The Holy Hieromartyr Methodius, Bishop of Patara — Defender of the Resurrection of the Body against Origen

On 20 June, the Church commemorates the Holy Hieromartyr Methodius, Bishop of Patara in Lycia, who died as a martyr for Christ at the turn of the third and fourth centuries. He is remembered by the Church not only for the blood he shed, but also for a particular labour: he was one of the first and most important ecclesiastical writers to give a measured and systematic answer to certain teachings of Origen concerning the resurrection — teachings he judged insufficient to preserve the identity between the body that dies and the body that rises. Against them, Methodius defended a truth that is at once simple and difficult: God does not replace man’s body with another, but raises up the same body and transforms it unto incorruption.

This article pursues three things, kept clearly distinct from one another: what the Synaxarion tells us of his life and martyrdom; what can be established with historical grounding about his person and his dates, there where the sources do not agree among themselves; and what stands at the heart of his teaching on the resurrection, for which the Church honoured him as a defender of the true faith.

I. The Life, according to the Synaxarion

The Synaxarion presents Methodius as a man dedicated to God from his youth. The Lives of the Saints say of him that, “having given himself to Him from his youth, he showed himself a pure vessel and a dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit”¹. For his pure life and for his skill in the right interpretation of the dogmas, he was raised while still young to the priesthood, and afterward set as bishop of the city of Patara, which lies in the region of Lycia, in Asia Minor.

As a shepherd, the Synaxarion shows him enlightening the Church by his word and defending it from heresy. In that time the “heresy of Origen, which deceived many,”¹ had spread, and Methodius rose against it through many writings and homilies, turning many back to the true faith; his words, the Synaxarion says, “shone throughout the whole world like lightning”¹.

It was precisely this boldness that brought him to martyrdom. The Synaxarion recounts that the unseen enemy, unable to bear his great labours for the Church, armed against him “his servants, that is, the heathen who worshipped idols,” urging them to put him to death by torments¹. Seized by the pagans and cruelly tortured, Saint Methodius was pressed to worship idols; and because he refused, “the pagans, having seized Methodius, the hierarch of Christ, cut off his head with the sword, and the saint passed to a better life”¹. Thus he sealed with his blood the confession he had kept by his word, “confessing Christ unto the shedding of blood and a martyr’s end”¹.

The Synaxarion gathers this end into a single image: he who before had served the Lamb of God offered himself afterward as a sacrifice, “as a slain lamb,” and was adorned “with twofold crowns” — the crown of confessing the true faith and the crown of martyrdom¹. In this setting the Church commemorates him: first a defender of the faith by word, then a martyr by blood.

II. The Person and the Dates: What Can Be Known with Grounding

For a reader who desires the whole truth, it is our duty to say openly that the sources do not agree on a few particulars of Methodius’s life. This touches neither his veneration nor the heart of his teaching; it concerns only the historical margin of his life, there where the hagiographic tradition and the historical record say different things.

The episcopal see. Our Synaxarion and the service of the day call him “Bishop of Patara.” The earliest surviving witness about him, however — that of Blessed Jerome, in his work On Illustrious Men — calls him bishop of Olympus in Lycia and afterward of Tyre². From this comes the name under which he most often appears in scholarly literature: Methodius of Olympus. Both Patara and Olympus are cities of Lycia, and part of the tradition links his end to Tyre, in Phoenicia. The reader who seeks him under the name “Methodius of Olympus” should know that this is one and the same saint whom our calendar commemorates as “Bishop of Patara.” We here use the name from the calendar, without denying the others.

It is also fitting to explain why his life is so little known to us. As the Romanian editor of his writings observes, whereas Saint Gregory the Wonderworker was Origen’s disciple and admirer, passing over his errors, Methodius was on the contrary his opponent, and in several of his works does nothing other than to set forth and refute Origen’s teaching; it was precisely this opposition that drew upon him the ill-will of Origen’s friends, who saw to it that Methodius’s life and name remained in obscurity³.

