The Passio and Gregory of Nyssa

The two strata of the literary tradition of St. Theodore the Recruit, weighed against each other. The firmest early witness is not the developed Passio but Gregory of Nyssa’s encomium On St. Theodore, preached at the martyr’s shrine at Euchaita around 379–381 — a securely-dated fourth-century rhetorical and liturgical text that describes the crowded shrine, the pilgrimage, the painted images of the martyr’s passion on its walls, and an invocation of Theodore’s protection against barbarian invasion of Pontus. This file distinguishes Gregory’s encomium from the later narrative Passio (BHG 1760–1773), weighs the dating and reliability of each, and shows why the encomium is among our most important early sources for the martyr-cult and for early Christian martyr-iconography.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; warrior-saint)

Two Kinds of Source

Almost everything popularly known about St. Theodore the Recruit — the recruit of the Marmaritae cohort, the legate Brincas, the burning of the temple of the Mother of the Gods, the iron combs, the death by fire — comes from the developed Passio (BHG 1760–1773), a narrative hagiographic text whose composition postdates the events it relates and whose circumstantial detail belongs to the genre of legendary elaboration (see Burning the Temple of the Mother of the Gods). Behind and before that narrative, however, stands a witness of an entirely different order and a far higher evidential value: the encomium On St. Theodore (De Sancto Theodoro, also titled Oratio de Sancto Theodoro) delivered by Gregory of Nyssa, one of the three Cappadocian Fathers, at the martyr’s own shrine in Pontus in the last decades of the fourth century (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore, PG 46:736–748). To distinguish these two kinds of source — a securely-dated rhetorical-liturgical oration on one side, a later anonymous narrative Passio on the other — is the first task of any sober account of the saint, and it is the burden of this file (cf. The Historical Core; The Encomia and the Passio).

The difference matters because the two strata answer different questions. The Passio tells us how the Church came to narrate the martyrdom; Gregory’s encomium tells us, with the authority of a near-contemporary eyewitness to the cult, that there was a soldier-martyr Theodore venerated at a great shrine in Pontus within living memory of the persecutions — and it shows us that cult in vivid, datable detail (Delehaye 1909; Walter 2003).

Gregory of Nyssa and the Setting of the Encomium

Gregory, bishop of Nyssa in Cappadocia (c. 335 – c. 395) and younger brother of Basil the Great, was among the foremost theologians and orators of the post-Nicene Church (on Gregory among the Fathers, see Gregory of Nyssa and The Church Fathers). The encomium On St. Theodore belongs to a recognized class of his works — the panegyrics on martyrs, delivered on the martyr’s feast at the place of his veneration, as part of the festal liturgy of the day. This one was preached at the martyrium of St. Theodore at Euchaita in Helenopontus, the Pontic town that had grown up around the martyr’s shrine and would later take the name Theodoroupolis (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore; Walter 2003; on the site, see Euchaita, the Cult Center).

The oration is conventionally dated to around 379–381, within the years of Gregory’s mature episcopate and within perhaps seventy or eighty years of the traditional date of the martyrdom (c. 306) (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore; Walter 2003). The dating rests in part on an internal datum to which we shall return: Gregory’s closing invocation of the martyr against an imminent barbarian incursion into Pontus, which scholars connect with the Gothic disturbances of the lower Danube and the Black Sea region in the years following the Roman disaster at Adrianople in 378. This anchoring gives the encomium a firmness of date that the Passio wholly lacks, and it is the chief reason the oration, rather than the narrative, is treated as the secure terminus of the tradition (Walter 2003; Delehaye 1909).

What Gregory Describes: The Shrine and the Pilgrimage

The encomium is, before it is anything else, a window onto a living cult. Gregory describes the martyrium as a richly adorned shrine and dwells on the throng of pilgrims who have gathered for the feast — a crowd so dense, in his rhetoric, that the place can scarcely contain them, the faithful streaming in from the surrounding country to keep the martyr’s day (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore, PG 46:736–748). This is among the earliest and most concrete literary descriptions we possess of a martyr’s shrine in full operation: the adorned church, the gathered multitude, the festal liturgy, the veneration of the martyr at the place of his relics. For the historian of the cult of the saints it is a document of the first importance, and it establishes beyond reasonable doubt that by the 380s the cult of Theodore at Euchaita was already great and well-established — not a recent invention but a settled devotion drawing pilgrims to Pontus (Walter 2003; Delehaye 1909; cf. Euchaita, the Cult Center).

