Lucifer of Cagliari

Lucifer was bishop of Cagliari, the chief city of Sardinia, from sometime before 353 until his death about 370 or 371. He entered history as the most uncompromising defender Athanasius ever had in the West, and he left it having made himself impossible.

The fight was over Nicaea. The emperor Constantius II backed the Arian party and worked to get Athanasius of Alexandria condemned by Western bishops. Lucifer volunteered to go as papal legate to the Council of Milan in 355 and argue the case. He argued it badly, in the sense that he would not bend an inch. The council, under imperial pressure, condemned Athanasius. Lucifer refused to sign, and Constantius exiled him, first to Germanicia in Syria, then to Palestine, then to the Thebaid in Egypt.

From exile he wrote. Five pamphlets survive, addressed directly to the emperor with titles that give the tone: On Not Consorting with Heretics, On Kings Who Are Apostates, That One Must Die for the Son of God, On Not Sparing Those Who Offend Against God, and On Not Forgiving Those Who Sin Against God. They are strung together out of long strings of Scripture, mostly from Kings and the prophets, and their argument is simple: you are Ahab, you are Jeroboam, you are persecuting the church of God, and there is no negotiating with a lie. Athanasius, who received copies, wrote back that Lucifer had spoken like a prophet, and later called him a second Elijah.

Constantius died in 361 and his successor Julian let the exiled bishops go home. Athanasius called a council at Alexandria in 362 to settle how to receive back bishops who had signed Arian formulas under pressure, the council decided, generously, that repentant bishops could keep their sees. Lucifer would not have it. Bishops who had given way, he held, were finished; let them be received as laymen or not at all.

Worse, he went to Antioch, where the Nicene party was already split between two claimants, and consecrated Paulinus as bishop on his own authority. That single act hardened a schism at Antioch that ran for more than fifty years and that Basil, Jerome, and Rome all spent decades trying to heal.

Lucifer went home to Sardinia and broke communion with practically everyone. His followers, called Luciferians, kept a small rigorist church going in Sardinia, Spain, and elsewhere for a generation after his death. Jerome wrote a dialogue against them.

The Sardinian church has long venerated him as a saint; the wider church has never quite known what to do with him. Both reactions are about the same man.

Sources: Lucifer of Cagliari, Opuscula (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 14); Athanasius, Letters; Jerome, Altercatio Luciferiani et Orthodoxi and De viris illustribus; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.