Dear brothers and sisters!
The saint we will meet today, St. Theodore the Studite, takes us to the heart of medieval Byzantium. at a time which was turbulent from the religious and political point of view.
St. Theodore was born in 759 to a noble and pious family: his mother, Theotista, and an uncle, Plato, abbot of the Monastery of Sakkudion in Bithynia, are venerated as saints.
It was indeed his uncle who oriented him to the monastic life, which he embraced at the age of 22. He was ordained a priest by the Patriarch Tarsius, but he broke off his communion with him because of the weakness he showed in the adulterous matrimony of Emperor Constantine VI.
The consequence was Theodore's exile in 796 to Thessalonica. Reconciliation with imperial authority took place the following year under the Empress Irene, whose benevolence led Theodore and Plato to transfer to the urban monastery of Studios, together with a great part of the monks from Sakkudion, in order to escape Saracen incursions. That is how the important 'Studite reform' had its beginning.
Nonetheless, the personal affairs of Theodore continued to be agitated. With his usual energy, he became the head of the resistance against the iconoclasm of Leo V the Armenian, who opposed anew the existence of images and icons in churches.
A procession of icons organized by the monks of Studios set off a police reaction. Between 816 and 821, Theodore was flagellated, jailed and exiled to different places of Asia Minor.
In the end he was able to return to Constantinople but not to his own monastery. He therefore settled with his monks on the other side of teh Bosphorus. He died, it seems, in Prinkipo, on November 11, 826, the day on which the Byzantine liturgical calendar remembers him.
Theodore distinguished himself in the history of the Church as one of the great reformers of monastic life and even as a defender of sacred images during the second phase of Iconoclasm, working alongside the Patriarch of Constantinople, St. Nicephorus.
Theodore had understood that questioning the veneration of images called into question the truth of the Incarnation itself. In his three books Antirretikoi (Confutations), Theodore drew a comparison between, on the one hand, the eternal intra-Trinitarian relationships, where the existence of each divine Person does not destroy their unity; and on the other, the relationship between the two natures of Christ, which, in him, do not compromise the one Person that he is as the Logos.
He argues: To abolish the veneration of the icon of Christ would mean cancelling out his own redemptive work, since from the time he took on human nature, the invisible eternal Word appeared in visible human flesh, and in this way, sanctified all the visible cosmos.
The icon, sanctified by liturgical benediction and the prayers of the faithful, unites us with the Person of Christ, with his saints, and through them, with the heavenly Father, thus entering into the divine reality in our visible and material cosmos.
Theodore and his monks, witnesses of courage during the time of the iconoclastic persecutions, are inseparably linked to the reform of the monastic life in the Byzantine world. Their importance stodr from an external circumstance: their number.
Where the monasteries of the time never had more than 30-40 monks, we know from the Life of Theodore that there were, all told, more than one thousand Studite monks. Theodore himself tells us that in his monastery, he had almost 300 monks.
And so we see the enthusiasm of faith that was born in the context of this man who was truly informed - and formed - in the faith. Still, more than their numbers, the new spirit imprinted by the founder on monastic life proved to be quite influential.
In his writings, he insists on the urgency of a conscious return to the teaching of the Fathers, especially to St. Basil, who was the first legislator of monastic life, and to St. Dorotheus of Gaza, a famous spiritual father from the Palestinian desert.
Theodore's characteristic contribution was insisting on the necessity for order and submission on the part of the monks. During the persecutions, they were dispersed, each one getting used to live according to his own judgment.
Now that it was possible to reconstruct a communal life, they needed to commit themselves to the utmost in order to make the monastery a true organic community, a true family, or, as Theodore would say, a true 'Body of Christ'. In such a community, the reality of the Church in its entirety is concretely shown.
Another basic conviction of Theodore was this: monks, compared to secular clergy, take on the commitment to observe Christian duties with greater rigor and intensity. That is why they make a special profession reserved for hagiasmata (consecrations), which is almost a 'new baptism', of which their garments are a symbol.
Monks, compared to seculars, are characterized by their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Addressing his monks, Theodore spoke about poverty in a concrete way, sometimes almost picturesque, as following Christ, and therefore from the beginning, an essential element of monasticism, which also indicates a path for everyone.
Renouncing private property, freedom from material things, along with simplicity and moderation, are requisite in radical ways only for monks, but the spirit of such renunciation is the same for everyone.
