The Life by Theodore of Paphos

The principal hagiographic vita of St. Spyridon is the Life composed by Theodore, bishop of Paphos, who delivered it as a festal encomium in the year 655 (BHG 1647). It is from this seventh-century homily — and not from the early fifth-century historians — that the developed miracle-cycle for which Spyridon is famous chiefly derives. This file establishes what Theodore’s Life is, who Theodore was, the date and occasion of its delivery, its relation to an earlier metrical Life attributed to Spyridon’s disciple Triphyllios, the modern critical edition by Paul Van den Ven, and the methodological question of how a vita three centuries removed from its subject can be used — pinning the miracle-cycle to its earliest written attestation without certifying it as history.

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

What the Document Is

The work conventionally called the Life of St. Spyridon is not a continuous narrative biography written for private reading but a hagiographic encomium delivered as a homily on the saint’s feast. Its author is Theodore, bishop of Paphos on Cyprus, and the Life is the principal and fullest premodern account of Spyridon — the text that gathers, orders, and transmits the great body of miracle-stories on which the saint’s later fame as a wonderworker rests. In the standard catalogue of Greek hagiography, the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, this Life is numbered BHG 1647, with related and derivative pieces (epitomes, metaphrastic recensions, and synaxarial notices) carrying neighboring numbers; the Life of Theodore is the head of that family (Van den Ven 1953; Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, ed. Société des Bollandistes).

The Life matters precisely because of what stands behind it and what does not. Behind it stand the early and sober fifth-century notices of Socrates Scholasticus (Ecclesiastical History I.12) and Sozomen (Ecclesiastical History I.11), and the Latin witness of Rufinus of Aquileia, all of which already present Spyridon as a married shepherd raised to the see of Trimythous, a Father of Nicaea, a confessor, and a reputed worker of wonders (see Socrates, Sozomen, and Rufinus). What the early historians do not contain is the full luxuriant miracle-cycle — the snake turned to gold, the raisings of the dead, the river halted, the developed Nicaea scenes — in the elaborated form in which the later Church received them. That elaborated form is the contribution of the hagiographic tradition, and the Life of Theodore of Paphos is its principal surviving monument (Van den Ven 1953; Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques).

Theodore of Paphos and the Date of 655

Theodore was bishop of Paphos, one of the ancient sees of Cyprus, in the middle of the seventh century. His authorship and his episcopal rank are stated within the text itself and are accepted in the critical literature; he is otherwise a figure known almost entirely through this one work (Van den Ven 1953). The Life preserves its own occasion and date: it was composed and delivered as a panegyric for the saint’s feast in 655, that is, in the years immediately following the Arab conquests that had swept across the eastern Mediterranean and begun to press hard upon Cyprus itself. The date is one of the firmest things about the text, fixed by internal indications and accepted in the scholarship (Van den Ven 1953).

The occasion shapes the genre. A festal encomium is not a critical biography; it is liturgical rhetoric in praise of a saint, delivered to a congregation gathered to keep his memory, and governed by the conventions of the enkomion — amplification, the heaping-up of wonders, the assimilation of the saint to scriptural and earlier hagiographic models. To read Theodore’s Life as though it were a documentary chronicle is to misread its purpose. The Bollandist hagiographer Hippolyte Delehaye laid down the governing principle a century ago: the hagiographer’s aim is edification and praise, not the registration of fact, and the literary laws of the genre — the migration of motifs from saint to saint, the inflation of the marvelous, the schematic ordering of a life around set pieces — must be reckoned with before any vita is used as a historical source (Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques). Theodore’s Life is a fine specimen of the genre and must be read by its rules.

That the Life dates from 655 — over three centuries after Spyridon’s death (traditionally c. 348) — is the single most important fact for weighing it. It is a late, not an early, witness; its value is that it preserves the state of the Cypriot tradition about Spyridon in the mid-seventh century, including stories that may rest on genuine local memory and stories that are manifestly literary elaboration, without itself providing the means to tell the two apart. The early historians remain the control; the Life is what is being controlled.

The Earlier Metrical Life Attributed to Triphyllios

A central and genuinely contested question concerns the sources Theodore himself used. The Life and the surrounding tradition point back to an earlier account associated with Triphyllios, a disciple of Spyridon who became bishop of Ledra (Leucosia, later Nicosia) and who is himself a historically attested figure: Jerome names him as the most eloquent man of his age and a pupil of Spyridon (Jerome, De viris illustribus 92). The tradition holds that an early — and in some descriptions metrical, that is, verse — Life of Spyridon was composed by or associated with Triphyllios, and that this earlier text lies behind the later prose hagiography.

The existence, nature, and dating of this Triphyllian Life are not settled. [Disputed: the tradition (reflected in the later hagiography and discussed by Van den Ven 1953) credits Spyridon's disciple Triphyllios of Ledra — a real figure, named by Jerome, *De viris illustribus* 92 — with an early *Life*, in some accounts a metrical one, which would push the literary tradition back toward the fourth century; against this, the directly transmitted hagiographic dossier is the seventh-century *Life* of Theodore of Paphos (655), and how much genuine fourth-century material, if any, reached Theodore through a Triphyllian source rather than through later oral and literary tradition cannot be securely determined (Van den Ven 1953; Delehaye, *Les légendes hagiographiques*)]. The methodological upshot is cautionary: a Triphyllian substratum, if it existed, would be precious, but it is not independently recoverable behind Theodore’s text, and the developed miracle-cycle must be assessed as it actually reaches us — in a seventh-century encomium — rather than as though a fourth-century eyewitness Life were in hand. The honest position is that Theodore’s Life is the earliest extant connected hagiography of Spyridon, whatever older material it may imperfectly preserve.

