Asterius of Cappadocia

Asterius was a Cappadocian, trained as a sophist, a professional teacher of rhetoric, and a pupil of Lucian of Antioch, the same teacher Arius claimed. He is usually called Asterius the Sophist to keep the label on him.

During the persecution under Diocletian and Maximin he sacrificed to the gods. He came back to the church afterward, but under the canons of the day a man who had lapsed could never be ordained, and Asterius never was. He remained a layman for the rest of his life. It did not stop him from becoming the most effective writer the Arian party had.

He wrote a book called the Syntagmation, arguing that the Son of God is a creature, the first and highest of God's works, made before all ages, but made. He travelled to churches in Syria and read it aloud. Athanasius says he was constantly at the councils of the anti-Nicene party, drafting their documents. Jerome lists him among illustrious men, noting the commentaries on the Psalms, the Gospels and Romans that he left.

His book is lost. What survives of it survives because his opponents quoted it in order to take it apart. Marcellus of Ancyra wrote against him at length; Athanasius quotes him repeatedly in the Orations against the Arians and treats him as the sharpest formulation of the position. That is the strange service Asterius performed. His arguments were clear enough and forceful enough that the orthodox could not answer with slogans; they had to say precisely what they meant by begotten, by eternal, by of one substance with the Father. Much of the vocabulary of Nicene theology was hammered out against sentences Asterius wrote.

A large body of homilies on the Psalms also circulates under the name Asterius. Whether they are his is disputed; their theology is orthodox, and many scholars now assign them to a different, later Asterius.

He died sometime after 341. He is on this wall not as a teacher to follow but as a fact about the fourth century: the men who denied the deity of Christ were not fools, and the creed the church confesses was forged against real arguments.

Sources: Athanasius, Orations against the Arians and De synodis; Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 94; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, I.36; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. III.