Section 08: The Letters and the Pentarchy

Theodore the churchman, seen through his correspondence. Some five hundred and fifty letters survive — the great critical edition is Fatouros’s (CFHB 31, numbered through Ep. 564) — and through them Theodore governed, counseled, rebuked, and rallied across a quarter-century. From the letters comes his ecclesiology: a Church whose unity is conciliar and pentarchic, free of the emperor, and able to appeal beyond him to the five patriarchal sees, Rome among them. This section sets out the corpus and the ecclesiology it carries.

Contents

File Topic
The Vast Correspondence The ~550 surviving letters (ed. Fatouros, CFHB 31, 1992; numbered through Ep. 564); their range — church governance, pastoral care, spiritual direction, the resistance; their recipients across the empire; their value as a historical source for the period
Rome and the Pentarchy Theodore’s ecclesiology of the “five-headed body” of the Church; the appeals to Pope Paschal I (817) and the other patriarchates against the iconoclast synod; the language of Roman primacy in his letters and how Orthodox and Catholic readers weigh it; conciliarity and the Church’s freedom from the emperor

How to Use

  • Start with The Vast Correspondence for the corpus itself — its size, its editions, its range, and its worth.
  • Read Rome and the Pentarchy for the ecclesiology the letters articulate, including the much-debated appeals to Rome, handled with both-sides sourcing.

Cross-References