Family and Sakkoudion

The origins of St. Theodore the Studite: his birth in 759 into a senior Constantinopolitan civil-service family; his formidable uncle St. Plato, the assayer-turned-monk of the Symbola monastery; the renunciation of the whole household after the death of Leo IV (781) and the founding of the family monastery of Sakkoudion in Bithynia; Theodore’s tonsure, his ordination to the priesthood by Patriarch Tarasios (c. 787), and his accession to the abbacy of Sakkoudion in 794. This is the bedrock on which the reformer, the canonist, and the Confessor would be built.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

A Constantinopolitan Family of the Civil Service

Theodore was born in 759 in Constantinople, into the comfortable, pious upper reaches of the Byzantine bureaucracy (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 18–27; the date and city are agreed across the sources, including the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Theodore of Stoudios”). His father, Photeinos, held a senior post in the imperial financial administration — the Lives describe him as an administrator of the imperial revenues, an office of the rank near the sakellarios or imperial treasury (Pratsch, pp. 18–21). His mother, Theoktiste (c. 740–802), came of a distinguished Constantinopolitan house; Theodore’s own funeral oration for her, the Laudatio Theoctistae (PG 99:884–901), is one of the warmest and most personal pieces in his corpus and the chief source for the family’s inner life (Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 9–18). She was, by his account, a woman of stern piety who ran a strict household and disciplined her children severely — a temper the son inherited.

The family was, then, neither monastic by tradition nor obscure: it was a household of the capital’s service class, with property, connections at court, and an education to give its sons. Theodore received the standard Byzantine schooling in grammar, rhetoric, and the rudiments of theology and philosophy — a formation in classical letters that would surface later in his iambic verse and in the dialectical sharpness of his anti-iconoclast polemic (Cholij, pp. 18–24; on the education, see The Formation of a Reformer).

The Uncle: St. Plato of Sakkoudion

The decisive figure of Theodore’s youth was his maternal uncle, St. Plato (Platon). Before his conversion Plato too had been a man of the bureaucracy — by the tradition a zygostates, an official assayer or weigher of the coinage — who renounced the world and, from about 759, lived as a monk at the Symbola monastery on Mount Olympus in Bithynia, the great monastic district of Asia Minor across the water from Constantinople (Pratsch, pp. 27–28; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Plato of Sakkoudion”). [Disputed: the monastery of Plato’s first profession is given as Symbola in the scholarly tradition (Pratsch; ODB); some popular sources render it Symeon, an unstandard variant.] Plato rose to be abbot there, and acquired a reputation as a calligrapher and a man of rigorous asceticism. It was Plato who would draw the whole of his sister’s family out of the world.

The Renunciation and the Founding of Sakkoudion (781)

The turning-point came with the death of the iconoclast emperor Leo IV in 780 and the accession of the boy Constantine VI under his mother the empress Irene, who favored the holy images and the monastic party (Pratsch, pp. 71–76). In the changed climate Plato persuaded his sister Theoktiste, her husband Photeinos, and their children to renounce the world together. In 781 the household disposed of its property — freeing its slaves, a detail the tradition preserves with approval — and the men of the family followed Plato across to Bithynia, while Theoktiste and the women entered the monastic life separately (Pratsch, pp. 71–76; Cholij, pp. 24–30).

On a family estate in Bithynia, at a place called Sakkoudion (Sakkudion), Plato established a new monastery. Plato governed it as abbot; the young Theodore, his most gifted nephew, became his closest disciple and right hand, and was set to organize the common life on the rule of St. Basil the Great (Pratsch, pp. 76–80; Cholij, pp. 30–35; on the Basilian foundation see The Formation of a Reformer). Sakkoudion was thus from the first a family foundation, ascetically severe and Basilian in discipline — the seedbed of everything Theodore would later build at the Stoudios. [Disputed: Theodore’s exact tonsure date is not preserved; the sources tie it implicitly to the family’s profession of 781 (Pratsch, pp. 76–80), and no firm year is independently attested.]