Gregory also rehearses, in the manner of the encomium, the martyr’s identity and passion: Theodore the soldier who confessed Christ in the persecution and was perfected by fire, burned for his faith. Gregory’s account is praise rather than narrative — he is not composing a Passio but extolling a martyr already known to his hearers — and so it confirms the broad shape of the tradition (a soldier-martyr burned in the persecutions) without supplying the circumstantial machinery of the later narrative (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore; Delehaye 1909). This is precisely the point at which the two strata can be measured against each other: what Gregory securely attests is the soldier-martyr and the fire; what the Passio adds is the cohort, the legate, the temple-burning, and the rest.

The Painted Images: An Early Witness to Martyr-Iconography

One passage of the encomium has made it famous far beyond the study of Theodore’s cult. Gregory describes the shrine’s walls as adorned with painted images depicting the martyr’s deeds and his passion — the artist, he says, having rendered in color the acts of the martyr, his struggles, his sufferings, and the form of Christ presiding over the contest — so that the church itself became a kind of book, instructing the faithful through pictures as well as words (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore, PG 46:736–748; Walter 2003). Gregory frames the images approvingly, as a legitimate and edifying mode of teaching: the painted passion of the martyr moves the beholder to devotion as a vivid sermon moves the hearer.

This passage is one of the earliest explicit literary witnesses to Christian narrative iconography of a martyr — to the practice of depicting a saint’s life and sufferings in painted images on the walls of his shrine, and to a fourth-century Father’s positive theological estimate of that practice (Walter 2003). For the history of Christian art and for the theology of the holy image it is a text of considerable weight: it shows that already in the 380s the passion of a martyr was being narrated visually at his shrine, and that a major Cappadocian theologian could commend such images as instruction and incitement to piety. The encomium thus stands among the foundational early sources for the iconography of the saints, a witness invoked in the later defense of the holy images (on the wider question, see Icons and Iconoclasm; on Theodore’s own iconographic type, The Warrior Saint in Icons).

The Invocation Against the Barbarians

The encomium closes with a passage that is both a moving instance of early intercessory devotion and the chief anchor for its date. Gregory turns from praise to petition and addresses the martyr directly, calling on Theodore to watch over his country and his people — and in particular to ward off the barbarian, the Scythian (Gothic) threat then menacing the Pontic region, beseeching the soldier-martyr to defend his homeland against the invader as a heavenly soldier still in the service of his King (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore, PG 46:736–748; Walter 2003). The invocation is doubly significant. Theologically and devotionally it is an early and explicit instance of the invocation of a martyr’s intercession for concrete temporal protection — the soldier-martyr enlisted, after death, as a guardian of the land against its enemies, a role that would become central to the whole cult of the Byzantine warrior-saints (Walter 2003; cf. Theodore Among the Military Martyrs).

Historically, the barbarian peril Gregory names is what allows the oration to be dated. Scholars connect the threatened invasion of Pontus with the Gothic movements in the Black Sea and lower-Danube region in the aftermath of the battle of Adrianople (378), which places the encomium most plausibly around 379–381 (Walter 2003; Delehaye 1909). It is a striking economy of evidence: the same sentence that gives us one of the earliest invocations of a warrior-saint against barbarian invasion also pins the whole text to a narrow window of years, and so furnishes the secure chronological terminus against which the undatable Passio must be measured.

Dating and Reliability: The Encomium Against the Passio

The decisive methodological point is the difference in evidential value between the two sources. Gregory’s encomium is a securely-dated fourth-century witness: its author is named and known, its place of delivery is the martyr’s own shrine, its date is fixed within a few years by the Gothic peril it invokes, and it stands within a lifetime or two of the martyrdom it commemorates. Whatever its rhetorical heightening — and it is a panegyric, composed to praise and not to chronicle — it is firm evidence for the existence and the character of the cult of Theodore at Euchaita in the 380s, for the soldier-martyr burned in the persecutions, and for the painted images and the pilgrimage (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore; Walter 2003). Its reliability as a witness to the cult is high; what it does not do is supply a detailed biography of the martyr.

