Patriarch Theodore I of Alexandria

Theodore I was the Chalcedonian (Greek, or Melkite) patriarch of Alexandria in the first decade of the seventh century, occupying the see for a short period usually given as 607 to 609. He stands in the line of patriarchs who, after the Council of Chalcedon, remained in communion with the imperial church of Constantinople and with Rome, as distinct from the Coptic miaphysite patriarchs who commanded the allegiance of most Egyptian Christians. Next to nothing has come down about his family, birthplace, or formation. He is known almost exclusively from patriarchal catalogues that insert him between Eulogius I and John the Almsgiver (John V). Those catalogues, and brief allusions in later hagiography of John, are the basis for dating his rule to the closing years of the emperor Phocas.

The church of Alexandria had been divided for a century and a half by the time Theodore became patriarch. Chalcedon’s definition of two natures in Christ had been rejected by a large part of the Egyptian hierarchy and monastic world, which followed the theology associated with Cyril of Alexandria as interpreted by Dioscorus and his successors. From the later fifth century onward there were therefore two rival bishops of Alexandria: a Chalcedonian patriarch, often supported by imperial officials and by the Greek-speaking population of the capital, and a Coptic pope whose authority was stronger in the monasteries and the countryside. Theodore belonged to the former succession. His predecessor Eulogius I, patriarch from the 580s until 607 or 608, had been an active theological writer and a correspondent of Pope Gregory I of Rome; Eulogius’s relative prominence in the sources only underlines how little was written about Theodore himself.

Theodore’s two years in office coincided with a troubled moment in Byzantine political history. Phocas had seized the throne in 602; his reign was marked by revolt, fiscal strain, and the beginning of a disastrous war with Sasanian Persia. Egypt was not yet a battlefield, but the imperial government on which the Chalcedonian patriarchate depended was weakening. No synodal acts, letters, or chronicles describe Theodore’s administration, his relations with the Coptic hierarchy, or his dealings with the Augustal prefect at Alexandria. When he died or otherwise vacated the see—traditionally in 609—the appointment of a successor fell to the new regime of Heraclius, who took power in 610. The choice was John, a wealthy Cypriot later surnamed the Almsgiver, whose charity during the Persian wars made him one of the best-known saints of the Greek church in Egypt.

The Melkite patriarchate that Theodore headed was still counted among the five great sees of the Christian pentarchy, even though its real flock in Egypt was limited. Greek liturgy and the imperial creed continued in the patriarchal churches of Alexandria, while the Coptic church maintained its own pope, at that time members of the succession that included Anastasius and Andronicus in the early seventh century. Within a decade of Theodore’s death the Sasanians would occupy Egypt, and a generation later the Arab conquest would end Byzantine rule. Those upheavals, together with the fame of John the Almsgiver, have left Theodore I as an almost purely chronological figure: a name and a pair of years in the official list of Greek Orthodox patriarchs of Alexandria.

He is not to be confused with several other ecclesiastics named Theodore connected with Egypt, including early martyrs, the eighth-century Coptic Pope Theodore I, and later medieval Melkite patriarchs. No medieval liturgical calendar assigns him a feast, and he was not the object of a known cult. The absence of a vita or of contemporary narrative means that claims about his monastic status, place of death, or burial cannot be verified from surviving historical sources. His historical significance is therefore modest and structural: he preserved, for a very short interval, the continuity of the Chalcedonian succession at Alexandria on the eve of the Persian and Islamic transformations of Egypt.