Severus of Antioch

Evagrius, who did not share his views, gives the outline of his life. Severus came from Sozopolis in Pisidia, studied law at Beirut, was baptised at Tripolis and became a monk near Gaza. Expelled from his monastery by supporters of Chalcedon, he went to Constantinople and came to the notice of the emperor Anastasius. He was made bishop of Antioch in November of the sixth indiction, the year 561 of that city’s era, which is 512, and in his letters to other bishops he expressly anathematised the Council of Chalcedon (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 3.33).

In the first year of Justin he was ordered to be arrested and fled (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 4.4). Evagrius says that Theodora later persuaded Justinian to send for him, that at Constantinople he found the patriarch Anthimus of the same mind and persuaded him to give up his see, and that a constitution of Justinian then anathematised them both (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 4.10–11). John of Ephesus, who honours him as the first of the exiled patriarchs, says that he lived as a monk in the deserts of Egypt, contended against Julian of Halicarnassus, spent two years in the capital without result, and returned to Egypt, where he died (John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints 48 (Patrologia Orientalis 18, pp. 685–689)). The later history of his party is told under Jacob Baradaeus and the Syriac Orthodox Church.