Flavian

Saint Flavian of Constantinople was patriarch of that city in the mid-fifth century and is venerated as a bishop and martyr in both East and West. Almost nothing secure is known of his early life: neither the year nor the place of his birth is recorded in surviving sources. He first appears as a priest of the church of Constantinople and as its oikonomos, or steward. After the death of Patriarch Proclus he was chosen for the see in 446. Ancient accounts portray him as austere and comparatively unskilled in court politics, a character that soon placed him at odds with influential figures around the emperor Theodosius II.

The crisis of his patriarchate was the teaching of the archimandrite Eutyches, an aged and well-connected monk in the capital. Eutyches was understood to deny that Christ remained consubstantial with humanity after the Incarnation and to assert a single nature in Christ. In November 448 Flavian presided over a home synod at Constantinople which examined Eutyches, judged his doctrine incompatible with the faith of Nicaea and of Ephesus, and deposed him. Eutyches rejected the sentence and obtained support from the chamberlain Chrysaphius and from Dioscorus of Alexandria. Pope Leo I, informed of the case, sent Flavian the doctrinal letter later called the Tome of Leo, affirming two natures in the one person of Christ.

In August 449 a council met at Ephesus under Dioscorus’s presidency. Later known as the Latrocinium or Robber Council, it denied Flavian and the papal legates a fair hearing, restored Eutyches, and deposed Flavian. According to multiple ancient witnesses he was beaten by soldiers and by Dioscorus’s partisans, condemned to exile, and died of his injuries shortly afterward in 449, in Lydia in Asia Minor. The precise locality is not established with certainty: some reports place the death in a Lydian village after the journey into exile, others associate it more closely with the violence at Ephesus itself.

Theodosius II died in 450. Under Marcian and Pulcheria imperial policy was reversed. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 condemned the Robber Council, deposed Dioscorus, and rehabilitated Flavian, whose confession was held to agree with Leo’s Tome and with the doctrine of two natures united in one person. His relics were translated to Constantinople and laid in the Church of the Holy Apostles. He is commemorated as a martyr; the Roman Martyrology keeps his feast on 18 February, and Byzantine calendars also remember him in mid-February. No particular patronages are securely attached to his cult. Recognition as a saint came by liturgical veneration and by the judgment of Chalcedon, long before later formal canonization procedures.