Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 23 May 2026
severus of antioch: update
Sebastian Brock Keywords: Severus, of Antioch, approximately 465–538; Anastasius I, Emperor of the East, ca. 430–518; Anathema; Antioch (Turkey); Apologetic writings; Authors; Coptic Christian Saints; Council of Chalcedon (451); Henoticon; Heresy; Julianus, Bishop of Halicarnassus, active 6th century; Justinian I, Emperor of the East, 483?–565; Miaphysitism; Monasteries; Monks; Monophysites; Orthodoxy; Patriarchs and patriarchate; Peter the Iberian, approximately 411– approximately 490; Philoxenus, Bishop of Hierapolis, approximately 440– 523; Saints; Syriac Christianity; Syriac language; Syriac Orthodox Church; Theodora, Empress, consort of Justinian I, Emperor of the East, –548; Theologians; Theology; Zeno, Emperor of the East, approximately 425–491 Life severos of antioch (Latinized spelling Severus) was born c. 465 to well-off pagan parents living in Sozopolis, in Pisidia. He would have already had a good Greek education in Sozopolis before he traveled to alexandria, the seat of several famous Neoplatonist teachers, including Ammonius. An idea of the layout of the lecture rooms in which he would have listened to their classes can be gained from the excavations at Kom el-Dikka. It was at Alexandria, where Severos studied for about two years, that he first met Zacharias, who became his close friend and (eventually) his biographer.
Probably in 486, Severos moved to Berytus (modern-day Beirut) to study at the famous law school there; not long afterward, Zacharias joined Severos in Berytus and introduced him to Christian intellectual circles and to the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers. Successfully won over to Christianity, Severos was baptized at the shrine of saint leontios in Tripolis, probably in 488.
The Syriac biographic tradition, by contrast, held that Severos’s parents were Christians, and that the Severos who was a signatory at the first council of ephesos (431) was his grandfather. When, on 18 June 513, he preached a homily (number 27) at the shrine of St. Leontios, Severos recalled his baptism there a quarter of a century previous, and in the Coptic version of the Greek original Severos states quite clearly that his background was in paganism. In the Syriac version made by Jacob of Edessa, however, Severos’s pagan background is glossed over, and in Zacharias’s account of events, the reader is rather led to assume that Severos came from a Christian family. The later biographical tradition concerning Severos reproduces this ahistorical tradition.
Once Severos completed his study of Roman law in Berytus, it was his intention to return to Pisidia to pursue a career in the legal profession. Indeed, he had already made preparations to leave in 492, but had a radical change of mind and decided to join several of his friends in taking up monastic life: first at the anti-Chalcedonian Monastery of Peter the Iberian in Maiouma (near Gaza). Though Peter had died the previous year on 1 December 491, his successor as hegumen, or abbot, Theodore, received Severos’s monastic profession. In the following years Severos deepened his knowledge of the Christian tradition and its main writers, including the extensive works of Cyril of Alexandria (cyril I), who was to become his prime authority in matters of Christology. Some eight years later, around 500, Severos founded his own monastic community, was ordained as priest, and took on the role of hegumen. The Emperor zeno’s henoticon (482) had aimed to resolve controversy over the Council of Chalcedon by forbidding the use of the Council’s term “nature,” which had proved to be the cause of much controversy. The Henoticon itself became a subject of controversy, but ©Claremont Graduate University 1 Sebastian Brock, Severus of Antioch: Update 23 May 2026 for Severos it was acceptable, and was given an interpretation in Anastasius’s Typos that was specifically anti-Chalcedonian.
Zeno’s successor Anastasius (491–518) had sympathy for the Miaphysite position, and so it was to him, rather than to Macedonius the Patriarch of Constantinople, to whom Severos successfully appealed in 508, when he was sent to defend the case of the Miaphysite monasteries in the Gaza area against attempts by the pro-Chalcedonian Patriarch Elias of Jerusalem to suppress them, using Nephalios as his agent. In response to Nephalios’s direct attack on him in writing, Severos wrote two Discourses against Nephalios; of these, the second survives complete in a Syriac translation, whereas only parts of the first are available, in both Greek and Syriac.
