Anysius

Anysius was bishop of Thessalonica in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, succeeding Ascholius (also called Acholius), the bishop who had baptized Emperor Theodosius I at Thessalonica in 380. Anysius took up the see not long after Ascholius’s death, which is generally placed in 383. Thessalonica was then the chief city of Macedonia and the ecclesiastical metropolis for much of the prefecture of Illyricum. The city combined close ties to the imperial court with a long-standing relationship to the church of Rome, and Anysius’s episcopate unfolded as the Eastern and Western halves of the empire drew administratively apart after Theodosius I died in 395.

The bishops of Rome treated Anysius as papal vicar for Eastern Illyricum. Pope Siricius wrote to him confirming the traditional rights of the see of Thessalonica to supervise episcopal elections and discipline across the prefecture, an arrangement already associated with Ascholius. Pope Innocent I likewise corresponded with Anysius and maintained the vicariate. In that capacity Anysius served as a principal link between Rome and the churches of Macedonia, Greece, and the neighboring Balkan provinces at a time when questions of jurisdiction between Rome and Constantinople were becoming more sharply drawn.

Anysius was known to Ambrose of Milan, who addressed a letter to him after Ascholius’s death, praising the late bishop and urging Anysius to follow his example. Anysius belonged to the Nicene party that had been secured in the empire after the Council of Constantinople in 381. In the early fifth century he and other bishops of Macedonia sided with John Chrysostom when Chrysostom was deposed and exiled from Constantinople. That stance aligned them with Pope Innocent I and the Western churches, who regarded the condemnation as unjust.

Almost nothing is recorded of Anysius’s family, birthplace, or early career. He is last securely attested in correspondence of about 406, and by the second decade of the fifth century Rufus had succeeded him at Thessalonica. Later tradition numbered him among the saints; some calendars associate his memory with 30 December, a date also kept for the earlier virgin martyr Anysia of the same city. No contemporary narrative of his death or burial survives, and the history of any local cult is poorly documented in the extant sources.