Repose and the Triumph of Orthodoxy

The end of Theodore’s life and its vindication: his death on 11 November 826, in the years of enforced silence under Michael II; the disputed place of his repose; the final restoration of the icons on the first Sunday of Lent, 11 March 843, under the Empress Theodora and the Patriarch Methodios — the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” that vindicated the cause Theodore had suffered for; the translation of his relics, with his brother Joseph’s, to the Stoudios in 844; and his feasts of 11 November and 26 January.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

The Death of Theodore (826)

Theodore died on 11 November 826, at about sixty-seven, after some five years of freedom-without-vindication under Michael II — released from the prisons of Leo V but never permitted to resume his abbacy, the icons still officially in eclipse (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 285–315; OCA, Lives of the Saints, 11 November). The Lives report that he died as he had lived, in the service of the Church — by the tradition, while the Liturgy was being celebrated, surrounded by his monks (the vitae; reported as the tradition attests, per this collection’s hagiographic discipline). He did not live to see the cause win; he died, as so many confessors do, in the dark before the dawn, seventeen years short of the restoration.

[Disputed: the place of Theodore’s death is contested. The scholarship (reflected in Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, and the review literature) places his death and burial at the monastery of St. Tryphon on Cape Akritas, on the Bithynian coast where he had settled with his monks after his release (see The Exiles and Floggings); the Orthodox synaxarion and liturgical tradition place his repose on the island of Prinkipo in the Princes’ Islands. The two are sometimes harmonized by distinguishing the place of death from the place from which the relics were later translated, but the discrepancy is genuine.]

The Triumph of Orthodoxy (843)

The vindication came in 843. After the death of the last iconoclast emperor, Theophilos (842), his widow the Empress Theodora, regent for her young son Michael III, moved to restore the icons. The iconoclast patriarch John the Grammarian was deposed and replaced by the iconodule confessor Methodios I; and on the first Sunday of the Great Fast, 11 March 843, the veneration of the holy icons was solemnly and finally restored, in a great procession and synodal act in Constantinople (Pratsch, pp. 310–315; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.vv. “Theodora,” “Methodios I,” “Triumph of Orthodoxy”). This event — the Triumph of Orthodoxy — ended iconoclasm for good; it has been commemorated ever since on the first Sunday of Lent as the Sunday of Orthodoxy, on which the Church proclaims the faith of the councils and the veneration of the icons (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils).

The Triumph was the vindication of everything Theodore had stood and suffered for. The theology he had perfected in the Antirrhetics (see The Three Antirrhetics) was now the confessed faith of the Church; the synod of 815 he had defied was condemned; the resistance he had organized and sustained from exile (see The Resistance) had won. That he did not live to see it changes nothing of his place in it: the iconodule victory of 843 was, in large part, the harvest of the confession Theodore had kept alive through the dark years, and the Church has always understood him as one of its chief architects, ranked with the patriarchs Nikephoros and Methodios among the heroes of the icons’ restoration.

The Translation of the Relics (844)

The vindication was sealed by an honor to Theodore’s body. In 844 — eighteen years after his death, under the now-restored Orthodox order — his relics were translated to the Stoudios monastery, the house he had reformed and made famous, and laid there beside those of his uncle and master St. Plato of Sakkoudion; with Theodore’s relics were translated those of his brother St. Joseph, Archbishop of Thessalonica, his companion in the confession (Pratsch, pp. 313–315; OCA, Lives of the Saints, 26 January). [Disputed: the year of the translation is given as 844 in most accounts (“eighteen years after his death”), with a variant of 845 in some sources.] The translation, carried out by his disciple Naukratios and others with the blessing of the Patriarch Methodios and the Empress Theodora, was a public act of the restored Church: it brought the great Confessor home to the monastery his name had glorified, and it gave the Stoudios the relics of its founder as a perpetual sign of the cause it had won.

The Feasts

The Orthodox Church keeps two feasts of St. Theodore the Studite:

11 November — the day of his repose, his principal feast, on which he is commemorated as “the Confessor and Abbot of the Stoudios.”
26 January — the translation of his relics to the Stoudios, kept jointly with his brother St. Joseph of Thessalonica.

On these days the Church remembers him as a Confessor for the icons, a Father of the Church, and the great reformer of the monastic life — the three offices of one life. He is honored, too, every year on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, when the victory he prepared and did not live to see is celebrated, and his name stands among those of the defenders of the faith proclaimed in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy.

The Synodikon and the Sunday of Orthodoxy

The Triumph of 843 was not allowed to fade into a single celebrated occasion; it was fixed in the Church’s calendar as a perpetual commemoration, and given a text. On the first Sunday of the Great Fast each year the Church keeps the Sunday of Orthodoxy, on which it proclaims anew the faith of the seven councils and the veneration of the holy icons, repeating in liturgical form the act of 843 (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 310–315; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 1991, s.vv. “Synodikon of Orthodoxy,” “Triumph of Orthodoxy”). The instrument of that proclamation is the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, a document first promulgated in connection with the restoration and read out on that Sunday, which sets the seal of the Church upon the orthodox and pronounces anathema upon the heresiarchs. Its rhythm is the rhythm of the day itself: to the defenders of the true faith, Eternal Memory (aionia he mneme), thrice repeated; to the champions of heresy, Anathema. The Synodikon was added to and reshaped over the centuries that followed — most notably to take in the controversies of the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries — but its original and abiding core is the vindication of the icons and the honoring of those who had suffered for them.