Severos remained in Constantinople until 511, contacting and corresponding with numerous state and ecclesiastical officials. To this period belong his writings against the Eutychian Romanos of Rhossos and the Messalian Lampetios; likewise, Severos’s controversy with Patriarch Macedonius, involving 1 Timothy 3:16, ended with Macedonius’s deposition in 511. During Severos’s time in Constantinople there appeared a Florilegium consisting of 244 quotations from Cyril I, claiming his support for the Chalcedonian Definition. In response, Severos provided a refutation in his Philalethes, putting the quotations in their proper context. Following the deposition of Flavian, Patriarch of Antioch, at a synod held in Laodicea in Syria Prima, Severos was elected to be Flavian’s successor, and was consecrated as patriarch on 16 November 512 by Metropolitan philoxenos of mabbug and eleven other bishops. In his allocution, which survives in Syriac translation, Severos proclaimed his acceptance of the three Councils: nicaea, constantinople, and Ephesus I, together with the Henoticon. At the same time, he anathematized nestorios, Eutyches, the Council of Chalcedon, and the Tome of pope leo I.
During his patriarchate, Severos held a moderate line, striving toward healing divisions and the reunion of the five Patriarchates on the basis of the Henoticon. He was, however, met with opposition from both sides, on the one hand from Miaphysites who rejected the Henoticon in that it failed to condemn the Council of Chalcedon openly; and on the other hand, from Dyophysites who promoted the Council. The latter were represented not only by the Patriarchates of Rome and Jerusalem, but also by several dioceses within his own patriarchate, including Cilicia, Cyrrhestike, and Syria II. Severos’s first letter to his fellow Miaphysite Sergius dates from 515, and his numerous travels within the Patriarchate of Antioch during the years 512–518 can be followed to some extent thanks to information provided by the 125 Cathedral Homilies Severos preached during this period.
During the night of 8/9 July 518 the Emperor Anastasius unexpectedly died, and a few days later, justin I became emperor. By 15 July, the Council of Chalcedon was proclaimed as the official Christian position of the empire; at the same time, Severos was anathematized and Vitalian (who had earlier rebelled against Anastasius, but had now been made a general by Justin) sent Orestes, the comes of the Orient, to arrest Severos and have him mutilated (Severos’s Homily 34 from 513 had celebrated Vitalian’s defeat). Severos, however, managed to get away from Antioch undetected, and an account of his dramatic escape is given in a subsequent letter to a friend which has only recently been published (Soumi 2016). Once Severos reached Egypt, he was welcomed by Patriarch timothy iii (517–535).
Little is known about the last two decades of Severos’s life, spent in Egypt. Probably his second and third letters to Sergios belong to the years immediately following his exile; the same applies to his extensive three-volume Against the Impious Grammarian, who can be identified as the Chalcedonian John of Caesarea. A fellow Miaphysite bishop who likewise took refuge in Alexandria was julian of Halicarnassus; initial friendship between the two men soured when Julian propounded the teaching that the flesh of the incarnate Christ was incorruptible, corresponding to the state of Adam before the Fall. For Severos, this vitiated the Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 2 Sebastian Brock, Severus of Antioch: Update 23 May 2026 salvific effect of the incarnation, seeing that what was not assumed (in this case, the corruptible human body of Adam’s post-Fall condition) was not saved.