The place of martyrdom. The Romanian Synaxarion says that Saint Methodius suffered at Chalcis, in Syria. The Western sources and historical scholarship indicate, instead, the city of Chalcis in Greece (in Euboea). The name of the city is the same; the region, different. We cannot decide between the two with certainty, and so we note them both.

The time of martyrdom and the emperor. Here lies the most considerable discrepancy, and it arises within our own sources. The Synaxarion says that Saint Methodius suffered “in the reign of Aurelian,” who reigned between the years 270 and 275. But the commonly received dating of his martyrdom is probably around the year 311 or 312, that is, in the time of the last great persecution of Christians, under Diocletian and his successors. The two cannot stand together: between the reign of Aurelian and the year 312 there are nearly forty years. Historical scholarship places his work toward the end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth, and his martyrdom in the persecution of 311–312⁴. The name of Aurelian, preserved by some Synaxaria, appears to be a confusion of later tradition — and indeed the earliest witness itself, that of Blessed Jerome, leaves the time of his death in question. We say this not to dishonour the liturgical source, but for the sake of truth: the commemoration of the Saint remains unshaken, even if the name of the persecuting emperor was remembered wrongly.

Over and above these discrepancies at the margin of history, the sources do meet in what is essential: a bishop of Lycia, author of writings by which he set forth and refuted the errors of Origen — above all that concerning the resurrection — and a confessor who sealed his faith by a martyr’s death, probably around the year 311/312. The fact of his martyrdom itself is attested by the earliest witness, Blessed Jerome, who calls him crowned with martyrdom, even while leaving its time and place in question². The manner of the martyrdom — the torments, the refusal to sacrifice to idols, and the beheading by the sword — is set before us by the Synaxarion; to the Synaxarion belongs also the image of the monk dedicated to God from his youth. Historical scholarship retains with certainty the core: a Lycian bishop, a systematic opponent of the Origenist conceptions, who died as a martyr at the turn of the two centuries.

III. The Writings: What Is His and What Is Not

Several writings have come down under the name of Methodius, but they do not all carry the same force of authenticity, and an article that wishes to be of use must distinguish them. Four works are received as truly his and give us the shape of his thought; the Romanian edition of the Fathers and Ecclesiastical Writers contains them all⁵.

The Banquet, or On Chastity (in Greek the Symposion; also known as The Banquet of the Ten Virgins) is his only work preserved entire in Greek. It is a dialogue on virginity and purity, composed after the manner of Plato’s Symposium, in which ten virgins deliver, each in turn, a discourse in praise of virginity. Though its theme is purity, the work also touches upon the mystery of the body and its resurrection, as we shall see.

Aglaophon, or On the Resurrection (so named after one of the speakers of the dialogue) is the work in which the heart of his opposition to Origen on the resurrection is found. Of it there survive Greek fragments and an Old Slavonic version, which permits an almost complete reconstruction of the work, as well as a detailed summary in the Bibliotheca of Patriarch Photius⁶. There the truth is clearly set forth that the very body which was man’s in life will be raised and transformed unto incorruption.

Concerning Free-Will (in Greek Peri tou autexousiou) is a dialogue against the Gnostic teaching on the origin of evil, in which the freedom of the human will is defended.

On Life and Rational Conduct is a word of exhortation to moderation in the present life and to hope in the life to come.

Besides these, there survive testimonies to works now lost, among them one against the pagan philosopher Porphyry.

It must then be said, without evasion, what is not his. Under the name of Methodius there circulated, beginning in the seventh century, an apocalyptic writing commonly known as the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, composed in Syriac, with prophecies about the empires of the world and the end of the ages. This writing does not belong to Saint Methodius of Patara; it was placed under his name by a far later author, to lend it weight. This distinction also clears up a cause of confusion in some Synaxaria: the prophecy of the “fall of Constantinople,” sometimes ascribed to Saint Methodius, cannot come from him. The city of Byzantium did indeed already exist; but its refounding and consecration as Constantinople, the new capital of the Empire, took place only in the year 330, more than a century after his martyrdom. Such prophecies come from the writing placed under his name in later times, not from his genuine work. The profitable teaching of Saint Methodius must be sought in his authentic writings, not in those attached to his name at a later date.

