TRINITY · 19 SEPTEMBER Archbishop & Abbot · Confessor
Theodore of Tarsus & Hadrian of Canterbury
Archbishop & Abbot · Architects of the English Church · d. 690 & 709
Theodore — THEE-oh-dor · Tarsus — TAR-sus · Cilicia — sil-ISH-ee-a · Hadrian — HAY-dree-an · Vitalian — vy-TAY-lee-an
O God, who in thy Providence didst bring thy servants Theodore and Hadrian from the far parts of the earth to build up thy Church in England; Grant that thy Church may never want for such wise governors and patient teachers, who count no distance too great and no labour too heavy in the service of thy people; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
God’s instruments are not always the ones we would have chosen. When the Archbishop of Canterbury died in 664, Pope Vitalian (vy-TAY-lee-an) searched for a replacement and found, after considerable difficulty, a Greek-speaking monk from Tarsus (TAR-sus) in Cilicia (sil-ISH-ee-a) — the city of the Apostle Paul, on the far south-eastern edge of Asia Minor — who was sixty-six years old, had never been to England, spoke no English, and belonged to a monastic tradition formed entirely in the Eastern Mediterranean. His name was Theodore (THEE-oh-dor). The Pope was concerned enough about sending an Eastern monk to govern the Western Church that he asked the African abbot Hadrian (HAY-dree-an) to accompany him as a companion and guide, to ensure that Theodore imported no Greek customs contrary to the faith. Theodore and Hadrian travelled together from Rome to Canterbury, arriving in 669. Theodore governed the English Church for twenty-two years. Hadrian directed the school at Canterbury for forty. Between them they transformed the English Church from a fragile, quarrelsome, half-organised collection of missionary outposts into the most learned and most unified ecclesiastical province in northern Europe.
Theodore did this primarily by travelling. He visited every diocese in England, holding synods, settling disputes between bishops, redrawing boundaries, creating new sees where the work of conversion had outrun the existing structures. The Synod of Hertford in 672 was the first council of the whole English Church — the first occasion on which bishops from every kingdom met together under a single authority — and it was Theodore who convened it, presided over it, and drew up its canons. He separated the unwieldy diocese of Northumbria into smaller units. He resolved the long quarrel between Wilfrid of York and the Northumbrian kings with patient and not always successful diplomacy. He brought order to a Church that had grown in fits and starts, by the energy of individual missionaries and the faith of individual kings, without the structural coherence that would allow it to endure beyond the lifetimes of those individuals. Bede, who was eight years old when Theodore died, says simply that the English Church was never in a happier or more peaceful condition than under his rule. Coming from Bede, who never wasted his admiration, this is the highest possible tribute.
Hadrian meanwhile was doing something equally essential and less visible. The school he directed at Canterbury alongside Theodore was teaching Greek and Latin to the sons of the English nobility and the English Church — not the rudimentary Latin of the liturgy, but the full classical and scriptural tradition, including the computus, sacred poetry, Roman law, and the interpretation of scripture. Bede tells us that some of Hadrian’s students, still alive when he was writing, spoke Latin and Greek as fluently as their native tongue. The school at Canterbury under Hadrian was the seedbed from which the next generation of English scholars grew — the generation that produced, among others, the learning that made Bede himself possible. Theodore was the administrator; Hadrian was the teacher; between them they are what Benedict Biscop was to Wearmouth-Jarrow, multiplied across the whole breadth of England. An African abbot and a Greek monk between them gave the English Church its mind.
There is a particular grace in the sheer improbability of it. Theodore came from the city of Paul, whose letters he knew as intimately as any scholar of his age, and he came to the land that Paul had never reached, to complete in the far north-west of the world the work that Paul had begun in the east. He arrived old and died older, having given everything the final decades of his long life could give. He was buried at Canterbury beside Augustine, the first Archbishop, whose unfinished work he had at last completed. When he died in 690 he was eighty-eight years old, still governing, still writing, still present to his Church. Hadrian outlived him by nineteen years and taught until the end. The Trinity season in which their joint feast falls is the long green season of ordinary faithfulness, the weeks in which the Church does not do dramatic things but simply endures and teaches and governs and prays. Theodore and Hadrian are its patron saints — the men who turned the extraordinary energy of the first missionaries into the steady, durable structure within which the English Church could live for centuries. They are not the fire. They are the hearth that holds it.
O Almighty God, who didst guide thy servants Theodore and Hadrian across the world to build up thy Church in England; Grant to all who govern and teach in thy name the same breadth of learning, the same patience of governance, and the same love for the people entrusted to their care; that thy Church, being well ordered and well taught, may grow into the full stature of thy Son; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.