When Severos’s initial gentle rebuke had no effect, and Julian became more and more obstinate, the controversy became drawn out, in stages reflected by Severos’s several responses: first, in his three letters to Julian, the rejection of Julian’s Tomos, and the refutation of his views; then against further additions made by Julian, and against his Apologia, ending finally with an Apologia for Severos’ own earlier work, the Philalethes, which Julian had used misleadingly. Julian’s teachings, designated as “Aphthartodocetic” and “Phantasiast” by his opponents, clearly found many followers in Egypt, and when Patriarch Timothy iii died in 535 and was succeeded by theodosios I, there were riots in Alexandria and the Julianists succeeded in installing their rival candidate, gaianos, leaving Theodosios to retire to Constantinople and the protection of the Empress theodora. Such was the success of Julian’s views in the north of Egypt that at some point Severos had to take refuge outside Alexandria, settling in Xois (modern sakha) in the Delta, where he was hosted by a magistrate named Dorotheos.
Meanwhile, Severos found himself dealing with other disputes, internal to the Miaphysites, in particular the Agnoetai, or followers of Themistios, who held that the incarnate Christ was ignorant of the Father’s will. On two occasions, Severos was requested by the Emperor justinian (527–565) to travel to Constantinople to partake in discussions aimed to bring unity by reconciling proponents and opponents of the Council of Chalcedon. The first occasion was in 532, when Severos evidently declined, or was not in a position, to come, and the Colloquium of bishops from either side took place without him. Accounts of this meeting survive from both sides, and it is clear that although the emperor made considerable concessions, his condition that the Miaphysite bishops should accept the Libellus of Pope Hormisdas to regain their sees was, not surprisingly, unacceptable to them.
The second occasion was in 535–536, and this time, Severos traveled to the capital in the company of his friend and ally Peter, Metropolitan of Apameia, and the stylite Z‘ura. Once in Constantinople, Severos managed to win over to the Miaphysite position Anthimos, who had recently (in 535) been consecrated Patriarch of Constantinople. This news was hastily conveyed to Pope Agapetus in Rome, who set out at once for Constantinople where he summarily deposed Anthimos and consecrated Menas as his successor, urging him to convoke a synod to condemn Severos. Shortly before the synod convened, however, Agapetus died. At this Synod of 536 Anthimos and Severos, along with Peter and Z‘ura, were anathematized. Their sentences were confirmed in Justinian’s Novella 42, dated 6 August 536, and any scribe who copied writings by Severos was threatened with amputation of their hands. Severos returned to Egypt, where he died two years later, on Monday 8 February 538. He and his local benefactor in Sakha, Dorotheos, are splendidly commemorated in wall paintings of the eighteenth century in the church of St. Sergios and St. Bacchos in Sadad, Syria.
Severos’s Surviving Writings Severos was a major player in the religious politics of his time and the author of many works. His writings are of considerable interest and importance from several different perspectives, as can be seen from the varied titles included in the Select Bibliography of Secondary Literature, below.
Severos was a prolific author, and thanks to early Syriac translations of many of his writings, an impressive amount of his literary oeuvre survives, having escaped the ban on copying his works in Greek in 536. As will be seen from the list of his extant works, the bulk of his output concerns Christological controversies of his time, whether defending the Miaphysite position against attacks from Chalcedonian opponents (e.g., Nephalios, John the Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 3 Sebastian Brock, Severus of Antioch: Update 23 May 2026 Grammarian), or dealing with intra-Miaphysite disputes (e.g., Sergios, Julian of Halicarnassus). Severos was a towering figure in the Christological controversies of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, and it was the Belgian scholar Joseph Lebon who, in his 1909 book Le monophysisme sévérien, first rehabilitated Severos as a major theologian who should be treated (from the Chalcedonian perspective) as a schismatic, and not a heretic. Severos simply regarded himself as an exponent of the Christology of Cyril of Alexandria, with the basic formula of “One composite nature of the incarnate Word of God.”
