Severus

Severus of Antioch was a leading theologian and ecclesiastical head of the anti-Chalcedonian (miaphysite) movement in the eastern Roman Empire in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. He was born in Sozopolis in the province of Pisidia, in Asia Minor, into a family already connected with the church; later sources report that his paternal grandfather had been bishop of Sozopolis and had taken part in the Council of Ephesus in 431. The exact year of his birth is not recorded in contemporary documents and is known only approximately from later tradition. As a young man he received a classical education, studying grammar and rhetoric at Alexandria and law at Berytus (Beirut), then a major school of Roman jurisprudence. After these secular studies he received baptism—later tradition places the event at the martyr-shrine of Leontius in Tripoli in Phoenicia—and entered the monastic life in Palestine, in communities around Gaza associated with Peter the Iberian and with a strict Cyrillian reading of Christology.

In the first decade of the sixth century Severus became a principal opponent of the Council of Chalcedon (451) and of bishops who accepted that council’s definition of two natures in Christ. He argued, in the line of Cyril of Alexandria, that after the Incarnation Christ is one incarnate nature of God the Word, and he treated Chalcedon and the Tome of Leo as Nestorianizing. Under the emperor Anastasius I, whose religious policy favored the opponents of Chalcedon, Severus was chosen patriarch of Antioch and consecrated in 512, in succession to Flavian II. As patriarch he preached an extensive cycle of Cathedral Homilies, issued synodical letters, and sought to align the church of Antioch with miaphysite teaching. He wrote in Greek; a large part of his corpus survives complete only in Syriac translation, which became the main vehicle of his later influence in the non-Chalcedonian churches.

The accession of the emperor Justin I in 518 reversed imperial policy and restored Chalcedonian bishops. Severus was deposed from the see of Antioch and condemned. He escaped arrest and spent the remaining two decades of his life in exile in Egypt, moving among sympathetic monasteries and private houses to avoid imperial officers. From exile he continued to write treatises and letters, to provide episcopal leadership for anti-Chalcedonian congregations, and to debate fellow miaphysites, most notably Julian of Halicarnassus, whose teaching on the incorruptibility of Christ’s body Severus rejected. He died in Egypt in 538, on a date commemorated as 8 February. Early sources do not fix his burial place with certainty.

In the Oriental Orthodox churches, especially the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church, Severus is venerated as a saint, teacher, and confessor; his feast is observed on 8 February. The Chalcedonian churches of East and West historically listed him among the heresiarchs of the sixth century. No single act of canonization in the later Latin sense is recorded; his sanctity rests on continuous liturgical commemoration in the churches that rejected Chalcedon. Modern historical scholarship treats him as a central source for the institutional and doctrinal history of the non-Chalcedonian communities and as a major Greek theologian whose work must be recovered in large part through Syriac.