Ordination by Patriarch Tarasios (c. 787)

Theodore was ordained priest by the Patriarch Tarasios of Constantinople — the patriarch who would preside over the restoration of the icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council. The scholarly dating places the ordination at about 787, in the years around Nicaea II, when Tarasios (patriarch from 784) was at the height of his authority and the iconodule cause ascendant (Pratsch, pp. 80–81). [Disputed: the date of Theodore’s priestly ordination is given as c. 787 by Pratsch (pp. 80–81) and the modern scholarship; the older Catholic Encyclopedia (1912, s.v. “Theodore of Studium”) dates it to 781, but since Tarasios became patriarch only in 784 the earlier figure cannot stand, and c. 787 is preferred.] The ordination by Tarasios is more than a biographical detail: it bound Theodore from the start to the patriarch he would later, in the Moechian affair, feel compelled to oppose — and it is part of why that opposition was so painful (see The Adulterous Marriage Affair).

Abbot of Sakkoudion (794)

In 794, when Plato withdrew from the daily governance of the community on account of age and ill health, Theodore became abbot of Sakkoudion at about thirty-five (Pratsch, pp. 80–81; the Catholic Encyclopedia agrees on 794; Cholij, pp. 35–40). His accession was, by the Lives’ account, reluctant — he accepted only under his uncle’s pressure — but once in the office he governed with the rigor that would mark his whole career. The catecheses to the brethren begin in these Sakkoudion years; the earliest pieces of the Great Catechesis belong to this period (see The Catecheses).

It was as abbot of Sakkoudion, within a year of taking office, that Theodore was drawn into the first of his great confessions. The emperor Constantine VI — the same boy-emperor whose accession had opened the way for the family’s conversion — put away his lawful wife and contracted an uncanonical second marriage, and the abbot of Sakkoudion refused to be silent. The quarrel that followed, the Moechian controversy, would cost him his first exile and would set the pattern of his life: the canon held against the throne, whatever the cost (see The Adulterous Marriage Affair). The community Plato had founded as a refuge of strict asceticism had produced, in his nephew, a man who would carry that strictness into the open field against emperors.

The Laudatio Theoctistae and the Piety of the Household

Of all the windows into Theodore’s origins, none opens so wide as the funeral oration he composed for his mother, the Laudatio Theoctistae (PG 99:884–901). Delivered after Theoktiste’s death in about 802, it belongs to the rhetorical genre of the epitaphios logos — the panegyric of the deceased — but it is unusually candid for a saint’s son writing of his mother, and modern scholarship treats it as a primary document for the family’s inner life rather than as mere conventional praise (Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 9–18; Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 18–27). In it Theodore describes a woman of the capital’s service class whose devotion was austere to the point of severity: she rose for the night office, gave herself to almsgiving and the relief of prisoners, fasted strictly, and governed her household and her children with a discipline that the son recalls without softening. He even confesses that her chastisement of her children could be harsh — a frankness that lends the encomium its weight as evidence, since hagiographical convention would more naturally have smoothed it away (Cholij, pp. 9–18).

The oration also discloses the texture of the family’s piety before the great renunciation: the regular keeping of the feasts, the reverence for the images and the saints, the household’s almsgiving, and — strikingly — Theoktiste’s own literacy and her habit of learning the Psalter by heart in later life, which Theodore presents as the crown of her conversion to the monastic discipline she eventually embraced. The Laudatio is, in this sense, a portrait of the kind of lay piety out of which Byzantine monasticism was continually replenished: not a rejection of an irreligious world, but the intensification of an already devout one. The Studite vitae and the oration together present the mother as the first and sternest of Theodore’s formators, the source — by his own reckoning — of the exacting temper that the canons would later find in the abbot (Theodore, Laudatio Theoctistae [PG 99:884–901]; Cholij, pp. 9–18). The companion oration for his uncle, the Laudatio Platonis (PG 99:803–850), performs the same service for the other great formative figure, and the two encomia stand as Theodore’s own testimony to the two people who made him.

