Talk:Theophylact of Bulgaria

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, now in the public domain.

[edit] Why Bulgarian people? He was Greek

Actually his native language was Greek and his surname Ifestos and he clearly thought himself as separate from the Bulgarians whom he unfarily described as "frogs","monsters" etc a sentiment that his flock seemed to reciprocate in full.

The few events of Theophylaktos’ life which are known with certainty can be summarized briefly. Born in Chalkis, probably before 1055, he moved to Constantinople, where he became the pupil of Michael Psellos, a teacher of rhetoric and deacon of St. Sofia. Some time in the 1080’s he was appointed by the Emperor Alexios Komnenos as tutor to the young Constantine, son of the former Emperor Michael VII, who was then regarded as prospective heir to the throne. About 1090 he became Archbishop of Bulgaria, with his see in Ohrid. As primate of the Bulgarian Church, Theophylaktos was entrusted with the spiritual administration of a large, and predominantly Slav-speaking, area of the Balkans which, some seventy years earlier, had been annexed to the Empire through the conquests of Basil II. Two further facts of his biography were recently discovered by the French scholar Gautier: as one of his poems shows, he was still alive in 1125 or 1126, and possibly still at that time and he bore the surname ὁ Ἥφαιστος (14).

All the rest we know about Theophylaktos comes from his numerous writings. They include the celebrated Παιδεία βασιλική, written for his imperial pupil, the remarkably fair-minded treatise “On the Errors of the Latins” in which he severely criticised his Greek colleagues for slandering the customs of the Latin Church, a series of commentaries on books of the Old and New Testaments, two important works of hagiography, and a large number of letters which he wrote, as archbishop of Ohrid, mostly to high-placed Byzantine officials(15). This correspondence is a major source of our knowledge of conditions in the central and northern Balkans around the year 1100, and of Theophylaktos' attitude towards his Slav-speaking flock.

A cursory reader of these letters might easily conclude that, as the senior representative of the Byzantine Church in Bulgaria, Theophylaktos was every inch what today would be called a colonialist oppressor and a rabid imperialist. The opinions he held of his diocese and its inhabitants were, for one thing, less than complimentary. The Bulgarians he describes as "monsters", "scorpions" and "frogs", among whom he is condemned to live. Φύσις... Βουλγαρική, πάσης κακίας τιθηνός (16) — this judgement of Theophylaktos hardly suggests a zealous pastor or a benevolent Kulturträger. Furthermore, he shows a disagreable snobbishness in affecting to despise local Slavonic place-names, which does not prevent him from using a βάρβαρον ὄνομα as a technical term whenever he feels a professional need to do so(17). His letters to officials in Constantinople are full of lachrymose complaints at being relegated to what he evidently regarded as a dreary outpost of the Empire. "Now that we have lived for years in the land of the Bulgarians", he wrote about 1105, "the rustic way of life has become our friend and companion"(18). There seems little doubt that Theophylaktos was, on the whole, unloved by his Bulgarian flock: in one of his letters he complains that the people of Ohrid, evidently to spite their Greek archbishop, sang a victory song (παιᾶνά τινα ἐπινίκιον) in the streets of the city, in rememberance no doubt of the past glories of the Bulgarian nation(19).

Dimitri Obolensky The Byzantine Impact on Eastern Europe The Byzantine Inheritance of Eastern Europe. Variorum Reprints, London 1982.

Xenovatis (talk) 17:09, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] other

According to Adam Clark, Theophylact gives the following of the relationship of Jesus and John the Evangilist (Gospel author), "Theophylact makes him one of the relatives of our Lord, and gives his genealogy thus: 'Joseph, the husband of the blessed Mary, had seven children by a former wife, four sons and three daughters-Martha, (perhaps, says Dr. Lardner, it should be Mary), Esther, and Salome, whose son John was; therefore Salome was reckoned out Lord’s sister, and John was his nephew.' If this relationship did exist, it may have been, at least in part, the reason of several things mentioned in the Gospels: as the petition of the two brothers for the two chief places in the kingdom of Christ; John’s being the beloved disciple and friend of Jesus, and being admitted to some familiarities denied to the rest, and possibly performing some offices about the person of his Master; and, finally, our Lord’s committing to him the care of his mother, as long as she should survive him." - Joel Harris