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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Amphilochius of Iconium
died c. 403Patristic
Gregory's cousin and Basil's protégé, a Constantinople lawyer who left the courts and became bishop of the city Paul had preached in.
Summary
- Lived died c. 403.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
Amphilochius was born in Cappadocia about 340 into a family that produced more than its share of bishops. Gregory of Nazianzus was his cousin. Basil of Caesarea was his mentor and close friend. He trained as a rhetorician and practiced law in Constantinople for several years before giving it up, going home to care for his aged father, and living quietly.
In 373 Basil had him made bishop of Iconium, the city Paul and Barnabas had preached in, modern Konya, in Turkey. He was young for it and said so. Basil wrote him letter after letter, part encouragement and part instruction, and those letters became some of the most important canonical texts in the Eastern church. When Amphilochius asked Basil to explain the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, Basil answered with the treatise On the Holy Spirit, one of the decisive books of the fourth century, and dedicated it to him.
Amphilochius was at the Council of Constantinople in 381 that completed the creed. He fought Arianism in his own province, and he pressed the emperor Theodosius to bar Arian assemblies. Theodoret tells a story about that campaign: Amphilochius came before the emperor and paid full honor to Theodosius but pointedly ignored his son Arcadius, who had just been made co-emperor. When Theodosius objected, Amphilochius replied that if the emperor could not bear to see his son slighted, he should understand how God the Father regards those who dishonor his Son. The Arian meetings were banned shortly after.
He presided about 390 at the Council of Side, which condemned the Messalians, a movement that held that prayer alone saves, that the sacraments and the moral struggle are irrelevant, and that a demon dwells in every soul until expelled by ecstatic prayer.
His best-known surviving work is the Iambics to Seleucus, a poem of advice to a young man, which ends by listing the books of the Bible in verse so they could be memorized. It is one of the earliest full canon lists in the East, and it is candid about which books were still disputed, it notes that some receive Hebrews and some do not, and that opinion on Revelation was divided.
He died sometime after 394. Most of his sermons are lost or survive in fragments.
Sources: Basil of Caesarea, Letters and On the Holy Spirit; Theodoret of Cyrus, Ecclesiastical History; Jerome, On Illustrious Men; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Amphilochius".
What was happening while he lived7 moments · AD 313–600
- 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.
- 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.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Amphilochius of Iconium at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Cousin of Gregory of Nazianzus, who wrote out the New Testament book list in verse for a young friend.
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.