IV. The Heart: The Resurrection of the Body against Origen

Here lies the very heart of his veneration and the reason the Church named him a defender of the true faith.

The foundation of Saint Methodius’s teaching is not a philosophical theory about the matter of the body, but the Resurrection of Christ. He who rose is the Same who was crucified: the tomb is empty, and the wounds remain as witness; the body can be handled (Luke 24:39; John 20:27), without being, by this, any longer subject to corruption and death. In Christ both identity and change are shown together — it is not another body that rises in place of the one crucified, yet the body that rises is transfigured and filled with the power of the Spirit. After this pattern will our resurrection also be. This is the axis upon which all that follows rests.

To understand Saint Methodius’s opposition, one must first say, without harshness, what Origen taught — for Methodius rises not against a man, but against a teaching.

What Origen Taught

Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–254) was a man of great learning, whose labours in the interpretation of Scripture the Church has not denied; Methodius himself acknowledges his service to ecclesiastical theology. Reared in the habits of Platonic philosophy, Origen nevertheless wove, in a few places, the Christian teaching together with opinions that did not accord with the faith of the Church. Three of these touch our theme — and it must be said at the outset that Methodius often combats them in the form in which he himself ascribes them; not everything that was later called “Origenism” can be laid, without remainder, to the charge of the historical person of Origen.

The first concerns the origin of the soul. In the form ascribed to Origen, souls would have existed before the body, and the body would have been given to them as a bond, as the consequence of a prior fall; the body would thus be the cause of our sins. Methodius rises against this scheme, which bound the bodily world itself to the fall of rational beings.

The second concerns the manner of the resurrection, and here much precision is required. Origen does not deny the resurrection: he speaks of the body’s putting on incorruption and immortality. The difference lies in how he explains the identity between the body we now have and the one to come. Origen places the emphasis on the continuity of the form (the “shape,” in Greek eidos) or of the individual principle of the body, while the matter would be transformed from the ground up, since the material body flows ceaselessly and never remains the same. Methodius holds that such a continuity does not suffice and that it risks replacing the resurrection of the concrete body with the receiving of another body. The dispute, then, is not whether something rises, but whether the same body rises, or only its form upon another body.

The third concerns the unfolding of the worlds. Origen speculated about a succession of worlds or ages and about a permanence of the corporeality of rational beings, without, however, holding matter to be uncreated or coeternal with God — which he plainly rejects. Methodius opposed the way this scheme bound the material world to the fall of rational beings, but he did not charge him with the pagan teaching of an eternal, self-existent matter.

Against these opinions, Methodius set a threefold answer.

The Body Is Not the Soul’s Chain

Origen called the body a “bond” of the soul, a hindrance to its good works. Methodius overturns this notion: the body does not hinder the works of the soul, but is borne by the soul and works together with it in all that the soul entrusts to it⁷. Evil does not come from the body as such, but from the sin that entered the body through disobedience.

As for death, it must be regarded with full discernment. God does not create death as a good and is not the author of evil. Death entered the world through sin and remains, in the Apostle’s words, “the last enemy” that shall be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26). After the fall, however, God permits mortality and turns it providentially against sin, so that evil, having entered into man, may not become immortal in him; it is in this sense that Methodius says death was appointed for the destruction of sin⁸. Death remains the enemy of human nature, but in Christ it is compelled to become a passage to the resurrection.

