Cyprus in the Age of Constantine

The island church into which St. Spyridon of Trimythous (c. 270–348) was born and over which he served as bishop: a Christianity that traced itself to the apostolic mission of Paul and Barnabas (Acts 13:4–12), organized into ancient sees — Salamis/Constantia, Paphos, Trimythous — and emerging, in Spyridon’s own lifetime, from the Great Persecution into the Constantinian peace. This file sets the historical stage on which a simple inland village bishop of Cyprus could sit among the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council; the autocephaly later secured at Ephesus (431) is noted as subsequent context, not as Spyridon’s doing.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Wonderworker; Father of Nicaea)

An Apostolic Foundation

The Christianity of Cyprus is among the oldest documented in the world, because the island was the very first stage of the Church’s organized mission beyond Antioch. The Acts of the Apostles records that Barnabas and Saul, “sent forth by the Holy Spirit, departed unto Seleucia; and from thence they sailed to Cyprus,” preaching first “in the synagogues of the Jews” at Salamis and then crossing “the whole island unto Paphos,” where the proconsul Sergius Paulus believed and the magician Bar-Jesus (Elymas) was struck blind (Acts 13:4–12). This first missionary journey gives Cyprus an apostolic charter as explicit and as early as any in the Christian world.

The island had a still earlier and more intimate claim, for Barnabas himself was a Cypriot. Luke identifies him as “Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas… a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus” (Acts 4:36), and it was to his homeland that he returned with John Mark after parting from Paul (Acts 15:39). Cyprus thus venerates Barnabas not merely as a visiting evangelist but as its own apostle and founder, a fact that would prove decisive for the island church’s claims to independence in the fifth century (on the apostolic age generally, see Pre-Schism Church). Beyond the canonical record, the men “of Cyprus and Cyrene” who first preached to the Greeks at Antioch (Acts 11:20) show that Cypriot Christians were active agents in the earliest Gentile mission, not merely its recipients.

By the close of the apostolic age the island had a settled Christian presence in its principal cities. The episcopal organization that the fourth century inherited rested on these foundations: the great see of Salamis — refounded after earthquakes and renamed Constantia in honor of the imperial house in the fourth century — together with Paphos, the Roman administrative capital, and a network of lesser inland sees, among which was the small town of Trimythous (Tremithus), Spyridon’s see. That a bishopric of such modest size existed at all testifies to how densely the island had been evangelized: Cyprus was not mission territory in Spyridon’s day but a long-established Christian land with its own hierarchy.

A Roman Province on the Sea-Roads

Cyprus’s ecclesiastical importance was inseparable from its geography and its place in the empire. The island sat at the maritime crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean, within easy reach of the Syrian, Cilician, and Egyptian coasts, and it had been a Roman possession since 58 BC, governed in the imperial period as a senatorial province under a proconsul — precisely the office Luke assigns to Sergius Paulus at Paphos (Acts 13:7). Under the administrative reorganization that Diocletian and Constantine carried through at the turn of the fourth century, Cyprus was attached to the civil Diocese of the East (Oriens), whose great metropolis was Antioch. This administrative tie to Antioch is the root of a tension that would shape the island’s later history: the bishops of Antioch came to regard the Cypriot churches as falling, by analogy with the civil order, under their jurisdiction.

For the lifetime of Spyridon, however, the salient fact was simpler. Cyprus was a prosperous, populous, thoroughly Romanized province whose towns possessed organized churches and whose bishops could travel — when summoned across the sea to a council in Bithynia, as they were in 325 — as participants in the common life of the imperial Church. The island’s connectedness, not its isolation, is what made it possible for an obscure village bishop to take his place among the assembled hierarchs of the oikoumene.

The Church Out of the Furnace: The Great Persecution

Spyridon’s generation was the generation that passed through fire. He was born, by the traditional reckoning, around 270, which means that he reached maturity precisely as the empire launched its last and most savage assault on the Church. The Great Persecution began under Diocletian in February 303 with an edict ordering the destruction of churches and the burning of the Scriptures, followed by edicts demanding the imprisonment of clergy and, in 304, universal sacrifice to the gods. In the East the persecution raged with particular ferocity and lasted, in fits and starts, until the Edict of Galerius in 311 granted toleration and the subsequent Edict of Milan (313), issued in the names of Constantine and Licinius, restored the Church’s confiscated property and established legal freedom of worship.

The early church historians remember Spyridon specifically as a man marked by this persecution. Rufinus, writing his Latin continuation and translation of Eusebius around 402–403, places Spyridon among the confessors — those who suffered for the faith without dying — and reports that he had lost an eye and been hamstrung in one leg, then condemned to the mines, during the persecution (Rufinus, Ecclesiastical History X.5; ed. Mommsen, GCS). Whether this physical maiming belongs to the bedrock of history or to the developing tradition is genuinely uncertain [Disputed: Rufinus (HE X.5) reports Spyridon as a confessor maimed (an eye gouged, a leg hamstrung) and sent to the mines; Socrates and Sozomen, who depend partly on Rufinus, transmit the confessor status while the early Greek tradition does not uniformly insist on the specific mutilations, which some scholars judge a hagiographical amplification]. What is not in serious doubt is the framing: the man who would later instruct the Council of Nicaea was remembered as one who had stood firm when standing firm could cost an eye, a tendon, or a life.