In fact, we should not depend on material property - we must instead learn renunciation, simplicity, austerity and moderation. Only then can a fraternal society grow, only then can the urgent problem of poverty in this world be overcome. Therefore, in this sense, the radical practice of monastic poverty substantially indicates a road that we can all take.
When Theodore explains the temptations against chastity, Theodore does not hide his own personal experiences and shows the path of internal struggle to arrive at self-control, dominion over oneself, and in this way, respect for one's own body and the bodies of other persons as temples of God.
But the principal renunciations were for him the demands of obedience, because each monk had his own way of living, and being inserted into a great community of 300 monks truly meant a new form of life, which Theodore called 'the martyrdom of submission".
In this, too, the monks give an example of how much it is necessary even for ourselves, because after original sin - man's tendency to do his own will - the primary principle is the life of the world, then all the rest must be subjected to one's own will.
But if everyone follows only himself, the social fabric cannot function. Only by learning to insert oneself within a common freedom, to share it and be subject to it, to learn legality, namely, subjection and obedience to the rules of the common good and communal life, can society, as well as the ego itself, be cleansed of the arrogance that one is the center of the world.
Thus, Theodore with his monks helps us to understand ,with his fine introspection, what true living is, how to resist the very temptation of making one's will the supreme rule of life, and to keep one's true personal identity - which is always an identity together with others - and peace of heart.
For Theodore the Studite, important virtues on a par with obedience are humility and 'philergia', love of work, in which he sees a criterion for testing the quality of personal devotion: he who is fervent in his material commitments, who works with assiduity, he argues, will also be the same in his spiritual commitments.
That is why he would not allow that under the pretext of prayer and contemplation, any monk could be exempted from work, even manual labor, which is really, according to him and to the monastic tradition, a means to find God.
Theodore was not afraid to speak of work as 'the monk's sacrifice', his 'liturgy', considering it nothing less than a sort of Mass through which monastic life becomes angelic life.
And that way, the world of work is humanized; man through work becomes much more himself, as well as closer to God. A consequence of this singular vision deserves to be recalled: precisely because it is the fruit of a form of 'liturgy', the riches deriving from common labor were not to serve the comfort of the monks, but must be destined to help the poor. Here we can all grasp the necessity that the fruits of labor should be of benefit to all.
Obviously, the work of the Studites was not simply manual: they had a great importance in the religious-cultural development of Byzantine civilization, as calligraphers, painters, poets, educators of the youth, schoolteachers, librarians.
Even while carrying out vast external activities, Theodore did not allow himself to be distracted from what he considered to be closely corollary to his function as superior: to be the spiritual father of his monks.
He knew what a decisive influence in his life were his good mother and his sainted uncle Plato, who he describes with the significant title of 'father'. And that is why he exercised spiritual direction over his monks. Everyday, his biographer tells us, after evening prayers, he sat before the iconostasis to hear confidences from everyone. He also gave spiritual counsel to many persons outside the monastery.
His spiritual testament and letters highlight his open and affectionate character, and show how his paternal manner led to true spiritual friendships in the monastic field as well as outside it.
Theodore's Rule, known by the name Hypotyposis, codified shortly after his death, was adopted, with some modifications, on Mt. Athos when, in 692, St. Athanasius Athonite founded the Great Lavra (Monastery), and in Kievan Rus, when at the start of the second millennium, St. Theodosius introduced it in the Lavra of the Grottoes.
Understood in its genuine significance, the Rule proves to be singularly actual today. There are many currents today that undermine the unity of common faith and impel towards a kind of dangerous spiritual individualism and spiritual arrogance.
It is necessary to defend the perfect unity of the Body of Christ (the Church) and to make it grow, in order to harmoniously achieve the peace of order and sincere personal relations in the Spirit.
It is perhaps useful to summarize in conclusion the principal elements of Theodore's spiritual doctrine. Love for the incarnated Lord and for his visibility in liturgy and in icons. Faithfulness to baptismal vows and a commitment to live in communion within the Body of Christ, which is also understood in the sense of communion among Christians. A spirit of poverty, moderation, renunciation, chastity, self-mastery, humility and obedience - opposed to the primacy of one's own will, which destroys the social fabric and the peace of the spirit. Love for material and spiritual work. Spitritual friendship born out of purifying one's conscience, one's spirit, one's life.
Let us seek to follow these teachings which show us the way of true living.