Athanasius Condemned and Acquitted

So they first attacked Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, a holy man who had been present at the Synod of Nicaea as a deacon, and they condemned him in his absence. To the charges that false witnesses had piled up against him they added this one: that with wicked intent he had received Marcellus and Photinus, heretical priests who had been condemned by a sentence of the synod. Now there was no doubt that Photinus had been justly condemned. But in the case of Marcellus, it seemed that nothing deserving condemnation had been found at that time; and belief in his innocence was strengthened above all by the hostility of that party, since no one doubted that the very judges who had condemned him were heretics. [a]

But the Arians did not want to get these men out of the way so much as Athanasius himself. So they pressed the emperor to go so far as to send Athanasius into exile in Gaul. Before long, however, eighty bishops met together in Egypt and declared that Athanasius had been unjustly condemned. The matter was referred to Constantine. He ordered bishops from the whole world to gather at Sardica, and the council to review the whole proceeding by which Athanasius had been condemned. In the meantime Constantine died; but the synod, which had been called together while he was still emperor, acquitted Athanasius. Marcellus too was restored to his bishopric. But the sentence on Photinus, bishop of Sirmium, was not lifted, for even in the judgment of our own side he is held to be a heretic. Even so, this outcome troubled Marcellus, because Photinus was known to have been his disciple in his youth. But this too helped to secure Athanasius’s acquittal: Ursacius and Valens, leading men among the Arians, after they had been openly cut off from the communion of the church following the Synod of Sardica, came before Julius, bishop of Rome. They asked his pardon for having condemned an innocent man, and publicly declared that Athanasius had been rightly acquitted by the decree of the Council of Sardica.