Hence also the way Methodius interprets the Apostle Paul’s words concerning the “body of death” and the strife between the “law of the mind” and the “law of sin” in the members (Romans 7). Origen read these as a condemnation of the body itself. Methodius shows that the Apostle does not call the body death, but the law of sin which is in the members, hidden in us through the transgression of the commandment⁹. His proof is simple and strong: if the body itself had been death, the Apostle would not have given thanks to God for the deliverance brought through Christ, since by bodily death all died even before the coming of Christ. Therefore what Christ brought us is deliverance from the sin that dwells in the body, not the casting off of the body.

“Flesh and Blood Shall Not Inherit the Kingdom”

Those around Origen leaned, against the resurrection of the body, on the Apostle’s word: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50). If the flesh does not inherit the Kingdom — they said — then the flesh does not rise.

Methodius undoes this objection on two levels. In his moral reading, “flesh and blood” does not mean the body itself, but man ruled by the passions, the irrational impulse toward pleasures. In the broader sense of the Pauline text, the expression denotes human nature in its present condition, mortal and corruptible. In both readings the conclusion is the same: it is not the body as God’s creation that is cast out of the Kingdom, but its corruption, which shall be overcome by transformation. For this reason, Methodius adds, the Apostle at once explains himself: “neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.” And corruption, he notes, is not the thing that is corrupted, but the power that corrupts. At the resurrection, it is not corruption that shall inherit incorruption, but incorruption that shall clothe what was corruptible, according to the word: “this corruptible must put on incorruption” (1 Corinthians 15:53)¹⁰. Far from denying the resurrection of the body, this passage confirms it.

The Resurrection of the Same Body, Not Only of the “Form”

Here the most considerable difference is sharpened. Origen, as Methodius presents his teaching, holds that it is not the same body that will be given back to the soul, but that the form of each, according to the appearance by which the body is now distinguished, will rise stamped upon another, spiritual body. The ground was a philosophical one: the matter of the body flows and is renewed, so that only the form would remain constant; therefore only the form would rise.

Methodius overturns this ground by a proof drawn from the very heart of the faith: Christ. Origen offered, as a pattern of the resurrection, the appearing of Moses and Elijah on the mountain. Methodius answers with discernment. The recognizable appearing of Moses — allowing him to be known by his face — cannot yet be called the general resurrection, and it cannot deprive Christ of the name “the first begotten of the dead” (Revelation 1:5; Colossians 1:18): if anyone had risen fully before Christ, Christ would no longer be the first. The case of Elijah, however, is more difficult, since Scripture says that he was taken up with the body, without passing through the common death (2 Kings 2:11); Methodius himself acknowledges the difficulty and treats it separately, without closing it within a settled ruling. What he insists on showing is not a definition concerning the manner of these appearings, but the fact that the true resurrection — full and immortal — begins from Christ¹¹.

And further, Methodius shows that the very idea of a “form” that would separate itself from the body and remain untouched does not stand. The form cannot exist apart from its matter, just as the shape of a melted statue perishes together with the melting, no longer having existence of itself. If, on the contrary, the form remains incorrupt, then precisely that which never fell cannot be called “resurrection.” The resurrection, then, concerns precisely the body that died and was corrupted, which God raises up again.

What, Then, Is the Change of the Body?

The question might arise: if the same body rises, what then does the “spiritual body” of which the Apostle speaks mean? Methodius does not deny the change; he places it, however, otherwise than Origen does. The change is the restoration of the body to an impassible and glorious state — a transformation that takes place, he says with a clarity that leaves no room for confusion, not by the change of the arrangement of the members, but by the body’s no longer desiring carnal pleasures¹².

Here it must be said plainly what we do and do not mean by “the same body.” We do not speak of a mere reassembly of the same material particles, as though the resurrection depended on the recovery of every atom. The faith of the Church confesses the real identity of man and the continuity of his body as a person, not a theory about the recovery of matter. God does not fashion a copy in our place and does not give the soul a covering unconnected with the present life; He raises up the whole man and transforms his body unto incorruption. And “spiritual body” does not mean an immaterial or aerial body, but the human body fully subject to, illumined and enlivened by, the Holy Spirit¹³. The risen body is not another body, cast off from matter, but the same body, gaining incorruption, immortality, and impassibility, in full communion with the Holy Spirit. The change for the better does not mean the abandonment of matter, but the gaining of incorruptibility.

