Roberto Spataro: SOPHRONIUS OF JERUSALEM, THEOLOGIAN BECAUSE POET

Sophronius of Jerusalem († 638) was an erudite rhetorician, and a poet with great gentleness and delicacy who composed 20 poems by which he inaugurated the said Byzantine literary genre “Anacreontic”. In the first eight poems of this collection he narrated some important events of Christ’s life that are reported by the Gospels, such as His Baptism at the Jordan river or the triumphal entrance in Jerusalem. Sophronius may be considered to be a great theologian who inherited the theological legacy of the Church Fathers, and refused the tenets of heresies, including those of his times. The scope of this essay is to demonstrate that the lexical and stylistic features of his “Sacred poems” are entangled with his theology aligned with the Tradition. The former is an indispensable interpretation-key of the latter.