Sophronius of Jerusalem

Sophronius of Jerusalem, also called Sophronius the Sophist, was a seventh-century monk, theologian, hymnographer, and Patriarch of Jerusalem. He was born in Damascus, in Byzantine Syria, in the mid-sixth century; no contemporary source records an exact year of birth. Of Greek culture and education, he was trained in rhetoric and philosophy, which accounts for the epithet later attached to his name. Drawn to the ascetic life, he became a monk and formed a close companionship with John Moschus. The two traveled widely among the monastic settlements of Egypt, including the Nitrian desert, then to Mount Sinai and the lavras and coenobia of Palestine. After Moschus died in Rome around 619, tradition holds that Sophronius brought his companion’s remains back to Palestine for burial. Their journeys supplied much of the material for Moschus’s Spiritual Meadow, which was dedicated to Sophronius.

In the following decades Sophronius became a leading voice of Chalcedonian orthodoxy in the East. He composed liturgical poetry, including a cycle of anacreontic odes on the holy places of Jerusalem, as well as homilies. He opposed both lingering Monophysitism and the imperial Monothelite policy associated with Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople and Emperor Heraclius, insisting that Christ possessed two natures, two energies, and two wills. When the see of Jerusalem fell vacant he was elected patriarch in 634. His synodical letter, sent to the other patriarchal sees including Rome, set out a detailed dyothelite confession and remains an important theological document of the period.

His patriarchate coincided with the Arab conquest of Syria and Palestine. After the Byzantine defeat at the Yarmuk in 636, Jerusalem was isolated and underwent a prolonged siege. In 637 Sophronius, as the city’s principal Christian authority, negotiated its surrender to Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab. Later Christian narratives describe a courteous meeting in which Umar declined to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre so that the building would remain in Christian hands, and the terms of capitulation guaranteed the security of the Christian population and their churches. These arrangements were later associated in tradition with the so-called Pact of Umar. Sources portray Sophronius as deeply grieved by the loss of the holy city.

He died in Jerusalem in March 638, only months after the surrender, and is remembered as the last patriarch to preside over the city while it still had a Byzantine Christian majority. His surviving works include the synodical letter, twenty-three anacreontic poems, and several sermons, among them homilies on the Holy Cross and the Presentation. A Life of Saint Mary of Egypt has traditionally been ascribed to him, though modern scholarship disputes the attribution. He is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church; his feast is kept on 11 March. No widely attested later patronages are attached to his name.