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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Acacius of Caesarea
died c. 366Patristic
Eusebius's pupil and successor, heir to the greatest Christian library in the world, who turned that learning against the Nicene party.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The First Council of Nicaea — Vasily Surikov (1876), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 366.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
Acacius was the pupil, librarian and successor of Eusebius, the historian of the church. He took the see of Caesarea in Palestine about 340 and kept it until his death in 366. He was blind in one eye, and his enemies never let anyone forget it, the Greek nickname monophthalmos follows him through the histories.
He inherited Eusebius's library, one of the greatest in the Christian world, and his learning was real. Jerome, who used that library himself, credits him with seventeen books on Ecclesiastes, six volumes of miscellanies, and a life of Eusebius. Almost all of it is lost.
What survives is the record of his politics, and it is the record of a man on the wrong side of the great question. Acacius led the party that would not say the Son is homoousios, of the same substance, with the Father. His formula was that the Son is simply "like" the Father, which is why the group took his name: the Acacians, or Homoians. It was a compromise that sounded reasonable and gave away the point.
He was effective. He deposed Cyril of Jerusalem in 357 in a quarrel that was partly doctrine and partly a fight over which see outranked which. At the twin councils of Seleucia and Ariminum in 359 he walked out with a minority, went to the emperor Constantius, and got his creed imposed on the whole church anyway, the year Jerome later said the world groaned to find itself Arian. He had a hand in deposing Macedonius and installing Eudoxius at Constantinople in 360.
He was also flexible. When Jovian became emperor in 363 and Nicene faith was back in favor, Acacius signed the Nicene creed. When Valens turned the other way, Acacius turned with him. He was deposed at a synod in Lampsacus in 365 and died the next year.
He is on this wall as data, not as a hero. The Arian controversy was not settled by men shouting slogans at each other; it was fought against opponents who were literate, well connected, and often more politically skilled than the orthodox. Acacius is what Athanasius was up against.
Sources: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History; Jerome, On Illustrious Men; Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion.
What was happening while he lived4 moments · AD 313–600
- 313The Edict of Milan makes Christianity legalConstantine and Licinius agreed that everyone in the empire could worship as they chose, and ordered confiscated church property returned. After nearly three centuries of being an illegal religion, the church woke up protected.
- 325The Council of NicaeaAbout three hundred bishops met in a lakeside town in what is now Turkey to answer Arius, an Alexandrian pastor who taught that the Son was God's first and greatest creature, glorious, but made, so that "there was when He was not." The council answered with one word: the Son is *homoousios* with the Father, of the very same being, begotten, not made.
- 335Athanasius is exiled for the first timeThe bishop of Alexandria, who had been at Nicaea as a young deacon, was banished to Trier in Germany after a rigged synod. Four more exiles followed; he spent roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop away from his city.
- 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.
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 Caesarea at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Eusebius's successor at Caesarea and a shrewd operator on the Arian side of the great debate.
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.