The other main components of Severos’s output consist of preaching, in the form of the collection of his 125 Cathedral Homilies, epistolography, and hymnography. Within all these genres much material of an exegetical, doctrinal, or canonical character caught the attention of later excerptors. In the case of exegesis, a surprising amount of material, even under Severos’s own name, is to be found in the various Greek collections of Old and New Testament Catenae. Material by Severos also turns up in Syriac doctrinal florilegia, while the West Syriac Synodicon and bar hebraeus (Bar ‘Ebroyo, d. 1286) in his Nomocanon and elsewhere, draw extensively on Severos for canonical matters. Presumably beginning soon after Severos’s death, collections of, and selections from, his vast correspondence were made. His “hymns” take the form of responsorials (Syriac ma‘nyatha) to Psalm passages. The original Greek text of a few of these hymns has turned up in papyri, though in fragmentary form.
The Transmission into Syriac The translation of Severos’s writings into Syriac began already in his lifetime, especially in the case of letters to Syriac-speaking monastic communities; this is nicely illustrated in Severos’s Letter to Antiochos, which specifically mentions the process of translating his letter. An early major undertaking was the translation of Severos’s works against Julian of Halicarnassus; this was undertaken in Kallinikos in 538, either by their bishop, Paul, himself, or at his initiative. In some cases the initial translation work was revised at a later date. This applies particularly to the Cathedral Homilies collection, which was probably first translated shortly after Severos’s death, and then revised well over a century later by Jacob of Edessa, an undertaking completed in 700/701. Jacob’s revision survives almost complete and has been used for the edition which was reproduced in Patrologia Orientalis; the only missing homilies are numbers 5 and 17 (the latter, however, has been recently recovered), while for homilies 1, 3, 4, 6, 11, 12, 13, 16, only fragments survive. Only part of the initial translation of the Cathedral Homilies is preserved in the manuscript tradition; of this earlier translation, only the texts of Homilies 52 and 77 have so far been published. The single homily whose Greek original survives complete is Homily 77, which masquerades under the name of either gregory of nyssa or Hesychios of Jerusalem.
Fragments of the Greek originals are to be found for Homilies 1–2 , 4–6, 8, 10, 14, 15, 23, 25, 28, 29, 31–35, 38, 42, 46, 48, 49, 51, 56, 60, 66, 67, 70, 72, 74, 79, 83, 85, 90, 91, 94, 96, 98, 101–105, 107–110, 115–117, 120, 122, 123, and 125. Complete Coptic translations survive for Homilies 1, 24, and 27, and in part or fragments for Homilies 14, 28, 60, 77, 103, and 115.
Another case where an earlier translation was subsequently revised concerns a collection of hymns by Severos (and a few other authors). The earlier translation was done by Paul, Bishop of Edessa, around 624, but this was revised half a century later, again by Jacob of Edessa, in 675. The oldest manuscript containing Jacob’s revision may even be an autograph (British Library, Add. 17,134), but in any case, it illustrates very clearly by several means the kind of changes which Jacob made.
The name of one more translator of Severos’s works is known: that of Athanasius of Nisibis, who produced, in 669, a translation of the Sixth Book of Select Letters, with 123 letters arranged according to topics. At the beginning of each letter, its source in a much larger Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 4 Sebastian Brock, Severus of Antioch: Update 23 May 2026 collection of Severos’s Letters is given. In this larger, lost collection, the Letters had once been arranged chronologically: before, during, and after Severos’s time on the patriarchal throne. For each of these categories, the number of books of letters Severos wrote can be deduced: before his patriarchy, four books; during it, an additional ten books; and afterward, nine more books. The total number of Severos’s Letters has been estimated as 3,759. Besides Athanasius’ translation, at least two other translations of these letters evidently existed, at least for some of the letters included in the 1915 and 1920 editions by E. W. Brooks, entitled A Collection of Letters. The subject matter of Severos’s voluminous correspondence varies greatly, with exegesis and canonical and doctrinal matters being the most frequent topics covered. The dates of the Syriac translation of other works by Severos, such as the Books against John the Grammarian, are unknown.