The Critical Edition: Paul Van den Ven

The modern study of the Spyridon dossier rests on the critical edition of the Belgian Bollandist scholar Paul Van den Ven, La légende de S. Spyridon évêque de Trimithonte, published in the Bibliothèque du Muséon series at Louvain in 1953. Van den Ven’s volume edits the Life of Theodore of Paphos together with the related Greek texts of the dossier, sorts out the relationships among the recensions, and provides the apparatus and discussion that make a source-critical reading possible. It is the indispensable scholarly foundation for any serious treatment of Spyridon’s hagiography, and it is cited throughout this collection as the authority for the text, the date of 655, the BHG numbering, and the analysis of the tradition’s growth (Van den Ven 1953).

Van den Ven’s work belongs to the great tradition of Bollandist hagiographical criticism — the centuries-long enterprise of the Society of Bollandists, who edit the Acta Sanctorum and publish the journal Analecta Bollandica, and whose method was given its classic theoretical statement by Hippolyte Delehaye in Les légendes hagiographiques (Brussels, first edition 1905). That method does not despise the saints’ Lives; it takes them with full seriousness as what they are — devotional and literary monuments whose historical kernel must be reached through, not around, their genre. Van den Ven’s edition of Spyridon is an application of exactly this discipline to one saint’s dossier, and the present collection follows his lead in keeping the seventh-century Life and the fifth-century notices visibly distinct (Van den Ven 1953; Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques).

What the Life Contains

The Life gives Spyridon’s career the shape the later Church knows: the simple Cypriot shepherd of deep humility, married and a father, raised to the bishopric of Trimythous; the confessor of the persecution; the Father of Nicaea who confounds the proud; and, above all, the tireless wonderworker. It is in the hagiographic tradition headed by Theodore’s Life that the famous episodes are found in developed form — the conversion of a serpent or snake into gold to relieve a poor farmer; the raising of the dead, including the saint’s own deceased daughter Irene summoned to disclose where a deposit had been hidden; the rebuke of a grasping grain-merchant; the miracles of rain and provision in famine; and the scenes of the saint’s bluntness and unpretending sanctity (these episodes are treated, pinned to their sources, in The Miracles of Provision and Healing and The Sarakina and the Humble Saint).

Two points of method govern how this collection uses that contents. First, some elements of the cycle have a partial anchor in the early historians: Sozomen already reports the thieves bound invisibly in the sheepfold and the affair of the daughter Irene and the entrusted deposit (Ecclesiastical History I.11), so these are not Theodore’s inventions but older tradition that he inherited and amplified. Second, other elements — most famously the developed brick-and-Trinity scene at Nicaea — appear in the early notices either not at all or not in the elaborated form the later tradition gives them, and these are pinned to the hagiographic and post-Nicene sources where they actually first appear, never read back into 325 (see The Brick and the Trinity). The Life fixes the cycle in writing; it does not certify it as history (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

How a Seventh-Century Life Is Used

The reliability question can be stated precisely. Theodore’s Life post-dates by some three centuries the fifth-century notices that are themselves already a century after the events; it is a homily, not a chronicle; and it shows every mark of the encomiastic genre. It cannot, therefore, be used to establish the historicity of any episode it relates. What it can be used for is twofold. It is the earliest connected attestation of the miracle-cycle, and so it allows each story to be dated — to be said, accurately, to be “first recorded in connected form in the seventh-century Life of Theodore of Paphos” rather than floated as timeless fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). And it is a primary witness to the Cypriot cult of Spyridon in the mid-seventh century — to what the island’s Church, on the eve and in the aftermath of the Arab conquests, believed and celebrated about its shepherd-bishop. As a window onto the living devotion of seventh-century Cyprus the Life is invaluable; as a transcript of fourth-century events it is not available, and Theodore did not intend it to be.

The disciplined result is the one this whole section exists to model. The historical Spyridon — shepherd, bishop of Trimythous, Nicene Father, confessor, reputed wonderworker — is secured by the early historians (see The Historical Spyridon). The developed wonders are secured, as tradition, by Theodore of Paphos. Holding the Life in its proper place — neither discarded as fable nor mistaken for a documentary record — is what it means to read a saint’s vita honestly within the Orthodox tradition that loves it.

References

Van den Ven, Paul, ed. La légende de S. Spyridon évêque de Trimithonte. Bibliothèque du Muséon 33. Louvain: Publications Universitaires / Institut Orientaliste, 1953. (The critical edition of the Life by Theodore of Paphos, BHG 1647, with the related Greek texts of the dossier; the date of 655; the analysis of the recensions and of the tradition’s growth; the discussion of the Triphyllian question.)
Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca. 3rd ed. Ed. François Halkin / Société des Bollandistes. Subsidia Hagiographica 8a. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957. (The BHG numbering of the Spyridon dossier, headed by no. 1647.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes hagiographiques. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1905 (and later editions; Eng. trans. The Legends of the Saints). (The classic statement of Bollandist hagiographical method: the vita as edifying literature, the migration of motifs, and the conditions under which a Life may be used as a historical source.)
Socrates Scholasticus. The Ecclesiastical History I.12. Trans. A. C. Zenos, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 2. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890. (The early notice of Spyridon the shepherd-bishop.)
Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History I.11. Trans. Chester D. Hartranft, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 2. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890. (The thieves in the sheepfold and the daughter Irene — early tradition Theodore inherited and amplified.)
Jerome. De viris illustribus (On Illustrious Men) 92. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 3. (Triphyllios of Ledra, disciple of Spyridon, “the most eloquent man of his age.”)