Acacius Brings a New Creed to Seleucia

Acacius and his supporters found fault with what had been done, because the others had shut the church doors and signed in that way. They declared that “all such secret proceedings deserve to be suspected and have no force whatever.” Acacius raised these objections because he was eager to bring forward another statement of the faith that he had drawn up himself. He had already submitted it to the governors Leonas and Lauricius, and he was now set on having it alone confirmed and established, instead of the one that had been signed. So the second day was taken up with nothing but his efforts to bring this about. On the third day Leonas tried to bring both parties together in a friendly meeting; Macedonius of Constantinople and Basil of Ancyra had arrived in the course of it. But when the Acacians saw that both parties had come to the same position, they refused to meet. They said that not only those who had been deposed before, but also any who were at present under accusation, ought to be shut out of the assembly. After much wrangling on both sides this view won, and those under any charge left the council, while the party of Acacius came in to take their places. Leonas then said that Acacius had handed him a document, to which he wished to draw their attention. But he did not say that it was the draft of a creed which contradicted the earlier one, in some points covertly and in others openly. When those present fell silent, thinking the document contained something other than a statement of the creed, the following creed composed by Acacius was read, together with its preface: [a]

“We assembled yesterday by the emperor’s command at Seleucia, a city of Isauria, on the twenty-seventh of September, and did our utmost, with all moderation, to keep the peace of the church and to settle questions of doctrine on the authority of the prophets and the Gospels, so that we would approve nothing in the church’s confession of faith that is at odds with the holy Scriptures, as our Emperor Constantius, most beloved of God, has ordered. “But certain persons in the synod have wronged several of us, preventing some from stating their views and shutting others out of the council against their will. At the same time they have brought in men who have been deposed, and men ordained contrary to the church’s canon, so that the synod has become a scene of uproar and disorder. The most illustrious Leonas, the count, and the most eminent Lauricius, governor of the province, have seen this with their own eyes. We are therefore compelled to make this declaration. “We do not reject the faith that was ratified at the dedication of the church at Antioch. We give it our decided preference, because our fathers who met there to examine certain disputed points agreed to it. But the terms homoousion and homoiousion have troubled the minds of many in the past and still unsettle them; and a new term has lately been coined by some who assert the anomoion of the Son to the Father. We reject the first two, since they are not found in the Scriptures; but the last we anathematize utterly, and we regard those who approve its use as strangers to the church. We plainly acknowledge the homoion of the Son to the Father, in keeping with what the apostle has declared about him: ‘Who is the image of the invisible God.’ [b]

“We confess, then, and believe in one God the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and of things visible and invisible. We believe also in his Son our Lord Jesus Christ, who was begotten of him without passion before all ages, God the Word, the only Son of God, the Light, the Life, the Truth, the Wisdom, through whom all things were made that are in the heavens and on the earth, whether visible or invisible. “We believe that he took flesh from the holy Virgin Mary at the end of the ages, to abolish sin; that he was made man, suffered for our sin, rose again, and was taken up into the heavens to sit at the right hand of the Father, from where he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. “We believe also in the Holy Spirit, whom our Lord and Savior has called the Comforter, and whom he sent to his disciples after his departure, as he had promised. Through him he also makes holy all believers in the church who are baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Those who preach anything contrary to this creed we regard as strangers to the catholic church.” [e]

This was the statement of faith that Acacius put forward, signed by himself and by all who shared his opinion, whose number we have already given. When it had been read, Sophronius, bishop of Pompeiopolis in Paphlagonia, said: “If expressing a separate opinion day after day is to be accepted as the statement of the faith, we will never arrive at any accurate understanding of the truth.” Those were Sophronius’s words. And I firmly believe that if the predecessors of these bishops, and their successors too, had felt the same way about the Nicene Creed, all these controversies would have been avoided, and the churches would not have been shaken by such violent and senseless disturbances. But let those who are able to understand how these things stand be the judges. At that point, after many remarks had been made on all sides, both about this statement of doctrine and about those who were accused, the assembly broke up. [f]