The narrative Passio (BHG 1760–1773) stands on the opposite footing. It is an anonymous hagiographic composition of uncertain and demonstrably later date, transmitted in multiple recensions, whose circumstantial detail — the cohort of the Marmaritae, the legate Brincas, the temple of the Mother of the Gods and its burning, the precise sequence of tortures — has the marks of legendary development rather than documentary report (Delehaye 1909; Walter 2003). Hippolyte Delehaye, in his foundational study of the Greek military-saint legends, treated the Passio of Theodore as a developed legend of this kind, and modern hagiography has largely followed him: the secure historical residue is the cult and the soldier-martyr that Gregory attests, while the temple-burning narrative is the legendary core elaborated afterward (Delehaye 1909). [Disputed: the dating and historical value of the narrative *Passio* are contested. Hippolyte Delehaye (*Les légendes grecques des saints militaires*, 1909) and the scholarship following him treat the developed *Passio* (BHG 1760ff.) as a legendary elaboration of considerably later date than the events, whose circumstantial detail — including the temple-burning — is not documentary; against this stands only the firm early evidence of the cult at Euchaita and Gregory of Nyssa's encomium *On St. Theodore* (c. 379–381), which attests a venerated soldier-martyr burned in the persecutions but not the *Passio*'s detailed narrative. The proper conclusion is that the *Passio*'s circumstantial story is hagiographic development, while the existence of the martyr and his cult is secured by Gregory and by the shrine, not by the *Passio*.]

The right ordering of the evidence, then, reverses the popular intuition. The vivid story is the late and legendary stratum; the firm history is the spare encomium and the shrine it describes. Gregory of Nyssa’s On St. Theodore is the load-bearing document of the whole tradition — the witness that converts an undatable legend into the cult of a real and early martyr of the Pontic Church (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore; Delehaye 1909; Walter 2003).

Why the Encomium Matters

For three distinct fields of study Gregory’s encomium is a key source, and its importance reaches well beyond the dossier of one martyr. First, for the cult of the saints: it is among the earliest detailed literary descriptions of a martyr’s shrine in full festal operation — the adorned martyrium, the crowds of pilgrims, the veneration of the relics, the keeping of the feast — and so a primary document for the rise of the cult of the martyrs in the fourth-century East (Walter 2003). Second, for the iconography of the saints: its description of the painted images of the martyr’s passion on the shrine’s walls, commended by a leading Cappadocian theologian, is one of the foundational early witnesses to Christian narrative martyr-iconography and to its theological justification (Walter 2003; cf. Icons and Iconoclasm). Third, for the theology of intercession and the warrior-saint: its closing invocation of the soldier-martyr against barbarian invasion is an early and explicit instance of the martyr enlisted as heavenly protector of the land, the seed of the whole later cult of the military saints of Byzantium (Walter 2003; cf. Theodore Among the Military Martyrs). In each of these respects the encomium is a witness whose value is independent of, and greater than, the narrative Passio it antedates.

References

Gregory of Nyssa. On St. Theodore (De Sancto Theodoro; Oratio de Sancto Theodoro). In Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 46, cols. 736–748. Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1858. (The encomium preached at the Euchaita martyrium c. 379–381: the adorned shrine and the crowd of pilgrims; the soldier-martyr burned in the persecution; the painted images of the martyr’s passion on the shrine’s walls; the closing invocation against the barbarian/Scythian incursion into Pontus.)
Passio of Theodore Tyro (BHG 1760–1773). In François Halkin, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca. 3rd ed. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957. (The later developed narrative martyrdom, distinguished here from the encomium.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Paris: Picard, 1909. (The Passio of Theodore as a developed legend; Gregory’s encomium and the Euchaita cult as the firm early evidence.)
Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. (Gregory’s encomium as a witness to the early cult, to martyr-iconography, and to the warrior-saint’s protective intercession; the dating via the Gothic threat after Adrianople.)