ABSTRACT
So why, during the 820s, the closing years of his life, was the good abbot so visibly distressed? Why did he resort so frequently to the clichés of personal failure and lament the damage that the years had done? Certainly there was good reason to complain about the failure of the emperor Michael II (820-29) to roll back all the iconoclast measures, and everything that that decision implied for Theodore and his followers.2 But more pointedly, perhaps, was the barrage of reports he received in his last years about sliding standards of Christian morality, both in the world and especially among his own monks. Stories of sexual misconduct (porneia), in particular, surrounded him on all sides, from a recurrence of the dreaded 'adultery' (moicheia) scandal to frequent reports of moral lapses among his monks. The bitter irony of these developments was that the abbot had invested enormous effort and put himself and his monastic career at risk as a younger man for the very purpose of combating this most pernicious of sins in and around the city of Constantinople, only to watch circumstances eventually overtake him. By the mid-820s there was little more he could do as he sat in his place
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of exile, sick and ageing, with only his team of letter-carrying messengers at hand to enforce discipline on his flock. Here was an impossible situation that might have looked very much irreversible, indeed a life's failure. Theodore had become a second Chrysostom in more ways than he could have imagined.3
