Today is the feast of a very interesting and unusual character in the history of the English people, a seventh-century archbishop of Canterbury named Theodore.
He was born at the very beginning of that century in southeast Asia Minor, at Tarsus, more famous as the birthplace of St Paul, then still part of the Byzantine Empire. Very little is known of his early life, but it seems clear that if he did not move west when the region was invaded by the Persians in 613-14, he certainly did when it was taken by the Arabs in 637. It has been guessed that before this, he was educated at Antioch and possibly also Edessa, both important centers of Christianity in ancient times. After living in Constantinople for many years as a monk, but not a priest, he moved to Rome. Despite the disintegration of the Empire, and the city’s very considerable drop in population, the old capital was still very much a crossroads of humanity, and Theodore settled in one of the Greek monastic communities that were still numerous there. He learned Latin and became as familiar with its literature as he was with that of his native language. (
Pictured right: a stained glass window of St Theodore in the Anglican church of St John the Evangelist in Knotty Ash, England. Image from Wikimedia Commons by Rodhullandemu, CC BY-SA 4.0) In 664, the first native English archbishop of Canterbury, St Deusdedit, died. The see had been founded less than 70 years earlier by the Roman monks whom Pope St Gregory the Great had sent to England, and the new English hierarchy still felt a strong dependence on Rome. His successor, Wighard, was therefore sent to Rome to be consecrated, but died before this could happen. Pope Vitalian wished to nominate in his place a Benedictine abbot from Naples named Adrian, but the latter refused this honor, and recommended Theodore in his place. St Vitalian accepted on condition that Adrian go with him as an adviser. Thus a Greek from Asia Minor, who could boast that he was a fellow-citizen of one of the authors of the New Testament, and had perhaps studied in the place where the word “Christian” was invented, found himself bishop of a see more than 2,200 miles from his birthplace. Adrian was in origin a North African Berber; his specific birthplace is unknown, but the chief see of that region, Carthage, is well over 1,200 miles away from Canterbury.
Theodore was highly successful as archbishop, and helped to give the organization of the church in England a permanent form which in many ways would endure until the Reformation, nearly nine centuries later. He made Adrian abbot of the monastery of Ss Peter and Paul in Canterbury, (later renamed for St Augustine, the leader of St Gregory’s English mission), and together they established a school there, of which St Bede the Venerable writes:
“And because they were both very well instructed in both sacred and secular letters, … they gathered a group of disciples, and daily poured forth rivers of saving knowledge to water their hearts; and thus taught their students, together with the books of holy writ, the sacred disciplines of the arts of poetry, astronomy, and arithmetic. As a testimony of this is the fact to this very day, there are still living some of their students, who know Latin and Greek just as well as they know their native language. Nor were there ever happier times since the English came into Britain; since they had kings who were most brave and Christians, and were a terror to the barbarous nations, and the prayers of all men hung upon the joys of the heavenly kingdom of which they had just heard; and all who desired to be instructed in sacred reading had masters at hand to teach them.” (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, 4.2)
Many pupils of the school at Canterbury became bishops and abbots, and continued elsewhere their teachers’ tradition of learning. Theodore himself died in 690 at the age of 88, after serving as archbishop for twenty-two years. The success of his mission may be judged from these words of Christopher Dawson, one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, who wrote this about Bede (671-735) as a product of the generation of scholars trained by Theodore and his contemporaries: “No one could guess from the study of his work that a man like Bede … was hardly two generations removed from pagan barbarism.” (Medieval Essays, p. 144)
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| St Bede writing his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in a German manuscript of the 12th century. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) |
