praised it already. Theophylact answers that gratitude is owed by every member of the body, each according to its ability, and that the sacrifices of the old tabernacle differed with the means of the givers. He then lays a foundation of two creations: the first is the passage from non-being into being, and the second is the passage from bad living to good living, the correction of the moral choice.

From there he takes up the forty days of the Lenten fast and reads them carefully. The fast begins on a Monday and ends on the Friday before the raising of Lazarus, and the days that follow belong to the Passion. Forty is the product of four and ten, the four general and ten foundational commandments; knowledge of the commandments and the practice of the virtues have to grow together, like body and soul. Fasting without works earns no crown, whether it is the fasting that Isaiah records God rejecting, the fasting of heretics, or that of a believer who fasts and then indulges.

The core of the oration explains why the Cross stands in the middle of Lent. It cheers the runner in mid-course, as trainers shout from the stadium rail, and it holds out the resurrection to which the Cross leads by the hand. Theophylact then explains what the Cross accomplished. The adversary had overcome humankind with two hands, pleasure and grief. In the wilderness Christ overcame the first, and in the Passion the second, and the death of the sinless Lord, unjustly inflicted, dissolved the just death that Adam had incurred. Reconciliation with the Father comes through the Cross, which he calls its mediator.

The last third of the oration turns to application. He names the Cross as power, armor, sign, wisdom and footstool, and then addresses in turn the king, the soldier, the rich, the poor, the honored and the despised, the person at ease and the person cast down, the priest, the monk, the simple believer, the tax collector and the thief. Each has something to take from the Cross. He ends with the bending of the knee, which recalls death to sin and rising to righteousness, and with the supper prepared at the altar and in the kingdom.

Theophylact opens on the limits of praise: even angelic speech could not match her worth, and silence would be ungrateful. He proceeds by way of a brief history of providence. Human nature had fallen and been scattered among opinions; God had instructed it through law and prophets and dreams, and when these proved insufficient, he came in the likeness of sinful flesh. The birth of the one who would bear him had to be sanctified, and so the parents were chosen.

He then follows the story told in the Protoevangelium of James, chapters 4–8. Joachim and Anna are righteous and childless; they turn to fasting and prayer and reject charms and sorcerers, and they receive a daughter. They give her back to God. A procession of kin, neighbors and torch-bearing girls leads the three-year-old to the Temple, the priests come out with hymns, and the high priest, moved by God, sets her in the Holy of Holies, a place that no one but himself entered, and he only once a year. Theophylact reads the act as the beginning of the end of the Law and as a pledge of the entrance into the heavenly sanctuary that Christ would open for all.

The oration next explains the details as signs: the child is female because a woman brought in transgression and a woman leads the way back; three years old, because the number signifies the Trinity; the lamps are the light of life kept in the hands of active labor. A rebuke to those who cling to the letter follows, and then the turn to the hearers. The soul that has been barren may conceive the fear of the Lord; the virgin is told to guard her purity; the married are told that marriage does not separate them from God, since Joachim and Anna were married and became forebears of God according to the flesh. The oration ends with the wish that all may enter the more perfect Holy of Holies, where Christ has entered as forerunner.

The surviving portion picks up an argument about the end of the apostle John. The Gospel’s final chapter reports a saying among the brothers that the beloved disciple would not die, and the evangelist replies that Jesus never said this. A popular belief, of which Augustine also wrote, held that John lay sleeping, still alive, in his tomb at Ephesus. Theophylact gathers the testimony of earlier writers to the contrary: Eusebius, who writes that John died at Ephesus; Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, who says that John fell asleep there; Hippolytus of Rome, who says that his remains, though sought, were never found; and Caesarius, brother of Gregory the Theologian, who reads Jesus’s reply to Peter as a rebuke of the disciples’ misunderstanding.

He then takes up the idea that John lives on to be a witness at the end alongside Enoch and Elijah, and answers it from the two witnesses of Revelation 11, whom he identifies as Enoch and Elijah alone. The piece finishes with a short exposition of John 21:24–25, the evangelist’s own testimony and the remark that the world could not contain the books that would record all that Jesus did, and a closing doxology to the Trinity.

The treatise has a prologue and seventeen numbered sections. In the prologue Theophylact says that he does not think the Latins’ errors are many, nor such as could split the Churches, except one that bears on the head of the faith. He also describes a temper he sees around him, in which each person hurries to seem someone by charging the majority with heresy.

