Macedonius’s Teaching on the Holy Spirit, and Marathonius

The spirit of innovation praises itself. So it pushed further and further, creeping on to greater novelties with growing conceit. In contempt of the fathers it made laws of its own. It does not honor the teachings of the ancients about God, but is always thinking up strange doctrines and restlessly adding novelty to novelty, as events now show. For after Macedonius had been deposed from the church of Constantinople, he renounced the views of Acacius and Eudoxius. He began to teach that the Son is God, and that he is like the Father in all respects and in substance. But he maintained that the Holy Spirit does not share in the same dignity. He called him a minister and a servant, and applied to him whatever could be said without error of the holy angels. This teaching was taken up by Eleusius, by Eustathius, and by all the other bishops who had been deposed at Constantinople by the party of the opposite heresy. Their example was soon followed by no small part of the people of Constantinople, Bithynia, Thrace, the Hellespont and the neighboring provinces. For their way of life had great influence, and that is what ordinary people pay special attention to. They carried themselves with great seriousness, and their discipline was like that of the monks. Their speech was plain, and in a style suited to persuade. [a]

It is said that all these qualities were united in Marathonius. He had first held a public post in the army, under the command of the prefect. After making some money in this work, he left the military life and took charge of the institutions for the relief of the sick and the destitute. Later, at the urging of Eustathius, bishop of Sebaste, he took up the ascetic life and founded a monastery in Constantinople, which still exists today. He brought so much zeal, and so much of his own wealth, to the support of this heresy that many called the Macedonians Marathonians; and, it seems to me, not without reason. For it appears that he alone, together with his institutions, was the reason it was not wiped out entirely in Constantinople. In fact, after Macedonius was deposed, the Macedonians had neither churches nor bishops until the reign of Arcadius.

The Arians, who drove out of the churches and harshly persecuted everyone who disagreed with them, stripped them of all these privileges. It would be no easy task to list the names of the priests who were driven out of their own cities at this time; for I believe that no province of the empire escaped such a calamity. [c]