CHAPTER IV

DEPOSITION OF SEVERUS, BISHOP OF ANTIOCH. SUCCESSION OF PAUL AND EUPHRASIUS

SEVERUS, who had been ordained president of Antioch, as stated above, ceased not daily to anathematise the synod at Chalcedon, and chiefly by means of those epistles called Enthronistic, and in the responses which he sent to all the patriarchs, though they were received only at Alexandria, by John, the successor of the former John, and by Dioscorus and Timotheus: which epistles have come down to our time.

Many contentions having thus arisen in the church, whereby the most faithful people were split into factions, Justin, in the first year of his reign, ordered him to be arrested, and to be punished, as some say, by having his tongue cut out; the execution of which sentence was committed to Irenæus, who, at Antioch, held the government of the Eastern provinces.

Severus himself confirms the account of Irenæus being appointed to arrest him, in a letter to some of the Antiochenes, describing the manner of his escape; wherein he casts the strongest invectives on Irenæus, and states that he is under the strictest surveillance lest he should escape from Antioch. Some say that Vitalian, who still appeared to be in the highest favour with Justin, demanded the tongue of Severus, because he had reproached him in his discourses.

Accordingly, he flies from his see, in the month Gorpiæus, which in the Latin language is called September, in the five hundred and sixty-seventh year of the Era of Antioch. Paul succeeds to the see, with orders to proclaim openly the synod at Chalcedon. Afterwards, retiring voluntarily from Antioch, he went the way of all flesh by a natural death. He is succeeded in his see by Euphrasius from Jerusalem.