Eulogius of Alexandria

Saint Eulogius was the Greek patriarch of Alexandria from about 580 to 608, a great defender of the right faith against Monophysitism and a close friend of Pope Gregory the Great. The Church remembers him as a learned bishop who gave the Church of Alexandria, for a time, new life.

He was first a monk at Antioch, then the first abbot of the monastery of the Mother of God in that city. He then became patriarch of Alexandria, in the time of the emperors Maurice and Phocas, before Saint John the Almsgiver. He was a steadfast defender of the faith against the various forms of Monophysitism. Pope Gregory the Great wrote him many letters, full of words of esteem; he expressed the wish that Eulogius survive him, recognising in him the voice of truth, and a book of his against the Agnoetae was sent to the pope before it was published.

Eulogius refuted the Novatians, whose communities still existed in his diocese, and upheld the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ against Nestorius and Eutyches. In 589 he held a council at Alexandria to condemn two heretical groups. He wrote against the Agnoetae, led by the deacon Themistius, who taught that Christ did not know certain things, such as the day of Judgment, and against the Severans, Theodosians, Gaianites and Acephali. He left eleven discourses in defence of Pope Leo I and the Council of Chalcedon. Most of his writings are lost; fragments survive through the Library of Patriarch Photius, among them extracts from a large book on the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation. In his works he developed the teaching on the natural human will in Christ, speaking even of two operations and two wills, and was thus a forerunner of Saint Maximus the Confessor.

He fell asleep in 608. His feast is on 26 February and 13 June.