The Council at Constantinople

At this time the man who most recently fed the flock at Nazianzus was living at Constantinople. He was constantly resisting the blasphemies of the Arians, watering the holy people with the teaching of the gospel, catching those who wandered outside the flock, and leading them away from poisonous pasture. In this way he made what had once been a small flock into a great one. When the divine Meletius saw him, he knew full well what the makers of the canon had in view when they forbade bishops to be moved from one see to another: they meant to prevent all scheming for advancement. So he confirmed Gregory as bishop of Constantinople. Shortly afterward the divine Meletius passed away to the life that knows no pain, crowned with the praises of the funeral speeches of all the great orators. [a]

Timothy, bishop of Alexandria, who had followed Peter, the successor of Athanasius as patriarch, ordained Maximus in place of the admirable Gregory. Maximus was a Cynic who had only lately allowed his Cynic’s long hair to be cut, and he had been carried away by the flimsy rhetoric of Apollinarius. But this absurdity was more than the assembled bishops could bear. They were admirable men, full of divine zeal and wisdom, such as Helladius, the successor of the great Basil; Gregory and Peter, Basil’s brothers; Amphilochius from Lycaonia; Optimus from Pisidia; and Diodorus from Cilicia. [d] The council was also attended by Pelagius of Laodicea, Eulogius of Edessa, Acacius, our own Isidore, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Gelasius of Caesarea in Palestine, who was renowned for both his learning and his life, and by many other athletes of virtue. [f]

All these men I have named separated themselves from the Egyptians and celebrated the divine service with the great Gregory. But Gregory himself begged them, gathered as they were to promote harmony, to put every question of wrong done to one man below the cause of agreement with one another. “For I shall be set free from many cares,” he said, “and once more lead the quiet life I hold so dear, while you, after your long and painful warfare, will gain the peace you have longed for. What could be more absurd than for men who have just escaped the weapons of their enemies to waste their own strength in wounding one another? By doing so we will make ourselves a laughingstock to our opponents. So find some worthy and sensible man, able to bear heavy responsibilities and carry them out well, and make him bishop.” Moved by this advice, the excellent shepherds appointed as bishop of that mighty city a man named Nectarius, of noble birth and distinguished for every kind of virtue as well as for the splendor of his ancestry. Maximus, as one who had shared in the madness of Apollinarius, they stripped of his rank as bishop and rejected. Next they enacted canons for the good government of the church and published a confirmation of the faith set out at Nicaea. Then each of them returned to his own country. [g]

The next summer most of them gathered again in the same city, summoned once more by the needs of the church. There they received a synodical letter from the bishops of the West, inviting them to come to Rome, where a great synod was being gathered. They asked, however, to be excused from traveling so far from home, saying that to do so would be useless. But they wrote, both to point out the storm that had risen against the churches and to hint at how carelessly the Western bishops had dealt with it. They also included in their letter a summary of the apostles’ teaching. But the boldness and wisdom of their words will be shown more clearly by the letter itself.