On the fourth day they all met again in the same place and went on with their proceedings in the same quarrelsome spirit as before. This time Acacius spoke in these words: “Since the Nicene Creed has been altered not once but many times, nothing prevents us from publishing another one now.” Eleusius, bishop of Cyzicus, replied: “The synod has met now not to learn what it did not know before, nor to receive a creed it had not already accepted, but to confirm the faith of the fathers, from which it should never depart, in life or in death.” That is how Eleusius answered Acacius, and by “the faith of the fathers” he meant the creed that had been published at Antioch. But surely he too might fairly have been answered this way: “How is it, Eleusius, that you call those who met at Antioch ‘the fathers,’ when you do not recognize those who were their fathers? The framers of the Nicene Creed, who acknowledged the homoousian faith, have a far better claim to the title ‘the fathers,’ both because they came first in time and because it was they who admitted those who met at Antioch to the priesthood. “Now if those at Antioch have disowned their own fathers, then those who follow them are, without knowing it, following men who have killed their own fathers. Besides, how can they have received a lawful ordination from men whose faith they declare unsound and impious? But if those who made up the Nicene synod did not have the Holy Spirit, who is imparted by the laying on of hands, then those at Antioch did not properly receive the priesthood. For how could they have received it from men who did not have the power to confer it?” Points like these might have been put to Eleusius in answer to his objection. But they then moved on to another question, arising from what Acacius had stated in his creed, “that the Son was like the Father,” and they asked one another in what this likeness consisted. The Acacian party said that the Son was like the Father in his will only, and not in his “substance” or “essence”; but the rest maintained that the likeness extended to both essence and will. The whole day was used up in arguing this point. Acacius was refuted out of his own published works, in which he had stated that “the Son is in all things like the Father,” and his opponents asked him, “How do you now deny that the Son is like the Father in his ‘essence’?” Acacius replied that “no author, ancient or modern, was ever condemned out of his own writings.” They kept up the discussion on this matter to a most tiresome length, with much bitterness and subtle argument but with no approach to agreement, until Leonas rose and dismissed the council. That was the end of the synod at Seleucia. For on the following day, though he was pressed to do so, Leonas would not meet with them again. “I was sent by the emperor,” he said, “to attend a council where agreement was expected. But since you cannot possibly come to an understanding with one another, I can no longer be present. So go to the church, if you like, and indulge in empty chatter there.”

The Acacian faction, thinking this decision was to their own advantage, also refused to meet with the others. The opposing party, left on its own, met in the church and asked those who followed Acacius to attend, so that the case of Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, could be heard. That bishop had been accused long before, though on what grounds I cannot say. He had even been deposed, because out of fear he had not appeared for two whole years, although he had been summoned again and again so that the charges against him could be examined. Nevertheless, when he was deposed, he sent written notice to those who had condemned him that he would appeal to a higher court, and the emperor Constantius approved this appeal. So Cyril was the first, and indeed the only, clergyman who ventured to break with the church’s custom by becoming an appellant, as people commonly do in the secular courts of law. He was now present at Seleucia, ready to be put on trial. For this reason the other bishops invited the Acacian party to take their places in the assembly, so that a general council might pronounce a definite judgment on the cases of those who were accused. For they had summoned others too, charged with various offenses, to appear before them at the same time, and these had taken refuge among Acacius’s supporters to protect themselves. So when that faction kept refusing to meet, after being summoned again and again, the bishops deposed Acacius himself, together with George of Alexandria, Uranius of Tyre, Theodulus of Chaeretapi in Phrygia, Theodosius of Philadelphia in Lydia, Evagrius of the island of Mytilene, Leontius of Tripolis in Lydia, and Eudoxius, who had formerly been bishop of Germanica but had afterward wormed his way into the bishopric of Antioch in Syria. They also deposed Patrophilus for defiance, because he had not come to answer a charge brought against him by a presbyter named Dorotheus. These they deposed. They also excommunicated Asterius, Eusebius, Abgarus, Basilicus, Phoebus, Fidelis, Eutychius, Magnus and Eustathius, ruling that they should not be restored to communion until they made a defense that cleared them of the charges against them. When this was done, they sent letters of explanation to each of the churches whose bishops had been deposed. Annianus was then made bishop of Antioch in place of Eudoxius. But the Acacians soon seized him, and he was handed over to Leonas and Lauricius, who sent him into exile. The bishops who had ordained him were angered by this and lodged protests against the Acacian party with Leonas and Lauricius, openly charging them with having violated the decisions of the synod. When they found they could get no redress in this way, they went to Constantinople to lay the whole matter before the emperor.