Commontide
Proper 19
Liturgical Color: White/Gold
The 15th Sunday after Trinity
O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Archbishop of Canterbury
Anglican Commemoration
The Greek monk who organized the Church of England. Sent from Rome at the age of sixty-six to a quarrelsome island at the edge of the world, Theodore of Tarsus spent twenty-one years turning a scatter of rival missionary jurisdictions into a single ordered province, summoning its first national council, carving its dioceses, and founding at Canterbury the finest school in western Europe. Bede's verdict was plain: he was the first archbishop whom the whole English Church consented to obey.
Theodore was born in Tarsus, Cilicia — the same city as the Apostle Paul — around 602. He was educated in the Greek-speaking East, studying at Antioch and possibly at Constantinople and Athens. He was a monk, deeply learned in Greek patristic theology, Scripture, Roman law, astronomy, metrics, and medicine — a range of knowledge virtually unmatched in the seventh-century West.
When the English see of Canterbury fell vacant after a series of contested elections and premature deaths, Pope Vitalian chose Theodore — an elderly Greek monk with no connection to England or its feuding kingdoms — as a compromise candidate who owed nothing to any faction. Theodore was consecrated in Rome on March 26, 668, and arrived in England on May 27, 669.
What followed was one of the most remarkable administrative achievements in Church history. Theodore found an English Church divided among the kingdoms of Kent, Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex, with overlapping jurisdictions, disputed boundaries, and no mechanism for collective action. Within four years he convened the Council of Hertford (672/673) — the first council of the entire English Church — which established canonical norms for episcopal jurisdiction, monastic discipline, and marital law.
He subdivided unwieldy dioceses, created new bishoprics, and established clear lines of authority running through Canterbury. He resolved the bitter dispute between Wilfrid of York and Chad of Lichfield with diplomatic skill. His Penitential — a systematic guide for confessors, compiled from his oral teaching by his students — became foundational to English pastoral practice.
At Canterbury, Theodore and his colleague Hadrian (an African monk) established a school that taught Greek, Latin, Scripture, computation, metrics, astronomy, and Roman law. Bede called it a golden age: students from across Britain came to Canterbury, and some were 'as fluent in Latin and Greek as in their native language.' Theodore's school trained the generation of scholars who produced the great works of Anglo-Saxon literature and learning.
Theodore died on September 19, 690, at the extraordinary age of approximately eighty-eight, having served as archbishop for twenty-one years.
Theodore's tradition is almost entirely historical rather than hagiographic. No miracle narratives are associated with him in the earliest sources. Bede's treatment is one of unqualified admiration for Theodore's administrative genius, learning, and pastoral wisdom, but without the miraculous elements that mark other entries in the HE.
The Penitential attributed to Theodore has been the subject of scholarly debate — it was compiled by his students from his oral teaching rather than written by Theodore himself. Multiple recensions survive, and not all material in them may derive from Theodore. However, the core of the Penitential reflects his pastoral theology.
Theodore's bringing of Greek learning to England was understood by Bede as providential — a bridge between Eastern and Western Christianity at a time when the traditions were drifting apart.