Severus of Antioch

Severus of Antioch was a leading theologian and patriarch of the anti-Chalcedonian (miaphysite) tradition in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. He was born at Sozopolis in Pisidia, in Asia Minor, into a well-connected family; later tradition held that his grandfather had been bishop of that city. As a young man he received a thorough classical education, studying grammar and rhetoric at Alexandria and then law at Berytus (Beirut), then one of the principal legal schools of the Roman East. According to his contemporary biographer Zacharias Scholasticus, Severus remained a catechumen during his student years and received baptism only as an adult, at the shrine of the martyr Leontius in Tripolis in Phoenicia, in the later fifth century. After baptism he turned from a legal career toward asceticism. He visited holy places in Palestine, associated with the monastic circle of Peter the Iberian near Maiuma of Gaza, lived for a time as a hermit in the desert of Eleutheropolis, and eventually founded a monastery of his own in the Gaza region. He was ordained to the priesthood in that monastic setting.

In the first decade of the sixth century Severus emerged as a principal spokesman for those who rejected the Council of Chalcedon (451) and the Tome of Leo, while also refusing the extreme Eutychian denial of Christ's consubstantiality with humanity. He upheld the Christology of Cyril of Alexandria, especially the formula of the one incarnate nature of God the Word, understood as a union without mixture, change, division, or separation. In 508 he went to Constantinople with a delegation of Palestinian monks to seek the support of Emperor Anastasius I, who favored the Henotikon of Zeno and was hostile to strict Chalcedonianism. After the deposition of Patriarch Flavian II of Antioch, Severus was consecrated patriarch of Antioch in November 512. During a six-year patriarchate he preached the Cathedral Homilies, issued synodical letters, deposed Chalcedonian bishops where he could, and attempted to impose a coherent miaphysite settlement on the civil diocese of the East. His tenure ended when Anastasius died in 518 and the new emperor, Justin I, restored Chalcedonian bishops. Severus was condemned, fled Antioch in September 518, and took refuge in Egypt.

The remaining twenty years of his life were spent in exile, largely in hiding among the monasteries and Christian households of Egypt, though he continued to function as the intellectual and, for many, the canonical head of the anti-Chalcedonian communion. In the 520s he entered a sharp controversy with Julian of Halicarnassus, who taught that Christ's body was incorruptible from the moment of the Incarnation; Severus insisted that the body of Christ was consubstantial with ours and subject to the blameless passions until the Resurrection, and that Julian's view undermined the reality of the Incarnation. Under Justinian I he was invited to Constantinople around 535, where he found temporary allies in Patriarch Anthimus of Constantinople and Empress Theodora. The arrival of Pope Agapetus I and the synod held at Constantinople in 536 led to the condemnation of Severus, Anthimus, and Peter of Apamea; imperial legislation ordered the burning of Severus's writings. He returned to Egypt and died there on 8 February 538. Later Coptic and Syriac tradition places his death at Sakha (ancient Xois) in the Nile Delta.

Although Justinian ordered the destruction of his Greek works, a large corpus survives in Syriac translation, including the Cathedral Homilies, extensive correspondence, polemical treatises against Chalcedonians and against Julian, and liturgical material. These texts made Severus the decisive post-Cyrilline theologian of the churches that would become the Syriac Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, and related Oriental Orthodox communions, which venerate him as a saint and doctor. The Chalcedonian churches of the East and West, by contrast, numbered him among the condemned figures of the sixth-century controversies. His principal feast is observed on 8 February, the date of his death.