The Post-Nicene Greek Fathers

A Platonic philosopher of Cyrene, Synesius was converted and, in 420, chosen bishop of Ptolemais, the chief city of the Pentapolis. He was with difficulty persuaded to take the office, urging his philosophic habits and his unfitness for administrative duties, as well as his dissent from some of the beliefs of the Church. Besides holding the Origenistic belief in the pre-existence of souls, and some other peculiar doctrines, he did not believe in the resurrection of the dead in the literal sense in which this doctrine was held by the Church. Notwithstanding this dissent, and his unwillingness to leave his wife, the churches felt so much the need of his strength that he was ordained, and he became a bishop whose integrity and faithfulness was unsurpassed. His few treatises are rather philosophical and rhetorical than theological. They are a very frank discourse "Of Reigning well," pronounced before the Emperor Arcadius; a discourse in praise of philosophy and astronomy, and another defending the study of poetry and rhetoric; an ingenious work entitled "The Praise of Baldness"; two books "Of Providence," containing a romance of two brothers, Osiris and Tytion, kings of Egypt; and a book "On Dreams." We have also numerous letters of Synesius, a few of which are upon ecclesiastical subjects, and ten hymns or odes. We give the more space to this poetry, since Mrs. Browning has recorded her opinion that Synesius was "the chief, for true and natural gifts, of all our Greek Christian poets." The spirit and style of the odes may be gathered from the following close rendering by Mrs. Browning of a part of the ninth: