-
Theodoret on the "School of Antioch": A Network Approach
- Journal of Early Christian Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2007
- pp. 517-562
- 10.1353/earl.2007.0073
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
The School of Antioch has more often been treated as a doctrinal abstraction than a social entity. This study reinterprets the Antiochene phenomenon as a socio-doctrinal network, a group of clerics bound by a call and response of doctrinal language. Conciliar documents and the letters of Theodoret of Cyrrhus showcase this network in operation in the 430s and 440s. For earlier, formative decades, the network must be approached indirectly through historical narrative. In his Church History Theodoret narrates how one bishop-claimant (Meletius of Antioch) and his partisan following (featuring Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia) combined preaching, teaching, and ascetic associations to claim and organize Syrian bishoprics.While sometimes tendentious, Theodoret's narrative presentation finds external confirmation. It suggests that Antiochene doctrines coalesced in a specific social context, a germinating mix of clerical friendships and enmities, and that they developed as part of an intertwined socio-doctrinal dynamic.