Theotimus

Saint Theotimus was bishop of Tomis (Tomi), the principal city of the Roman province of Scythia Minor on the western Black Sea coast, in the region later known as the Dobruja. He flourished in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. The principal contemporary witnesses are the church historians Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen, together with Saint Jerome. Sozomen describes him as a Scythian by origin who had been formed in the philosophical life, a phrase that in Christian usage of that age normally meant a disciplined ascetic and a man of letters rather than a pagan school philosopher. Jerome, compiling his catalogue of Christian writers about 392–393, already knew Theotimus as bishop of Tomis and as the author of short, pointed treatises in dialogue form, written in a classical manner, and added that further works were then in hand. None of those writings survive, and no ancient full-length life of Theotimus is extant. His biography must therefore be reconstructed from these brief but independent notices rather than from later legend.

As bishop of a Danubian frontier see, Theotimus combined care of a mixed Greco-Roman and local flock with missionary contact beyond the empire. Sozomen records that he went among the Huns, that they treated him with unusual respect for a Christian cleric, and that he used gifts and ransoms to recover captives. Later martyrological tradition, echoing the historians, states that even unbelieving barbarians honoured him for holiness and for miracles attributed to him. Within the church he took a moderate, learned line in the controversies of his generation. When Theophilus of Alexandria was attacking the memory and books of Origen, Theotimus is reported to have argued that it was unreasonable to condemn wholesale what earlier teachers had found useful. He belonged to the wider circle that supported Saint John Chrysostom: the same historians present him as aligned with the bishop of Constantinople during the conflicts that ended in Chrysostom’s deposition and exile. He thus stands at the intersection of frontier mission, Greek literary culture, and the Origenist and Johannite crises of the turn of the fifth century.

No reliable source records the year or place of his birth, the year of his death, or the site of his burial. He was already bishop and a published author by the early 390s and was still active in the first years of the fifth century, when the disputes over Origen and over Chrysostom were at their height. Later handbooks sometimes assign his death to the early fifth century, but that is an inference from the silence of the sources after those events, not a dated obituary. He is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on 20 April, with the notice that at Tomis in Scythia he was venerated even by infidel barbarians for outstanding holiness and miracles. Eastern calendars have also remembered him, though printed menologia are not wholly uniform as to the day. He was not Bishop of Rome, nor patriarch of an autocephalous see; Tomis was a suffragan bishopric of the Thracian/Scythian civil diocese. No medieval religious order claims him. The philosophical, ascetic character of his life as described by Sozomen, together with the ordinary discipline of Eastern bishops of his time, indicates a celibate career; no spouse or children are named in any surviving witness. His cult is that of an early bishop-saint of the lower Danube, known from Jerome and the Greek church historians rather than from a legendary passio.