The second section lists what the questioner regards as Latin faults: unleavened bread at the offering, fasting on the Sabbath, a different reckoning of the fast before Easter, the treatment of clerical and lay marriage, shaved beards, rings and silk vestments on clergy, meat-eating among ascetics, and the manner of their prostration at worship, together with the eating of strangled meat. He treats these as customs and turns to the single point he regards as touching doctrine, the words “and the Son” added in the West to the Creed’s article on the Holy Spirit. The next five sections (3–7) argue the case. Christ speaks of the Spirit as proceeding from the Father, and Theophylact distinguishes procession, the manner in which the Spirit has his being from the Father, from sending, giving and imparting, which are said of the Spirit in relation to the Son. If the two were the same, he says, the Son would be a second cause of the Spirit. He grants that a language with few words might blur the distinction in ordinary speech and sermons, but he asks that the Creed confess procession from the Father alone.

Sections 8 to 10 take the unleavened bread and the Sabbath fast. He reasons that Christ ate the legal Passover and then gave the disciples his own mystery from the bread that happened to be at hand; that the churches of Jerusalem, Egypt, Libya and Corinth used leavened loaves; and that the canons of Laodicea and those the sixth council confirmed, and Basil’s homilies on fasting, tell against a Sabbath fast. Section 11 defers the question of clerical marriage, since the Latins raise it against the East in turn.

Section 13 adds that an addition to the Creed cannot be excused by the dignity of the see that makes it, and it touches in passing on the claims made for Peter. The last seven sections (12–18) turn to Theophylact’s own side. Using the image of a physician who treats the vital organs first, he says that the faith must be defended in earnest, and that what does not touch the essentials can be left alone. He invokes Paul’s adaptability, the ship’s captain who slackens the sheet in a high wind, and Gamaliel’s restraint, and he warns those who fasten the names of old heresies on a brother out of pride. The treatise closes with a call to bear with the weak and heal the broken.

The work has two parts. Part One, a panegyric in thirteen chapters, praises the young Constantine: his imperial city and its temperate air, his agile body, his memory and quickness of mind, his father and grandfather, and most at length his mother Maria, whose renunciation of imperial luxury for a hard monastic life, her alms given by night, her learning and her care for her son are set out with warmth. A digression (chapter 10) criticizes patrons who build new foundations under their own names while old houses decay.

Part Two, an admonition in thirty chapters, converts that praise into an obligation. The gifts God gave Constantine make him more blessed than any emperor if he adds virtue to them, and more wretched if he wastes them. Kingship without kingly character is empty. After a brief account of three legitimate and three corrupt forms of government, Theophylact paints the tyrant, who seizes power by bloodshed, plunders and terrorizes his people, and lives in dread of his own bodyguard, and then the just king, who receives rule from the goodwill of his people and rests it on piety.

The remaining chapters treat particular duties: to keep faithful friends and shun flatterers; to test officials first in a man, then in a household, then in a city; to work as the helmsman works; to train in arms in time of peace and honor the old soldiers; to keep away buffoons and hold company with the learned; to love humanity as God does, using the sword rarely, like the king bee that has no sting; and to surpass his subjects in virtue and wisdom as the shepherd surpasses the sheep. Theophylact promises a further discourse if this one is well received and ends by telling Constantine to obey his mother, since God will then be his fellow worker.

The five pieces speak to different questions, and the same character can be traced through all of them. Theophylact wants doctrine to issue in life. In the oration on the Cross the forty days of Lent exist for the sake of works joined to knowledge, and the closing sections bring the theology of the Cross to bear on the king, the beggar, the monk and the thief. The oration on the Theotokos moves from a temple procession to the virgins and married couples in the congregation.

The Cross oration gives a compact account of redemption in the Eastern tradition. Two ideas carry its argument: that Christ meets and conquers the enemy on the ground of pleasure and of grief, and that his death, endured without sin and therefore unjustly, cancels the debt of humankind’s just death. The oration on the Entrance belongs to the Church’s Marian devotion and gives Joachim and Anna the honor of ancestors of God according to the flesh. The story itself comes from the Protoevangelium of James, which stands outside the canonical Gospels, and the feast has no direct biblical reference; the oration reads it as a sign of grace passing beyond the Law into the Church.