The Monastic World of Bithynian Mount Olympus

Sakkoudion was not founded in a vacuum but on the edge of one of the most important monastic landscapes of the Byzantine world: Mount Olympus in Bithynia (the Mysian Olympus, modern Uludağ above Bursa), the great monastic district of north-western Asia Minor (Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, 2007, pp. 308–322; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Olympos, Mount”). Across the Sea of Marmara from Constantinople, near enough to feel the capital’s controversies yet remote enough to offer refuge from them, the wooded slopes of Bithynian Olympus had by the later eighth century become studded with lavras, cells, and cenobia, and would in the iconoclast era serve as a stronghold of the iconodule and monastic party. It was the natural place for a Constantinopolitan family of iconophile sympathies to withdraw when the death of Leo IV opened the way; Plato’s own first monastery of Symbola lay in this same Olympan milieu (Pratsch, pp. 27–28, 71–80; ODB, s.vv. “Olympos, Mount,” “Plato of Sakkoudion”).

The significance of the setting is twofold. First, it placed the young Theodore within a living network of ascetic houses and holy men, so that the recovery of the strict cenobitic ideal he would later carry to the Stoudios was nourished by a regional culture of serious monasticism rather than improvised from books alone (Hatlie, pp. 308–340). Second, it tied the family’s foundation to a district that the iconoclast emperors regarded with suspicion precisely because it harbored the monastic resistance — a fact that helps explain why Sakkoudion, when the Moechian quarrel came, could be so swiftly broken up by imperial force (Pratsch, pp. 107–110; see The Adulterous Marriage Affair). Bithynian Olympus was the seedbed of a generation of confessors, and Theodore is its most illustrious son.

The Brothers: Joseph and Euthymios

Theodore did not renounce the world alone but as one of a band of brothers who entered the monastic life together in 781. The most prominent of his siblings was Joseph, who shared Theodore’s whole career of confession and was later raised to the see of Thessalonica as archbishop — and who, with his brother, would be exiled in the second phase of the Moechian affair, banished to the island of Prote in 809 (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 170–173; ODB, s.v. “Joseph of Thessalonica”). This Joseph, Theodore’s brother and ally, must be carefully distinguished from the other Joseph of the controversy — Joseph of Kathara, the priest who blessed the adulterous marriage — with whom the popular sources sometimes confuse him (see The Adulterous Marriage Affair). Joseph of Thessalonica was himself a hymnographer of note, and the brothers’ shared labors in the Studite scriptorium and choir bound the family’s piety to the liturgical reform that would become the house’s enduring legacy.

A third brother, Euthymios, is also named in the tradition among the children who followed Plato into the monastic life, though he left a fainter mark on the record than the formidable Theodore and the episcopal Joseph (Pratsch, pp. 18–27; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 9–18). The pattern is the decisive thing: Sakkoudion was a family monastery in the full sense, a household transposed bodily into the cloister, with uncle as abbot and nephews as monks. This kinship at the core of the community gave it both its early cohesion and, in the hands of Theodore’s enemies, a charge of nepotistic clannishness; but it also meant that the Studite confession, when it came, was carried by a family that had already staked everything together once, in 781, and would do so again and again under successive emperors.

References

Pratsch, Thomas. Theodoros Studites (759–826) — zwischen Dogma und Pragma. Berliner Byzantinistische Studien 4. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. (The standard biography; the chronological anchor for the birth, family, Sakkoudion foundation, ordination, and abbacy.)
Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (On the family, the Laudatio Theoctistae, and the formation.)
Theodore the Studite. Laudatio Theoctistae (Funeral oration for his mother Theoktiste), PG 99:884–901; and Laudatio Platonis (Funeral oration for Plato), PG 99:803–850 (Migne, 1860).
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.vv. “Theodore of Stoudios,” “Plato of Sakkoudion,” “Stoudios,” “Olympos, Mount,” “Joseph of Thessalonica.”)
Hatlie, Peter. The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca. 350–850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. (On the Bithynian monastic milieu of Mount Olympus and its relation to the capital.)
“Theodore of Studium.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14. New York: Robert Appleton, 1912 (newadvent.org) — used to locate the older dating tradition (ordination 781, abbacy 794), corrected against Pratsch.