Eustathius of Antioch

Eustathius came from Side in Pamphylia. He was bishop of Beroea in Syria, and about 324 he was moved to Antioch, one of the three greatest sees in Christendom. He arrived in time for the fight.

At a council held at Antioch early in 325, before Nicaea, Eustathius presided while the assembly examined the new teaching of Arius and provisionally excommunicated three bishops who supported it, including Eusebius of Caesarea. At Nicaea itself later that year he was one of the leading opponents of Arius, and some accounts have him delivering the address of welcome to Constantine.

He did not stop after the creed was signed. He kept attacking those he judged to be Arians in disguise, and he named Eusebius of Caesarea among them. The counterattack came within a few years. About 327, at a synod at Antioch, Eustathius was deposed. The charges were a bundle: that he taught Sabellianism, collapsing the persons of the Trinity; that he had insulted the emperor's mother Helena; and that he had fathered a child by a woman who was produced to swear to it. Ancient writers who had no reason to defend him regarded the last charge as fabricated, and later reported that the woman confessed as much on her deathbed.

He was exiled to Trajanopolis in Thrace and died there, and he never retracted a word.

His congregation would not accept the settlement. A large body of the Antiochene faithful, called the Eustathians, refused communion with the bishops installed after him and worshiped separately for decades. That refusal helped produce the Meletian schism, which divided Antioch for more than half a century and which councils at Constantinople and Rome could not untangle.

Most of his writings are gone. One substantial work survives nearly whole: On the Witch of Endor, Against Origen. In it Eustathius argues that the woman at Endor did not raise Samuel, and behind that particular question he attacks Origen's whole allegorical method, insisting that the plain historical sense of the text is the sense, and that a reader who dissolves the narrative into symbol has stopped reading the Bible. It is the earliest sustained Antiochene protest against Alexandrian allegory, and the school that Diodorus and Chrysostom built stands downstream of it.

Sources: Athanasius, History of the Arians; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, I.24; Theodoret of Cyrus, Ecclesiastical History, I.20–21; Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 85.