Anastasius I of Antioch

Anastasius I of Antioch was a Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch in the later sixth century, occupying the see in two separate periods, from 561 to 571 and again from 593 until his death in 599. He succeeded Domnus III during the reign of Emperor Justinian I. Almost nothing can be verified about his family, date of birth, or place of origin; later liturgical notices sometimes connect him with Palestine and with the monastic life before his elevation, but contemporary narrative sources do not establish those details. What can be said with confidence is that he was already regarded as a man of learning and as a preacher when he became patriarch, and that he belonged to the imperial, Chalcedonian hierarchy in a Syrian church still deeply divided after the Council of Chalcedon.

His first patriarchate was dominated by conflict with imperial religious policy. In the last years of Justinian, the emperor sought to impose aphthartodocetism, the teaching associated with Julian of Halicarnassus that Christ’s body was incorruptible even before the Resurrection. Anastasius refused to accept the edict and preached against it. Justinian moved to have him removed, but died in 565 before the deposition was completed. Under Justin II the sentence was carried out: Anastasius was deposed in 570 or 571 and replaced by Gregory of Antioch. He remained in exile for more than twenty years, while many continued to regard him as the legitimate occupant of the see. The episode belongs to a wider pattern in which sixth-century emperors tried to force doctrinal formulas on the eastern patriarchates, and in which the Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch had to govern a region that also possessed a rival Miaphysite hierarchy descending from Severus of Antioch.

Restoration came after Gregory of Antioch died in 593, under Emperor Maurice. Pope Gregory the Great, who esteemed Anastasius and exchanged letters with him, is commonly associated with the diplomacy that accompanied his return to the see. In his second tenure Anastasius maintained communion with both Rome and Constantinople and resumed theological work. He wrote against tritheism, the doctrine linked to John Philoponus that seemed to divide the Trinity into three substances, and he composed homilies and treatises on the Trinity and the Incarnation. The manuscript tradition later confused some of this material with writings of the seventh-century monk Anastasius of Sinai, a different figure, so the exact corpus of the patriarch remains difficult to delimit.

Anastasius I died in 599 while still in office at Antioch and was succeeded by Anastasius II. He is commemorated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, with a feast on 20 April. Surviving knowledge of his life depends mainly on ecclesiastical historians of the period, especially Evagrius Scholasticus, on papal correspondence, and on later synaxaria. Those sources yield a coherent outline of his two patriarchates, his resistance to aphthartodocetism, his long exile, and his restoration, but they leave his early years, burial, and personal circumstances largely undocumented.