PROLEGOMENA.

THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THE BLESSED THEODORET, BISHOP OF CYRUS.

I. — PARENTAGE, BIRTH, AND EDUCATION.

In Antioch, at the close of the fourth century, there lived a husband and wife who were wealthy and happy in the enjoyment of all the comforts of life, with one exception: they were childless. Married at seventeen, the young bride spent several years enjoying the pleasures that wealth and society could provide. At the age of twenty-three, she was afflicted by a painful disease in one of her eyes, for which neither the books of the ancient authorities nor the latest medical discoveries could suggest a remedy. One of her domestic servants, feeling compassion for her distress, informed her that the wife of Pergamius, who was then in authority in the East, had been healed of a similar ailment by Petrus, a famous Galatian hermit who lived in the upper story of a tomb in the neighborhood, accessible only by a ladder. The afflicted lady, as the story—which her son later repeated¹—goes, hurried to climb to the recluse’s latticed cell. She was dressed in her usual elaborate costume, wearing earrings, necklaces, and other gold ornaments; her silk robe was blazing with embroidery, her face smeared with red and white cosmetics, and her eyebrows and eyelids artificially darkened.

“Tell me,” said the hermit upon beholding his brilliant visitor, “tell me, my child, if some skilled painter were to paint a portrait according to the strict rules of his art and offer it for display, and then some dauber were to come along, quickly splashing paint on the canvas, finding fault with the artistic picture, lengthening the lines of the brows and lids, making the face whiter, and heightening the red of the cheeks—what would you say? Do you not think the original painter would be offended by this insult to his art and these unnecessary additions from an unskilled hand?” These arguments, we are told, eventually led to the young Antiochene lady's improvement in both piety and good taste, and her eye is said to have been restored to health by the sign of the cross. It is not impossible that the discontinuation of the use of cosmetics helped, if not caused, the cure.

For six more years the husband and wife lived a more religious life together, but they remained without children. Among the ascetic hermits whom the disappointed husband begged to join him in his prayers was one Macedonius, distinguished by the simplicity of his diet as “the barley eater.” In answer to his prayers, it was believed, a son was finally granted to the pious couple.² Since the condition of the blessing was that the boy should be devoted to divine service, he was appropriately named at birth “Theodoret,” or “Given by God.”³ It is impossible to know the exact date of this birth, which had such important consequences for the history and literature of the Church. The less probable year is 386, as given by Garnerius,⁴ while the more probable and now generally accepted year of 393 follows the calculation of Tillemont.⁵

¹ Religious History, 1188 et seq.
² Religious History, 1214.
³ The Hebrew equivalents of this general term are Nathaniel and Matthew. Modern English custom has returned to the Greek for “Theodore” and “Theodora,” while “Dieudonné” and “Diodati” are familiar in French and Italian.
⁴ Garner, the French Jesuit Father, was born in Paris in 1612 and died in 1681. His Auctarium Theodoreti Episcopi Cyrensis, including dissertations, was published in 1684.
⁵ According to this calculation, Theodoret would be fifty-six at the time of the letter to Leo, written in 449, in which he speaks of his old age, and about thirty at his consecration as bishop in 423. W. Möller, in Herzog’s Encyclopædia of Protestant Theology (1885 ed., xv. 402), suggests 390.