About the Book

In the first book to be devoted exclusively to Severus, well-known author in the field, Pauline Allen, focuses on a fascinating figure who is seen simultaneously as both a saint and a heretic.

Part of our popular Early Church Fathers series, this volume translates a key selection of Severus's writings which survived in many other languages. Shedding light on his key opposition to the Council of Chalcedon and rehabilitates his reputation as a key figure of late antiquity, it examines his life and times, thinking, homiletic abilities and his pastoral concerns.

Severus was patriarch of Antioch on the Orontes in Syria from 512-518. Though he is venerated as an important saint in the Old Oriental Christian tradition, he has mostly been regarded as a heretic elsewhere; and as his works were condemned by imperial edict in 536, very little has survived in the original Greek.