The Night Hymns and the Arian Riot

The Arians, as we have said, held their meetings outside the city. So whenever the feast days came round in each week — I mean Saturday and the Lord’s day, on which assemblies are usually held in the churches — they gathered inside the city gates around the public squares and sang responsive verses suited to the Arian heresy. They did this for the greater part of the night. Then in the morning, chanting the same songs, which they called responsive, they paraded through the middle of the city and so went out of the gates to their places of assembly. But they kept using insulting language about the Homoousians, often singing words like these: “Where are those who say that three things are but one power?” John feared that some of the simpler people might be drawn away from the church by hymns of this kind. So he set some of his own people against them, so that they too might busy themselves with chanting night hymns, and so outshine the efforts of the Arians and strengthen his own followers in the confession of their faith. [a]

John’s plan seemed good, but it ended in riot and danger. For the Homoousians performed their night hymns with greater display: John devised silver crosses for them, on which lighted wax candles were carried, paid for by the empress Eudoxia. So the Arians, who were very numerous and burning with envy, decided to take revenge with a desperate and violent attack on their rivals. Remembering their own recent dominance, they were full of confidence that they could win, and full of contempt for their opponents. So without delay, on one of these nights, they came to blows. Briso, one of the empress’s eunuchs, who was then leading the singers of these hymns, was struck on the forehead by a stone, and some of the people on both sides were killed. At this the emperor, in anger, forbade the Arians to chant their hymns in public any more. Such were the events of this occasion.

We must now, however, say something about how this custom of responsive singing began in the church. Ignatius, third bishop of Antioch in Syria from the apostle Peter, who had also spent time with the apostles themselves, saw a vision of angels singing hymns to the Holy Trinity in alternating chants. So he brought the way of singing he had seen in the vision into the church at Antioch, and from there it was passed down by tradition to all the other churches. Such is the account we have received about these responsive hymns. [c]