The short piece on the Matins Gospel shows a habit of mind found in the commentaries as well. Where a popular belief goes beyond what Scripture and the early witnesses support, Theophylact sets out the witnesses one by one, and he treats the testimony of the Fathers as the surer guide.

Against the Latins deserves careful reading for what it argues and for how it argues. Theophylact stands within the Eastern tradition and states its position on the procession of the Spirit with confidence and a full set of arguments. Churches of the West, which added the words “and the Son” to the Latin Creed, have understood that addition differently, and the question has been discussed at councils and in modern ecumenical dialogue. This volume reports Theophylact’s treatise as he wrote it. What stands out in it, and what has drawn modern readers, is its method: it distinguishes matters that touch the faith from matters of custom, it holds that not every difference of custom can divide the Churches, and it says that the correction of an erring brother should be attempted with gentleness. Theophylact also holds up a mirror to his own side and finds pride and zeal without knowledge there.

The Education of a Prince belongs to the long tradition of Greek writing on kingship. Its Christian marks are the claim that piety is the foundation of a king’s rule and that his love of humanity should imitate God’s. The tyrant chapters press this in vivid images, and the chapters on friends and on flatterers show what counsel Theophylact hoped his pupil would keep.

Theophylact’s fame has always rested chiefly on the commentaries. A twentieth-century bishop of Ohrid, Nikolaj Velimirović, called them the finest works of their sort after those of Chrysostom, and they are still read for their benefit. The Latin West knew them as well: Thomas Aquinas drew on his Gospel commentaries in the Catena Aurea, and Latin translations appeared in the sixteenth century. The shorter works in this volume travelled with the larger corpus. They were gathered in the Venice edition of Theophylact’s works, published in 1754–1763 with a dissertation by Bernardo Maria de Rubeis, and reprinted by Migne as volume 126 of the Patrologia Graeca.

Each of the five has had its own life. The orations continue to be tied to the days on which they were preached: the third Sunday of Lent, the feast of 21 November, and the Sunday Gospels of the Resurrection cycle. The treatise on the Latins has been read in more than one way. Some readers value it as a witness that a Byzantine bishop in the decades after 1054 could regard nearly all Latin usages as matters of custom, and that he pleaded for patience toward them. Others read it as a compact statement of the Eastern case on the Creed. The two readings sit together without difficulty, and both find support in the text.

This volume is a fresh modern English translation made from the Greek text printed in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, volume 126 (Paris, 1864). The columns are as follows: the oration on the Cross, 106–129; the oration on the Entrance of the Theotokos, 130–145; the homily on the Eleventh Matins Gospel, 146–150; the Discourse concerning the Latins, 222–253; and The Education of a Prince, 254–286. Migne’s volumes reprint the eighteenth-century Venice edition and are not a critical edition. In several places the printed Greek is corrupt or has been marked with dots for a lost word. Where that happens, the translation follows the correction in Migne’s own margin or the reading of his facing Latin translation, and a short note says so.

Brief notes identify Scripture echoes, classical allusions and the earlier writers Theophylact cites, where these could be confirmed. The chapter numbers and headings of The Education of a Prince follow the Latin Index of Chapters in Migne, since several of the printed Greek headings are damaged. Old Testament citations follow the Septuagint in text and numbering, as Theophylact’s own Bible did, and New Testament citations follow the standard numbering; Scripture references are given in Arabic numerals.

The house conventions apply throughout. Theophylact is credited as the author and Royal Archives as the translator.

A reader new to Theophylact can begin with the oration on the Cross, which is the most complete of the homilies and shows his voice best. The oration on the Entrance rewards a slower reading, since it moves quickly between narrative and interpretation, and it is best read alongside the passage of the Protoevangelium of James that it follows. The Matins fragment is short and can be read in a few minutes, preferably with John 21 open.

Against the Latins rewards a reading in two passes. On the first, follow the argument on the Spirit in sections 3 to 7 and the counsel in sections 12 to 18, which can be understood without any specialized background. On the second, look at the arguments on the bread and the fast, which depend on the church history of Theophylact’s day. The Education of a Prince is easy to read once its opening is past: the panegyric is ornate, and the second part is direct and often vivid. Readers who enjoy it may find that the tyrant chapters and the chapters on friendship are the ones to which they return.