John in Asia: Heraclides and Gerontius

John was told that the churches in Asia and the neighboring regions were governed by unworthy men, who traded the priesthood for the income and gifts it brought, or handed out that office as a private favor. So he went to Ephesus and deposed thirteen bishops, some in Lycia and Phrygia and others in Asia itself, and appointed others in their place. The bishop of Ephesus had died, and so John ordained Heraclides over that church. Heraclides was a native of Cyprus and one of John’s deacons. He had formerly joined the monks at Scetis and had been a disciple of the monk Evagrius. [a]

John also expelled Gerontius, bishop of the church in Nicomedia. Gerontius had been a deacon under Ambrose in the church of Milan. He declared (I do not know why, whether he meant to invent a miracle or had himself been deceived by the arts and phantoms of a demon) that by night he had seized a creature something like a donkey, cut off its head, and flung it into a mill. Ambrose thought such talk unworthy of a deacon of God, and ordered Gerontius to stay in seclusion until he had made up for his fault by repentance. But Gerontius was a very skillful physician. He was eloquent and persuasive and knew well how to win friends, so he laughed at Ambrose’s order and went off to Constantinople. In a short time he gained the friendship of some of the most powerful men at court, and not long after he was raised to the bishopric of Nicomedia. He was ordained by Helladius, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, who did this for him all the more readily because Gerontius had used his influence at court to get Helladius’s son a high appointment in the army. When Ambrose heard of this ordination, he wrote to Nectarius, who presided over the church of Constantinople, asking him to remove Gerontius from the priesthood and not to let him and the order of the church be so abused. However much Nectarius may have wished to obey, he could never carry it out, because of the determined resistance of the people of Nicomedia.

John deposed Gerontius and ordained Pansophius, who had once been tutor to the emperor’s wife. Pansophius was a man of real piety and of a mild and gentle disposition, but the Nicomedians did not like him. They rose in riot again and again. In public and in private they recounted Gerontius’s kindnesses and the generous help they had received from his medical skill, which he used freely and actively for rich and poor alike; and, as people do when they praise those they love, they credited him with many other virtues too. They went about the streets of their own city and of Constantinople as if an earthquake or a plague or some other stroke of divine wrath had struck, singing psalms and offering prayers that they might have Gerontius as their bishop. In the end they were forced to give way to necessity. With grief and groans they parted from Gerontius and received in his place a bishop they regarded with fear and dislike.

The bishops who had been deposed, and all their followers, railed against John as the leader of a revolution in the churches, who overturned the rights of the ordained against the laws handed down from their fathers. Driven by their grievance, they condemned things he had done that most people thought worthy of praise. Among other things, they reproached him over the proceedings taken against Eutropius.