Here is seen the most important consequence of Saint Methodius’s whole argument: man is not a soul to which the body would be a temporary garment, to be cast off, but a unity of soul and body. The body is not a chance receptacle in which the soul dwells for a time, but a constitutive part of the person. The soul without the body and the body without the soul are the unnatural state that death has brought; the fullness of man is restored through the resurrection. For this reason salvation is not the soul’s flight from the body, but the healing and resurrection of the whole man.

To set all this within a single image, Saint Methodius recounts, in Aglaophon, something he says he saw on Mount Olympus in Lycia: a fire issuing from the earth at the mountain’s summit, and beside it a plant, green and flourishing, which the fire did not burn, though it burned the branches cast by the fire itself into the flame. This, the Saint says, God appointed as a sign of the Day to come: when all things shall be wrapped in fire, the bodies endowed with chastity and righteousness shall pass through it as though through cold water¹⁴. The pure body is not burned by the fire of judgment, but passes through it unto incorruption.

The same assurance runs through the Banquet as well, though its theme there is purity. The body is there no hindrance but, on the contrary, the flesh with its five senses, kept in purity, is likened to a lamp of five lights, which the soul will bear as a torch when it stands before Christ the Bridegroom on the day of the resurrection¹⁵. The body is the lampstand through which the light of holiness is shown forth on the day of the resurrection — not the burden of which the soul would divest itself.

And one thing more must be added: the resurrection is general. Not only the righteous shall rise, but all men — some unto life, others unto judgment (John 5:28–29). The difference between them does not concern the reality of the risen body, which shall belong to all, but the manner in which each will meet the glory of God.

V. The Judgment of the Church and the Commemoration Today

What Saint Methodius defended at the turn of the third and fourth centuries was to be confirmed by the Church conciliarly later on. In the sixth century, the Church rejected synodally several Origenist theses, among them the pre-existence of souls and certain conceptions concerning the disappearance or the radical transformation of bodies. The condemnations at Constantinople in the year 543 are certain; the exact relation between the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas and the acts of the Fifth Ecumenical Council of the year 553 — whose surviving acts concern chiefly the “Three Chapters” — remains debated among scholars¹⁶. Saint Methodius may therefore be called one of the first to have seen the danger clearly, and a forerunner of the Church’s reaction against Origenism, without claiming that his whole argument was ratified word for word by the Council of 553.

Yet the measure of the Saint must also be kept. Methodius was no enemy of philosophy, since he himself was reared in the teaching of Plato and made use of the higher interpretation of Scripture. Nor was he a persecutor of Origen, but acknowledged his labours for the Church, rising only against his erroneous opinions. This is the very measure of the Fathers: not hatred toward a man, but love of the truth and care to keep unharmed the faith of the many and the simple, who cannot of themselves separate the wheat from the tares.

For us today, the witness of Saint Methodius is not an old quarrel long since closed. The temptation to regard the body as a burden, and salvation as an exit from the body, did not die with the ancient controversies; it returns, under various forms, whenever faith in the resurrection of the body weakens and turns into a vague hope of a “soul” without a body. Saint Methodius brings us back to the confession of the Creed: “I look for the resurrection of the dead” — that is, the resurrection of the same body, transformed unto incorruption, not cast off. He teaches us that our body, fashioned by God and made a partaker of the rational person, has a dignity that neither sin, nor death, nor philosophy can take from it, and that this dignity will find its fulfilment only after the resurrection.

O Holy Hieromartyr Methodius, who didst defend the truth of the resurrection and didst seal it with thy blood, pray to God for us.

