Theophylact of Nicomedia

Saint Theophylact, bishop of Nicomedia, was a confessor in the time of iconoclasm and died in exile in the year 845. The Church remembers him on 8 March.

He was from Constantinople and received an excellent education, gaining a reputation for wisdom. As a young man he came to Patriarch Tarasios, who gave him a thorough theological education; then he entered a monastery on the Bosphorus. After some years Tarasios ordained him bishop of Nicomedia. He was well known for the churches, hospices and homes for wanderers that he built. He distributed alms generously, was guardian of orphans, widows and the sick, and attended personally to those afflicted with leprosy, not hesitating to wash their wounds; he is said to have gone about with a towel to wash and bind the wounds of the sick.

When the emperor Leo V the Armenian renewed the iconoclast heresy (813-820), Patriarch Nikephoros, Tarasios' successor, called a council at Constantinople in 815. Theophylact and other bishops argued forcefully for the rightness of honouring the holy icons, but the emperor remained obstinate. It is told that Theophylact said to him: “A bitter ruin will come upon you, emperor, suddenly, and you will find none to save you from it.” For these words the emperor removed him from his see and sent him into exile in Caria, where he spent nearly thirty years, enduring many hardships and insults. He died in exile, in the year 845, a confessor of the faith, a wonder-⁠worker and a man of Christian spirit.