Theophilus held the patriarchate of Alexandria for 27 years (385–412), making him the longest-serving Alexandrian patriarch of the entire late-Roman period. He was substantively the architect of the institutional Christianisation of Alexandria — the transition from a city that was substantially Hellenistic-pagan in its institutional culture as late as the 380s to a city that was substantially Christian in its institutional culture by the 410s. His tenure also produced the operational precedent that his nephew Cyril would inherit and that would substantively produce the 415 murder of the philosopher Hypatia.
How he got the throne
Theophilus had been a junior cleric in the Alexandrian patriarchate of his predecessor Timothy I. The 385 election was substantively a compromise between the contending intra-Alexandrian factions; Theophilus was acceptable to most of the senior clergy because he had not been visibly aligned with any of them, and the election was confirmed by the imperial authorities at Constantinople without significant resistance.
The Alexandria of 385 was a city of approximately 300,000 inhabitants, the largest city of the eastern Roman Empire after Constantinople itself. Its institutional religious life was still plural: a Christian patriarchate (perhaps a third of the population), a Jewish community (perhaps a tenth, concentrated in the eastern Delta quarter), and a Hellenistic-pagan establishment centred on the great temple complex of the Serapeum and on the libraries and lecture halls of the Mouseion. The institutional cultural prestige of the Hellenistic-pagan establishment was greater than its numerical share of the population.
The Serapeum and after
Theophilus’s most visible act was the systematic destruction of the Serapeum in 391, executed under the legal authority of Emperor Theodosius I’s anti-pagan edicts of the same year. The Serapeum destruction was the substantive turning point in the Alexandrian religious balance; the surviving Hellenistic-pagan institutions either converted, were dismantled by similar legal-physical action, or went substantively underground over the following two decades.
Theophilus extended the operational pattern to a wide range of secondary Alexandrian pagan sites through the 390s and 400s — the temple of Tyche, the Mithraea of the eastern quarters, the smaller temples of the Boucolia district, the pagan funerary complexes of the western necropolis. The substantive end of public Hellenistic-pagan religious practice in Alexandria can be dated to about 412 (the year of Theophilus’s death).
The senior pagan philosophers of the city had largely emigrated or gone into professional retirement by the end of Theophilus’s patriarchate. Olympius, who had organised the pagan defence of the Serapeum in 391, had fled to Italy and died there. Hypatia continued to teach mathematics and philosophy in the private Alexandrian context that the Theodosian and post-Theodosian legal regime had left open to her, but her institutional space had contracted by the 410s.
The Origenist controversy
Theophilus also intervened decisively in the substantively complex doctrinal dispute that has come down through Church history as the Origenist controversy. The 3rd-century Alexandrian theologian Origen had been the most influential of the early Greek Christian Platonists; his theological writings had been substantively influential in shaping Christian thought through the third and fourth centuries; by the 390s the substantively orthodox doctrinal consensus had moved away from several of his positions (particularly on the pre-existence of souls and on the eventual restoration of all created beings, including possibly Satan, to communion with God).
Theophilus moved against the population of Origenist monks in the Nitrian Desert (the major monastic centre west of Alexandria) through a series of substantive ecclesiastical-political manoeuvres in 399–402. The conflict drew in the patriarch of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, who had given refuge in his patriarchate to several of the expelled Nitrian Origenists.
Theophilus retaliated by organising the Synod of the Oak at Chalcedon in September 403, which deposed Chrysostom on substantively political-procedural charges and exiled him from Constantinople. The substantive consequences of the Synod of the Oak ran for the following two decades — Chrysostom died in exile in 407, his rehabilitation came posthumously in 438, and the Alexandrian and Constantinopolitan patriarchates remained at odds for a generation.
What he passed to his nephew
Theophilus died at Alexandria in October 412. His nephew Cyril — whom Theophilus had personally trained as his ecclesiastical successor through the previous decade — was elected patriarch within days. Cyril inherited the operational pattern Theophilus had developed: substantive willingness to use crowd action and physical force against doctrinal and religious opponents, substantive willingness to escalate against rival patriarchates and against imperial-civil authorities, and substantively the same Alexandrian Christian-monastic activist base that had executed the 391 destruction.
Within three years of his elevation, Cyril’s patriarchate had presided over the lynching of Hypatia by a mob of Christian parabalani in March 415 — substantively the same operational pattern Theophilus had taught him, now applied to a different target. The substantively orthodox Catholic and Coptic Christian traditions both canonised Cyril as a saint and Doctor of the Church on the strength of his subsequent dogmatic work; Theophilus is the more difficult case for hagiographic remembering and has substantively been so for fifteen centuries.
The substantive end of Alexandrian Hellenistic-pagan religious institutional life cannot be separated from Theophilus’s twenty-seven-year patriarchate.