"You shall die in your bed under the sharpest torments" ~ The martyrdom of St. Theodoret and the horrible death of Julianus

The passion of St. Theodoret, from Shea: Pictorial Lives of the Saints, 1894.

If you've read Lactantius's work known as Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, you know that it was a widely-held belief in Christian antiquity that those who made war against the Church tended to suffer particularly atrocious deaths. Heresiarchs, also, were cursed with a similar fate, as we saw previously in the gruesome death of Arius in AD 336.

Today is the feast of Saint Theodoret of Antioch. This obscure saint deserves to be better known today as he was one of the last to be slain under the auspices of a pagan emperor of Rome. His slayer was the uncle of the apostate emperor Julian, coincidentally also named Julianus. This Julianus was at the time serving as prefect of the East. Seeking to curry favor with his imperial nephew, Julianus attempted to seize the treasures of the Antiochene Church, and when his intentions were made known, all the clergy of Antioch fled—except one. The ecclesiastical historian, Sozomen, continues the tale:

One presbyter, by name Theodoritus, alone did not leave the city; Julian seized him, as the keeper of the treasures, and as capable of giving information concerning them, and maltreated him terribly; finally he ordered him to be slain with the sword, after he had responded bravely under every torture and had been well approved by his doctrinal confessions. [Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen, Book V, Chapter 8]

Alban Butler offers the following prophecy uttered by Saint Theodoret, as he was about the be slain following his torments, as taken from the Bollandist’s Acta Sanctorum:

“You, Julian[us], shall die in your bed under the sharpest torments; and your master who hopes to vanquish the Persians, shall be himself vanquished: an unknown hand shall bereave him of life; he shall return no more to the territory of the Romans.” [Butler: The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and other Principal Saints]

Immediately thereafter, Julianus had the saint’s head struck off. The date given is October 22, AD 362.

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After a short space of time, the prophecy of Saint Theodoret came to pass in a most horrible way. Here is Sozomen’s description:

When Julian[us] had made a booty of the sacred vessels, he flung them upon the ground and began to mock; after blaspheming Christ as much as he wished, he sat upon the vessels and augmented his insulting acts. Immediately his genitals and rectum were corrupted; their flesh became putrescent, and was changed into worms. The disease was beyond the skill of the physicians. However, from reverence and fear for the emperor, they resorted to experiments with all manner of drugs, and the most costly and the fattest birds were slain, and their fat was applied to the corrupted parts, in the hope that the worms might be thereby attracted to the surface, but this was of no effect; for being deep buried, they crept into the living flesh, and did not cease their gnawing until they put an end to his life. It seemed that this calamity was an infliction of Divine wrath, because the keeper of the imperial treasures, and other of the chief officers of the court who had made sport of the Church, died in an extraordinary and dreadful manner, as if condemned by Divine wrath. [Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen, Book V, Chapter 8]

The second part of the prophecy was also fulfilled, as the emperor Julian the Apostate was slain while on campaign in Persia less than a year later.