Notes

1. Lives of the Saints for the month of June, the 20th day, “The Commemoration of the Holy Hieromartyr Methodius, Bishop of Patara,” and the Synodal Synaxarion of the Romanian Orthodox Church, vol. X (June). The phrases rendered here in English (“a pure vessel and a dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit”; “the heresy of Origen, which deceived many”; “shone throughout the whole world like lightning”; “his servants, that is, the heathen who worshipped idols”; “the pagans, having seized Methodius, the hierarch of Christ, cut off his head with the sword, and the saint passed to a better life”; “confessing Christ unto the shedding of blood and a martyr’s end”; “as a slain lamb”; “twofold crowns”) are translated from the Romanian Synaxarion. ↩
2. Jerome, De viris illustribus (On Illustrious Men), ch. 83: Methodius is called bishop of Olympus in Lycia and afterward of Tyre, and is named a martyr (martyrio coronatus est), at Chalcis in Greece; there too Jerome leaves the time of the martyrdom in question — in the last persecution or, as others say, under Decius and Valerian. ↩
3. Cf. the introductory study of Fr. Prof. Dr. Constantin Cornițescu to Saint Gregory the Wonderworker and Methodius of Olympus, Writings, in the series Părinți și Scriitori Bisericești (Fathers and Ecclesiastical Writers), vol. 10, Bucharest, 1984. ↩
4. For the dating of the martyrdom probably to 311–312 (the persecution of Diocletian and his successors) and for the chronological placing of his work at the turn of the third and fourth centuries, cf. the critical edition G. N. Bonwetsch, Methodius, GCS 27, Leipzig, 1917, and the later studies on Methodius’s eschatology. ↩
5. Saint Gregory the Wonderworker and Methodius of Olympus, Writings, introductory study, translation, notes, and indices by Fr. Prof. Dr. Constantin Cornițescu, PSB, vol. 10, Bucharest, 1984. The volume contains, for Methodius: The Banquet, or On Chastity; Aglaophon, or On the Resurrection; Concerning Free-Will; and On Life and Rational Conduct. ↩
6. The summary and the fragments of Aglaophon preserved by Patriarch Photius are found in his Bibliotheca, cod. 234. For the English translation of the surviving fragments, cf. Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF), vol. VI, Buffalo, 1886, pp. 364–377, the edition used below for the location of the Greek fragments; for the critical text, cf. Bonwetsch, GCS 27. ↩
7. Cf. Methodius of Olympus, From the Discourse on the Resurrection (Aglaophon), in ANF vol. VI, p. 364. ↩
8. Cf. Aglaophon, ANF vol. VI, p. 372. ↩
9. Cf. Aglaophon, ANF vol. VI, p. 373. ↩
10. Cf. Aglaophon, ANF vol. VI, p. 374 (the distinction between “that which is corrupted” and “that which corrupts”; the interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:50). ↩
11. Cf. Aglaophon, ANF vol. VI, pp. 375–376 (the argument grounded on Christ “the first begotten of the dead,” against the example of Moses and Elijah; the separate treatment of Elijah’s case). ↩
12. Cf. Aglaophon, ANF vol. VI, p. 376. ↩
13. For the meaning of “spiritual body” as a body fully subject to and enlivened by the Holy Spirit (rather than immaterial), cf. Aglaophon, ANF vol. VI, p. 376. ↩
14. Cf. Aglaophon, ANF vol. VI, p. 375 (the vision on Mount Olympus). ↩
15. Cf. Methodius of Olympus, The Banquet, or On Chastity, Discourse VI, in ANF vol. VI (the flesh likened to a lamp of five lights borne by the soul on the day of the resurrection). ↩
16. For the Origenist condemnations at Constantinople (543) and for the discussion concerning the relation between the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas and the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553), cf. the studies on the conciliar history of the sixth century. (Note: some secondary sources wrongly write “533”; the year of the Second Council of Constantinople / Fifth Ecumenical Council is 553.) ↩

Scripture quotations follow the Authorized (King James) Version.