Among the names the Synodikon holds up for “eternal memory” are the heroes of the icons’ restoration, and Theodore stands among them. The Church remembers him on the Sunday of Orthodoxy as one of the chief architects of the victory it celebrates — ranked with the confessor-patriarchs Tarasios, Nikephoros, and Methodios, and with the Empress Theodora, among those whose confession won the day (Pratsch, pp. 310–315; OCA, Lives of the Saints, 11 November). The arrangement has a deep fitness. Theodore had given his life to the confession of the icons and died seventeen years before its triumph; the Synodikon makes that confession perpetual, so that every year, on the very Sunday that crowns his cause, his name is spoken among the victors. The theology he perfected in the Antirrhetics (see The Three Antirrhetics) is the theology the Sunday of Orthodoxy confesses; the man who suffered for it is among those it blesses.

The Veneration of Theodore

The honoring of Theodore was sealed in the three forms by which the Orthodox Church venerates a saint: a place in the calendar, the keeping of his relics, and a fixed iconography. His place in the calendar is the two feasts already named — the 11th of November, the day of his repose and his principal commemoration as Confessor and Abbot of the Stoudios, and the 26th of January, the translation of his relics, kept jointly with his brother St. Joseph of Thessalonica — together with his perpetual remembrance on the Sunday of Orthodoxy (OCA, Lives of the Saints, 11 November and 26 January). The hymnography of these days, much of it from the Studite tradition of liturgical poetry that Theodore himself had done so much to shape, praises him under all three of his offices at once: the reformer of the common life, the theologian and Confessor of the icons, and the patient sufferer of exile and the lash (see The Exiles and Floggings).

His relics, translated to the Stoudios in 844 and laid beside those of St. Plato of Sakkoudion and his brother Joseph, made the monastery he had reformed the center of his cult, a place of pilgrimage and a perpetual sign of the cause the house had won. And his iconography fixes him in the visible memory of the Church in the form proper to his rank: he is depicted as a monk and abbot, in the dark monastic schema, an elder of middle years with a pointed or tapering dark beard going to grey, often holding a scroll or a Gospel book and giving a blessing — the very type of the monastic Father and teacher, recognizable as Theodore by the inscription of his name and by his settled place in the iconographic tradition. That the man whose theology had vindicated the making of icons should himself be written into icons is a symmetry the tradition has always relished: the defender of the image is honored by an image, and the doctrine that every icon depicts a person and reaches its prototype is confirmed each time the faithful venerate the icon of St. Theodore.

The Studite Party in the Restored Church

The Triumph did not only vindicate Theodore’s cause; it brought his followers to the center of the restored Church. The translation of his relics in 844 was carried out by his disciple Naukratios — the same Naukratios who had led the dispersed Studite community through the years of persecution and through whom Theodore had governed from exile (see The Vast Correspondence). Under the restored Orthodox order Naukratios became abbot of the Stoudios, and the Studite party — the monks who had kept Theodore’s confession and his rule through the dark years — emerged as a major force in the church of Theodora and Methodios, custodians at once of the founder’s relics, his liturgical and monastic legacy, and his uncompromising memory (Pratsch, pp. 313–315; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 1–30). The continuity from confession to vindication was thus not merely doctrinal but personal and institutional: the community that had suffered with Theodore now flourished, the rule he had given it now spread, and the house that bore his relics became the great engine of Studite monasticism whose influence would reach from Athos to Kiev.

From the Grave, a Founder

There is a fitting symmetry in the end of Theodore’s story. He had spent his life building two things — the reformed common life of the Stoudios and the confession of the icons — and in 843–844 both were vindicated at once: the icons restored, and the founder’s relics brought home to the monastery whose rule would soon conquer the Orthodox world (see The Studite Typikon and Influence and Scholarship). Theodore died a prisoner-in-effect of a hostile regime, his cause apparently defeated; within a generation he was a Father of the Church whose theology was dogma and whose rule was the pattern of monasticism from Athos to Kiev. The dark before the dawn was real; so was the dawn.

References

Pratsch, Thomas. Theodoros Studites (759–826) — zwischen Dogma und Pragma. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. (The death of 826, the Triumph of Orthodoxy of 843, and the translation of the relics.)
Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (On the end of Theodore’s life and the place of his death.)
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.vv. “Theodora,” “Methodios I,” “Triumph of Orthodoxy,” “Theodore of Stoudios.”)
Venerable Theodore the Confessor and Abbot of the Studion. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, 11 November; and the translation of relics, 26 January. (The repose, the translation, and the feasts, as the tradition attests them.)
The Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Ed. and trans. Jean Gouillard, “Le Synodikon de l’Orthodoxie: édition et commentaire,” Travaux et Mémoires 2 (1967): 1–316. (The text proclaimed on the Sunday of Orthodoxy; the “eternal memory” of the defenders of the icons and the anathemas against the iconoclasts.)