Saint Anatolius of Laodicea

Eusebius of Caesarea, who lived in the same years, describes Anatolius as "an Alexandrian by birth," who "in learning and skill in Greek philosophy, such as arithmetic and geometry, astronomy, and dialectics in general, as well as in the theory of physics, he stood first among the ablest men of our time, and he was also at the head in rhetorical science." ¹ For that reason, Eusebius says, the citizens of Alexandria asked him to set up a school of Aristotelian philosophy there. ¹

Jerome lists the same subjects, adding grammar, and calls him "a man of wonderful learning." ³ The Catholic Encyclopedia calls him "one of the foremost scholars of his day in the physical sciences and in Aristotelean philosophy." ² The Roman Martyrology says that he left writings worthy of admiration not only to people of faith but also to philosophers. ⁴ Jerome places him under the emperors Probus and Carus. ³

Eusebius says that many deeds were told of him during a siege of the Pyrucheium, a quarter of Alexandria, and that he would give one as an example. ¹ Inside the besieged quarter bread had run out, "so that it was more difficult to withstand the famine than the enemy outside." ¹ The rest of the city sided with the Roman army and was not under siege, and there Eusebius, a friend of Anatolius who later became bishop of Laodicea, had a name that "had reached even the Roman general." ¹

Anatolius sent word to him of the people dying of hunger, and Eusebius asked the Roman commander, "as the greatest possible favor, to grant safety to deserters from the enemy." ¹ When he heard it had been granted, Anatolius called the senate of Alexandria together and first proposed that they all make peace with the Romans. ¹ They were angry at the advice, so he tried another way. ¹

"I do not think you will oppose me," he said, "if I counsel you to send the supernumeraries and those who are in nowise useful to us, as old women and children and old men, outside the gates, to go wherever they may please." ¹ Why, he asked, should they hold on to people who would soon die, and starve those who were crippled and maimed, when bread was needed for the men who held the walls? ¹ The council agreed. ¹

He then saw to it that the decree reached further than its wording. ¹ Eusebius says that he let out first the members of the church and then people of every age from the rest of the city, "not only the classes included in the decree, but, under cover of these, a multitude of others, secretly clothed in women's garments," and that they slipped out of the gates by night to the Roman camp. ¹ There Eusebius, "like a father and physician," took them in and nursed them back to health. ¹ "He saved almost all the besieged." ¹

The Catholic Encyclopedia tells the story with Anatolius himself arranging terms with the besiegers to receive the women, the children, the old and the infirm, and says the defenders were the forces of Zenobia; Eusebius names neither the defenders nor the cause of the war. ¹² The encyclopedia calls it "a patriotic action on the part of the saint, as well as one of great benevolence." ²

Eusebius says that Theotecnus, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, "first ordained him as bishop, designing to make him his successor in his own parish after his death," and that for a short time the two of them presided over the same church. ¹ Then a synod was called at Antioch to deal with Paul of Samosata, and Anatolius set out for it. ¹ As he passed through Laodicea, where his friend Eusebius had been bishop and had died, "he was detained by the brethren there." ¹

The Catholic Encyclopedia says he "was seized by the people and made bishop," and that whether Eusebius "had died, or whether they both occupied the see together, is a matter of much discussion," treated at length by the Bollandists. ² Eusebius himself writes that Eusebius was dead when Anatolius was kept, and remarks that the church of Laodicea had two such pastors in succession, "one good man, as they say, following another," both of whom came from Alexandria after the war. ¹

His successor was a disappointment. ¹ Eusebius says the next bishop of Laodicea, Stephen, admired for his philosophy, proved in the persecution "a cowardly and unmanly dissembler rather than a true philosopher," and that the church recovered under Theodotus, a physician of bodies and of souls. ¹

Eusebius says that Anatolius "did not write very many works," but that his eloquence and learning show in those that remained, above all in what he wrote on the Passover. ¹ He quotes a long extract from the Paschal Canons, in which Anatolius sets the first new moon of a nineteen-year cycle on the twenty-sixth of the Egyptian month Phamenoth, which he gives also by the Macedonian calendar and by the Roman: "the eleventh before the Kalends of April." ¹

His argument is that the Passover belongs after the spring equinox, and that those who place the first month before it "commit no slight or common blunder." ¹ He cites Jewish writers from Philo and Josephus back to Aristobulus, and then sets the proof aside as no longer necessary for Christians, for whom the veil of the Mosaic law has been removed, "so that now at length with uncovered face we continually behold as in a glass Christ and the teachings and sufferings of Christ." ¹

Eusebius also mentions his Institutes of Arithmetic in ten books, and Jerome names the same two works as the measure of "the greatness of his genius." ¹³ The Catholic Encyclopedia says fragments survive of the ten books on arithmetic and of the treatise on the date of Easter. ²

None of the sources used for this page names Saint Anatolius of Laodicea the patron of anything, and none is supplied here. ¹²⁴ He is remembered as a bishop of Laodicea and a scholar whose writings, the Martyrology says, philosophers also admired. ⁴

Saint Anatolius's feast is July 3, the day on which the Roman Martyrology commemorates him at Laodicea in Syria. ⁴ The Catholic Encyclopedia gives the same date, and notes that it is shared with his namesake Saint Anatolius of Constantinople. ²

He was a man the city asked to teach philosophy, and in a famine he used the skills of a council chamber. ¹ When his first proposal failed, he made a second one the council could accept, and then let it cover far more people than it said. ¹

His friend outside the walls had asked a favor of the enemy general, and took in the starving as they came. ¹ Eusebius tells the two men's parts together and calls them one good man following another. ¹

In the Easter canon the scholar of the heavens lays his proofs aside and turns to Christ seen with unveiled face. ¹ He was on his way to a synod when a church in need kept him, and he stayed. ¹