This matters for understanding the council itself. The bishops who gathered at Nicaea in 325 were, many of them, survivors — men who still bore, in Eusebius’s vivid testimony and in the later accounts, the scars and empty eye-sockets of the persecution years. The historian Theodoret would later write of Constantine kissing the maimed faces and sightless eyes of the confessor-bishops assembled before him. Spyridon belonged to exactly this company. The peace of the Church was, for his generation, not an abstraction but a deliverance survived in the body.

The Constantinian Peace and the Road to Nicaea

The defeat of Licinius by Constantine in 324 made Constantine sole master of a reunited empire and gave the eastern Church, for the first time, a single Christian sovereign. Almost immediately the new order confronted its first great internal crisis: the controversy ignited at Alexandria by the presbyter Arius, who taught that the Son of God was a creature, made out of nothing before time, and not coeternal and consubstantial with the Father. To resolve the dispute Constantine summoned the bishops of the whole inhabited world to Nicaea in Bithynia in the summer of 325 — the First Ecumenical Council (on its place in the Church’s life, see Ecumenical Councils; on its dogmatic result, The Nicene Creed and The Holy Trinity).

That a bishop of tiny Trimythous in Cyprus should be numbered among the roughly three hundred Fathers of that council is a measure of how completely the island belonged to the catholic Church of the empire. The early historians who recount Nicaea — Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen, both writing in the mid-fifth century and both drawing on Rufinus and on Cypriot oral tradition — name Spyridon among the participants and preserve the stories of his role there (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History I.12; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History I.11; trans. NPNF II/2). Whether Spyridon was already consecrated bishop before the council or was raised to the episcopate only afterward is not perfectly clear from the sources [Disputed: Socrates and Sozomen present Spyridon as a bishop at the time of Nicaea (325), which is the dominant tradition; a minority view, weighing the chronology of his life and the late date of much of the hagiography, leaves open whether his episcopal consecration preceded or followed the council]. The companion section treats his presence and his reported acts at the council in detail (see Spyridon at Nicaea and The Brick and the Trinity).

The decisive point of the stage-setting is this: the Constantinian peace did not produce a Church of polished court theologians only. It produced a council in which men of deep simplicity — confessors fresh from the mines, shepherds and farmers raised to the episcopate — sat as equals with the learned. The fourth-century Cypriot church, apostolic in origin and tempered in persecution, was exactly the soil from which such a figure could grow.

Cyprus After Spyridon: The Road to Autocephaly

A final element of context belongs to the period after Spyridon’s death (traditionally c. 348) and must be carefully distinguished from his own life, lest the later glory of the Cypriot church be retrojected onto him. Throughout the fourth and into the fifth century the bishops of Antioch pressed the claim that Cyprus, as part of the civil Diocese of the East, lay under Antiochene jurisdiction and that the Cypriot bishops ought to be ordained by Antioch. The Cypriot church resisted, appealing to its apostolic foundation by Barnabas and to its long-standing custom of ordaining its own bishops.

The dispute was settled in Cyprus’s favor at the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431, whose Canon 8 ruled that the bishops of Cyprus should retain the right to consecrate their own metropolitans “free from all molestation and violence,” confirming the island’s self-governance against the Antiochene claim. This decision is the legal charter of the autocephaly of the Church of Cyprus, one of the oldest autocephalous churches in Orthodoxy. It is essential to stress that this came nearly a century after Spyridon and owed nothing to his initiative; it is mentioned here only because it expresses, in canonical form, the same ancient apostolic self-understanding of the Cypriot church that already stood behind Spyridon in 325. A tradition later embellished the story with the providential discovery of Barnabas’s relics and a copy of Matthew’s Gospel under the emperor Zeno (later fifth century), which the Cypriots are said to have used to vindicate their case — an account that postdates the council and belongs to the developing legend of the see (on weighing such traditions, see The Historical Spyridon).

For Spyridon’s own day, the takeaway is the modest one with which we began: he served a church that was apostolic, well-organized, and woven firmly into the imperial communion — a church that could send its village bishop across the sea to help define the faith of the whole world.

References

The Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version. (Acts 4:36; 11:20; 13:4–12; 15:39 — the apostolic mission to Cyprus and Barnabas the Cypriot.)
Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History I.12. Trans. A. C. Zenos, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 2. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890. (Spyridon the shepherd-bishop among the Fathers of Nicaea.)
Sozomen. Ecclesiastical History I.11. Trans. Chester D. Hartranft, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 2. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890. (Spyridon at Nicaea; his daughter Irene.)
Rufinus of Aquileia. Ecclesiastical History X.5. Ed. Theodor Mommsen, in Eusebius, Werke II.2, Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller (GCS). Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1908. (Spyridon as confessor, maimed in the persecution and sent to the mines.)
The Seven Ecumenical Councils. Trans. Henry R. Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 14. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1900. (Council of Ephesus, 431, Canon 8, on the autocephaly of Cyprus.)
Hill, George. A History of Cyprus, Vol. 1: To the Conquest by Richard Lion Heart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Roman Cyprus, its administration within the Diocese of the East, and the early sees.)