Anglican Commemoration
Archbishop of Canterbury
September 19 · d. 690
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 about 602 in Tarsus of Cilicia, the city of the Apostle Paul, in what is now southern Turkey. He was a Greek, schooled in the learning of the Christian East, deep in Scripture and the Greek fathers but also in Roman law, astronomy, and medicine, a range of knowledge almost unheard of in the West. By the time the church of Canterbury came looking for an archbishop, Theodore was an old monk of sixty-six living in Rome, the last man anyone would have predicted for a wet and feuding kingdom at the edge of the world.
The English see had fallen vacant after a tangle of contested elections and sudden deaths. Pope Vitalian, casting about for a candidate who belonged to none of England's rival kingdoms, settled on the elderly Greek, consecrated him in 668, and sent him north with an African abbot named Hadrian for company. Theodore arrived in 669 and went to work with the vigor of a man half his age.
What he found was not one church but a scatter of competing jurisdictions across Kent, Northumbria, Mercia, and the rest, with no way to act together. What he left, twenty-one years later, was a single province. He toured the whole of England, the first archbishop ever to do so. In 672 he summoned the Council of Hertford, the first council of the entire English Church, and gave it canons for the ordering of bishops and the keeping of Easter. He carved unwieldy dioceses into workable ones and settled the bitter quarrel between Wilfrid and Chad with a firm and fatherly hand.
And he taught. With Hadrian he made the school at Canterbury the finest in western Europe, where Englishmen learned Greek and Latin, Scripture and verse and the reckoning of the calendar, so well that Bede, a generation later, marveled at it. When Theodore died in 690, nearly ninety years old, Bede wrote the simple verdict that says everything: "Theodore was the first archbishop whom all the Church of the English consented to obey."
Theodore comes to us almost entirely through Bede's Ecclesiastical History, written within fifty years of his death by a man who had been taught by Theodore's own pupils and who regarded the old Greek with frank admiration. Bede records the consecration, the journey, the Council of Hertford, the reorganization of the dioceses, and the school at Canterbury, and the surviving canons of Hertford bear out the picture.
Strikingly for an early medieval saint, almost no miracle stories cling to Theodore. Bede praises his administration and his learning, not his wonders. A Penitential circulated under his name, compiled by his students from his oral rulings; scholars debate how much is genuinely his, but its core reflects the pastoral mind Bede describes. The man is historical to an unusual degree, an administrator whose monuments are councils, dioceses, and a library.
Theodore is commemorated on September 19, the day of his death in 690. He is honored as the true organizer of the Church of England, the archbishop who turned a missionary frontier into an ordered province with a single shared discipline, and as the founder, with Hadrian, of English learning.
Before Theodore, the English kingdoms each kept their own church; after him there was one English Church, and the line of Canterbury he strengthened runs unbroken to this day. He is remembered too as a living bridge between East and West, a Greek from Paul's own city who gave his last and greatest years to the Christians of Britain.
Some links below are Amazon affiliate links. Commontide may earn a small commission from purchases; the public-domain links beside them are always free.
Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Books IV-V)(Latin, c. 731)
Recommended: Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World's Classics
The one full source for Theodore's episcopate; the Oxford World's Classics is the standard translation.
Public domain: Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Book IV
Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on His Life and Influence(English, 1995)
The standard modern scholarship on Theodore and the Canterbury school.
Further reading. The one essential source is Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Books IV and V. For modern scholarship, the standard study is Michael Lapidge, ed., Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on His Life and Influence (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Henry Mayr-Harting's The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England sets him in context.
Online resources. Bede's Ecclesiastical History is free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and the Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
As an Amazon Associate Commontide earns from qualifying purchases.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Theodore of Tarsus special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Mercia /ˈmɜːrʃiə/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52