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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Acacius of Beroea
died c. 437Patristic
Bishop of Aleppo for more than fifty years, he remembered the aftermath of Nicaea and was still sitting in council when the church argued over Nestorius.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The First Council of Nicaea — Vasily Surikov (1876), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 437.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
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".
What was happening while he lived8 moments · AD 313–600
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
- c. 397–400Augustine writes the *Confessions*He told his whole story, theft, ambition, a long affair, a slow surrender, as one long prayer addressed to God. Nothing quite like it had been written before, and it invented the spiritual autobiography.
- c. 405Jerome finishes translating the Old Testament from HebrewCommissioned by Bishop Damasus in 382, Jerome worked for decades in Bethlehem, learning Hebrew so he could go behind the Greek to the original. His Latin Bible, later called the Vulgate, was the Bible of the West for a thousand years.
- 410Rome is sacked; Augustine begins *The City of God*Alaric's Goths took the eternal city, and pagans blamed the Christians for abandoning the old gods. Augustine answered across thirteen years (413–426) with a book about two cities, one built on love of self, one on love of God, and only one of them permanent.
- 431The Council of EphesusBishop Nestorius objected to calling Mary *Theotokos*, "God-bearer," and Cyril of Alexandria pressed the point that the title is a claim about the child, not the mother: the one she bore was God. The council agreed, though the politics around it were ugly.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Acacius of Beroea at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Lived past a hundred and had a hand in nearly every church quarrel of his very long century.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.