The Vast Correspondence

Theodore’s largest surviving work: the corpus of more than five hundred and fifty letters, edited critically by Georgios Fatouros (CFHB 31, 1992) and numbered through Ep. 564; their range across the years 796–826 and across every subject of the Church’s life — governance and discipline, pastoral care and spiritual direction, the Moechian and iconoclast controversies, the resistance; their recipients throughout the empire and beyond; and their value as one of the richest historical and theological sources of the period.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

The Corpus and Its Edition

Theodore left behind one of the great letter-collections of the Byzantine age. The surviving correspondence amounts to more than five hundred and fifty letters, spanning the years from about 796 to 826 — the whole arc of his public life, from the first Moechian exile to his death (Fatouros, ed., Theodori Studitae Epistulae, CFHB 31, 1992; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 1–30). The standard critical edition is Georgios Fatouros, Theodori Studitae Epistulae, in the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae (CFHB 31), two volumes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992) — the first volume containing the prolegomena and letters 1–70, the second letters 71 through 564 with indices. Fatouros’s edition superseded the older text reproduced in PG 99 (which derived from the seventeenth-century edition of Sirmond) and is now the reference for all citation of the letters.

[Disputed: the size of the corpus is stated variously. The actual surviving letters are described as “over 550”; Fatouros’s edition numbers them through Ep. 564 (some numbers covering letters known only by fragment or testimony), and the publisher’s printed title gives the range “Epp. 71–560.” The safest statement is therefore: over 550 surviving letters, numbered to Ep. 564 in Fatouros. A bare round figure such as “555” should not be cited.] [Disputed: the edition’s year of publication is given as 1991 or 1992 in different catalogs; 1992 is the dominant date, with the two volumes sometimes dated 1991/1992.]

The Range of the Letters

The correspondence is remarkable for its breadth. Across its hundreds of pieces Theodore writes on virtually every aspect of the Church’s life (Cholij, pp. 1–30; Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, throughout, which draws on the letters as its principal source):

Church governance and discipline — the application of the canons, the conduct of clergy and monks, the great controversies of the day, the relations of monastery and hierarchy and throne. The letters are where Theodore’s ecclesiology of the Church’s freedom and the pentarchy is worked out in practice (see Rome and the Pentarchy and Church and Emperor).
Pastoral care and spiritual direction — guidance to monks on the ascetic life, to laypeople on the conduct of a Christian life in the world, to penitents on repentance, to the grieving on consolation. Among the recipients are figures of the court and the aristocracy, women as well as men (the letters to the patrician lady Eirene are a notable example), to whom Theodore acts as a director of souls across the distance.
The controversies — the Moechian affair (the earlier letters) and the second iconoclasm (the great body of the exile correspondence; see The Letters from Exile), in which Theodore argues the issues, rallies the resistance, rebukes the lapsed, and appeals to the wider Church.

The Recipients and the Reach

The letters went out across the whole Byzantine world and beyond its borders — to monasteries and bishops throughout the empire, to imprisoned and exiled confessors, to the imperial court, to the deposed Patriarch Nikephoros, and outward to Rome and the eastern patriarchates (see Rome and the Pentarchy). This reach is itself a fact of significance: it shows Theodore at the center of a correspondence-network that spanned the Orthodox world, the hub through which the iconodule cause was coordinated and the wider Church was kept informed and engaged. No other figure of the period commanded so extensive an epistolary presence, and it is one of the marks of Theodore’s unusual authority — moral rather than jurisdictional — that he could exercise it (Pratsch, throughout; Cholij, pp. 1–30).

The Structure and Transmission of the Corpus

The shape of the corpus as we now have it is the work of its modern editor, and something of its history can be read in that shape. Fatouros arranged the letters in two books answering to the two great divisions of Theodore’s later life. The first book (Epp. 1–70) gathers the correspondence of the years down to about 814 — the period of the Moechian controversies and the first iconoclast troubles; the second book (Epp. 71 through the high numbers of the edition) collects the vast body of letters from the second iconoclasm and the years of exile, 815–826, which make up the bulk of the surviving correspondence (Fatouros, ed., Theodori Studitae Epistulae, CFHB 31, 1992, prolegomena; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 1–30). The disproportion between the two books is itself eloquent: it is the persecuted, scattered, embattled Theodore of the second iconoclasm whose letters survive in the greatest number, because it was then that the letter became his chief instrument of governance and resistance, and then that his disciples took the greatest care to preserve what he wrote.

That preservation ran through a medieval manuscript tradition of some complexity, the letters circulating in collections of varying completeness, which Fatouros sifted and collated to establish his text. Before him the standard text had been that printed in PG 99, which simply reproduced the seventeenth-century edition of the Jesuit scholar Jacques Sirmond — an edition of real learning for its day but incomplete and uncritical by modern standards, and built on a narrower manuscript base (Cholij, pp. 1–30; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 1991, s.v. “Theodore of Stoudios”). Fatouros’s critical edition of 1992 superseded Sirmond/PG 99 at a stroke: it rests on the full manuscript witness, establishes a sound text, supplies a continuous and now-standard numeration, and adds the prolegomena, apparatus, and indices that make the corpus usable as a historical instrument. It is for this reason that the letters are now cited by Fatouros’s numbers rather than by the old columns of Migne, and that the safest description of the corpus — over 550 surviving letters, numbered through Ep. 564, the publisher’s title giving the range as “Epp. 71–560” — is a description of Fatouros’s edition and not of the older text it replaced.

