Acacius of Beroea

Acacius was born in Syria around 322 and died past his hundredth year. He was trained as a monk under Asterius near Antioch, and lived long enough that a man who could remember the aftermath of Nicaea was still sitting in council when the church argued about Nestorius. He was made bishop of Beroea — the city we now call Aleppo — in 378, and held the see for well over fifty years. Early on he stood with the orthodox party. He was sent to Rome to plead the cause of Meletius of Antioch, he was present at the Council of Constantinople in 381, and he was among the first to press the church to condemn Apollinaris, who taught that in Christ the divine Word took the place of a human mind. Acacius saw the danger clearly: a Savior without a human mind has not saved the human mind. Then comes the part of his record that cannot be softened. In 403 he sided with Theophilus of Alexandria against John Chrysostom at the Synod of the Oak, the rigged assembly that deposed Chrysostom and sent him into the exile that killed him. Acacius nursed a personal grievance — Chrysostom had lodged him badly on a visit to Constantinople — and he let it drive him. He was in schism with Rome for years over it before finally being reconciled. His last service was his best. When Cyril of Alexandria and John of Antioch tore the church in two over Nestorius, Acacius, by then well over a hundred, wrote to both sides urging restraint. He warned Cyril that his Twelve Anathemas sounded to Eastern ears like Apollinaris speaking again, and he pressed the Antiochenes to grant that Mary may rightly be called Theotokos, the God-bearer. The compromise he argued for became the Formula of Reunion of 433, which brought Cyril and John back into communion and held the church together after Ephesus. He died about 437, having outlived nearly everyone he ever fought with. His surviving letters are few, and they read like a man who had learned late what haste costs. Sources: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History; Theodoret of Cyrus, Ecclesiastical History; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Acacius".