Notable Recipients and Letter-Groups

The reach of the correspondence is best seen in its recipients, for the letters fall into natural groups according to the people Theodore was writing to and the offices he was discharging toward them (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, throughout, which reconstructs the network from the letters; Cholij, pp. 1–30). A first and large group is the letters of spiritual direction to laypeople, and within it the letters to women are especially striking. To the patrician lady Eirene and to other women of the court and the aristocracy Theodore writes as a director of souls across the distance of exile — on prayer, repentance, almsgiving, the bearing of grief, the conduct of a Christian life amid the responsibilities and temptations of the world. These letters show a Theodore far gentler than the polemicist of the controversies: a pastor who takes the inner life of a noblewoman as seriously as the discipline of a monk, and who treats the spiritual direction of laypeople as a real and demanding office, not a condescension.

A second group is the correspondence with his own monastic family, above all the great series of letters to Naukratios, his closest disciple and the de facto leader of the dispersed Studite community during the persecution. Through Naukratios, Theodore governed his scattered monks from exile — directing, consoling, rebuking the lapsed, settling questions of conduct, holding the community together when its members were imprisoned and dispersed across the empire; the Naukratios letters are among the most important in the corpus for the inner history of the resistance (Pratsch, throughout; see The Letters from Exile). A third group treats canonical and disciplinary questions — Theodore answering, with the precision of the trained canonist, the queries put to him on the application of the canons, the limits of oikonomia, the treatment of penitents, the validity of orders, the duties of clergy and monks. Read together, these groups display the whole range of Theodore the pastor: severe where the faith or the canons were at stake, tender in the cure of individual souls, tireless in the government of a community he could no longer reach except by the pen. The letters are the place where his authority — moral rather than jurisdictional — is seen actually at work, soul by soul and case by case.

Alongside these stand the great public letters: those to the deposed Patriarch Nikephoros, fellow-confessor and exile, with whom Theodore stood shoulder to shoulder against the renewed iconoclasm; the appeals outward to Rome and the eastern patriarchs, in which the ecclesiology of the pentarchy and the Church’s freedom from the throne is pressed (see Rome and the Pentarchy); and the letters of exhortation to imprisoned monks and confessors scattered across the empire, rallying the resistance and steadying the wavering. The same pen that consoled a grieving noblewoman and answered a canonical query also coordinated, from a succession of cells and prisons, the whole iconodule opposition of the age. It is the union of these registers — the intimate and the public, the cure of one soul and the governance of a Church-wide cause — that makes the correspondence so singular a record, and that justifies the verdict of the modern scholarship that no other figure of the period left so complete a self-portrait in his letters (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, throughout; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 1–30).

The Letters as a Historical Source

For the modern historian the correspondence is a treasure. It is the principal contemporary source for the inner history of the Moechian controversy and the second iconoclasm — the events, the personalities, the arguments, the texture of the resistance — and it is the chief foundation of the modern scholarly reconstruction of Theodore’s life and times (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, is built upon it; see Influence and Scholarship). Because the letters are dated and addressed, they allow the chronology of Theodore’s career to be reconstructed with a precision rare for the period, and they preserve the voices and fates of dozens of lesser figures — confessors, monks, officials — who would otherwise be lost entirely. They are, in short, both a primary witness to one of the great struggles of Byzantine Christianity and a window onto the daily working of the Church in the early ninth century.

The Letters and the Whole Theodore

The correspondence also unifies the figure this collection has presented in parts. The reformer of the Catecheses, the canonist of the Moechian affair, the Confessor of the iconoclast resistance, the theologian of the Antirrhetics, the ecclesiologist of the pentarchy — all of them are present, the same man writing, in the letters. They are the connective tissue of his life’s work, the place where the disciplinarian and the dogmatician, the abbot and the Confessor, are most plainly one person. To read the correspondence is to meet Theodore whole: rigorous and tender, embattled and patient, never in doubt about the faith and never indifferent to a single soul. It is the largest thing he left, and in some ways the truest portrait of him (Cholij, pp. 1–30).

References

Fatouros, Georgios, ed. Theodori Studitae Epistulae. Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 31. 2 vols. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992. (The critical edition; vol. 1, prolegomena and Epp. 1–70; vol. 2, Epp. 71–564 with indices.)
Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (On the correspondence and its range.)
Pratsch, Thomas. Theodoros Studites (759–826) — zwischen Dogma und Pragma. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. (The biography built upon the letters as its principal source.)
Theodore the Studite. Epistulae, in PG 99 (the older Sirmond text, superseded by Fatouros).
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.v. “Theodore of Stoudios.”)